Isia has just recently blossomed into a three-year-old, which means she now has more and more words everyday to go with her opinions. And, bless her heart, she has lots of opinions. About her snacks, what she wants to wear, do, read, play, etc. Usually I can go along, or compromise grandly, with her opinions but sometimes I can't. For instance, she shares a room with her baby brother right now and that's not going to change for awhile. But wouldn't it be fun, I ventured, to design a room of your own? Yes, she thought. And so we did.
I am pretty sentimental. Once upon a time we moved to China and sold everything we had, except for those special letters and my favorite shirt from high school and all of those photos (and negatives) from our pre-digital days. So it's hard for me to not keep every artwork that Isia makes, but I'm learning to be discerning and store only what has real meaning. But what to do with the rest? We keep them on hand and try to find different ways to incorporate them into our lives. Such as weaving them together.
I first started sewing when I was little. I would take scraps of cloths, sew them together, and called it a dress for my doll. Then I grew, sewed scraps of cloth into backless wonders that tied together, and called them shirts. Sewing was a free-form exercise to use what I already had to make something new. I never took scraps of cloth and sewed them using an honest-to-goodness pattern. Until now, starting with Billy's robot pants, here. And while I still intend to free-form it time to time, I'm amazed at how much faster it is to let someone else do the planning work for you. Someone who even makes sewing your own smocking a feasible task...
"A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember."
Lots of our crayons have been making their way into the bag of brokenness these days. You know, that bag with all the tiny bits of broken crayons that are too tiny for little fingers to hold. They were the overlooked crayons, but no longer...
As I've shared before, I am trying to limit art supply purchases this year and focus instead on using up what we already have. It's been hard, because I keep seeing beautiful art ideas that would only require "this or that"- but it's been really good for me too. Not only do we have lots of art supplies already, but it's encouraged me to keep seeing everything as a potential art material. For example, who knew you could combine a plastic lid and a tissue paper roll to get this?
