Week 4: Giblets.

 This is my 5-year-old's original painting.  She said she made it just for me. I could kiss it, or eat it with honey!  I just absolutely love this!

Now, about giblets. :)

Giblets is the affectionate name my husband gave for the piles...and piles...and piles of little pieces of toys that both of our girls seem to love. The Cootie Bugs game, Monopoly, chess and checker board sets, Barbie parts, card games....all of these things seem to get piled in the middle of our playroom! They make a huge mess. Then we have to go through, sort them out a piece at a time, find which game that every little piece of cardboard goes to, and we don't feel like we've really accomplished any housework when we're done sorting through it. 

A lot of my art projects seem to follow this pattern too.
 
I'll have fifty-five different ideas in any given day.  Sometimes I'll start pieces of a project, then abandon it for whatever reason--I need another tool, the project's not working the way I want it, a kid loses a fingernail (!!!) or I just get sidetracked.  Eventually, I look around, and it feels like half of my studio is covered with half-finished items.

Any time I finish a writing project, my brain simply aches for the physical and visual action of crafting.  So, after finishing a short screenplay last week, I was revved up and ready to finish a lot of the little things, the "giblets" that had accumulated in my brain and work space. 

Of course, I felt like I hadn't accomplished *anything* artistic this past week until I looked through my photos and had a physical record of everything I'd done. Blogging to the rescue! :)

The first project was to make this incredibly fun "schedule" for the kids. I've wanted to do this for a year, literally, and just "never got around to it." I literally found the sun picture in a moving box from our last house!Now it's finally done. I got the idea from the inimitable FlyLady, who suggested making a visual routines list for kids that were too young to read.  The girls both loved it, and started following it immediately.  :)  With no pressure from me, of course.  And I never had to remind them of anything ever again. :p

The tags were upcycled cereal boxes, and I used some old beads that weren't annealed--so they busted in my hands when I tried to make jewelry with them. >:-[

I made these with the girls.  We took clothespins apart, covered them with gesso, slapped on the acrylic paint of our choosing, and then stamped them with Staz-On ink.  I got the idea from Shona Cole, but thought, "Aw, what will we do with those? And who would ever want to buy them?" Cause no idea is good unless someone would want to buy it, right?  Well, these little babies made me smile, and that was enough for me.  I started using them everywhere:

...and they make me smile every day now. :)

Another project I worked on this week was an art journal, here:

...and here...

...and then I bound the pages together....

 ....only to realize that I'd measured something wrong at 4am, and the pages didn't fit to the covers properly!

The bound pages stuck out at the top of the cover, and were half-an-inch away from the bottom. :(  And, um, I'd used wire to bind it with, so it wasn't like I could just chop all the excess off.  I'd spent all that time cutting out tabs and holes and binding everything, and now I'd have to start all over again.  :(

I put a new tool on my wish-list: a wire binding machine!

Also this week, I learned to make great guacamole, thanks to my new favorite website: www.chipotlefan.com.  Yeah, it was yummy. We had that for lunch a couple of times.  With chips. And nothing else. :) I'm not ashamed.

My oldest made a new creation:

And celebrated it:

Yes, that really is her throwing pieces of Styrofoam everywhere. She thinks I'm the cool mom, until I make her help me clean it up. ;) Styrofoam is not fun to clean up.

I did some writing.  I spent one morning outlining my musical play.  Yeah, it's the one I've been working on for a bajillion years, have ten songs for, and have even written spin-offs of it for various church skits, but never finished.  I almost hate it now, but I want to finish it, just so I never have to think of it again.  I think I may need to write a SFD just to get it out of my system. (google "SFD writing" if you don't know what that means, haha)  At the very least, I was able to figure out a couple of reasons *why* I always get stuck, and hopefully I can spend a week on it without puking. :)

One morning, I felt so blah/sleepy/useless and prayed, "Lord, what do You want me to do today?" I strongly felt like he said, "Praise Me," and I did.  I pulled out my guitar and praised Him.  I even wrote part of a song.  That's when my two-year-old walked in the room with a stunned expression on her face, and I realized that she may have no memory of me playing.  For Shame. 

I took some pictures, and experimented with the different settings on my camera.  I'll post those later, because the kids have been patient enough, and I need to get back to the real world.

Finally, I had a blessed moment when my two-year-old knocked some Raymond Carver poetry books off the bottom shelf.  In a whirlwind moment of ADD, I just *had* to sit and read forty pages of it (I'm a fast reader--it took me about 10 minutes). Carver's language soaked right through my skin again, reminding me of all that God had delivered me from.  I wrote a couple of poems in his minimalistic style, and I'll post one for you here.

I have to be patient. 
I will not be my mother.

I will not scream when 
A little girl sings 
about songs that never end
at the top of her lungs
when I have a headache. 

I will take an asprin
and remind her
that she'll be on Broadway someday.