Team Gray!

My mother was a real crafting snob. She preferred extreme crafts: forget the bead loom, she was into bead embroidery, ribbon embroidery, crewel work, quilting, tatting, spinning her own yarn, knitting, crocheting, basket weaving, sewing clothes, including my wedding dress. . .

She looked down her nose at things like latch hook, or needlepoint. My embroidery lessons began at cross stitching, but my mother was chomping at the bit to teach me the other stitches. Embroidery was one of the few crafts she taught me that I took to with a gusto, entering some of my crewel work in the County Fair, etc. (I won a few ribbons for it as well–1st, 2nd and grand prizes, if memory serves).

But when I took my mother’s approach with my own girls, I was disappointed. Yanni never finished her cross stitch picture. The stitches were too small for her to handle, and she had a hard time reading the diagram. We never finished that project begun when she was 10 or 11. So I dialed it back a bit and started buying needlepoint kits. Yanni finished 1, a butterfly, and even framed it before she lost interest in the craft altogether.

Last month I found the fish kit I’d bought years ago for Yanni to work on. It was missing yarn and needle, so I thought I’d go to Hobby Lobby and find those things so I could give the kit to Joy. I didn’t see the big plastic needle I was looking for, but I did find other simple needlepoint kits, (after I almost fell for the temptation of cool cross stitch projects), and a latch hook. (Despite my mother’s snobbery, I fondly remember the 1 latch hook set she’d bought in the 70s that the whole family sat down and worked on together).

I thought it would be wise to get Imani and Joy a needlepoint kit, and that was a good idea. I sat them both down and showed them how to work on the picture, and both of them liked it. Imani called it “the best craft ever,” because it was interesting and not messy.

Sometimes you have to do what works for your family.

Note: We haven’t started the latch hook set yet. I’ll let you know how that goes when we do.

Back in the mid 90s, I assembled a wooden doll house with Yanni, my oldest child, 4 at the time. I found the project so engrossing that I made several kits of furniture after finishing the house. I wanted the project to go on an on. . .

This summer, I pulled out a bunch of kits my mother had bought years ago for the children. One of them was a house you could assemble using brick and mortar. She had bought the dollhouse kit for Xay, my second born, to design a castle. I was intimidated by the idea of designing a castle. I couldn’t figure out how to make a house like on the box, let alone wrap my mind around round towers, turrets, etc. So, though we may have measured out how to lay the foundation on the provided platform back when we got the kit, we never proceeded with the house.

I wanted to remedy that this summer, and so we set out to make the house. Talk about an exercise in cooperation and patience! We copied the diagram best we could, laying out the foundational bricks. We mixed the sand mortar mix with water, and figured out how to lay bricks. We called Xay in to help at one point, but for the most part it was a project for the babies and me. Bricklaying was addictive. I wanted to keep going, and I ended up laying bricks where I should have set windows. Our project became very mortar-covered, and slightly crooked.

We let the house dry before we proceeded. The next time we worked on the house, Yanni helped us. We agreed we needed to tear the house down and start over. Thankfully, the mortar is water soluble, so we wet the house to pull the bricks apart. This time we glued the house to the foundation. Yanni worked on one side of the house while I worked on the other side. Imani did the ornamental work–the archways for the front porch. Joy laid bricks across the back wall, while Esteban scraped excess mortar. Even Chanya could spread mortar on a brick so I could lay it.

We worked on the house whenever we had time. Now it is ready for a roof. We still need to tile the roof. If we work on it daily, the house project should be done in about a week. We may drag it out by taking our time.

Structurally, our building is solid, but we have too many bricks on the front of the house. We make up for gaps in other places by mortar. We would do things differently if we started over again. It is not perfect, but it has been a great learning experience. When we finish this house, I’ll display it on the breakfront next to the other house. I neither want to make it again nor do I want to let the children play with it.

We have a wooden dollhouse kit beckoning us from the laundry room shelves. We have only just begun our dollhouse making adventure.

Some of the crafts this summer have overlapped, like origami and building a dollhouse out of tiny bricks and mortar. I’ll write of the particular joys of the latter experience at another time. Now for my latest obsession: Origami.

I have a few childhood origami memories. I think we did a unit on Japan in first or second grade, and we learned to write a character or two, and we learned to make a simple origami shape–a dog, or something. Then, as a teenager, I spent the night at our (unitarian) church folding paper cranes for our sister church in Japan. Why they’d want butchered terrible cranes done by American first-timers, I don’t know, but our goal was to make 100 or so cranes to send.

Joy, my crafty kid, was obsessed with creating the perfect paper airplane, so I thought she might like origami. I got a book, Super Simple Origami at Hobby Lobby, along with a 100 sheets of origami paper.

Intimidated by the pretty paper, I was paralyzed. I left it to Yanni to see what she could do with it. She was able to figure out how to make a balloon from the paper package instructions, but got stuck trying to use the book. I carefully tucked away the paper and book for a later day. That was at least a year ago.

When Yanni’s friend Jasmine came over one day, she asked for the origami paper. (How did she know we had any? Is that a usual provision in one’s house?). Jasmine has spent the summer working at the art institute, and she learned a thing or two about origami. She made various boxes and cooty catchers, and used up enough paper to pique the little girls’ interest.

I pulled out the book again, and discovered that, while the directions were in English, they still needed decoding. Not that I made this discovery from a rational mind. I was flipping out, throwing book and paper across the table in frustration, wondering what in the world a valley fold and a mountain fold was. I turned the book back to the introduction and found an explanation for the different types of folds, and even how they look in directions. I muddled through some of the birds at the front of the book, but really parked myself at the flower. This was what Yanni had been trying to make from the beginning.

The directions actually looked like you were to pull the pedals in a rounded direction, over the back of the tiny folded square you’d just made. I pulled it carefully, rip! There was much discussion as to what the flowers really looked like. Imani had her own version, that was very pretty. Joy and I mudded through to the penguin before I put the book and the (now basically ugly) colored squares away.

I talked to friends about how hard origami was, and they wondered why I’d even attempt such lunacy. I decided to google origami, and I found this site. The site further broke down the reading origami patterns code, and reacquainted me with my old friend, the crane. I made some rather shaky and inaccurate cranes before making a box. I really liked making the box, and I made a few. Then I wandered away from the traditional designs and tried to make the site’s author’s original designs. Doomed, I tell you! Doomed!

I went back to google. I found this site. The title, Origami That’s Fun and Easy caught my attention. This site even had designs for kids. I made a ladybug right away. Then I followed their directions for a crane, and it was nice and neat. (this has nothing to do with all my folding practice, right?)

Joy and I watched a video for making a rose. Talk about intimidating! The video had no words at all, just a pair of hands creasing, and re-creasing, and then gently coaxing the paper to form the proper shape. When she was done, she indeed had a beautiful paper rose. I decided to go back to the children’s designs. I made a cup. Then all the kids made cups. We poured actual water in them. They were thrilled.

But the real strength of this site is what happened today. The little girls asked if they could go to the Origami That’s fun and Easy site by themselves, and they started making things! They started out with the ladybug, and then the dog face. A little later, they made more cups, and by the time Joy was finished, she’d made a horse that flipped when you pulled its tail. She’d even returned to the book and made a cat face. Esteban proudly showed me his creations, and he even had origami on the brain at bathtime, folding up every towel he could get his hands on into some sort of shape.

Although I felt like a raving lunatic at some point this weekend, this is one craft I’m glad I stuck with. The patience, persistence, ability to read a diagram, follow directions that origami breeds is worth the time and frustration of starting. I see beautiful greeting cards on the horizon.