sad and unnecessary post


This post isn’t about craft or parenting or sewing or art. If you have laundry to fold, you should go do that instead of reading this.

Two weeks ago, my kids had a t u m m y b u g and then I got it and the whole thing left me feeling weak and weirdly sad. And the main thing I was thinking about afterward was how much I miss my grandmother, Nanu. As a child, she was my in-town grandma. She would brush my hair with a way-too-stiff bristle brush for hours on end– til it felt like silk. And I would run to the mirror to see how beautiful I looked with silk hair, but it never really looked very pretty. It only felt pretty and so, so smooth. She could scrub a pan til the plating came off. She was maniacal and obsessive and controlling and I loved her so much…all one hundred pounds of her. So tiny. read more

Ladybug Stuffie




Today was one of those dreamy marathon playdate days. We had six hours of peaceful goodness involving one trip to the grocery, a house relocation, swimming and pre-dinner popsicles. Perfection.

Now you know that there is nothing I like more than a kid who wants to sew something and I basically rope every child I can find into making a stuffie of some sort these days. After a year of it, the big boy has grown weary of sewing cute pillows and stuffies, but he occasionally obliges me. read more

Trivet?

My dear friend had a birthday recently and she is a baker. She always bakes birthday cakes for everybody and I wondered who was going to make hers. So I sewed her one. It is a trivet/mini-quilt/giant pot-holder thingy.

When the creative act takes over sometimes I forget to do some basic planning…like measuring, for example! This would-be pot-holder is now probably a trivet. But it says, “lovely baker girl” on it for my lovely baker girl friend. I like the ric rac raspberry filling and the crumpled ribbon frosting. (Don’t look too closely at the binding. I attached in about five minutes and didn’t even pin it so it is super wavy and crooked.) read more

Sockies!

The Original Sockie

Lately, we have been making Sockies in our house…that is our made-up name for sock stuffies. There is nothing perfect about a Sockie. They are down-and-dirty, cheap-and-easy fun! All you need is a sock, a rubber band to close it, a marker and some polyfil (or rice…or sand…or crumpled newspaper!) read more

Lemonade Stand






The big boy played hookie from school today because I was too lazy to actually get him there on time. It was an unusual choice.

We wandered into our neighbor’s yard and just happened to have a big box with us. (That is something that would never happen to an adult: having a big empty box in your hands for no reason whatsoever. But kids are masters at carrying things to and fro). The big boy started gathering all the lemons beneath the lemon tree. It smelled so good under there. The exotic perfume of lemon and orange blossoms always makes me feel as if I live in a magical far-off land. But that same smell is the harbinger of the intense desert heat to come. It is bittersweet and too short lived. read more

a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan…

photo by Howard Jones

9,500 people missing from just one town. I am stunned…saddened…speechless. Watching images of the power of the sea and the earth makes me feel humble to say the least…but nauseated is mor apt. Really, there are no words for it…fear, panic, shock, pain…these words seem weightless in comparison to the events in Japan. Our hearts break for the Japanese people and also for ourselves–for the horrible loss of even a single human life, let alone thousands. read more

The things they say

We had one of those talks today…you know…those “I-need-you-to-listen-to-me-because-you-are-not-too-young-to-understand-the-meaning-of-the-word-respect” talks. I was talking to the big boy about not using his water bottle as a g u n at school. And about not using that insolent tone with me or his elders…and I was saying it is disrespectful and it can hurt a person’s feelings and blah, blah, blah…mwah, mwah, mwah, wahwah, wah (insert Charlie Brown grown-up trumpet voice here.) read more