Island Mama

There’s this hole in the concrete patio. We have no idea why it’s there, how long it’s been there, if it was for a reason or due to an accident. It was there when we moved in.

I keep wanting to fill it in. But then we wonder if it’s useful in some way.

Certainly, it’s fun.

And messy. It’s just down-slope from the outside water faucet, so even if it hasn’t been raining, it is often filled with water.

Yes, he has shoes on. And is standing shoe-deep in the water.

And boys will play in it. Drop things in it. Stand in it. Splash in it. And even (and this is what convinces me we need to fill it in) try to drink from it. Timothy, with a sandpit shovel, tries to scoop up water and mud and feed it to himself. I know he’s working on using utensils, but I’d really rather he kept it to the table. And, you know, preferably food.

Inspired by the book The Creative Family, which I received last week, I decided to try wet felting with the boys. I already had loads of colored wool from my recent adventures in needle felting, so we got out some bowls of warm soapy water, lots of towels, and started dipping and rubbing balls of wool.

It was much harder to actually make balls than I expected, but we had fun anyway. Even Timothy enjoyed playing with the warm water and eventually, bored with the wool, he found some of his plastic spoons somewhere and before I knew it, it had turned into a dishwashing game…

The quilt is (almost) 1/8th done. At least (almost) 1/8th of the pattern part of the top. That’s not counting borders and quilting and binding.

The whole pieced part is 17 squares by 17 squares, and I’m doing them in batches of 4 x 4 squares. Then I’ll have to do one row for the center each direction to join it all together. Two 4×4 bits are done.

The first section took me three evenings, a couple hours each time. Last night I completed the second section. It’s looking good, I’m very happy with it so far.

On the last day of March, we had sun, then snow, then sun, then snow….. It was cold and wet and what was that about March going out like a lamb?

We got outside for a little while before dinner in one of the sunny spells, and there are definite signs of life in the garden, finally!

One of our new apple trees is showing green. (So are the plums and cherries!)

The raspberries are really getting leafy.

The salad greens are coming up already, despite the snow! You can just see the tiny green leaves there.

There are salmonberry flowers appearing all over the place! Thank goodness they have such bright flowers, because we’d never have known we have so many of them if they didn’t stand out so distinctly.

——

Today, it was warm outside. Warm from the sun! No chill in the air, we spent the whole afternoon outside, playing, working, tidying up. It was delightful and I can’t wait for the weather to be more reliably like that.

——

I’ve been working on the quilt, I will have photos to share soon. I’m sort of piecing blocks in chunks as I go to make sure it’s working before I have 289 blocks ready to put together all at once. The top is 1/16th done.

Inspired, again, by something I read.

Required:

Place a paper plate inside the salad spinner, pour a few blobs of paint on, and spin!

Pretty plates. I think we ended up with 6 or 7.

And this is what it does to the inside of the salad spinner. We used washable, non-toxic tempera paint, though, and it was actually really easy to clean up. (Ben loves doing dishes too, so it was like part of the fun, even!)

Inspired by these, we decided we needed a snake of our own. So, naturally, we bought a couple of ties at the thrift store and made Snakey. I don’t know what the originals are stuffed with, but ours has mixed dried beans for about three-quarters of it, then soft stuffing for a bit, then more beans in the head. Gives it a nice weight and dangly-ness (that’s a word, right?).

Both boys were very into the dried beans we used for filling him — they ended up all over the room, hello sensory experience! — although it took Timothy a while to figure out what we were doing. But once he did, he was right in there in the middle of it, grabbing his little fistfuls of beans and dropping them into the tie. It was cute. He didn’t seem to want to stop.

After Snakey was all finished, and Ben had cuddled with him for a while (”I’m gonna take the snake to bed, mama. He’ll help me sleep in my own bed all night.”) and named him, it was snack time. Snakey’s snack was totally set up and provided by Ben.

Playsilks are a Waldorf concept. They’re big silk scarves, in pretty colors, very versatile. But they’re expensive, usually around $10 - $12 each.

Having seen a bunch of people lately (here, here, and here) dying their own silk scarves, I was inspired to try it too. I bought a dozen of the 30″ x 30″ scarves from Dharma Trading, eventually found the Kool-Aid at the grocery store (I had no idea where to look! I’ve never bought it before!), and one morning a few weeks ago Ben and I worked on it. We did the simplest version we could:

• mix up the Kool-aid with water in a bowl
• wet the scarf, put it in the bowl and cover with plastic wrap
• microwave and let rest for 3 minutes each, twice
• rinse and hang to dry

Some people soak in vinegar and other complications, but I read somewhere that Kool-Aid is acidic enough that there’s no need for that. Our very simple method seemed to work just fine. I haven’t washed them yet, so I have no idea about colorfastness, but if the dye washes out, oh well, it just means we can play with dye again, right?

We also decided to experiment with some other household coloring agents. When we spill certain things on our clothes, they’re hard to get out. So it seems like they’d make good dyes too. The light gold and coppery ones in the bottom left were soaked with teabags and boiled with coffee grounds, respectively. The light pink one was just soaked in cold blackberry juice for a while. An hour, maybe. The lavender one was microwaved (same steps as above, basically) with a cup of frozen mashed blueberries and a bunch of water and some vinegar.

The kids have been playing with them a bit. They can be capes, pirate head wraps, blankets for babies. We can dance with them, bounce with them, wave them around. Ben likes to wrap presents in them. Timothy actually had lots of fun walking into them, through them and around them when they were hanging on the drying rack. Must figure out something we can hang them from that he won’t bump his head on, I think he’d enjoy that.

I finally started on the king-size quilt I’ve been planning since last August. After entering the quilt I made for my youngest son in the county fair, I decided my goal this year was to make a quilt that would deserve to be hung up and displayed in its entirety, instead of being folded up and hung over a railing in a nook, lost among the bulk of entries. So my husband came up with a design based on a mathematical curve, I started with one fabric I love that I’d picked up at the thrift store, and over the Christmas break I bought all the rest of the materials. (The quilt shop was having a pre-end-of-year-inventory sale, what could I do?) There was much discussion of colors and patterns while my in-laws were visiting for Christmas.

And finally, last night, I started cutting. I cut out 289 squares. (Rotary cutters rock!)

Now I have hundreds of little triangles to do. Pondering whether to cut them all at once or cut some and start sewing, cutting the rest as I go. Just to make sure the design is going to work, of course.

I realised last week that we were wasting the sunniest room in the house. What was formerly the guestroom and my sewing room faces south with sliding glass doors. It is a lovely bright room. And it was being used only a few weeks a year by guests who mostly just sleep there, and the rest of the time by me in the evenings when the kids are asleep. And on all of these sunny spring days we’ve been having, it was gated off and inaccessible while the playroom sat there and looked like a dark brown cave. No wonder the kids didn’t want to play in it.

Duh.

We moved the guest bed into the “cave” along with some stuff I want to store out of kids’ reach. We moved the toys into the sunny room and kept my sewing machine in there. We’ve spent at least some part of every day in there since then, boys playing together, or Ben helping me make something. All my supplies are easy to get to, and Ben is fascinated by the sewing machine and loves to help me use it.

I really like this new arrangement, and I think the boys do too.