Is the Forest a Girl or a Boy?

I'm not supposed to be here, so, shhh!, don't alert the Balancing Blogging with Daily Life authorities. . . . But I just had to share some shots of a picture-perfect Fall day.

This morning I went out with this preschool dropout for a "hike" (his idea) in the wetlands and woods . . .

and, as we were watching the geese and ducks and the turtles and frogs at the pond . . .
with the blue sky peeking through the thick trellis of leaves above us and the sunlight filtering through like a hard-won truth . . .
I realized that nature is the best school he could possibly be in, and that he is a perfect boy on this gloriously perfect day. And I am the luckiest person alive to be sharing this moment with him.

Afterwards, as we walked through the woods, I got to thinking about how gendered a place nature is. I think many people would identify nature as female. After all, "Mother Nature" is a fairly widespread cultural trope.

When I was growing up in rural South Texas, however, the outdoors was considered a decidedly masculine sphere of hunting animals for food and sport and trapping them for pelts. My dad--a hunter of deer, dove, and quail--took my brother along on his hunting trips but not me and my sister. We certainly took family hikes, but I think my father and I saw nature through different eyes. While I was admiring a deer or a family of doves, he was counting the buck's antler points and sizing up the dove family for that night's supper.

I asked my son whether the woods was a boy or a girl, and he responded that it was a girl AND a boy. I like that answer best of all. (The meadow, according to his scheme, is a boy, and the pond is a girl.)

And what about mushrooms, those decidedly phallic forest dwellers?

They are the fruiting bodies, or spore-releasing structures, of the underground parental unit called the mycelium.

The tiny, fragile tips of a mycelium reach out until they encounter the tip of a genetically compatible mycelium. They do a little mating dance and then, when conditions are warm and moist enough, up pops some mushrooms, which then release many spores, each of which can produce another mycelium.

So I guess my son's take on the woods as being both a boy and a girl is pretty apt, at least in relation to fungi.

If you look closely enough at the underside of these delicate mushrooms (which I think belong to the genus Coprinus), you can see the dusty, black spores ready to disperse and find a moist, dark place to grow into a new mycelium.

To preserve my memories of this wonderful Fall day, I plan to try some leaf-preserving crafts, courtesy of tutorials by maya*made . . .
and Resurrection Fern.

And felt another of Lil Fish Studio's acorns with the "mother" of all acorn caps we found on our walk.

Fall Fungi and Red-and-Green Motifs

It's been a little gray around here lately, and it's been feeling like incipient autumn is sucking out the color from our garden. We have only a few hardy blooms left over, and I know that it's time to go out and buy some mums to cheer things up. Most of the leaves on our trees are still green, so we haven't yet experienced Fall's vibrant golds and brilliant reds yet. But I ventured out into my garden with my camera to see what autumn color and textures I could capture.

The recent rains have enlivened our mushroom population, and it's always fun to go outside after a rainshower to see what new friends have popped up.

These two look like finely carved porcelain bowls. I love how the light diffuses through them as if they are lit from inside.

And I noticed a thriving "bouquet" of wood fungus growing on a stump. This little colony has doubled in size since the summer.

My kids have really gotten to be amateur mushroom hunters, and my almost-three-year old (who has now learned to look and not touch or eat) spotted these tiny, fuzzy mushrooms growing in the grass. The largest ones are only a few centimeters across.
I also noticed some dazzling red and green combinations throughout our yard--a red maple leaf nestled in the vinca and other groundcover with a trace of rain caught my eye.

I also noticed the red-veined bottoms of shiso leaves. The plant, whose leaves are green on top, had re-seeded itself from last summer in a tidy little row. Orange-red seed pods from Lily of the Valley. They look very Halloween to me.Probably one of the last, lonely wild strawberries. I love its nubby texture.So, the Fall color is out there, it just takes some searching to find.

I've been learning lots of new knitting and crochet tricks by following Resurrection Fern's beautiful and helpful series of knitting, crochet, and felting tutorials. Each little project has given me that little nudge to try some things that had intimidated me--knitting in the round, crochet, etc. So far I have crocheted an acorn necklace, knitted up a coffee cozie (and, for my son, a viola chin rest, which is just a narrower cozie stuffed with wool and sewed up at the ends!!), and started on one of the little knitted trees. I'd love to see what you've come up with by trying the tutorials.

I'll be taking a little bit of a blog break for the next few weeks. All I want to do is knit and crochet and felt these days, but reality is getting a little bit in the way. Work and a childcare crisis are taking up my time, and I need some time away from the siren call of the blogosphere and Flickr to attend to these pressing issues.

Happy Autumn!

Birthday Banner

Around our house, September marks the beginning of birthday season. My husband's birthday this week starts off our string of family birthdays--two in October, one in November, and, finally, mine in late December. (According to my daughter's calculations, I will be the answer to life, the universe, and everything.)
I used maya*made's tutorial for newspaper bunting to create a reusable birthday banner. It's an easy and quick project, though I have to admit I skipped the ironing step. (I don't even iron my husband's shirts, so I don't think I'm ironing newspaper!) My husband loved the texture and fabric-like look of each piece. I love how the text and images from the newspaper subtly show through the paint.

I didn't notice until I posted these pictures, but the red "t" appropriately enough has an ad for sippy cups from Mama Goose, where maya*made did design work.

This lazy mom will probably leave the banner up until the New Year rolls around. I just realized that I'll only need one more diamond to spell out "Merry Christmas," so I can turn the diamonds around to commemorate our holiday celebration as well. How's that for multipurpose?

My Baby Takes Flight

This great-horned owl, who has adapted to a wide range of habitats across North and South America, is winging off to tropical Sao Paulo, Brazil soon, as part of "A Little Fabric, A Little Chocolate" swap. He looks very fierce on the outside, but he's a real softie.

I admire how collage artists reuse whole images in a new context to create a unique piece of art. I approached making this guy as a three-dimensional collage. He's lovingly hand sewn and put together from parts of three different felted wool sweaters. As you can probably see, the main body is the cuff and lower part of a sweater sleeve. The "eyes" are cut from a larger knit pattern, and the "feathers" on his head and wings came together nicely from another sweater's design.

I find that felted wool is an extreme pleasure to hand-sew. The stitches just come through the wool very smoothly, and this stitch in particular is very rhythmic and soothing. It was kind of a gamble to use the contrasting blue thread, but I like the way it picks up the color of his eyes.
I also included a hand-painted Altoids tin, which is lined with a scrap from a felted wool sweater and contains a few coins and stamps for my swap partner's collections.

The fabrics are vintage '70s prints (red butterflies, Crayon-bright stripes, and red-white-and-blue dots and stripes) and are from a flea market in Pennsylvania's Amish country. The little paper mushroom ornaments decorating the fabric bows are from small stump, which inspired finder and photographer extraordinaire Smooth Pebble introduced me to. Artist/crafter Jill Pilotte's small stump shop is a real treasure, with a great eco-friendly vibe. If I hadn't purchased a few too many treasures lately, I'd be clearing her shop out of the reclaimed wood slices to use as pedestals, coasters, whatever!

This was truly a fun swap to put together, and I thank doodlebug finery--who sews the cutest sock animals and other sweet kid items--for organizing it!

The Start of a Kokeshi Collection

I've been enjoying glimpses of Chicago collage artist Linda Crispell's amazing collections. She collects just about everything and is a faithful estate-sale and flea-market hound. She has the eye of a slightly eccentric museum curator when it comes to displaying her found objects--vintage cake decorations, wooden airplane propellers, bird houses, etc.

Her kitchen looks like an old-fashioned candy shop, with vintage glass containers filled with goodies. In her dining room, she displays art work in a thrifted church bulletin case. It looks like her collage of items on display changes, and I think everything she does, including her paper collages, is completely inspired.

You can see why her home has been featured all over the place, online and in mags and newspapers. Did I mention that she also has a wicked sense of humor? "We live in a crack den when no one is photographing our house," she confessed.

Enough of my words, go check out her blog and her Etsy shop.

Shown above are the kokeshi dolls I bought in Japan 11 years ago. I found them in a shop at Nikko's Lake Chuzenji, which is famous for its monkeys. Why only two, you may ask? Good question. We were on shopping overload in Japan. There was just so much there that we absolutely fell in love with that it was hard to choose what to buy. (We also had a tiny California '50s tract home at the time that had no extra space for collections.) And I guess I always felt that we'd be able to return regularly. So far, that's not happened, but I'm hoping that these two dolls will be the start of a collection.

I'd love to see what you're collecting these days.

More Acorn Love

The Lilfish Studio-style acorns are as much fun to make as they look! (You can also buy some from Lilfish's Etsy shop!)

Today I wet-felted the little acorn bottoms out of some beautifully hand-dyed wool roving, most of which is from Etsy-seller Fibrespace Supplies. Look how silky the balls of wool roving look snuggled together in a bowl. I love the subtle colors.I had a little bit of trouble with a few of the balls. One or two ended up with an annoying "seam." The method that worked best for me was pulling apart the wool roving into two-inch strips and making a small pile of them, one layer at a time. Each successive layer was laid out perpendicular to the first. Then I pulled off longer strips and wound them loosely around that first wad of wool. Each successive strip was also perpendicular to the previous one. I ended up with a loose ball of wool like this.
I formed the wad of wool into a ball shape with my hands under hot running water and then dunked the ball into a bowl of hot, soapy water. (That first step under hot running water helped with the shaping; I found that if I dunked the dry wool into the soapy water first, the wool was too slippery to form the shape I wanted.) Then I worked the ball gently between my hands for a few minutes until it felted firmly.

Resurrection Fern has a tutorial for easy wet felting that bypasses the handwork and uses the washing machine. However, you would miss out on playing in the soapy water while watching your local wildlife through the kitchen window--in my case, our resident woodchuck was eating dandelion leaves in our yard and then flattening himself on our driveway. A squirrel was watching his antics curiously.
The acorns look jaunty and a little French with their little caps, no? The green ones are looking a little like Pepe the Jalapeno Acorn, so I like those little fellas.So, what's the deal with all the acorn love, you may well be asking. (Even if you're not, I'm gonna tell ya.) My kids and I have been collecting acorns and acorn tops (and the occasional cicada case and spider egg case) this summer, and occasionally we'll find twin acorns that have fallen off the tree together.I didn't realize why I found them so magical until I noticed one on a hike with a friend and a memory of a little tinkling of bells echoed in my ears. I had a quick memory flash of a truly magical movie that I had seen as a kid. It involved a girl who was given three magic acorns (I thought). Every time she wished for something, the acorn would open and the wished-for item tumbled out, accompanied by the tinkling of little bells.

Pre-Internet, that memory probably would have stayed a wispy, happy fragment. Ah, but today we have Google, the memory-replacement tool. I typed "what is the name of the movie with the magic acorn that grants wishes?" into Google, and the first hit, via Turner Classic Movies, gave me the answer: Three Wishes for Cinderella (1973). It's a Czech version of the classic fairy tale, and Cinderella here is a feisty heroine who lobs snowballs at the obnoxious prince and challenges him to a shooting contest. Oh, and she has a pet owl and a tall white horse that she rides through the snow. And the magic acorns were actually magic HAZELNUTS. Of course.

A little more Web surfing revealed that a dubbed version of the movie aired in 1973 on the CBS Children's Film Festival, hosted by beloved puppeteers Kukla, Fran, and Ollie. The program showed kids quality movies, most of them foreign, which is where I must have gotten my love for foreign films. (You can watch a clip of the movie on Youtube here.)

Thanks to the Web, I can align that almost-forgotten memory with how old I was and where I was living. If you don't mind indulging me in a little nostalgia, I can tell you that I was a tall, chubby, dark-skinned, bookish first grader living in a small, dusty, oil town in South Texas. Very small. Very dusty. Football and baseball for the boys, and cheerleading and twirling for the girls. My large, awkward self felt completely out of place there, and I lived through books. You can imagine how powerful it was for me to see Three Wishes for Cinderella and imagine myself galloping through the snow on my trusted steed and using my magic hazelnuts to make myself into the person I wanted to be.

Anybody have a tutorial for a set of three felted magical hazelnuts?

Crochet School

From Royal B. Farnum, C. Valentine Kirby,

George Sheldon Dutch, and Lida Hooe (eds.),

Practical Drawing, Art Education Edition, Book Five,

Practical Drawing Company, Chicago/Dallas, 1925.

All three kids got off to school this morning, fresh-faced, happy, and on time.

I guess that it's time to hit the books. For me this means crochet books, which I will study in my Resurrection Fern-inspired evening crochet class. Anyone care to join me?

Acorn Crochet

What an exciting but challenging time of year September is. There's such a great feeling of possibility, of starting fresh on a new school year. Old friends to see, new friends to meet, a new teacher to get used to, and literally a clean slate in the classroom.

But there's also so much activity that revolves around just getting the kids back to school--filling out forms; updating medical records; checking to see who has outgrown what and shopping and then shifting out summer clothes for fall; sifting through old school supplies and replenishing the supply; scheduling and shuttling kids to dentist, orthodontist, and doctor checkups, etc.

Add in a lot of motherly anxiety about my rambunctious youngest starting preschool and my sensitive middle one starting 4th grade, and for me that means insomnia and a very low level of tolerance for the ordinary quarrels that occur daily between the aforementioned boys.

So, for me, that means it's time for me to craft a little bit of alone time to try to gain some perspective so that I can get back to a feeling of appreciation for all that I have.

After a quick hot dog dinner and finally getting the excited kids to bed, here are some friends that I spent some time with last night:

I've been trying to teach myself to crochet for a while, but without a whole lot of success. I can chain 'til the cows come home. But I was just not getting the whole idea of where that darn crochet hook goes for a single crochet.

For some reason, something clicked in the spatial part of my brain last night. Resurrection Fern's straightforward tutorial for her Crocheted Acorn Necklace turned out to be an easy first crochet project. After I studied her directions and looked through my crochet books for details on each step, it literally took me minutes to complete a necklace. The first one I did in a thicker cotton thread so that I could see what I was doing. But the pink necklace made from the finer gauge cotton was just as fast and easy. And it looks so sweet hanging from a vintage mirror and around my daughter's neck. I do hope it will bring her luck tomorrow on her first day back to school.