Foamgator

I love the complete abandon with which Kate plunges into projects like this, confident that she can make things turn out just like Mom and Dad do. So when she tells me she wants to make her own foam animals, what can I do but shrug and get out the foam and a marker for her?

She sat down and drew these alligator pieces without any guide, just going from the other foam animals that she's seen us make. (You may have noticed that Kate seems to have a thing for reptiles. I have no explanation for this.)



We recently got Kate her own safety scissors. She's still figuring them out. She rough-cut the pieces and then I went back and did the detail work.

I got to do the actual assembly, too, of course. I wasn't sure if the body would be big enough, but I overlapped the legs and got everything squeezed in.



I think this is just so stinkin' cute.



And this is pretty cute, too!

Andy at 39 weeks

Taken September 26.



Andy surprised us with two teeth at his nine-month checkup, a few days after this. I hadn't noticed them at all.






He really is a very good-natured baby. He's a lot of fun to have around. (Though, of course, he's also into everything!)

It's my sister Betsey's birthday! Woo hoo!

Bathroom by Kate

Here's a fun idea--kids' drawings turned into vinyl!



Kate drew this shark back in July (from the Ed Emberly animal book, though his version is rather more elongated). I thought it was just wonderful and got the idea of having it made into a vinyl wall sticker for the bathroom.



I converted it to vectors using Adobe Illustrator's live trace feature (which does not require any actual knowledge of vectors and really only minimal knowledge of Illustrator). I emailed the file to Scribble It, along with my flourish, and got it cut in navy blue vinyl.



I did have a little trouble with bits not wanting to un-stick from the backing and stay on the wall, but I found it helped to pull the paper back at a really sharp angle.

I was really pleased with how it turned out, so I thought the shark should have some company.



When Kate drew the shark, she also drew this whale. At first I wasn't sure if I could use it, since she also drew a snake playing in the spray. (Kate's snakes often have legs. I'm not sure why.)



I was successful in removing the snake.



Later I got her to draw these other fish for me. This took some patience, as she's not always in a mood to take requests. (I ended up not using the one on the side.)



I converted them to vectors and flipped the one fish so it was facing the other direction.



Scribble It is quick! I emailed the files and had them on the wall within a week.



The whale is over the towel rack on the opposite wall. (These were the best pictures I could get, with cramped quarters and bathroom lighting.)



It's so fun to go into the bathroom and see Kate's fish on the wall. They're so cute and expressive. (It's the eyebrows--don't you think?)

Standy Andy

(September 23)



After the tummy scooting ...



... and the hands-and-knees crawling ...



... and the sitting ...



... comes the standing ...



(notice how he crawled out of his pants)



... and general mayhem!

And life is never the same again.

Paper Sculptures

The Canon Creative Park has all sorts of paper sculpture patterns (very cool stuff, and much more intricate and complicated--and time-consuming--than my little paper box animals). We put together this crocodile, which has a tricky articulated tail. (Doug had to tell Kate ahead of time that it wouldn't really be for playing with.)



This Tyrannosaurus took even longer. Lots of fiddly pieces to cut out.



I got to cut around all those teeth.



Doug was impressed by the design of the curved tail. I like the haunches.

We printed on thin paper and glued the sheets to old manila folders for extra strength, but then we had trouble with the layers delaminating at the structurally stressful points. I wouldn't recommend that method. On the site they suggest using matte photo paper.

In addition to all kinds of animals, they have some really astonishing architecture, and toys with moving parts.



Kate created her own version of the crocodile. (I helped with the upper jaw shape and some of the scales.) I love how she wants to do these things herself.

Andy at 38 weeks

Taken September 19. (Now I'm slightly less than two months behind! Woot!)



I love this shot.





Blankets--not just for sitting on!



I'm still kind of second-guessing my color editing. It'll take a while to get used to this monitor.

Today is Doug's mom's birthday. Happy Birthday Grandma Mary!

Owen Beach

More catching up! On September 18th we took a little afternoon excursion out to Owen Beach at Point Defiance. (People persist in calling it Owen's Beach. It's not possessive. Just thought I'd point that out.) Doug went back to teaching at the end of September, so this was kind of our last gasp of summer.



Andy crawls on Dad.




Not sure what Kate has on her face. (That's her rubber alligator on the log. Or perhaps it's a crocodile.)




I like the splash in this one.



Cold!




While I was taking pictures of Kate on the log, she was pretending to be a dinosaur of some kind--either a corythosaurus or a Teriyakisaurus (which, if you couldn't guess, is her own creation)--and she kept holding out her hand and hollering, "Give me your claw! Give me your claw!" But I managed to get at least this one shot where she looks like she's smiling. (With a dirty face.)

Veni, Vidi, Vector... Vinyl!

Back when I was designing laser-cut frames for Griff's Shortcuts, I got really good at working with vector graphics in Corel Draw. Vectors are quite a different animal from bitmap graphics, and very cool.



So now I'm trying to learn Adobe Illustrator. It's a real workhorse, but coming from Corel Draw, I'm not finding it particularly intuitive. I know it'll do everything that the other program did and much more (the version we got was a bit outdated even then), but figuring out how it does it can be a puzzle. I have managed to create a few things, with a lot of futzing around and using the Help function. The most frustrating thing is that I'm so used to zooming in and out with the scroll wheel on my mouse, in Photoshop, but in Illustrator the scroll wheel makes the image scroll side to side. Ack! You can use it to zoom, but you have to hold down the alt/option key at the same time. I suppose one can get used to this, but I don't understand why it's different in the first place. You'd think something so basic would be the same across the Creative Suite. Fortunately it does work on my graphics tablet, zooming with the touch strip.

I really need to just take some time and concentrate on Illustrator for a while, until my fingers know what they're doing without having to look things up all the time. Maybe after Christmas. (I'd like to learn to knit, too, more than a basic rectangle, but I don't see that happening any time soon.)

The coolest thing about vectors is that you can use them in conjunction with things like laser cutters and vinyl cutters. This is a little flourish that I made and got cut in vinyl. I looked at a lot of designs online and ended up making my own--I wanted something kind of loose and doodle-y. (I love those smooth tapering lines. You can set up the brushes in Illustrator to do that automatically. It is so cool.)

Emily Kate, who made my Korean proverb, isn't doing vinyl anymore, so I sent the Illustrator file to Scribble It and they cut it for me. I got two, and the plan is to put them up flanking the three-photos-in-a-row of Kate and Andy over my computer desk (which I still don't have--the photos, that is--though my new monitor came on Wednesday, so I guess I should get to work on those).

Some day I'd like to have a house I can paint. For now, vinyl is a fun alternative. Stay tuned to see what I did in the bathroom!

Andy at 37 weeks

Taken September 12.



Finally sitting! Kate was sitting at the end of July, so we were wondering when Andy was going to get around to it. They sure did approach things differently.








"Ooh, can I eat this? Hmmm... maybe not."



Bye bye!

Dino Pancakes

Doug made these for Kate.



Apparently ricotta cheese is the secret ingredient that helps them keep their shape. There was a little left in the fridge that needed to be used up, so Doug added it to the pancake batter. Kate ate them up, so I guess they were good!

Andy at 36 weeks

(More catch-up!) Taken September 5.



At this point Andy had been tummy-crawling all over the place for quite a while, but was just starting to get up on his knees. He'd push up and then rock back and forth, and drop his head down and look at his knees. It was like he knew what the next step was but just hadn't quite gotten all the parts coordinated.




Compare Kate at 36 weeks (these are cute).

Digi Dots

It's National Digital Scrapbook Day! (Or International. One of those.)



To celebrate, I'm sharing some polka-dot patterns that I made recently. Click here to download. This is a PAT file for Photoshop, with four different patterns in it. If you unzip the folder and then drag the PAT file into Photoshop, it should load automatically. (The icon looks like this:)



And here are some fun things that you can do with patterns!



Create a pattern fill layer (under Layer > Layer Style > Pattern Overlay, or click the "create new fill or adjustment layer" icon in the layers palette). Choose the pattern you want, and then adjust the scale to change the size of the dots. These patterns have black dots on a transparent background, so I added a white layer underneath.

I hardly ever use pattern layers, myself. (They do seem kind of boring.) The really cool thing is that once you have a pattern loaded, you can use it as a texture in the brushes palette.



Click on the brushes palette and go to "texture." Choose the pattern and adjust the size. I put my mode on "subtract" and checked "texture every tip." You can play around with the different modes and see what they do.



You can paint with polka dots!



Or try this: use a distressed brush, pick two colors, and in the brushes palette (under "color dynamics") set the foreground/background jitter to 100. I also increased the brush spacing (under "brush tip shape") and added an angle jitter (under "shape dynamics").

If you want to switch to another brush and keep your settings, click on the lock icons in the brushes palette. (Don't forget to unlock them when you're done!)

I'm using CS3, but I think most of this is basically the same in Photoshop Elements.

Autumn Dress

Over the summer I ran across the Dharma Trading Co. site. They have lots of white clothes and accessories for dyeing/painting/decorating (some very cool stuff there), including a couple of little girl's dresses with crocheted tops and fabric skirts (like this one). When I saw these, I thought, "Huh, I could do that!" And it would solve my problem of not being able to sew button holes.

Actually, my inability to do button holes is not the only thing standing in the way of my turning out beautiful dresses for Kate. The fact that my sewing machine (an old one that Scott had lying around) needs to be cleaned and adjusted is also a major drawback. But the principle is sound, and I was eager to give it a try. I made the top and asked Jill Tracy if she could put the skirt together for me. She did a beautiful job. Kate wore the dress to church this last Sunday, and we got some pictures afterward.



She spent most of the time huddling because she was cold, but I did get her to stand up for me and do an action rhyme about falling leaves that she got from her Highlights High Five magazine.




The fabric is from a dress that I made for me years ago. It was rather potato-sacky and I figured I wasn't likely to wear it again, but I really liked the fabric so I was glad to be able to use it for this.

It took me a while to find a thread color that I liked. I ended up ordering from Elmore Pisgah (color "fudge"), and then I ran out and had to order some more. (It says it's a size 10 thread, but I think it's a bit thinner than other size 10 threads I've used. It does work up nicely, and Kate apparently had no issues with the texture.) Then, when I took the top over to Jill and she attatched the skirt, we realized that it was just too short, so she took it apart and I added a few more inches onto the bodice. Seasonal projects can be risky, even if you start well in advance. At least I finished it while it's still fall!





I think this would work better for baby dresses, with a short yoke and poofy skirt. It took me quite a while to do all those rows and rows of single crochet. (I watched a lot of hulu.) I do love how it turned out!

(I might put some kind of edging around the neckline. Haven't decided yet.)

Marker Board Maestro

I wanted to share some more of Kate's drawings. These are all from August and September. (Our homemade marker board is getting rather frayed around the edges.)



Hippo



Dog



This is a pterodactyl, an iguanadon (see his thumb spikes?) and Kate says the thing at the bottom is a chicken.



Girl with dog (Kate says this is her and Clifford)



Crab (with eyelashes)

Kate's been drawing up a storm lately. (I can't really say "going through every sheet of paper in the house," because I do have quite a lot of paper that isn't the sort of thing I want her drawing on.) It's so fun to see what she comes up with.

Jack o' (late) Lanterns

We once again did not make it to a pumpkin patch, but I did go to Tacoma Boys and get two little pumpkins for Kate and Andy. We were so busy on the 30th and 31st that we just ran out of time, but I'd told Kate we were going to carve them (she seemed very interested in the idea of cutting holes in the pumpkins to make faces--apparently she didn't remember our previous pumpkin carving experience two years ago). So we went ahead and did it on November 1st. (Now see, you never would have known if I hadn't just admitted it in public.)



We bundled Andy up and took his travel crib outside, so he could watch the proceedings. He thought this was very cool. (Doug was on camera duty, and he didn't think he could hold Andy and take pictures at the same time. Having done this, I would have to agree that it is kind of tricky.)




Kate drew the face on her pumpkin. I believe this was her first experience using a writing utensil on a vegetable. (Okay, actually a fruit.)




I added centers to the eyes, but everything else is just the way Kate drew it.





Kate drew on Andy's pumpkin too, but she ended up with something that I couldn't really carve, so I just improvised.



Ta da!