Neighbors of Totoro: 2014

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Happy Halloween!

For Halloween this year, Gbear wanted to dress up as Marceline from the show Adventure Time. A feisty 1000 year old vampire with the impish personality of an eternal teenage girl, Marceline the Vampire Queen enjoys playing a bass guitar fashioned out of a giant red ax.

So we said "What the heck" and made it. Matt went to the craft store and found all sorts of useful items we could use as the nuts and screws and the strap pins. I carved the body and neck out of foam, and G helped me sand some of it to make it three dimensional. She also just generally kept me company with lots of sweet gratitude and joy, since that's just the kind of kid she is. We sealed it with a few layers of Modpodge, painted it, attached the strings, attached the "hardware," and then I took it out back and coated it in Krylon.

It took four or five work sessions total, but it was cool to see G learning and appreciating how a long term project like that comes together. And she REALLY LOVED IT!

For trick or treating, Matt dressed up as a grizzled sea captain. Who knows how to rock and roll.

I dressed as Snake Plissken, Kurt Russell's character from the 1981 action classic, Escape from New York.

I think I nailed it!

Trick or treating was FREEZING but fun!

We retired afterward to watch the Garfield Halloween Special and The Worst Witch. It was a lovely evening.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Summer afternoon fairy crowns

These pictures are very Cammila-centric. You can thank Matt for that!

It was just a lovely, hot summer afternoon. We're ripping out this whole jungle to rework the "garden" areas of the yard anyway, so I started making flower crowns out of the blooms made by the previous owner's perennials, while Gretje created a "lab" at the soon-to-be dismantled deck picnic table to pick apart and examine various flowers' seed pods. It was perfectly magical.