painting around the table

I came home from the store the other day with a new orchid.

I do so love to have a blooming orchid on my kitchen table, but seeing how I am incapable of getting them to rebloom it has been a long time since I’ve had one. I decided to remedy that with $15 and an impulse buy at Costco. Much easier than monitoring humidity, seasonal temperatures etc. etc.

Yesterday I sat down with a scrap piece of watercolor paper and my little box of paints and painted.

It wasn’t long until I had company.

We all felt so happy– it’s so easy for me to forget that I love to paint and that I don’t need total solitude to do it. My kids LOVE to sit and watch me. They love to paint along side of me.

It’s a habit I need to create.

triangles, elephants, and bicylces

I hosted a baby shower this weekend and in typical fashion did not take a single photo of my clean house, my mini cheesecakes and homemade braided challah bread, or the cute flower arrangements scattered about– but I did snap a few of the quilt I made before it wasn’t mine any more.

It’s a fun little quilt. If you’re interested, here’s how I made it:

I bought 6 quarter yard cuts (not fat quarters, but 9″ x 44″ pieces). I cut each of those into two 4 1/2″ x 44″ strips. Then I used the 60 degree mark on my ruler to cut one of each of those strips into a bunch of equilateral triangles. I pieced the triangles into 5 strips. I cut 4 of the remaining 4 1/2″ strips to be 39″ long with 60 degree angles at each end, figured out what order I wanted all the stripes to be in, and sewed them together. I ended up with a fun zig-zaggy edge and used the last two 4 1/2″ strips of fabric I had left to make binding out of. The back took about a yard of fabric.

Easy peasy, right? The trick is getting the hang of overlapping the corners of your triangles right so that when you press them flat they line up. I should take a picture of how to do that sometime, because as I’m searching the internet I’m not finding anything helpful to link to.

It was a great excuse to venture over to the new Fancy Tiger location. I wish it didn’t take me so long to drive over there.

Then again, it’s probably a good thing it’s not too close.

5 photos

Barry is out of town. Can you tell by my frequent posting? Let me tell ya– I am not cut out to be a single parent.

But even though I’m exhausted, there are parts of my day I can look back on and smile.

these two

My life is messy– as in snot encrusted, dog hair covered, crumbs on the floor, fingerprints on every door, little bits of cut up paper everywhere messy. I have friends who don’t let their kids play with play dough or paint because of the mess it makes. Sometimes I wish I had rules like that– and the spotless windows, counters, and hardwood floors to go with them.

But would I trade days like this– the self made masks, spaceship controls, jammies turned costume kind of days– for a house that stayed clean for hours on end?

Never.

(I can say that now that they’re all in bed and I’m alone with the mess.)