All in the Family

All of our kids (6 of them between The Gruffalo and myself) are artists.

A word about that number: I did not give birth six times. From prior marriages we each have 3, making a total of 6 in our blended family. When The Gruffalo and I got serious about our relationship, I watched how our children handled the Brady Bunching initiated by their parents. One thing that I noticed right away was a nearly universal lack of using 'step' when introducing or talking about their new siblings. Following their lead, I refer to all six of these terrific people as 'the kids' without a modifier (except in situations where there is the possibility of creating confusion).

Two of our daughters, Kage and The Mogul, also make jewelry. All of the kids have some (or lots) of their stuff stored at our house, and The Mogul came over last week to sort through some of her boxes of belongings.

Besides getting some free space in the garage, I had a bit of a bead swap with The Mogul. She browsed through my stash for things that she needed and, in turn, gave me some beads that I normally would not have chosen on my own.

This necklace is made up of some of the beads that The Mogul gave me, along with some copper barrel-shaped beads that I was trying to figure out how to use. All of the beads are knotted on beige colored silk cord, except for the large central bead which is wire wrapped on a decorative head pin:

And a close up of the focal piece of the necklace, which is really pretty and unusual:

I am working on another necklace using The Mogul's beads, and I'll post photos when it is done. All of the beads that she gave me are heavy marble or quartz or glass...not quite sure what I'm working with here but I appreciate the chance to use something besides aquamarine seed beads (my default color and size mode).

And I appreciate the extra space in the garage.

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

It is the morning of Mother’s Day 2013. We have a dozen people coming over for brunch, and that tomato and cucumber salad is not going to chop itself, but I have to write this post.

The Gruffalo and I have six adult children between us, yet no grandchildren. This is a fact that I bring up now and then to Kage, BeanBeanMoreBean, Smallest of All, The Mogul, Gandhi and Matisyahu, especially after I have spent time around a baby or a toddler. I am terribly subtle about it—a quick text to all six that reads only “GRANDCHILDREN!!!” is an example of my restraint in this area.

Despite my gentle teasing, though, I do not want anyone (my kids or anyone else’s kids) to have children before they are completely ready to do so. Parenthood is unrelenting hard work, and it never, ever ends. Even when you are totally prepared, you are never, ever ready. To paraphrase Debra Winger’s character in 'Terms of Endearment': As hard as you think it’s going to be, you end up wishing it was that easy.

With that in mind, I have to salute the Moms in my life before I start preparing brunch.

First of all, here’s to women who become mothers without raising a child. Both of my sisters, Barf and KK, have become mothers to adult children (and, thence, grandmothers--grrrrr!) through two completely different sets of circumstances, and they have done so with admirable grace and total commitment. Spending time with an infant is delicious, and women who step into motherhood do not get to begin their demanding role with this joyful interval. And, as I mentioned above, parenthood never, ever ends. Just because a child has become an adult does not mean that the challenges of mothering that person come to an end. With adulthood there are new and unthinkably complex issues for grown children and their parents to navigate. I raise a mimosa to women who willingly step into mothering adult children who they had no part in raising.

And here’s to my Mom. She is, as anyone in the family will tell you, magical. When my father was intermittently unemployed during my childhood, she somehow managed always to have money set aside for the necessities and the silly little luxuries that are vital to teenagers, like the perfect shade of light blue nail polish to match a home-made middle-school graduation dress. Even more importantly, she always had the time to make the dress and the time to drive around to find said blue nail polish. (Note to anyone younger than 40: in the 1970’s, you could have any color of polish you wanted as long as it was red or pink.)

Besides her money- and time-management skills, Mom has an uncanny ear for languages. When my sisters and I learned Spanish, Mom was always able to completely understand what we were saying. She could only answer in English, but our plans to speak Spanish in order to keep secrets from her were for naught. The same phenomenon occurred when my sisters and I resorted to Double-Dutch, a made up language that thwarted all of our middle school teachers but was no match for Mom.

In the kitchen, Mom is a wizard. If she tastes a dish she is able to deconstruct it and re-create it with eerie precision. She reads cook books like I read novels and she is always coming up with something new, while retaining all of the old favorites in her repertoire. She is also able to improvise brilliantly. Two words: Cheesy potatoes. Or, going back several years, a treat that prompted a neighbor to call one Saturday morning to ask “How do you make that #@$%& melted cheese on toast?”

My sisters and I were the recipients of all of this love, attention and cheese, as were all of our friends. Mom must have fed a regiment of kids when we were growing up, again doing so on an impossibly tight budget. She baked non-stop for weeks prior to Christmas and Easter, then distributed boxes of cookies to neighbors and friends and the priests at our parish. One of her springtime specialties, butterfly cookies, always caused a small, decidedly un-Christian scuffle in the rectory when she dropped them off.

And, although this is an incredibly long and complicated story that I will save for another blog post, Mom is also one of those women who stepped into parenting an adult child. The adult child is her own first-born. This puts her in yet another category, women who give birth to a baby knowing that the child will be raised by another woman. These are certainly mothers who deserve recognition today, too; women who make motherhood possible for someone else.

This entry has gone on longer than I planned and the brunch prep must begin now, but not before I raise a Pimm’s cup to Mom, a terrific mother and one of the bravest women I know.

Feliz Dia de las Madres, Mamacita, Itheguy lutheguve yahthegoo!

Ear! Ear!

The family agreed several years ago to give mostly hand-made or home-made gifts at the holiday season.

This year, the offerings were wonderful and varied:
Oldest daughter Kage made coffee/sugar facial scrub for the women of the family and peppermint bark for the men, both presented in mason jars. Here's hoping that none of the couples mix up their jars...

Son BeanBeanMoreBean created dozens of tiny (business-card sized) paintings and asked us each to chose our favorite.

Youngest daughter Smallest of All took a photograph of a table that my grandmother (G-Nan to the kids) had given her. She then altered the photo to add one of G-Nan's most familiar sayings in a font that looks like cross-stitch and gave us each a large print of the final product.

I worked for several weeks making holiday-themed earrings, which I hung on a jewelry organizer from Home Goods. (Slight diversion: If you do not have a Home Goods nearby, I weep for you.) Everyone was invited to chose a pair for herself or for his significant other.

This is what the selection looked like before the family arrived on Christmas Day:

The jewelry organizer was perched on the music rail of our 1910 Milton upright piano. My Mom disassembled the piano and refinished it in the garage of my childhood home back in 1969. I come from crafty stock.

Here are a few close-ups of the earrings:

From the left, the designs are: Christmas tree, angel, Christmas tree again, gold snowflake with lots of dangles and holiday gift with bow on top.

Another close-up:

Besides another view of the Christmas tree and holiday gift design, this view shows the snowman design.

It was fun to see which design each family member and friend selected. Making the earrings was great fun, too, because they were finished so quickly that I didn't experience my usual foot-dragging dislike of finishing a piece.

Which design do you think was most popular? Which one do you like best?
Happy Holidays to all! I am looking forward to a creative New Year.



 

Saturday Morning Cartoons

This may be hard for younger folk to believe, but there was a time before DVRs or TV-on-demand internet services. There was an even more distant time before VCRs. It was an era when, if you wanted to watch a particular television show, you had to be sitting in front of the set when it aired.

During this primitive time, the most important TV viewing time for kids was Saturday morning. This was the only time that all of the major networks showed cartoons for hours on end. There were prime-time cartoons during the week, like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, but for a dizzying glut of animated slapstick and mayhem, it was all about Saturday morning.

I have a visceral memory of flopping on a bean bag chair in the den of my childhood home just as Saturday morning cartoons were about to begin. That sense of anticipation is something that I did not experience again regarding a television show until many years later when my daughters Kage and Smallest of All got me hooked on (bwah!) Project Runway.

A consistent favorite during the Saturday morning cartoon era was any Looney Tunes cartoon: Bugs & Daffy (Wabbit Season! Duck Season!), Marvin the Martian (I am sooooo angry!), Michigan J. Frog (Hello my honey, hello my baby!). But for dialog-free, surreal cartoon bliss, there was nothing like The Roadrunner.

The great Chuck Jones directed many (if not most) of the Roadrunner cartoons. He crafted the complex and doomed methods that Wile E. Coyote devised (with help from The Acme Corporation, of course) to capture (or obliterate) the Roadrunner. He gave us a stylized, gorgeous view of the American southwest desert landscape that served as the backdrop for the Coyote’s never-ending pursuit of his prey. Chuck Jones taught us that, in the cartoon world, you could run across thin air for exactly as long as you didn’t look down.

An actual roadrunner looks very little like the purple, soft-edged Warner Brothers version. They look like this:

 

The Gruffalo and I enjoy spending leisure time in the desert, and roadrunners are a frequent sight. With their Mohawk-like crest, long legs, skinny frame and nervously peeved demeanor they resemble nothing so much as punk-rock chickens. They have a distinctive call which does not sound anything like ‘meep meep’.

This piece, a project-in-process, is called Roadrunner. I started it after a weekend walk with the dogs that included several roadrunner sightings. The shape is elongated and spiky, the colors are desert-like and the saturated orange tile beads are reminiscent of cartoon hues without being too extreme. I plan on adding long feather-shaped orange drops along the bottom of the necklace.

 

The colors and angles of this piece are a departure from my usual preferred hues and shapes. It is also woven in a set pattern of alternate opaque and translucent beads. This type of pattern is much easier to stitch than a random placement of colors. Whenever I am doing a random placement I have to think much harder than when I am following a pattern. Making a combination of colors look random is not as easy as it sounds; you have to pay attention to the way that the various rows & columns combine to avoid large blocks of a single color. Following a simple pattern like this allows my mind to wander while I bead. In fact, my mind wandered a bit too much and one side is longer than the other by two rows, so I have to unbead a little before I go on.

The translucent bead color in Roadrunner is called 'root beer' by Tila. Every time I read the side of the bead container I want a root beer float. Perhaps I will drive through A&W on the way home tonight--or maybe I'll use 'root beer float' as my next inspiration.