Some art for Sunday

Wanna see one of my favorite Christmas presents this year?  Of course you do.  It's the "Dress Lamp Tree" by Tim Walker.  Love it.  His aesthetic is similar to that of Pushing Daisies or Penelope. Fantastical. (But not the kind with sexy alien ladies in leather bras with daggers.  Not that there's anything wrong with that type of fantasy.  If you live in your mom's basement.)  You can (and should) see more of his work here.  The print came from here. Speaking of Pushing Daisies, where did Chuck's wardrobe come from?  Because I want it.  All.  Except I don't want to have to iron it. 

Birthday Tablecloth

This is going to be a lot of work when she starts having lots of kids to her birthday parties.  For all three of her birthdays I've had everyone at her party sign a 12in x12in piece of white muslin with her age appliqued on it.  Then I stitch over the names with embroidery thread and will someday (soon) assemble them to make a tablecloth for her to have at all the parties and keep and love forever and ever.  (We will never serve red Kool-Aid.)

This year there were quite a few more signatures.  I'm going to have cramped fingers.

We seem to have survived this round of sickness.  She did, however,  climb into bed with us at five this morning just in time to puke on my pillow.  Which was awesome.

She's gotten a lot of ibuprofen this time around, and with both Mr. V and I giving it to her I was concerned about overdoing it.  Here is my solution: I taped some paper to the back of the bottle (not the front so we can still read the label) and we wrote right on the bottle whenever we gave it to her.  We didn't have to go out of our way to write it down (at three in the morning) and we couldn't lose the paper we wrote it on.  I'm not suggesting I get a Nobel prize for that but, it worked for us.  On second thought, nominate me!  Seems like they are pretty easy to get these days.  :)

Now we rest...

Yesterday I spent the morning finishing a lunch bag I designed for my father-in-law's birthday present.  I wanted to make it large enough to fit the left-overs containers he takes, some snacks and a drink, and to open into a placemat so he can have a clean place to eat on the road.  I also wanted it to be wipe-down-able which presented some design challenges.   Here is what I came up with:  


(Pardon the pictures... I didn't have time to make them pretty.)  Also, don't zoom in too much.


I used faux wood oil cloth that I got here.


I took pictures of the process for a future tutorial, but that will have to wait until kid and I are over this flu.  We're in day three now, and she is still getting fevers of 102.  Poor kid.  Fortunately, I think we have a quiet stretch coming up, here, so we should be able to rest and recover.  And maybe make a tiny dent in the looong list of projects I have managed to accumulate.  

At least it wasn't yesterday...

She woke up this morning with a low grade fever that disappeared by nap time, but when she woke up from her nap: 102.7!  She's okay now that she's had some ibuprofen, but I've got it too...  I'm still waiting for two of her birthday gifts to arrive.  We got her a 4 ft by 6 ft gymnastics mat so she can practice her rolls without (much) fear (on my part.)  I think she'll be pretty excited about that one. 

 The other is this print by JooJoo.  I love her work and this one in particular.  (I got one of her bird prints for myself.)  I have a frame for the mermaid print so I can hang it up in her room with her other artwork.  (Pictures to come...)  I'm not sure she'll be as excited about this one as I am, but I'm sure she'll love it some day!  I'm amazed by watercolor artists.  You can see her other work here.

Tomorrow night we come to the end of the birthday celebration marathon:  This one for her 'Gi' (what she dubbed her Grandfather) who turned 50 the week she was born.  Then we settle in for some lazy winter days, which sounds more poetic than how I really feel which is more like 'The Hell we suffer through en route to spring.'  

We lived to fight another day.

It was a good day. She's not asleep yet, so I really shouldn't tempt fate by typing that, but that's the kind of wild-and-crazy girl I am. At first I wasn't thrilled with the Winnie the Pooh theme. I wanted to do something cool, something like Alice in Wonderland or the circus. However, after Mr. V. pointed out that she wouldn't recognize either of those, we settled on The Hundred Acre Woods. It turned out pretty well. And should I ever have to make gum paste bumblebees again, I think I could do it without having my fingers dyed black from food-coloring for a week.

I found the template for these pooh masks here and made them into a garland. Mr. V. helped me cut them out with his Edward Scissorhands skills.

For the center piece and the favors I found a super-cute idea here. I painted "Hunny" pots with the kid's names and filled them with candy. (In gold wrappers. In retrospect, that may have been lost on the party-goers.)

For the cake I made some little beehives with the aforementioned gum paste bumblebees. They took forever and evoked some unpleasant thoughts. I'm guessing that the websites I consulted for my first gum paste experience may have meant liquid food coloring and not gel food coloring as the "paint" for the bee faces and stripes because they never dried. Somewhere in the trash they are still leaving tiny, permanent, black smudges.

I made the dessert plates look like Pooh's red balloons with some baker's twine and white adhesive labels. Cute, no? (Note that I didn't put a window in the 'reflections' on the balloons. Why do people think that every balloon is reflecting a window?)

I put red balloons and Pooh's door sign on our front door. "Ring Also" with a backwards N.

We had pizza and this little veggie platter I found here.

I was impressed with the "Celebration Center" on the Disney website. Lots of cute printables and fun ideas. Who knew they did free stuff too?

So aside from the fact that she had no 'quiet time' today and is up two hours past her bedtime asking for milk and stories and songs and to be tucked in AGAIN, I think it went as smoothly as could be expected for a three-year-old's birthday. Which is to say, everyone lived.