this is halloween...

(an image from Nightmare before Christmas, which we're planning to see in 3-D this week! woot!)

This is one of the busiest--and most fun--times of year for me now, ever since my son was born 4 years ago on Guy Fawkes day (Nov. 5, if you're wondering. google Guy Fawkes if you don't know British history too. quite fascinating). There was a large crop of children born around the same time, due to an unusually snowy winter and God's unfathomable providence. So now, there are parties to plan, presents to find, party favors and invitations to think about, halloween candy and decorations to take care of, along with my yearly self-inflicted torture of making a kick-ass costume for my son.
This year's costume is, as you may have guessed, a shark. Making something that swims horizontally and has one long appendage into something vertical to fit two appendages, are some of the many challenges of the costume. Much agonizing, boatloads of hot glue, and late nights half-asleep problem-solving in my head have gone into this thing, and luckily it has paid off.

It was a near thing, however. The first version of the head weighed a tremendous amount, since I used a 5-gallon bucket plus more cardboard and a little metal bucket for the armature. I would try it on A, and he'd like it for a second and then get upset because it was hot and too heavy. Plus, the fleece I used to cover the head was such a light grey, and the head was so pointy, A looked like he was going to join David Duke at a white power event. Or perhaps a Great White power event...horrors. Anyway.
I cut off the heaviest bits, stuffed them with plastic bags instead, and then glued the whole thing back together. Cardboard and pink insulation foam make the dorsal fin, tail fin, and back support so the fin doesn't flop around. Some fishing line holds the tail up high enough to keep from scraping the ground too much, and mucho velcro attaches the grey head to the white underbelly, which is a large sweatshirt with cuts for pectoral fins (aka arms). I used dark grey and black paint to make the gills, darker details etc. The teeth are fun foam, folded in half and cut (to have two rows of teeth), and a piece of the bucket forms the lower jaw, covered in leftover sweatshirt material. WAY too much effort, but it's so much fun.The real confirmation of success is that A spent an afternoon playing with his shark head, laying it down on the sofa and covering it with his blankie. Yay! Today, he paraded around D's office in the costume, as they invite the kids to trick-or-treat there every year. It's a nice event, and some of the guys dress up in costumes. It is a game company, after all. I'm always curious whether A will be terrified of the guy in skeleton makeup and the "haunted office," or whether he will want to keep re-visiting those areas out of fascination and exhilirating fear. He wound up loving the skeleton man, and running flat-out from the troll in the haunted office, without any candy.

As for me, I was a Bag-a-rina for the annual Halloween party at D's cousin's. Everything was made of grocery bags and target bags. I crocheted the bags into a chain stitch, so they would be secure and I could use them again (I'm making yarn from bags, which is very time-consuming and kindof pointless until I can figure out something to make with the yarn). Also I braided several bags for a decorative waistband and bun-cover. Then I cut the bottom off a target bag to make a tank top, and tied bag bits to the shoulders. In the photo, my "low-cut" bustline had become much lower, slowly turning itself into a vest. And it's sweaty as the dickens. All the same, not bad for a technically free costume.
I'll update with a picture of A in the completed costume as soon as I can get one. It's almost as hard as getting a picture of a real shark...

please don't feed the aliens

Today A's preschool had a trip to Huber's farm, just above White Marsh. Somehow 3 carseats were crammed into the back of my friend B's car, 3 boys strapped in, and 2 crazy mommies tried not to get horribly lost. Everything worked out fine, and we arrived to a very overcast, but warm, morning of hayrides and veg picking. It hasn't felt like fall at all, and the poor plants have just been ravaged by drought, but there were still enough to get a nice bag full of goodies. It was great for A to see where our nice clean produce comes from (nice dirty lanes of plants, rotting veggies below our feet, and herbs), and there were parts of a haunted hayride that we passed on the way to each vegetable patch. Some parts were horribly macabre, but the rest were funny. I liked the low-tech quality of the place--no plastic-y Chinese prefab scary junk, just homemade hay-stuffed clothes with masks on, and old rusty farm equipment and boats transformed into castles and pirate ships. Oh yeah, and aliens.
We ended by picking a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. I can't remember ever doing that before--I've chosen pumpkins from crates, and "grown" them in my back yard, but never this. I put quotes around "grown" because the vines just appeared out of nowhere the first summer we lived here, and I thought, "oh nice! Zucchini!" The flowers were the same, at least. Then the zucchini got more and more round and turned orange...well, I did grow up in the city. How was I to know? I felt like it was a real confirmation of our choice to live there. Of all the plants to magically appear where I am living, pumpkins are perfect. Like having a welcome committee of bunnies greeting us on the front porch.
trudging back from the tomato patch. Very squishy.my friend's totally adorable kids. All our kids were very lethargic today, which made for good photo ops (they stay still longer! bonus!). I think our boys are going through growth spurts. the produce, post-washing. Yellow wax beans, yellow plum tomatoes, red grape tomatoes, swiss chard, and herbs! very tasty.


**update** I cooked the chard using this recipe tonight, and it was tres yummy!
**update 2** Here are the photos on flickr!

yay!

I have some good news! The two paintings I have recently completed have been accepted for an upcoming show on the Seven Deadly Sins! They will hang at the Fulton Street Gallery near Albany, NY, which is--granted--a hike (nearly 6 hours), but it might coincide well with a visit to my sister and her family in Maine. Who knows? It's worth a go, I say. So here's the completed Envy painting, since I hadn't posted it yet:I particularly enjoyed painting the mountains and the spinner. But I've looked at both of them too much to have any opinion on them anymore. There we are.

how to waste time

My sister has sent me a link to this site, and I have spent waaaaaaaaay too long on it today. It's called neatorama. It really is. Here's my favorite tidbit so far: how to fold a t-shirt really fast, courtesy of a Japanese TV show. My eyes hurt. I have been staring dumbfounded at the screen all morning. Sigh.
* update* check out the geekiest yarn projects ever! People after my own heart.

jacques cousteau and the incredibles

Sounds like a group from the 50's, doesn't it?

I took photos of A in his invented scuba gear, mentioned in the last post. He took out all his sea creatures toys and laid them on the floor, then "took pictures" of them with a red shoe.We also watched The Incredibles twice in two days, as he decided that he wasn't scared of it any more. It's one of my all-time favorite movies, animated or not, and is the best cinematic example of a great family. This Saturday I taught all day at the Lauraville community fair, at the request of my friend and fellow Art Ed graduate, B. We both suffered through student teaching and a boatload of other classes together, where she knitted socks.

Anyhow, I taught basic clay forms to about 200 kids who came by during the fair, and it was a ton of fun (and a ton of plasticine clay as well!). A and D came, and A really enjoyed using clay that didn't crumble like playdoh. So he took some home, and made the entire Incredibles family the other day (note the i with oval motif, on all of the incredibles' chests)(and A's piggies :):
And here's the new painting I'm working on. Envy is the theme, using the game of Life. I always loved the little hills and mountains on the game board, and the rainbow numbers on the spinning wheel. I need to do more with changing the values of the board and making the red car smaller/less clunky, but I'm happy with the overall composition.
above is my palette set-up. I have all the naked crayons in snack baggies, and 2 crayon melters with q-tips I use to paint with. I need to put three or four q-tips together to get more coverage, and I have a little metal eyedropper for siphoning off cups with too much of a color. Otherwise, to get rid of a color I wait till the crayons cool off, and can pull the color out.