Musings About Muses and Little Red Riding Hood

What awakens your creativity?

I was always that kid watching the world, drawing. Detached.
Is it something we're born with? I think that's part of it, certainly.
Children are awake to their creative nature.
Grown-ups tend to fall asleep.

For me, my muse was fully awakened with the birth of my daughter. I was no longer the observer, I was part of creation.

There were several years when she was a itty bitty that I put down my former tools of creativity. There is something inherently selfish about being an artist. It's a timeless zone that takes offense to the interruptions of earthly demands like a crying child. So in the interest of being a fully present parent, I put those things aside, thinking I would be able to be creative again one day. I didn't realize that my creative being would be entirely transformed through her. I was blessed with a child that would happily spend hours making marks on paper with her mommy. Finger painting, play dough, gluing scraps to paper plates. She delighted in all of it, and so did I! As her creative nature unfolded and grew, so did mine.

Another child came along. I was nervous. How could I love anyone else as much as I already loved Her? What I didn't yet know is that love increases exponentially, never diminishing. And my creative nature feasted! I was no longer just the observer. I was part of creation. I was honored.

Projects became puppet theaters and refrigerator box playhouses. I discovered fabric though my children, making capes, and tents, and tiny capes and tents for stuffed animals friends. And, most importantly, I discovered an unlimited well of inspiration, available by listening.

My children rarely require my constant presence now. There is no more finger painting. But I find that if I listen carefully enough I am treated to songs and poems and glimpses of sketchbooks.

And I have discovered that creativity, like love, increases exponentially.

. . .

Is it any wonder then that I find muses buried in the stories I poured over with my children?
I'm not the first to find a muse in Little Red Riding Hood. There's just something about that girl and her edible grandmother that has captured the imagination of children (and grown-ups) for generations.

The story we now know as Little Red Riding Hood was first published in French in 1697, but had been passed down orally for who knows how long before that. It was included in several English fairy tale collections in the 1700s, such as in A Pretty Book for Children; or in The Top Book of All, for Little Misters and Misses.

So many artists have been inspired by Little Red. Charles Dickens even said that she was his first love.

Here are a few two-dimensional incarnations of Little Red and her anthropomorphic Wolfy nemesis by different artists-

In the original stories, Little Red was always eaten up (let that be a lesson to you, wandering around in the woods talking to wolves)! Then various manly-types rescued her (and sometimes Grandma) for another couple of hundred years. It wasn't until the 1970s that Little Red started outsmarting that bad ole wolf and saving herself and her grandmother without assistance.

I think I like those endings best.

My Baby Girl

Click HERE to get a glimpse

of how very cool

my real-life monkey girl is.

. . .

. . .

I like to pick a color scheme when I start painting my week's projects. That way I don't overwhelm myself with so very many choices and become paralyzed with the possibilities of it all. That, and they all look pretty when sitting together for their end-of-the-week portrait.

. . .

Can you guess what this week's color choice was?

OK, I admit it, I cheat sometimes. However, being that I am the maker of my own rules, I let myself off the hook. Plus, I do enjoy the exceptions that make the rules.

A quick look around my neck of the woods and it's all too easy to see why yellow has shown up so obviously this week.

Scotch Broom is in bloom. It is the non-indigenous face of Spring here on the Oregon Coast. Oh sure, it's pretty, and it even smells lovely, but it's a deceptive fiend, inflicting it's perilous sniffy sneezy-ness on all allergy sufferers in it's path.

Still, I can't help but like it a little bit. That's my constant companion, Tuzy (aka Tuesday the Wonder Fluff), posing for the camera.

Revisiting Wonderland

We made a little Alice in Wonderland dolly this week.

The Cheshire Cat keeps her company.

She's just a little bitty thing,

but she sure can get herself into some mischief.

Alice, like Little Red Riding Hood,

is a friend I find myself visiting over and over.

So I thought I'd share some of her incarnations over the past few years.

.

As a child, books were my friends and my saving grace.

I'm forever grateful to the storytellers among us.

Wanna have a fabric swap?

Calling all you quilters and crafters and artsy fartsy fabric hounds!

I was thinking it would be fun to do a fabric swap. How about you?

Here are the specifics- Cut four 9x9 inch squares from five different fabrics (100% cotton only, please). That's 20 squares altogether. (You can easily get four 9x9 inch squares from a quarter yard or a fat quarter.)

Everybody sends their squares to me and then I mix it all up so everyone gets 20 different squares. There's sure to be some mathematical magicianaryness in there somewheres, but I'll leave that to Dylan.

Oh, the possibilities!

Comment here if you want to play.

We're all full up now.

Thanks to all who are playing!

(Make sure you give me an e-mail addy so I can send along my snail mail addy.) The first 15 (or so) who want to play are invited. If all goes well, I'll do it again sometime. Pick interesting fabrics (vintage is cool too), and send them to me by next Tuesday, May 26. I'll send your new variety packs off as soon as I get everyone's contributions.

Zen and the Art of Button Maintenance

Ever have one of those weeks where nothing falls easily into place? Every little thing just seems to be conspiring against you? For some of us it's traffic jams, disgruntled employees, cross customers, and a myriad of maddening moments.

My maddening moments are small, but some days/weeks thread knots, needles break, fingers bleed, paintbrushes fray, hands ache, brain aches, ideas hide, paint clumps, talent hides, supplies run out, fabric tears, and every little thing that can goes wrong, proving that grumpy ole Murphy's law.

My last week was like that. Minor annoyances where major aggravations. Mountains were molehills. I needed to decompress. I needed to zone out and give my mind some breathing room. So I put aside deadlines, made my self comfortable, and sorted buttons.

There is something strangely comforting about sorting, making calm out of chaos. You have to lose track of time for the decompression to take, and (for me) putting piles of white buttons into smaller piles defined by the number of holes is just the ticket. Taking a big ole box of Button Soup and turning it into a rainbow seemed to do the trick.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Sigh.
Decompression complete.

What works for you? What calms your brain and lets everything fall easily into place?

Button Stars and Quilted Stripes

I make it a rule to not talk politics in public, but I am an American, and for all it's flaws there is no denying it's a beautiful country built on beautiful ideals.

It was with those ideals in mind

that I tried to give my Uncle Sam a look of hope.

I imagined him looking towards a bright future.

There are no such heady concepts behind the flag we made this week. I just wanted to play with our national symbol a bit. Yes, I'm aware that it's not an literal translation of the official flag of the United States, but it gets the idea across. It's obviously an American flag, despite it's 15-star and 2-stripe deficit.

Had I known how much time would be invested in this not-so-little flag of mine, I probably would have thought again. I really like how it came out though, even if it did take a big ole bite out of my red-button jar. I counted (as best I could with my daughter helpfully counting along) and there are 168 (give or take) buttons on this Old Glory. I took it with me to baseball practice and soccer games, doing a good impersonation of Betsy Ross.

While I had the red, white, and blue paints out I couldn't resist making a little Lady Liberty to keep Sam company. He's wishing I would have made her a little older. Apparently she's at that age where she just asks "Why?" over and over and over. Good thing Uncle Sam is a patient man, he has a lot of explaining to do.

Mother's Day

Hope all you moms out there have had a lovely Mother's Day.

I had to share the little drawing my sweet girl made me for the occasion.

Isn't she sweet? I love me some Little Red!

Now I'm waiting for homework to be finished so we can play Pictionary. It is a rare occasion indeed when The Man of The Cart agrees to play a boxed game.

Mother's Day reminds me of a poem by our current-favorite poet, Billy Collins.

We love Billy Collins around here, and have spent many an evening huddled around the computer for storytime. The small miracle that finds my teenagers eagerly watching poetry readings with their parents is not lost upon me.

The Lanyard
by Billy Collins

The other day I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room, moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano, from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one into the past more suddenly— a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake learning how to braid long thin plastic strips into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard or wear one, if that’s what you did with them, but that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand again and again until I had made a boxy red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts, and I gave her a lanyard. She nursed me in many a sick room, lifted spoons of medicine to my lips, laid cold face-cloths on my forehead, and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim, and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard. Here are thousands of meals, she said, and here is clothing and a good education. And here is your lanyard, I replied, which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart, strong legs, bones and teeth, and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered, and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp. And here, I wish to say to her now, is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother, but the rueful admission that when she took the two-tone lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

Hope your day found you in the company

of some sort of motherly benefit, even if only in thought.

Alice Goes to Australia

Here's what we got in the mail yesterday-

That's The Cart on the cover! Woohoo! Our very first cover. If you look closely you'll see our little Alice dolly on the bottom there.

. . .

Alice is having quite the adventure in Australia!

Here she is playing croquet-

Here she is again-

It's our very first (and only) doll pattern.

I have no idea where you can buy this magazine here in The States. So if any of you come across it, please let me know. You can get this issue HERE starting May 15.

We are so pleased with the feature. Eight pages,

plus full-size pattern templates!

Thanks Australian Homespun! . . .

Meanwhile, back at The Cart . . .

Here's a little peek at some of what I'm working on today-

It just felt like a red-and-white kind of week. (More accurately, it has been a red-white-and-blue week, but you'll just have to wait til Sunday for the blue.)

. . .

What color is your week?

Punkinheads and Toothy Grins

All this Halloween talk has me thinking about pumpkins. Well, punkinheads anyway. There's really nothing inherently Halloweeny about squash, come to think of it. This little punkin-headed cutie is equally at home in Spring as she is in Autumn.

And here's another Halloweenish, but still not really, character for ya.

I know some people are super scared of red-faced horned types, but there's nothing to fear here. Just don't go buying a car from him and you'll be fine.

This fellow does an uncanny Tim Curry impression.

Mixed-Up May

Halloween stuff in May??

Yup.

The EHAG blog is hosting a treasure hunt (complete with treasure) for all you lovers of All Hallow's Eve.

The winner will get lots of goodies, including one from me too.

I'll be donating one of these skelly head ornaments.

Actually, it'll be an ornament like these skelly ornaments, only a bit different because

I don't want to ruin the surprise.

Surprises are fun,

and we could all use a little more of them.

Wouldn't it be fun to get all those

spooky little packages in the mail??

Fun with Business Cards and Cleaning Out the Pantry

I've been wanting to figure out a way to make business cards more useful. Oh sure, they're great when you need to balance a wobbly table or throw away your chewing gum, but I wanted them to be even more useful than all that.

So I made them into little notebooks. Tah-dah! Aren't they cute? Perfect for those moments when you need to write something down.

Here's how I made them, just in case you want to make some of your very own handy dandy business card notebooks.

-First I cut 5 pieces of scrap paper into 2" x 7" strips, folded them in half, and stapled in the middle.

-Then I cut a cardstock scrap 2" x 4", folded on side over 1/2", and put double stick tape like the picture shows.

-Third, I stuck the folded stapled paper part to the cardstock, leaving the folded edge up.

-Lastly, I stuck a business card on tap and folded down that sticky edge. Done!

I made a gazillion of them, thinking they'd be sweet to tuck in packages.

The backs are cute too!

And while I was on a repurposed-business-card kick, I made a bunch more into little gift tags. I just cut the corners off one side, folded over and glued a bit of colored cardstock where I wanted the hole, and punched said hole. Easy peasy.

Feeling mighty productive, I decided to clean out the pantry.

We always have the last little bit of several cereal boxes, crusts of bread, old crackers, and stale stuff that I wait for a sunny day to gather up. Why? Because I like to give it to the seagulls, of course. Dylan and I have made it a tradition on sunny pantry-cleaning days. I snapped some pictures while I was at it. The wind was just right and the gulls hung over us beautifully.

I'm afraid I'm a bit behind on my real work now, but at least I have pretty stacks of altered business cards and seagull pictures to show for it.