In the rain

Today was a much needed break from all the rain we have had for the last couple of weeks.  Sunny skies and an afternoon at the park helped everyone's mood.  So, what have we been doing?
Cooking...

Play food and real sort of food.  (sort of real and sort of food, and why is it organic?  Organic pancake batter in a can?  I find something a little incongruous there, but maybe that's just me.)  I couldn't resist trying the batter blaster.  The kids thought it was fantastic.  We won't be getting it again, until we go camping that is.

Playing ball and tubes...

Drawing...

Note the fashion forward belt choice.  Also known as the kitchen strap wrench.  She puts it on herself and often turns it into a tool belt with her little hammer.

Gluing...

These little wood shapes are a lot of fun.  For Christmas we got a bag of little geometric shapes and a bag of the popcicle stick people.  Colored pencils and crayons work great to color them.  You can find something like it here.

Lots of building with cardboard boxes and things...

Lots of vehicles that are always morphing into different things and each other.  Flying trucks, swimming submarines, floating trains...

And a castle...

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  Complete with a working portcullis, keep, tower, and a trap door on the top that the Lego rescue helicopter uses to pull the Lego guy out of the dungeon.  The copters semi trailer goes in and out of the front gate.  It might be a little anachronistic, but I'm OK with that.

This book has been helpful.  Sometimes it is just good for looking through.

Buddy Boy wanted to do a little face painting after seeing it in the book.  So we did.

He sat patiently but as soon as we were done he went and washed his face.  He had more fun watching me do my face.

So, that's what we've been up to.  That and Legos and reading and a few computer games (pbskids.org and Lego.com) and baking and cleaning and preschool and kindergarten open houses, but that's another story...

Kiddie prints

Here's the latest.  This week's contest is prints for kids.  I like the combination of the drawings with the geometric squares and rectangles.  I think it makes it a little more sophisticated, if you can call kitties in rectangles sophisticated.  I don't know which one to enter into the contest.  I'm thinking the beach balls.  What do you think?

Crayon contest up.

Here is the link to the Spoonflower Crayons contest.  If the link doesn't work go to Spoonflower.com and look under the blog tab.  There are many great ideas.
Alison

and another one...

Here's the latest fabric design.  The print is pretty big.  This picture represents a yard of fabric.  I drew the butterflies quite awhile ago to use for template for papercutting.  I had an idea to hang the paper butterflies from the ceiling of baby girl's room but haven't gotten around to it yet.  I quite like the fabric and it would fit in Baby Girls bedroom just like the butterflies I originally had in mind.  My only concern is the colors.  I think the yellow might be a little bright.  I had something a little more buttery in mind, but it is hard to tell from the screen.  Perhaps the butterflies are too big.  What changes would you make?

The Spoonflower contest theme for the week is Children's prints.  This sort of fits the theme, but not really.  I might do something else for the contest depending on how much time I have.  I have a lot of things to get done including sewing on actual fabric, but I'm having such a good time with this it is hard to stop.

More fabric swatches

I am still having fun with the Spoonflower fabric design contests.  This week's theme was crayons.  You had to do the design with actual crayons and then use a scanner or camera to digitize the image, no computer generated vector graphics or anything like that.  The idea was to be as low-tech as possible. 

I tried out two different floral designs even though you can only submit one for the contest.  I drew the original design then scanned it and printed it on colored paper.  I colored them with my trusty 64 pack crayons from the 1st grade.  (The box still has the dragon face sticker over the sharpener hole and a 19 on the front for my cubby hole number.)  I then rescanned the designs, cleaned them up a bit to make sure the edges match and there you have it.  I found a couple of online tutorials on how to make a repeating pattern work that helped a lot.  A lot of time spent on something that is absolutely meaningless but a lot of fun.

In my last effort, the little quail, I got 192 votes which placed me #39 out of 82 entries.  I am pleased with that for my first try.  This time I submitted the blue floral.  Maybe it is because my Grandma liked turquoise blue cabbage rose prints.  The carpeting in her bedroom was blue roses on a white background.  Needless to say we weren't allowed in there.

I like them both and had a hard time choosing.  Which is your favorite?

P.S.  I'll let you know when the crayon contest opens in case you want to vote (for me). :)

My little quail on Spoonflower

Spoonflower is a web site that does custom fabric printing.  If you can create a digital image they will print it on fabric for you.  They have regular theme contests for anyone willing to submit a design.  I love to look at what people are doing and vote for my favorites.  I have a few general criteria for my voting.  1) Do I like it enough that I would buy it in a fabric shop?  2) Does it seem to be technically good.  For this I look mostly at the design repeats.  Are there images that are cut off?  Do things line up and look like an overall pattern or just a bunch of blocks stuck together?  3) Does it follow the theme of the week.

I decided that I could do something that would be as good as some of the things that I had seen submitted.  So I gave it a try.  This week the theme was birds, with a restricted color palette, meaning you were limited to five different colors and white.  It was harder than it looks given my extremely limited ability at digital image creation and manipulation.  I couldn't do what I had in my head so I Gimp'd a couple of cute little quail instead.  It is a border print, so if you used it to make a skirt or curtains you would have a little family of quail standing in the grass growing around the hem.  I like the way it turned out even though it is quite simple and pretty amateur.  However, go ahead and vote for for my little birdies if you like them too. 

Here is the link to the contest page and the list of entries.  There were a lot of entries this week.  You can vote for as many designs as you like, but you can only vote one time.  My entry is called quail_2.

Fail

Yesterday on the way home from the park Buddy Boy informed me that Santa Clause hadn't done a very good job.  He didn't bring a boy sized jet pack with real fire and a grabbing arm with earwig pinchers.  Yes, I vaguely remember this coming up in conversation before.  I told him that Santa didn't have any.  He assured me that he did.

This just confirms my resolve to do a better job with Christmas next year.  Not the gift part necessarily, but the whole holiday thing.  There are only a few years when you are young when Christmas is absolutely magical.  I don't want to miss it.

Better luck next year.

True to life comics

This is how my evenings go.  "Mom" is closed when the kids go to bed.  Most things can wait until morning.

Thanks for the cartoon Mom.

Pont d'arc 2

When I finished this I liked it enough to give it to my family members, but I was a little dissatisfied and I couldn't put my finger on what was wrong.  After talking with my brother I realized that I had the light and shadows wrong.  I couldn't let it go so I took it out of the frame and fixed it.  Less contrast on the stone arch that is in the shadows and more on the trees that are in the bright sun.  Better.  Getting the colors right is tough since I am limited to the paper colors that are on the shelf.  I could paint my paper and then cut it the way Eric Carle (The Very Hungry Caterpiller) does his collages.  Not yet.

Dinners 2009

Last year one of my goals was to try to add more variety to the things we had for dinner and put a little more effort in to it.  I think I did pretty well.  I tried out many new recipes, some of which have made it into the regular rotation.  Who whould have thought that tofu and bok choy would be regular items on my grocery list?  We like it and the kids will eat it, the tofu at least. I also decided to keep track of what we were eating.  You may have noticed a link to my What's for dinner blog in the side bar.  I think that helped a bit when I got stuck in a rut.  So thanks to Excel pivot tables I counted up how often we repeated the dinners.  The top 10 were:

BBQ pork sandwiches 23
pasta 18
Pizzeti 16
Chili 13
pizza 13
sausages 12
chicken salad w/ mandarin oranges 11
pork chops & rice 11
hamburgers 10
Chicken kabobs 8
stir fried tofu & veggies 8
(OK so it's 11, but the last two were a tie)

Check here for a more complete list.

We burned out on Pizzeti (pita pizzas) as our quick after church meal and the kids won't eat them any more.  Part of the popularity of the BBQ pork sandwiches is that it is something that I make at home and something that Sam's Barbeque does very well.  For as healthy as the chicken salad w/ mandarin oranges sounds, they all came from Wendy's.  At least it is better than a Baconator.  (I did eat one of those, but only one.)  After looking at the list, I think I did pretty well.  Another year, another 365 dinners to go.  Any suggestions?