Medieval art

The Spoonflower contest theme for the week is Medieval.  This conjures up images of pseudo-Celtic motifs and Robin Hood.  At first I wasn't interested, but I started looking for things that might appeal to me.  At first I looked for images of medieval jewelry, but found very little of interest.  The metal working skills of the time appear to be pretty limited.  Then I ran across examples of illuminated texts.  I have always thought these were interesting and beautiful.  I have seen examples in museums and the New York Public Library.  Most of the online images I found were Celtic or Western European.  While beautiful, they weren't what I was looking for.  Then I found these images at the Getty Museum site, from the Canon Tables from the Zeyt'un Gospels. They are Armenian from the year 1295.

The images are wonderful.  I started to work on a lovely double border print with blue and gold scroll work and stylized leaves and vines as well as several different birds in blue and red on a parchment background.  I spent quite a bit of time learning how to manage gradients in Illustrator to do some shading.  That was interesting and useful.  Unfortunately I lost most of the work I had done, the joys of working digitally, and I'm not interested in starting over.  I've had my fun imagining the design.  I have other things I need to do.  Trust me, it was going to be really good.

Boys and Girls

They are so different.

Buddy boy loves mud, dogs, hunting snails, climbing trees, capturing robbers, and legos.

Baby Girl loves cats, anything pink and sparkly (she bee-lines for "princess shoes" in the stores), writing and drawing, playing soccer ball, and hopscotch.

So much fun.

Buddy Boy's shopping list

So Buddy Boy made a shopping list for me.  Dad helped with the spelling, but this is all he wanted.

He calls himself a "candyvore".  He would live on candy if I let him and Jelly Beans are a favorite.

Shadow puppets

Buddy Boy was looking through Make magazine (www.makezine.com) and found this page on shadow puppets.  It is a fun magazine.  It includes instructions for everything from shadow puppets, to remote controlled lawn mowers, extracting essential oils and fragrances from herbs and flowers, and a cat toy that sends Tweets to the cat's owner.

I started to make the dinosaur and Buddy Boy said no, he wanted a crane.

So we started with a crane.  We then made a wrecking ball, a sky scraper, a car, and a guy named Bob.  We had a lot of fun.  The pictures of the show are a little fuzzy and dark because the flash washes out the shadow.

The puppets are made from card stock with bamboo skewers taped to the back.  The tape is bright orange, but it doesn't matter.  The next day we made a caterpillar, a chrysalis, and a butterfly for Baby Girl.  We got fancy with the butterfly and taped tissue paper in the wing cut outs.  You get colored shadows.  The kids loved it and kept asking for more movies.  I didn't realize how popular they would be.

Hiking with the kids

Last week we went on a hike with friends in the Fremont Older Nature Preserve.  It was a gorgeous morning and a beautiful location.  I love living in such a beautiful place.  The kids had a great time.  I carried Baby Girl most of the way up, but then she was over the back pack and walked the rest of the way up and back down.  She did a great job. 

It was fun to hike with the other kids.  We saw caterpillars and ladybugs and even a deer.  The deer was absolutely unconcerned about us being there.  (The boys were studying a ladybug in this picture.)

Vintage fabric from Grandma's stash

Mom sent me this fabric.  It originally came from my Grandma A's basement.  She loved turquoise.  He bedroom and master bath were all turquoise.  But I can see why this didn't get used.  She was more of a cabbage rose lover than a mod paisley floral type person.  I love it.  Even though it is about 50 years old it looks good today.  So now the question is, what do I do with it?

Butterfly puppets

The theme for the week is puppets.  The design is limited to a fat quarter (21x18 inches).  I decided to make a caterpillar-butterfly combo puppet.  I used the butterfly wings that I had made previously.  I think it turned out quite cute although looking at it again I think that the puppets may be to big.  That is an easy fix.  I'll just print them at a higher dpi to shrink it down.  I think I might actually buy some of this and make the puppets.  Click here to vote for your favorite puppet designs.

Violin Stripe

Here is the latest fabric design.  The theme for the contest this week was musical instruments.  My design placed in the middle, 30 out of 75 entries.  Not bad.  The color needs tweeking as well as the repeat.  When you repeat the tile the lines don't all match up exactly, but I ran out of time.

New Police Jones product

Check out the new Police Jones product.  Disguise glasses.  It's pretty exciting!

P.S.  Buddy Boy came up with these with parts from the disassembled Monster Robot.  He tried to wear them for awhile, but the lenses are opaque, a minor design issue.

Kid stuff

We had a couple rainy afternoons and a few extra long naps from Baby Girl.  That made for some long afternoons to fill.  One day we made mints after Buddy Boy saw marzipan mice in a book.  We made mint mice as well as little roses.  I tried a couple of little chocolate peanut butter candies, but without a recipe they didn't turn out very well.

We also made a car out of a box.  So much fun, for a little box.

Baby Girl has fallen in love with princesses.  I don't know how it happened.  On this morning she wanted to wear her pink princess dancing dress.  She says that she is a princess and so am I.  Buddy Boy and Daddy are policemen.  Well if she is a princess at least I get to be one as well.  My consolation is that she likes to play with swords and dinosaurs as well as her princess dress-ups.

Buddy Boy really likes Henry and Mudge.  He calls the dog Smudge.  We get the books at the library and he reads them to me.  It is good practice for him.  This one was a story about spies and secret codes, so we did a little secret coding ourselves.

It was a simple code with the alphabet and numbers 1-26.  He got a little writing in, something he resists.

All in all a good week.