Embroidered Drawings

Now that we've fallen back with the clocks and the nights are about to get very, very long, I'm trying to recommit to finishing up a bunch of abandoned craft projects that I had started but never finished. The first thing on my list to work on is this embroidery project that I began about 3 years ago, after I first let Jake watch the original Superman movie. Pictured above you will find Jake's interpretation of the attempted mugging scene from said film, which made a deep impression on him. In this scene, Lois and Clark are stopped in an alley at gunpoint by a very bad man who shoots at the pair in the kerkuffle that ensues when Lois tries to be a sassy smartypants, rather than just hand over her purse. In Jake's translation, Lois (far left) screams "Eeeek!" while mild mannered Clark nervously reasons with the mugger "Sir, you can't solve a mystery with a gun." (I believe the actual words Clark utters are "Sir, you can't solve the world's problems with violence."). The mugger replies: "After I just rip off this lady's purse-now hand it over." I LOVE the details in this drawing; the bricks in the background indicating the location, Clark's hat and glasses, Lois's purse, the mugger's gun. The dark lines in the brick show where I've started embroidering so I've still got a long way to go. When its finished I'm going to make it into a pillow for Jake's room.

Detail from the Superman mugging scene:

Sometimes my kids' drawings are just so special to me that I take the liberty of reappropriating them into art of my own. In this picture, and the additional examples that follow, I've taken drawings that my kids have done, transferred them onto fabric and embroidered them. I love this idea so much-and I'll give props here to the mom whom I most hate to love (because I so deeply respect her lifestyle yet fall so short of emulating it), Amanda Blake Soule, from whose book The Creative Family I got this idea-that I had planned for a time on starting a business translating kids drawings into embroidered art. Alas, I somehow wound up making tote bags instead, but no regrets. I've taught Jake to embroider too, and he will occasionally sit with me and stitch a few lines still.

Here is another one of Jake's early drawings of a giraffe that translated beautifully into an embroidered image that now hangs in Michael's room. Jake actually did a series of these giraffes; I can't find the original one that I used for the embroidery art shown below this image, which is another great reason for stitching a good drawing-it'll last longer! Jake was five when he drew this. I was so moved by his having included with the giraffe a thought bubble, into which he drew a heart, then another heart inside of which he wrote his name. I'm not sure what he was thinking at the time, but I'm pretty sure it was something happy.

The drawing:

The embroidered piece:

Detail:

Note that the fabric is a bit puckered around the image in this drawing. I used plain muslin cloth for this project, but I'd recommend a natural linen for better results, since the weave is wider. I'll also add that to transfer the Superman drawing, which Jake drew on a letter sized piece of paper but which I wanted to put onto a bigger piece of fabric, I used an opaque projector to blow up the image, and drew it onto the fabric with a superfine tip marker. For the giraffe, I employed an embroidery transfer pencil, with which you can trace the image directly onto tracing paper, then iron onto the fabric. Be sure to flip your image around first if you're tracing letters. (So trace once, then flip the tracing paper over and trace again from behind; the backwards image will be the one you iron onto the fabric.)

Finally I'll share a much quicker image of Charlie's that I recently made since I'm trying to jazz up his pitifully under decorated bedroom with some cute wall art. I'll leave this in the embroidery hoop and hang it just like it is. I see an image of a mouse in profile, enclosed in a circle. Yes, he's got very long legs. For this picture I gave Charlie a pen and a piece of muslin and just asked him to draw me a picture. I embroidered right on top of his lines. It took me about 15 minutes to embroider.

PS, I learned to embroider in just a couple of hours by taking a class with Diana Rupp at the awesome Make Workshop. If you don't live in NYC or can't find a live person to teach you how to embroider, I'd recommend (as Diana did to me) getting yourself a copy of Melinda Coss's Reader's Digest Complete Book of Embroidery, which will teach you way more stitches than you'll ever need to get up and running with this craft form. I'm sure there are plenty of others out there that are less traditional, but this one is a great reference guide.

UPDATE:
Diana recently published her own book on how to embroider call the Embroider Everything Workshop. She teaches you all of the basics and then some, and includes some terrific projects to make. I highly recommend it!

Twas the Night Before Halloween...

This is a procrastination post. Right now I'm supposed to be making yellow boots of some sort to finish the Flash costume that Charlie will be wearing for Halloween tomorrow. But I kind of need a break from Flash. He's too damn fast, and lately I've been feeling the need to slow down.

This afternoon the kids started carving their pumpkins (see above), though by the time they went off to bed the table was still covered with pumpkin guts and some stray seeds. I'll finish them tomorrow. I also still need to adjust the cape for Michael's Superman costume, which is the very same one I made for Charlie last spring. Phew. One thing I did not leave til the last minute this year because I really wanted to make them were trick or treating bags for the boys. Growing up, my four siblings and I always used pillow cases to collect our loot. Whether this was because we were hoping to get a LOT of candy or because they were just practical (probably both) I don't remember. But I thought it would be fun to give my kids some bags that were a little smaller, weren't covered in a floral Laura Ashley print, and that went along with each of their personalities.

These are cotton drawstring produce bags from Ecobags, which we also use for our produce and bulk dry goods at the grocery store. To convert them into trick or treat bags, I just downloaded some free, fun Halloween fonts online, typed the text out in a Word document, and printed them onto some Epson Iron On Transfer paper.

Above is Jake's bag. He loves the bloody font. Some of the kids in his class at school this year are scaring the pants off of each other with their theories about how one sees Bloody Mary on Halloween. Apparently it involves standing in the bathroom with the lights off, flushing the toilet multiple times, and reciting a few select words while looking in the mirror. I had totally forgotten about this ghost story/urban myth from my own childhood until he started talking about it recently.

Charlie's bag is a remake of a tote I sold in my Etsy shop last year which had the same text in black on an orange bag. This suits my middle boy because he's such a tough customer. Seriously: if he comes to your house on Halloween, just give him the goods, nice and slow. You don't want any trouble from an angry Flash when he's coming down from a sugar high. But if you treat him right he's a real charmer.

Michael gets this bag because he tries so hard to be a bad ass like his big brothers, and watching him threaten you might just be one of the funniest things you'll ever bear witness to. But how much of a tough guy can a curly, blond headed two year old with blue eyes the size of Oreos be? Actually, don't answer that.

Happy Halloween everyone. Photos of the boys in all of their costumed regalia will surely follow.

Easy Upcycled Felted Cashmere Baby Legwarmers

Can I tell you how much I love wool felt? More specifically, I love felting wool sweaters that I find at thrift stores. I love buying them, felting them, and then shoving them all into this big bag that I have set aside for my ever growing collection of felted wool thrift store sweaters. You could say I am a collector of felted wool and cashmere thrift store sweaters. But the collection is becoming unwieldy and my house, for some reason, isn't getting any bigger. So I need to start making some stuff with these sweaters. Last spring, I made a bunch of felted wool bunnies as baby gifts for friends. I opened the bag last night with plans to make another, for another new babe I know, but instead I decided to try something else. I picked out the softest, pinkest, cashmeriest sweater of the bunch, and made myself some baby legwarmers. Well, they're not for me, actually. They're for this baby called Elodie. But anyway. It was so easy to do, I almost feel like you can figure it out without me telling you how. But, okay, I will.

First I cut the sleeves of of the sweater. After I cut out the seam the fabric was about 6.5" wide. The cuffs will be the ankle cuffs of the leg warmers. I cut the length to 9". These may be a little long for infants under a year, but they'll grown into them in no time.

Next I cut the seam out of the sleeve, turned the sleeve inside out, and pinned the edges. Then I sewed each one with a quarter(ish) of an inch seam allowance.

Finally, I turned the raw edges down, pinned them into place, and sewed a hem.

I turned them right side out, et Voila! These things are about 3 1/2" across lying flat, (though the cashmere still has plenty of stretch to it) and are intended as size 6-12 months. Probably they'll last a lot longer than that, since they have lots of room to grow in the length in particular.

UPDATE 11/20/11
I had to add this picture of Elodie modeling her new leg warmers. Super adorable!

A Family That Eats Together...

So we wound up in the newspaper. Well, not the paper, paper. Rather we were included in the online version of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, for an article about family dinners in America. (I had a bit of a laugh when I discovered that the photo they used of us is named "extra families slide", which made me feel kind of like we were leftovers. Still. It was cool to see us in the paper.)

I think the topic of family dinners is an important one, because I think in the answers to the questions about how we experience the evening meal are revelations to how we're living our lives in general. What kinds of food are we eating? Are we working too much or too late to make it home for dinner? Do we eat the same foods as our children or are we making separate meals for them? What kinds of things are happening around the act of meal preparation? (According to Jake, if you're in my house, you're watching very violent television.) But the question that's become most salient for me is: What actually happens once we're sitting down to the meal? I've written in earlier posts about how stressful a family meal can be at our table, because the kids fight, they may not eat as much (or at all) as we'd like, they get up from the table, etc., etc. This is consistently disappointing, because what we'd love to experience is a calm and connected time to wind down together and collectively recount the events of our day. In other words, our expectations for what the meal should be like are grossly at odds with the reality of our family dinners.

Recently I read an incredibly enlightening blog post written by the husband of a friend of mine (who herself writes an excellent blog on family and eating) who is a doctor specializing in eating disorders. His post, about the dynamic between parents and small children during meal time, for me served as a potent reminder (if the thought ever actually occurred to me at all) that this time, dinner time, with my children, functions as an extremely important opportunity for them to express themselves to my husband and I in ways that their words cannot always achieve. Sometimes at dinner the otherwise very independent Charlie is wanting desperately to sit in my lap, or he is an angry superhero who wants justice for his people (with the rest of us starring as the baddies). Sometimes the very capable Michael pretends to be a very small baby who needs me to feed him. Sometimes Jake, who usually finds his brother an interloping annoyance, chooses mealtime to invent games to play with Charlie. And because I want everyone to "behave" at dinner, my first instinct in any of these scenarios is often to try and deny my children their desires to deviate from my perceived norms of good table manners. I want them to sit. I want them to eat. I want them to do it politely and without a fuss. But A) I know this is a completely unrealistic expectation for me to have of them and B) I know that in those moments in which I'm able to relax and let them be who they are (playful, funny, silly, restless, boys, brothers) dinner is a better experience for all of us. Yes, they need to say please and thank you, yes they need to eat with utensils and behave a bit more like humans than like animals, but that's really it for now. Children evolve and mature. They even grow up. If I can use family dinners as an opportunity to practice presence of mind and acceptance of my family just as it is, I can probably have faith that someday these boys will eat with napkins in their laps. And the novelty of potty jokes might eventually wear off. Or maybe not.