Currently viewing the tag: "art/crafting"
Yes, it is back to school time!
Last year I shared my D.I.Y. inspirational posters for my classroom. This year I am adding a few more.
For the library:
Vocabulary enrichment:
This poster format was inspired by a crafter who was selling it in woodcut form for top dollar (see here). I kind of love my version just as much.
And to add to the “can’t really post in classroom” pile but serving to inspire me:
Metaphors can be a liability.
Not age appropriate. 10 year olds should enjoy and experience the world first and foremost.
Complaints are the currency of the unimaginative and inflexible. That should be another poster.
Math Fabric!
After looking for a good math fabric for my bulletin board and not liking the results, I made my own! This is my first fabric design on Spoonflower. I think I’ll be making many more designs in the coming months…
Summer recess is only a couple weeks in and I am still riding a wave of wrap-up productivity, knocking projects off my to-do list. I finished up my necklace holder about a month ago and since, my earrings have been eager for their own crafted display. Reusing some goodies and going back to my pastel spray paint, I managed to furbish a holder with equal pizazz for those earrings.
I taped up the inner part of this vintage frame with some painter’s tape. I purchased it from my favorite Long Island thrift, Island Thrift, several weeks ago.
3 coats of baby blue and some patience is all you need. And a well-ventilated area.
After some gentle nagging, The Electrician cut some wire mesh that fit the opening and secured it to the frame. And voila! My earrings holder is complete.
This thick mesh is perfect for earnuts and earwires! What else needs a custom-made holder or organizer???
Black stockings in a drawer all look the same. At a glance the opaque footless look like the sheer that look like the textured tights, etc. To add to this, my hose drawer exceeds maximum capacity, hiding some while making the rest more susceptible to snags. It is inside inefficiency where I see opportunity. As a organizational freak (different than the usual co-affliction: “clean freak” or the often mistaken “control freak” which has not much to do with spatial order but rather dictation of the use of space), I saw this as a problem to solve. After all, precious seconds are all we have and I like to make good use of them.
After searching for stocking organizers on the computer, I wasn’t impressed with what was available. I came up with the grand idea of making my own. So I had a photo shoot with my leg and bought myself some iron-on paper and a canvas door-hanging shoe holder.
I printed and trimmed my stocking pictures, prepared for a hot date with the iron.
No more confusion in my drawer! The iron-ons transfer vividly.
There she is! My own stocking organizer. Precious seconds back on my side.
Everything has its place. And with my embracing jewelry adornments lately, I needed to give them a proper home. Since I was not impressed with the standard tree or body form necklace holder, I had to make my own. Rustic and pretty, soft pastel and cold iron.
Start with a cheap vintage painting with a sturdy frame. Look up the artist online to make sure it’s not worth a million dollars then remove the painting within.
Have a handy person cut some wood to fit in the frame. Thank them. Select a dainty color from behind the locked gates of your local hardware store and set the wood up for spraying in a well-ventilated area, like the handy person’s backyard.
Spray your wood with at least 2 coats of color and 2 coats of a topcoat. Monitor the wood for curious bugs who may want to land and huff the chemicals. Let it dry thoroughly.
Get yourself a fancy, rustic hook. Like this moose hook.
Screw the hook to the wood in the frame. Marvel in its beauty.
Be on the look-out for #2 in this jewelry holding project: the earrings holder.
I have recently learned that there exist printable Shrinky Dink paper. Yes, Shrinky Dinks! Teeming with possibilities, I thought I’d create what I had been looking for in a pendant.
My first tries were an anatomically-correct heart, an artichoke (a play on the heart theme) and a brain. My parents’ ink was running low so the color is very vivid. I trimmed the excess paper and made ugly, sloppy holes. I was just eager to watch them wiggle and bake in the pre-heated oven!
It only takes a bout 2-3 minutes and they are shrunken and firmed up. The color darkened with the shrinking although the ink-strained stripes on the artichoke were still visible. Next time I need to make more careful holes within the image and trim them better. But they were going to be perfect for my first attempt at jewelry making!
And here is my first necklace! I attached the shrinky heart with some heart lockets and affixed them to the left of a double chain. The pendant is a bit large and I’ll consider that on my next batch of ‘dinks. Success!
While I was in the jewelry making section I picked up some other pieces to play with. This delightful branch and bird silver pendant was easy to piece together with set of tools.
I am so excited to be running a craft class after school with a gang of 4th and 5th graders. Here are some pictures from our first craft… plush owls.
Pin cushion place settings.
Piles of color.
Finally, a happy ending for my pile of fabric.
Ms. Banana digging for gold.
Orange eyes.
A parliament of owls.
1/1/11
#1: Volunteering.
Now that I have successfully decompressed from years of working and going to school in the evening, I have time to kill, time that often is wasted after work staring at various glowing screens. To make better use of this pool of minutes in 2011 I will incorporate a weekly volunteer position. Thing #1: Errand runner companion for homebound senior for Visiting Neighbors NY.
Update: I have a senior match! Our meeting is set for later this week.
1/8/11
#2: Reading.
I have a hard time reading. During the long span of college and graduate school, leisure reading was impossible. I read journals and research papers, technical writing; I read looong boring books about reading and craft-less writing about writing. It’s no wonder whatever morsel of free time was spent stimulating other senses. I was rebelling from what bound me, draining my energy and time. Now that I am decompressed, I am going to read again, open myself again to the world of books, my thing #2.
Update: My Book #2, Demian by Hermann Hesse, is going a bit slower. Dare I blame the tightly-bound yellowed and funky trade paperback from the 70′s format; it sits rigidly in my hand like a tense mousetrap.
1/15/11
#3: Giving.
I am the Universal Donor. This sounds like some kind of WWF wrestler but no, I am talking about blood type. 39,000 units of blood are needed everyday in America, blood for individuals undergoing cancer, surgery, transplants, as well as accident victims and those with blood disorders. In 2011 I will try to give every 10 weeks. This, along with my being a registered eye, tissue and organ donor, is thing #3.
1/22/11
#4: Crafting.
It’s official! I am running a weekly after-school crafting class! I will be spending 12 weeks with a group of precocious young ladies, making owls, cross-stitching and decoupaging. I am very excited to see what the young ladies can do during our time together, but I am also very excited to know that I will have set time to work on my own crafts. After a shopping spree at Michaels, I am set to go.
I’ve spent all week so far setting up my fifth grade classroom and haven’t cooked a darn thing. I entered my classroom mid-year this past January and didn’t have the opportunity to imprint the room with any of my own pizazz. But this year! Vintage fabric is strewn about and my tidy sense of deep-down organization and lively design will be invading the room. Not a fan of the half-butt and an admirer of spatial efficiency, I needed to cover closet doors of worn out wood with some inspiring messages and color, color, color! After some mishaps with some contact paper from the 1970′s, I thought it best to order a few feel-good but politically-charged posters from Northern Sun, a company that used to outfit me in my idealistic rebel teenager days. Then I moved on to Etsy for some wall art that was a bit more unique. Etsy always has deliciously wonderful prints, the kind I can peruse for hours smiling. Given my meager funds, I chose to replicate my own feel-good, life-is-beautiful prints in photoshop. Below is the series 1. Now to find a good printer… 
This one below will not go up in my classroom, but I wanted to make it anyway. It is a fascinating tidbit of science-love from the American physicist Lawrence Krauss.
With the coming of unseasonably warm temperatures is many neat things to do out and about in Brooklyn. The veg clan and I multi-tasked lunch with a charity cupcake sale with a craft sale in Park Slope to make the most of free time before the Monday drag. In the foreground here is my grey cupcake and, in the background, Farm Sanctuary‘s Vegan Bake Sale table outside in the sweltering heat schmoozing with the local foot traffic.
Having my dessert while I waited for my lunch, I chomped on a flour-heavy cupcake spread with grey matter and riddled with cookies and cream. Not the best vegan cupcake but for an extremely worthy cause. I adopted 3 cows from Farm Sanctuary back in 1994 when I first went vegetarian. After having stayed the farm some 10 years later, I got to meet Dolly, one of the surviving aging bovine I supported back then. What a wonderful place Farm Sanctuary is. 
Well worth the weekend wait, ‘Snice has become the standard in quality vegan sandwiches. Although I almost always opt for the Vegan Panini, today I tried the Philly Cheesesteak… with a ton of Daiya. (Looks like I am approaching another Daiya-out.) As per usual, ‘Snice did the trick. 
When he wasn’t tuning out the gal talk and day-dreaming about zombies, dragons and wizards, Tim brought the table some of ‘Snice’s treats to supplement the sale. Here is some sort of walnut and espresso bean-infused bundt cake and one of their signature cupcake (or lollipops). Neither I tried, being totally stuffed, but I had to snap their picture. 
Next up was the Food & Craft Sale at the Brooklyn Lyceum. There was a ton of cute stuff at the sale, including this tofu pirate from Panda With Cookie. It was too hot to shuffle past the patrons so we left in a jiff to resume Sunday duties of week prep. 
Vegan Reporting By Location
