Judah's First Birthday: Part Two

Secondly, the Mama Makes

I had all sorts of plans that didn't happen.  But given the time that I had, I actually got a fair amount done.

Decorations
We didn't have a party, but I still wanted to decorate for Judah's birthday.  So I made some garlands out of circles I cut out of felt and sewed together and another with some wool felted balls stung up on yarn.  I also used some pom-pom fringe I had on hand.

I forgot to take a picture specifically of the garlands all hung on Judah's birthday.
They looked better then, but this gives you an idea.

Here's a [terrible] picture of everything all decorated.

Crown
I made Judah a birthday crown loosely based on this pattern.  I'm hoping that I can just replace the elastic as his head gets bigger, so I just tacked the 1 on a felt diamond that I can easily replace with a 2 next year.

Spoiler Alert: You'll see more pictures of the crown in the next post in the context of the day's festivities and (more importantly) on the head of one very adorable birthday boy.

Crochet Ball
For Christmas, I crocheted a blanket for Judah.  I had some yarn left over, so I decided to crochet a ball for him to match.  I used this website, which I found on pinterest.  But the website is in German, so I had to improvise a bit here and there because despite taking 2 years of German in high school and 2 semesters in college, I was never taught crochet vocab.  Can you believe that?!?  I feel a little cheated by the sub-standard quality of my education.  (Sidenote: In adding this website, I just noticed that google chrome can translate it into English for you.  That would have been helpful to know 3 months ago.  Also, I just realised that I probably could have easily found another pattern for a crochet ball with a simple google or ravelry search, but this also did not occur to me.)

Draw-String Bag
Back in the fall, Jason and I scored a bunch of books and toys for Judah at a yard sale that we saved for Christmas and his birthday.  We got this set of blocks for 25 cents, but they came in a ziplock, which I thought was unacceptable.  So I made Judah a drawstring bag to put them in.  (Sidenote: no matter how many bags I make with flat bottoms, I always sew the corners wrong the first time and have to rip them out and redo them.)  And speaking of ripping things out and redoing them...

The Quilt Saga that Epically Broke My Heart
I finished the top of this quilt before Judah was born...so that's over a year ago.  It was loosely based on this sewing machine cover design in this book by Malka Dubrawsky.  I used a log cabin strip quilting technique to make 120 little blocks.  I pieced it together beautifully.  This thing was perfect...every little block perfectly squared.  But I never got around to quilting it.  Because I had this baby, and the rest is history.  Still, it was just so pretty that I used it in Judah's monthly photo shoots.

I was determined to have it finished for his first birthday.  It was going to be his big special gift made especially for him by his mama.  I worked on it all week...adding the borders, laying out the backing and batting, pinning every few inches, and finally, quilting it all together.  It was hard to pull all the layers through my basic singer sewing machine, but it was a matter of will.  I got to the end and inspected my work, and here's what I had done:

My perfectly squared blocks were all askew.  The back was all ripply.  I had ruined my masterpiece.  Apparently, the reason it was so hard to quilt was that my tension was off, and I didn't have a quilting presser foot.  I called my mom to ask her what I should do.  She said, "Well, you have two options.  You can just add the binding and call it done.  Or you can rip it out, bring it down to Jersey, and quilt it on my Elna 6003 Quiltmaker's Dream.  Do you want it to be finished, or do you want it to be done right?"  Boo.  I was hoping for "It's not that bad.  You're being silly."  But she was right.  This was Judah's baby blanket, and I wanted it to be an heirloom.  So I put it aside with a frowny face, feeling like a total failure of a mother, artist, and person in general.  Nevertheless, this was Judah's birthday.  And I wanted it to be about him, so I put the quilt out of my mind and moved on to the celebration.

[Edit: Since then, I did take the quilt down to Jersey, where my mom and I patiently ripped out the quilting.  She gave me a new piece of backing fabric, and we pinned it together.  Then she set up her Elna 6003 Quiltmaker's Dream, and I went to town.  And it turns out...it wasn't my Singer's fault after all.  I'm just a bad quilter.  I think I hold the fabric too tightly as I pull it through.  Because Judah's quilt was still ripply.  Jason and my mom both said it looked better, but if that's true, it's a minimal improvement.  I wasn't about to rip it out a second time, so I let my mom sew on the binding fabric, and I proceeded to hand-stitch it to bind the quilt together.  Finished.]

[Edit 2: But then I ran it through the wash, and the batiks bled onto my beautiful, clean, bright white fabric.  My mom says that if I keep washing it, eventually, the fabric will stop bleeding, and the stains will go away.  But the machines in my building are $3 per load, so that's just not going to happen any time soon.]

So for now it lives on the back of Judah's little recliner...wonky, wavy, and splotched.  So very far from the perfection of my original vision for the project.  But he is my sweet little boy, and he has compassion on his mama, and he's started taking it down and playing on it just to let me know that he likes it and that he loves me, despite all my insufficiencies.

Thanks, Judah.  I love you, too.

2011 CM9: A Tangerine in the Toe

Being the youngest of three, I never remember believing in Santa Claus.  Older sisters tend to do that for you.  They pave the way in school so your teachers love you before they know you.  They look out for you and give you hard-earned advice.  They take the brunt of your parents' discipline leaving you to coast through your adolescence.  But they also tend to ever so slightly tarnish the magic of make-believe.  I count myself among the fortunate youngest siblings of the world in that my sisters humored me more often than not.  And when they were being rotten, either by my blind faith in them or by their own convincing, I believed that we were just playing, and I loved every second.

When Christmas time came around, I still wrote letters to Santa asking for presents, but I knew my parents were behind it all.  Still, the tradition in my family somehow landed in this happy compromise between reality and deception: all the big presents wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper were from Mom and Dad.  But the stocking presents and everything wrapped in white tissue paper in neat piles under our stockings were from Santa.

Now, for those of you who didn't grow up with stockings or never welcomed the illusion of Santa into your home, let me tell you: there is a precise science to the way a stocking is filled:

• There is always candy involved.  This includes candy inside the stocking and 2-3 candy canes hung over the edge.  There is also usually a toothbrush to compensate for all the sweets.
• Presents are wrapped haphazardly with white tissue paper, closed with one piece of tape, and labeled with your first initial.  You can usually see through the wrapping to the present.  Because really, Santa has way too much to do to worry about pretty wrapping jobs for your stocking.
• There's some saying that originated somewhere about having a "tangerine in the toe."  For some reason, in preparing and opening stockings, we always say it, and it's very important.  But we use clementines instead because they're better.  And we just pretend to not know or notice the difference because it's just tradition, and that's how it's done.

And all that preamble is leading up to the fact that this was Judah's first Christmas.  And if you hadn't noticed, I am very particular when it comes to tradition, especially at Christmas.  So there was no way Judah's first Christmas wouldn't include a stocking.  So I stayed up way too late on Christmas Eve finishing this for him:

The front is pieced using a technique called crazy quilting.  It's probably my favorite way to sew because it doesn't require precision in cutting, piecing or sewing.  It's kind of like putting together a puzzle or a collage.  Once the top was done, I embroidered Judah on it.

Then I sewed the top to the lining and a layer of batting and did the same with the backing, lining, and another layer of batting.  Then I stitched the front and back together by hand.  To finish, I stitched on the gold trim, also by hand.

When I was in Jersey for Thanksgiving, I raided my mom's fabric stash so that Judah's stocking would match Jason's and mine.

With our lack of mantle, we had to hang our stockings on the kitchen cart.

 And here's Judah opening his stocking on Christmas morning:

J is for Judah!!

Don't worry--the candy canes were wrapped, and we took them away promptly after we were done taking pictures.

While we were opening presents, Judah stopped every so often, gave us a look like "are you sure it's okay for me to do this?" and then went right back to the paper.  I guess all of those, "Judah! Stop eating that wrapping paper!"s of the preceding weeks sunk in enough to make him hesitant.

He did this totally on his own.  The boy was made for product placement.  We really need to cash in on that.

And of course, the tangerine in the toe.

Merry Christmas, Judah.  Welcome to the family!

Show #3

Finally...the North Shore Bazaar.

I spent just about every free moment from Halloween to November 8th making inventory for this, my first ever craft show where I would be the main event of my own table. This past weekend, I kicked it into high gear. Jason and I were up until about 3:00 am on Friday night/Saturday morning felting pumpkins and acorns. Then I woke up at 8:00 on Saturday morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so I started working.

I set up my display in the middle of my craft room and added to it bit by bit as the day progressed. Inventory, price tags, display pieces, business cards, signage, a tree branch, skeins of wool, and so on until I was finally satisfied enough to say I was ready. I put in 16 hours of work (which doesn't include breaks for food, talking to my mom about pricing, and watching a little Antiques Roadshow on PBS) before I finally fell into bed at 3:30 in the morning.

I knew I was going to have a round table at the bazaar, so I used a clothesline display for my aprons to visually break the table into two sections. This is my display as staged in my craft room:


You may notice the little pedestal mirror from blogs past, which has now become my logo and sign. I finally settled on the business name "A Happy Little Sparrow" with the tagline: Creations for Nest and Flight, because I felt like "Every Cool Thing" was just too broad and not picturesque enough. So I started an etsy seller's account at www.ahappylittlesparrow.etsy.com, a business email address at ahappylittlesparrow@gmail.com, printed up some business cards, and appliqued/embroidered myself a little business sign, which I am in love with and quite impressed by, if I do say so myself, especially considering that I stitched it well after midnight the night before my show. Way to go, Robin. Here's a close-up of the sign:

So Sunday morning finally came. I unintentionally slept right through church and woke up at 11:26 (34 minutes before I was supposed to be at the bazaar, which was 25 minutes away), because I foolishly forgot to set an alarm for myself. So I jumped out of bed, jumped in the shower, and feverishly started getting ready for the day. Thankfully, my late o'clock preparations included packing everything up, so I was able to get everything ready and loaded up and out the door by 12:17, and Jason and I got to the show with just enough time to set-up and finish creating a few pricing signs before it started at 1:00. Phew. It was quite the whirlwind morning.

Here is my display all set up at the bazaar (and me in my cute little rooster utility apron):

My total inventory included 4 wet-felted pincushions ($12/each), 73 acorns ($2/each or 3 for $5), 21 pumpkins ($8/each), 5 owls (ranging from $15-$25), 11 aprons ($25/each), 4 felting kits ($30-$45), and about 45 jars of apple butter, strawberry jam, and strawberry lemon marmalade ($3 for a small jar, $6 for a large jar).

There were about 20 vendors at the show selling all sorts of local and fair trade goodies ranging from pottery to produce and blankets to bags. It was pretty well-attended, and everyone seemed to have a really good time. And after only 3 hours of standing by my table, I brought in a total of 128 dollars!! I was so excited. On the way to the show, Jason asked me how much I wanted to sell. I told him that the show had really already fulfilled its purpose. I was ready. I had created a load of inventory. I knew now that I could do it. And that was worth all of the work I had put into it. I said it would be pretty demoralizing to not sell a single thing, but if all I sold was one acorn, I would feel adequately affirmed. So to sell that much at my very first show, I was over the moon. And on top of all that, I handed out a ton of business cards, received so many affirming comments, and even had a person sign up on my email list! So all in all, the North Shore Bazaar was a major success for A Happy Little Sparrow and made me quite a happy little Robin.

I did learn few things that I will take with me into future shows:
1) I only sold one jar of marmalade and one jar of apple butter, which was strange because my mom's jam is always such a guaranteed good seller. So next time, I'm going to try to elevate the jars to eye-level so people can see what it is and realize how much they would love some homemade preserves for themselves and to give away as gifts to everyone they know.

2) I need to wear sneakers to my next show. As adorable and comfortable as my boots are, they do not hold up to multiple hours on my feet, and my back did not thank me for my vanity.

3) My utility aprons are awesome. My rooster apron worked out SO well. It kept my money separated and organized by currency. My business cards were nice and handy in my cute little pocket. And it held a pen and notepad, with which I kept track of everything I sold. Check plus!

4) As much as I loved my display, I think I need to go with a simpler, solid table cloth next time so it allows my products to stand out more. I also need to type out my signs and use black ink so they don't blend into the colors of my products and display.

5) After Halloween, I need to gear my products more towards Christmas and less towards fall.

6) It is very helpful to have a second person along so I can check out other vendors, get something to eat, and have someone to talk to when things are slow. Jason was vital and instrumental to the whole process of preparing and helping me with every aspect of the show. He helped me with felting. He offered loads of helpful opinions. He helped me load and unload and set up and tear town, following my scattered instructions perfectly. He manned the table while I scoped out the other tables. He made sure I ate and drank something and sat down occasionally. He was so encouraging throughout the whole process. And he even felted a pumpkin during the show to demonstrate the technique:
7) And finally, one of the most important things I learned from the show was: I can do this! I can make enough stuff that people like and want to buy. I can create a visually appealing display. And I can talk to people about my products and sell them things that they like. And the crazy thing is: I enjoyed every single part of it, from design to production to display to interaction to taking their money to have a nice day. I really thoroughly enjoyed it all!

So there you have it. My 3rd 1st show. I have one more show lined up for this year: the Christmas Bazaar at the seminary on Saturday, December 5th from 9:00-2:00. If you live on the North Shore, you should definitely come. It's a show for students, spouses, faculty, and staff of the seminary to sell their wares, and I will be there with my aprons, preserves, acorns, owls, and lots of other little goodies that are yet to be made. So here we go again. Back to the ol' grind stone! :o)

Show #1

And the updates keep on coming...
2 Fridays ago, I had the Kalos coffee house. I brought my tree wall-hanging and a few embroidery hoop fabric collages (a name which I made up and am quite proud of because that's exactly what they are). Here is a picture of the hoops:
You'll probably recognize the big one as the crazy quilt square I made a few weeks back. I'm planning to sell this set and more like it at the upcoming Cranberry Fest in Chatsworth, NJ.

For the most part, my little creations were well received, especially my tree wall-hanging. I don't know if people really understood my fabric collages because they're meant to be wall art, but they were placed on a table...which kind of made them look a little silly, as if they weren't really finished.The event itself was really fun. We got to hear some really good music and some...other music. :o) There were some really amazing pieces on display (my favorites belonged to Jen and Chris Anderson, who displayed prints from linoleum and copper etchings, respectively). The Kalos journal turned out beautifully. And there was an excellent turn out, probably about 300 people. By the time I got to play during the open mic portion, that number had dwindled quite a bit. For those of you who are familiar with my music, I played "Ebony" and "Don't Mess with Me." My guitar playing was a little sloppy, but it had probably been about a year since I'd done that sort of thing, so on the whole, I was sufficiently satisfied with the performance, and I'm glad I did it. You can hear "Don't Mess with Me" here. For some reason, my myspace page looks all funky, but the music player still works.

The show was a little bitter sweet for me. I had a bit of a "fan base" from my friends from the seminary--you guys rock! thanks for your support!!--but for the most part, the people who got the best reactions during the "open mic" section of music were the people who were...on the other side of awesome, and I think it's a shame that people find it so necessary to rave over the courage of minimally talented people and end up encouraging mediocre performances. Maybe that makes me a bad person. It probably makes me selfish. I just want people to listen to my music, to really hear it and appreciate it. But the truth is that for the most part, people don't really listen unless they already have an invested interest in me. And that's hard to come to grips with because I never know if my stuff is any good or if people are just complimenting my music because they're my friends and that's why they like it.

Oh well. I saw the remake of Fame a few weeks back with a friend of mine. It basically comes down to this depressing moral: you can have either fame or a meaningful personal life. You have to throw away all your relationships in order to be successful in performing arts. You can't have both.

A part of me still wonders what would have happened if I would have been brave enough to pursue music and songwriting. My life would have been drastically different, and it's easy to fantasize that I would have been so much happier to be living my dream, even unsuccessfully. But I know I would have had to sacrifice in other areas...big areas that are really important to me. So even though the movie made me all sad and nostalgic for my days being part of a lively and challenging artistic community, it was comforting to see other people (albeit fictional people) fail because they chose relationships over success, rather than some big romanticizing, fairy tale portrayal of the performing arts (which is what I expected it to be).

Wow...this post got all depressing. I just wanted to show you all my fabric collages and give you an update on the coffee house. Sorry for the existential despair. :o/ More lively and chipper crafting posts coming soon, documenting the results of the nothing-to-sell-at-upcoming-craft-shows panic. :o)

The Hard Work of Treedom

After many hours of sulking in my stumpedness, after dozens of ideas touched down upon and just as quickly discarded, after much frustrating and philosophical pondering on the question "what is beauty?", I finally have my submission for Kalos. I don't know how well it answers the question. In the end, I decided to do something that I could do well and that meant something to me. But before we get to the the philosophical reasoning behind my creation, let's start with the process, shall we?

I chose to finish a wall-hanging of a sun, a tree, and a river that I started a few months ago. It's a collaboration of applique and embroidery...because my hand-sewing is so impeccable. Once I had the fabrics chosen and the pieces cut, I had to sew them together. Of course all the lovely curves meant I had to sew all of the fabric onto my muslin base by hand, turning under the edges as I went.

After many hours of tiny little stitches, it was time for...more tiny little stitches. I did the top of my tree with a stem stitch and finished off the rest of the tree with stitches I don't know the names for. At this point, I'd just like to brag a little. The mark of good embroidery is that the back looks just as good as the front. This is the back:

And the front:Pretty good, right? Yeah, I know. :o)

Here is the completed panel (on my pretty mosaic coffee table):

I felt like it needed a border, so I added brown fabric from a curtain I found in the "As-Is Bin" at Ikea. (Oh how I love Ikea!) Once the border was attached, I cut out a brown back panel and a layer of batting so the back wouldn't show through my white muslin front. I sewed the front, batting, and back together inside-out like a pillow because at that point I couldn't decide whether it would be a pillow or a wall-hanging. (That also saved me from adding a binding around the edges, which would have been...more tiny little stitching.) In the end, I decided on a wall-hanging, so I stitched a sleeve of fabric onto the back, fed a dowel through the sleeve, and hung it on my bedroom wall. So here, again, is [a not stellar picture of] the finished product:
And now for the deep metaphorical explanation:
I began this project with the intention of hanging it over the door of my apartment. It would symbolize the three words Jason and I have engraved in our wedding bands: grace, truth, warmth. We decided that those were the virtues we wanted our marriage to embody: to be gracious to each other always, quick to listen, quick to forgive; to be grounded in the Truth and to always be honest with each other; and to be warm, gentle, and comforting to each other as well as having a welcoming and hospitable home. So my little wall-hanging has a river for grace, a tree rooted by that river for truth, and a sun for warmth. In addition to being a scene of serenity and beauty, what it represents is a shared life of those three virtues, and I believe that that qualifies as beauty, too. But there are more layers to the imagery. In talking to Jason about my idea, he pointed out that the images I planned to make were also very Trinitarian: the Father is the sun, the Son is the tree, and the Spirit is the river.

The day I finally decided to go ahead with this idea, I was reading psalm 1, which talks about "a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither." That little phrase "in its season" stuck out to me. Normally, I instinctively discard the terminology of "seasons" when it is used in Christian circles. I throw it out with "this too shall pass" and "God is in control" and other such cliches. But when I read psalm 1 the other day, I was struck by this tree and its seasons. It is rooted by the stream. It's where it is supposed to be. And because of that, it stays alive. It goes through photosynthesis. It recycles the CO2 in the atmosphere into oxygen. It provides shade for a picnic or an afternoon of climbing to a child. But all that is not the glory of a tree. The Bible says, "You will know a tree by its fruit." A tree's glory and its identity, the full mark and celebration of what the tree is, is its fruit. But sometimes...the tree is just a tree. It isn't always yeilding fruit. More often than not, the tree is building up sugar, storing it until the time is right for the fruit to grow and ripen. And in the mean time, the tree does the more simple, mundane acts of treedom... stretching its branches towards the sun, digging its roots deeper into the soil, pulling at the current of the river for a drink. And in all this reaching and stretching and striving, the tree's reward is to gain a little growth for itself and see its shade enjoyed, it branches climbed, and its leaves thoughtlessly torn off or chewed up! But someday, in its season, sure enough, the tree will yield fruit. And on that day, there will be no doubt what kind of tree it is.

The tree in my wall-hanging is fruitless at the moment. It is doing the hard work of stretching and reaching and growing, with little visible results. But it's where it's meant to be. It's doing the work it was made to do. And someday, it will burst forth into color and produce a rich harvest that makes all the stretching and striving make sense. And maybe on that day, I'll make another wall-hanging that displays the tree in all its rich and fruitful glory. Both scenes, I think, have something to say about beauty, maybe even more so the simple than the ostentatious. Because the struggle, the mundane day-to-day, all the hours of work and anticipation, are what eventually yield the harvest.