Monthly Archives: March 2013

Mar 15 2013

Blub Blub

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Ever since The Winter of Aquatic Death, I’ve been ignoring the aquarium. We are down to two tiny fish, a swarm of planaria, and some algae. Both the light bulbs burnt out several weeks ago. The water was a bit cloudy. I was even starting to use my secret mind powers (which I generally only use on dishes and laundry) to make the entire aquarium disappear. Anya told me she wanted to get some more fish, but I’m not going to put them into a home that resembles an underwater Dickinson orphanage. What do I do when things get messy? Clean Sweep ’em!

I couldn’t really take everything out of the tank and put it into piles, so instead I went to the pet store and bought new light bulbs. I am so wild and crazy. Even wilder and crazier than that? I didn’t leave the light bulbs in the car for two weeks. I didn’t let them get lost on the kitchen table for an entire season! Nope. I replaced the light bulbs right when I got home. I walked in the door, dropped my stuff on the floor, and changed those light bulbs! I really think I deserve a gold star for that alone, but it doesn’t stop there. Oh no, it does not.

After the tank was once again illuminated, I could see how much algae was growing on the sides, so I decided to scrub that off. Then I noticed all the flotsam dangling off the plastic plants and the princess castle. Those definitely needed to come out for a good washing. And heck, if I’m going to do that, why not break out the gravel sucker and suck up some muck? WOO! I really need to remember how much fun gravel muck sucking is because if I do, maybe I’d do it more often. It’s so much fun it’s sort of dangerous since I can easily get distracted by all the fun and suck up a fish or suck out so much water the fish end up flopping around on the gravel like in that horrible asthma commercial. Don’t worry. I managed to contain my fun adequately.

The aquarium is now beautiful and clean and tidy. I even rearranged the plants and other decorative items to give it a total Clean Sweep make over. The fish seem happy. I’m not so sure about the planaria, and I’m hoping the algae has suffered serious setbacks. But who cares about them? It’s time for more fish!

IMG_0036 (Any store is a toy store when you are Anya.)

Mar 10 2013

Yearlong Crafty Swap – Month 2

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My packet maker, Ginger, is a big-time stamper, and so it makes sense that my swap packet has a lot of stamped images. See, you don’t actually have to give someone the stamp for them to use the image. You can stamp the images on card stock and share them. Makes total sense, but for some reason this never occurred to me until I starting hanging out with Ginger. (Did you know there are digital stamps? Of course there are.) I haven’t done a lot with stamps even though I have quite a few. [There was that time I made my own stamps out of all sorts of weird things like pine needles and soda cups and clay pressed into air vent grates, but that’s sort of different.] This month’s swap I decided I’d take some stamped images on my journey out of my comfort zone.

While there are a billion different colors of stamp pads out there, stamped images definitely aren’t limited to just the one color that the stamp is stamped in. That is definitely an option, as is using markers to color onto the stamp to make the image. But as long as you are just stamping, there’s all that white space in the images just begging for color. Ginger and Kristy (another big-time stamper) spend a lot of time coloring, and while I like coloring myself, I generally prefer the crayon-in-book sort. Not only is my stamp-coloring-in experience newbie level, so is my stamp-coloring-in marker collection.

Although our swap cards don’t have to be the same for all 6 cards we make each month, I personally like it when the ones I am making are. I didn’t have six of any one image, but I had two very similar images with three copies each. I colored the images, and with each one finished my appreciation grew for the skill and work Ginger and Kristy (and other stampers) put into their colored images.

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The colored images were okay, but I was deeply bothered by the vampire-pale skin the girls had. My marker collection didn’t have anything remotely skin toned that wouldn’t cover up the face details. I pondered colored pencils, but somehow mixing pencils and markers seemed a lot like putting oregano on strawberry cake. (Anya has been bugging me to make strawberry cake for about two weeks. But not with oregano.) The images sat for about a week until I had a little bit of time to myself, and then I started heating up the kettle.

I decided to give my painstakingly colored gals a tea bath. I thought the markers I’d used were non-water-soluable, but since I didn’t have any images to spare I didn’t want to take a chance. I used my keen experimenting skills and created some sample pieces to use with different tea-staining methods.

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In this image, the rainbow strip on the bottom was directly submersed into the tea. The colors ran a lot. I tried another strip where I blotted the tea onto the paper with a paintbrush. The colors still ran, but the borders seemed to hold better. I tried using the paintbrush blotting on one image, and although the colors ran more than I wanted, I was sort of committed. By the time I’d finished all six pieces, I was feeling better about how the images looked. In fact, I was really digging how the colors washed out so the stamped details below came through. I also liked how the borders ran together and how everything was softer and less bright-n-fresh-n-new looking.

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After the images dried, they were a bit curled. I roughed up the edges with my edge-distressing thingy (does it have a real name?), and I pondered leaving the images like that. But, it just didn’t seem quite right. I put the images back in the bag and pondered some more. And went to Michael’s. And bought Modge Podge. I don’t think I’ve used Modge Podge since I was a kid and my Mom helped me decoupage some favorite post cards onto wooden plaques to hang on the wall. I put the images onto some orange card stock and then modged over the whole thing.

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When the Modge Podge dried, I finally felt like the images were done. Phew. I pulled out some patterned paper from my swap packet and then dug into my collection for blank cards, some twine (that came with the tags I bought for Month 1), pattern-cutting scissors, and the corner rounder. Wham! Bam! Tie! Glue! Snip!

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I handed out four of the six cards at our crafty day yesterday. The cards are definitely more awesome in person than in these not-so-awesome photos. Everyone seemed to like them. At least, no one used their card as a coaster or a blotter or a shim under a wobbly table leg.

So, that’s Month 2 done and here’s March only a wee bit done. Dare I start Month 3, or should I wait to spread out the fun?

Mar 7 2013

The Pot Maker

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I bet if everyone knew you could buy a Pot Maker, which turns ordinary newspaper into ordinary pot, well, I bet things would be different.

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Darn. I really feel like I should be able to come up with some awesome pot jokes given this great prop, but I see now that I didn’t even take the photo correctly. You can’t even tell it’s a Pot Maker. It could be a Bot Maker or a Rot Maker or a rare and coveted 3ot Maker.

So, Spring is on the horizon, and [even though I told Andy at one point last summer when the weeds had taken over and the groundhogs had eaten the last cucumber vine: “the gardening part of me is dead”] I decided to give gardening another go this year. Ever since we moved here oh so many years ago (SEVEN!), we’ve tried to garden and mostly failed. Last year was the best, but still pretty much all we got were potatoes and pumpkins. This is sort of embarrassing what with me supposedly being a Master Gardener(tm). This year, though…this year is going to be different! Yah! We’ll have potatoes AND pumpkins AND one more thing! It may even be something we like to eat!

I’ve had my Bot Maker for probably about 15 years, and I’ve never used it. What with my newly found gardening zest and determination, now seemed like a good time to break it in. Anya is absolutely in love with the Rot Maker. Even though we didn’t have any newspaper last night, we still had to make some pot…s. We used some drawing paper she’d doodled on, and it worked really well. Then today, we had to take it to school to show everyone how to make pot….s. I guess there wasn’t time to in class today to learn about making pot…..s, but the teacher said she’d love to have us bring the 3ot maker back another time. I don’t really intend to grow any plants from seeds, so I’m not sure what we’ll do with all the finished pot…..s. Want some?

Too much of anything, even pot making, is not good for anyone. [Plus we haven’t finished reading the weekly local newspaper yet. It just arrived today, and there’s a sudoku puzzle in there!] Because it’s still way too early here to plant anything and I want to keep my excitement alive and educate the kid and actually do something I’ve pinned on Pinterest….I bring you my Great Bean Experiment.

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The original looks a bit more interesting. I clearly have too large a container and too small a bean to ever have my experiment Pinned. Hrmpf. I wonder if I get extra points for having FOUR beans instead of just one?

The experiment started yesterday, and not much has happened yet. No wee green sprouts. No fuzzy white mold. No giant stalks shooting up into the sky, which I freely admit I am glad about because we got a bunch of snow yesterday and it is COLD and I am pretty sure our insurance wouldn’t cover that. I suppose if one day the beans do sprout, we’ll be prepared what with all the pot….s.

Mar 3 2013

The only rule in Chess Club is…

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Actually there are quite a few rules in Chess Club because…well, chess, you know? You can’t be moving your pieces about willy nilly and you can’t be calling the knights “horsies” or the rooks “castles” or the pawns the “lowly peons.”

Can you believe my kid is in Chess Club? This is the part where it would be fun to tell you about how Anya is a chess genius and how she plans to sweep the world’s chess tournaments in 2013, but pretty much she plays a beginner’s chess game with her buddy E. for about half an hour and then runs around chasing balloons. Also, apparently, there may be cookies involved. (No one told me this, or I’d have joined Chess Club, too.) Balloon chasing and cookies aside, I still think it’s pretty cool.

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It all started the Thursday afternoon before the school’s Mardi Gras Ball. (If you haven’t read about it, you should. It was a blast! Don’t worry if you missed it; you can join us next year!) I was running around school putting things together to take over the hall for the party, and Anya stumbled upon Chess Club, where three of her friends were engrossed over a game. Anya asked me if she could watch them, and she did. She stayed the whole time, and afterwards she asked me if she could join. And also, could we get a chess board, please?

A few days later, we had this: No Stress Chess. It’s a beginner’s chess game where the players draw cards to determine which piece to move next. Each card also shows you which ways the piece can move. It’s good for learning, but if you already know how to play it’s a bit frustrating; you see a move you could make, but no, you didn’t pick the card for that piece and so you have to move some other piece and then the King runs away and you lose.

Anya has requested to play chess a few times a week since we got the new board. Sometimes we use the cards, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we play by the rules, and sometimes we don’t. And that’s okay because even though there are rules in Chess Club, we don’t worry so much about them at home. Please, don’t tell them I still call the pieces horsies and castles and lowly peons. Shhhhhhhhhhh!