Francis asked for a Little Red Riding Hood this last Christmas.  Being the generous, always ready to give mother that I am, I sighed deeply.  The kid wants EVERYTHING.  Really.  If I wasn’t so exhausted with her requests, I would admire her pure desire (and imagination too really).  Like most things she asks for, I started sort of “hell no!” and worked towards, “hmmmmm….”.  Hmmmm won out obviously.

Back in high school, my friends and I made capes to wear around, because we were just those kind of dorks.  One of my fondest memories was of wearing our capes down to the beach one night and stripping off all our clothes to go jump in the ocean.  It was dark, the beach was empty except for us, and it was probably cold too as we’re talking about the Oregon Coast where the water reaches a balmy 40 degrees.  We were 18 and preparing to go off to college, so jump in the ocean naked, right?  Totally logical.  Many of my friends were quite conservative young ladies, so when I saw their bare little butts go bolting down the beach, I fell on my face in the sand laughing.  I don’t even remember jumping in the water myself (although I certainly did).  I just remember eating a lot of sand.

Anyway, the point of this digression is that I have made a cape or two before, so I figured I could whip one out again.  All the same, I thought I would buy a pattern just to be sure.

Too bad that my resolve to make things does not match my ability to read a pattern.  Sigh.  Directions.  What a drag that there are people out there who know how to do things and think that they can TELL me how to do it!  It is like my brain refuses to learn.  It is like I enjoy being ignorant or something, because truly I sit down to figure out a pattern and find myself skimming the written instructions.  I find myself daydreaming.  I need to talk sternly to myself to focus.  FOCUS, Ingrid.  You stupid, stupid girl.  You NEED this.  Now think!

I actually find that I am able to better follow directions if I sort of act them out.  If I read slowly and make hand gestures for things like “RIGHT SIDE OF FABRIC” then the words more readily permeate my dura matter.  ”Seam allowance” needs a hand gesture too.

All the same, I, of course, bought the wrong amount of fabric because I didn’t understand the numbers on the back.  Turns out those numbers were referring to how large the bolt of fabric is…like the size of the roll.  I couldn’t figure out why the pattern that to my mind was for a taller person needed LESS fabric.  Of course these things are all clear when you sit down to cut things out and can’t get the pieces out of your chunk of fabric.  Ohhhhhh.  In my defense, would it have killed them to write “size bolt” under the numbers?  No, not really, but these pattern people think they are dealing with the able-brained public.

Ennnnyway, I made the capes.  They look great, and I am pretty proud of them when the kids get compliments.  (I do need to teach them to beam beatifically and say, “My wonderful MOTHER made it for me!”).  I didn’t realize that I would get such an onslaught of requests from strangers for making capes when we go out in public.  I am numbering about request number 20, so if I ever need to go into business, I know where I will turn (but surely someone is doing this on ETSY right now?).  I really can’t imagine being motivated to sew a million and one capes.  It was not that exciting truthfully, and required far too much ironing for this girl who never wields an iron even for her own clothes.

The first day I thought I would let the kids touch and mess around to their hearts’ content.  It is sort of  hard for me to turn over control when I only have 10 weeks of instruction, but it seemed wise to let them mess around now before we launch into real building.  I gave them the assignment of making a magical place to go on vacation to.  They needed high places and low places.

This is a cliff with snake holes (complete with snakes!).

Here is an arch with vines and a tree.  Zephyr was in class that day, although he won’t be for the rest of the term.  The kid is only 5 and can’t handle that we will be smashing some projects.  I’m moving him to theater!

This is a savanna scene.  Obviously, none of this would hold up well if fired, but experimentation was the goal here, not end product.

The students really enjoyed playing without much guidance.  The room became relatively mellow, with most of the conversation just expressions of excitement for each other’s inventiveness and desire to show off their ideas to me.  I know the days will come when there are tears of frustration and heartbreak at the limitations of clay, but for now, it is all good times.

Really, I do have students in there besides my kids, but until I get formal permission to picture them, I am cropping those babies out!

Best thing about the new class?  I get to work in the art room.  The teacher gave me two whole shelves!  Imagine that!  She totally needs every inch of storage she can get, but she generously gave me two whole shelves!  There is a sink there.  Yeah, really, I know!  Don’t I sound like a public school teacher, rapturous about a sink?  And I hate to admit it, but the teacher there is messier than me, so I don’t have to worry too much about annoying her too much.  Anything I do in her room is seriously making it cleaner, not messier.

Worse thing?  Ummmm… see that clay there?  I got two huge bags of it for free a few years ago.  I knew that it was some fancy clay from Georgies, but I didn’t do my research before having the kids do an actual project with it during week 2.  I thought I was saving money, being prudent.  Turns out that : “The coarsest of all our sculpture clays, this body contains two types of coarse sand plus nylon fiber. The character of this clay comes from the basalt sand that bleeds out when it fires.”  That is code for “this clay will spit out chunks of melty stuff that will stick all over your kiln shelves when you fire it”.  It requires a process called “wadding” which I have never done and am not really sure how to do.  Well, crap.  I’m so glad I got it for “free”.  Now I need to hop off to the store and buy kiln wash and wadding material which sounds like a chemistry experiment.

All the same, clay is awesome.

ANNNNNNYYWAY……

Halloween.  The kids talk about Halloween costumes for months before October even peeks around the corner.  I think we are generally planning for costumes round about April, with final plans drafted early September.  We make everything of course because that is half the fun.  Plus it is one of the only times the kids think we are cool, so needless to say, we don’t want to throw that one over too lightly.

Brad has a great technique with the kids; one which he also uses when it is time to make pinatas.  He asks the same question each day for a week.  When the kid gives the same answer three days in a row, that is what he starts working on.

This year I had a freaking awful morning with the children one inservice day.  It was suppose to be great because we had nowhere to go, but as it was, we got trapped in a horrible maelstrom of whining and yelling.  (I tried to stop whining, really I did!). It looked like the whole day was bound to go to crap, but then we started digging through fabric in my studio.  In reality, I probably was trying to ESCAPE the kids, but they followed and engaged me and I made the best of it by shifting everyones focus to Halloween costumes.

Initially Zephyr wanted to be a clone trooper.  I sort of nixed that one.  It is the helmet thing.  I knew that Brad could do some paper mache magic, but you just never know in Oregon if it is going to be pelting down rain or 60 and balmy on Halloween night.  Next suggestion was a sting ray which was more my speed.

I learned something this year:  everything can be “poncho-ized”.  The poncho is the great Halloween costume middle ground.  Many a thing starts with a poncho, including sting rays.

Love the poncho.

Francis initially wanted to be a musketeer, which seemed super easy, if not too creative.  We had most of the elements of that costume already because she had been Puss in Boots a few Halloweens ago.  Or maybe it was for Mardi Gras?  Anyway, a musketeer is just Puss sans ears plus mustache.

Digging through the fabric though, we came across a bunch of (really tacky) stuff I bought a year or so ago when Zephyr said he wanted to be a mermaid.  Francis, in typical 8 year old form, said, “Ooooooooo!  It is beauoooooootiful!”.  So we started in on figuring out how to make her a mermaid.

I had a general concept for the tail—which she didn’t like.  When you are 8, you don’t care how you will walk down the street.  You want to cover those feet because of course, “mermaids don’t HAVE feet Mom!”.  She was close to tears, but I insisted that she must be able to walk.  I made a mid length skirt and then tacked on huge fins which then attached to black elastic that looped around her arms.  She could lift her arms to lift her fins.

Next problem wasn’t so hard.  I was not about to let my daughter run around in a bikini top.  I have nothing against bikini tops—I am not particularly modest myself— but bikinis belong at the beach or the swimming pool, not at school or trick or treating.

Going to Oregon Children’s Theater productions, I’ve really observed how the costume designers interpret and suggest features of the characters using textures and quality of fabric.  To make a chicken, they put a woman in tights and crocs and a square dance skirt with multi colored flounce.  The fluffiness of the skirts suggested the feathers and big butt of a chicken.  If they need to make a bug, they focus on color, crazy shoes and glasses.  Maybe a hat.  You don’t have to make the whole thing to make the viewer identify the subject.

Following these principles, I dug up this really cool crocheted top that my mom gave me.  I’ve worn it a couple times, but it has these drawstrings on it, so I knew I could cinch it up a lot.  Because it is crocheted, it suggests fishing nets, which to me suggests mermaids.  I think it worked.

We glue gunned a bunch of shells, broken necklaces, and nerd air beads to a fleece crown as the final touch.  (Air gun pellets are all over the pedestrian overpass most weekends.  They piss me off so much!  Don’t these teenagers realize they are LITTERING?  Anyway, I pick them up and this time glued them to the crown.)

Inez was a tag-team effort.  She wanted to be a shark.  I was tired of making costumes, so I handed it off to Brad.  Actually first I made her a poncho, then I handed it off to Brad.

Brad has some really great paper skills.  He sat down and figured this head out, then worked with craft foam sheets to make it more permanent.  I can’t say enough about those craft foam sheets.  I am sure they are some sort of environmental nightmare, but man, they work great!  You can glue gun them together and they sort of melt in the heat which can create a super clean bond (if you work fast and carefully and keep your mess on the inside of your object).  Here is the shark:

She looks a little pope-like from the front.

Brad made himself a star fish.  I was pretty impressed with his sewing skills, especially the care he put into making a pocket on his belly for candy (or his hands I guess),  but he was saddened by people’s guesses.  After a couple people asking if you are a banana or a penis, you would feel sad too.  (For the record honey, I don’t think you look at ALL like a penis.  I really don’t look at you and think “penis”….hardly ever.  Really.)

After all these costumes were done, I sort of threw mine together in less than 15 minutes.  I had wanted to be a creepy doll, but the execution on that one was sort of flawed.  I need to invest in one of those expensive theater make up sets, like the ones I remembered from high school.  Instead I had this greasy stuff from Goodwill.  It ran off my face in about 5 minutes and then I just looked like a Juggalo in a cute dress.  Anne joined us as a beautiful unicorn pony in a tutu (she found everything in our costume box—way to fit into a costume made for a 7 year old, Anne!).  Here is the group photo:

Suffice it to say, it sort of sucked the big one.  We made a small but respectable enough chunk of change, but not large enough to warrant the many desperate walks to find the nearest-neighbor-to-the-school-that-I-sort-of-knew so that I could ask to use her bathroom.

On a positive note, we priced things to MOVE, because, of course, we didn’t want to have to MOVE them ourselves at the end of the day when they didn’t sell.  One of the big bargains I picked up was a really ugly stick horse.  It had a shrunken head of stained blue upholstery fabric and orange yarn for a mane.  The cool part about it was that it was made of oak (sturdy!) and there was a wooden wheel on the end attached with a wooden peg.  I tossed it in my art studio thinking I might someday do something with it.

Fast forward a few months.  My eldest daughter is long on ideas and short on follow through.  Or more accurately, so full of ideas that she could not possibly create all the things she comes up with in one day…. so she makes me do things.  Here is her M.O.—she comes into my art area while I am working on something else (usually something boring and necessary like mending clothing or making cloth napkins).  She stands there really quietly for a bit until I have forgotten she is there.  I have poor peripheral vision and she tends to stand slightly back of my elbow where things get fuzzy.  Then, “Hey Mom, you know what you could do….” and then she proposes something REALLY HARD and seemingly impossible.  Then I sigh and say, “Francis… that is too hard!” or “I don’t know how to make a spiral out of fabric that flies with a basket attached that a toy mouse could sit in!” (insert parental whine).  The thing is, sometimes I DO know how to make things that she suggests.  Or rather, I can figure out eventually how to make what she suggests, but she has much more faith in my ability than I.

At Zephyr’s birthday, she thought I should make a fabric pea shooter toy from the Plants Versus Zombies game.

It involved sewing a sphere, which is sort of hard seeing as how I refuse to actually use math or measurement of any kind.  It kind of came out okay.  I forgot the frilly leafiness on its head which continues to bug me, but Zephyr was thrrrrrilllled.

Next Francis saw the stick horse and proposed that we make a better one for Inez.  ”Oh no Francis.  You see, that would need curves and stuff so it would be really hard!”.  But I sat down and started thinking and cutting and made a head that I was fairly happy with.  I shoved the old head up inside this one (weird, I know) and crammed a bunch of stuffing around it and felt fairly pleased with the result:

Inez rides “Angel” constantly now.  Truly, this horse has made about 30 trips to and from school.  Old people go gaga when they see a kid on a stick horse.  And Angel is pretty easy to ride because she has a wooden wheel at the end of her stick.  I keep waiting for Inez to tire of this toy, but she hasn’t.

Sometimes I feel pretty sorry for myself that I had a bunch of kids and could not “develop as an artist” or some such crap.  Other times I have to be honest and say that maybe having kids around and making things for them is some of the best inspiration I could find.

(This is almost too sweet for me—-gagging a little—but it is true.)

Her work is so gorgeous.  I find myself standing in front of it, wanting to dance, wanting to touch it, breathless with admiration for her skill and vision.So I took a class from her.

I had considered taking a class for a couple years, but the timing never quite worked.  Finally I saw a weekend course that would fit my schedule, convinced Brad to work from home Friday to cover my responsibilities with the kids, and signed up.

This was a really fantastic opportunity for me.  I keep doing my own art work, and I enjoy what I am messing around with, but I have few opportunities to really explore more advanced techniques.  My work continues to be pretty unfocused, and I accept that as a necessary part of where I am as an artist and mother.  It is okay.  All the same, it is such a joy to get away from my duties at home, to get to hang out with other artists and geek out about tools, and to get to stick with a piece for a chunk of time.

The technique that she led us through was pretty cool.  First we found objects that were interesting to us.  Here was mine:

Then we were encouraged to photograph and look deeply at our image.  She had us use digital cameras and then zoom WAY in to just a little piece that we would try to capture in clay.

Then the slabs came out and we roughed out our work.

Brad was asking about the consistency of this slab and as I was grasping for words, he supplied, “like really cold butter?”.  That is a perfect description.  It is easy to carve leather hard clay, but it also has an integrity to it, so you can use both traditional clay tools and tools more commonly used for stone and wood carving.

I wanted to capture the structure of this rhubarb stalk, but keep away from getting too tree-like.  I love tree images, but I tend to go back to that image a lot, so I wanted to focus on more of the ruffliness that made this look like a leaf rather than a large tree branch.

The process involved both carving down and building up.  Maria encouraged us to look closely and keep our images from getting flattened out, so I needed to build up as I went, which was interesting to me as it felt so different from the carving that I had done before in stone.  This was forgiving!  Did you take off too much?  Doesn’t matter!  Put it back!

Eventually I reached a place where I had to get rid of my image and start working with the spirit of the object.  It felt silly to be so nit-picky with where the leaf ruffled, where veins ran across, etc, so I tossed the rhubarb in the compost and just started looking at my carving.

It was so wonderful seeing how Maria worked with her tools.  She truly had both amazing sight and intelligent touch.  I found myself shocked at how she could make small adjustments to my work that were JUST PERFECT.  In that, I mean that she would point out somewhere that needed a slant, a line that needed to suggest where it started, a raised point or a terminating point, and those little touches made that tiny place on my work RIGHT.

This class was tiring because it was three 8 hour days of standing on concrete and carving, but it was just what I needed, and Maria was a very kind, gifted teacher.  It is such a joy to get to do art along with other people who are eager to learn and have interesting things to say about their process.  It was so nice to make something, rather than just do things that need to be redone tomorrow (i.e, dishes, sweeping, diapers, cooking, and laundry).

I came out with two decent carvings and one piece of crap.  I kept the piece of crap to practice glaze techniques in the future.  My better work will be dried over the next week or so, then fired, and you can check it out at my house in its finished form (I didn’t seem to remember to photograph anything actually finished!).  Here is my second project half way through and upside down because I needed to turn it a lot to get inside each petal.  Yay carving clay!

Free Range Kids was not just a book about not being a stressed out, unhappy helicopter parent who allows children no freedom for fear of injury.  It is also about kids becoming independent, capable adults.  One of the points that resonated greatly with me was the section on children’s need for chores.

I believe in chores.  Lenore Skenazy says that children need a sense of belonging and place within a family, and chores gives them a sense of accomplishment and contribution.  In addition, chores teach young people necessary skills.  I don’t have the book in front of me, so I can not properly give credit to the particular child specialist, but one point that I loved was thinking of chores as a long-term training program for life.  Effectively, a young person has about 18 years in their parents’ home.  Within that time, they need to learn every job that will keep a household functioning, and by the time they leave home should have mastered every job.  This is such a simple idea but it sort of shook me awake, because I have LIVED with those people who seemed to have never learned the jobs necessary to keep a household functioning…and I can tell you, it sucked.  They sucked.  I hated them for the skills that they did not know they lacked.

For someone with very young kids, I can easily sign on to a chore philosophy.  Yes.  They need to do chores.  On the other hand, when do they need to start doing chores?  And to what degree of competency?

Enter the chore wheel.  Wait.  Didn’t I already say that?  I keep saying it, so I figure I need to put the photo up here again.

When considering this chore issue, I figured that the kids needed to

1. get in the habit of doing things regularly
2. do small jobs that they can accomplish easily and quickly with a high level of personal satisfaction
3. do meaningful things that make a difference in our home (i.e., my happiness)
4. do jobs that will accommodate different skill levels
5. have some clever gimmick that makes the whole thing seem game-like

Enter the chore wheel!  (No I am kidding.)  But really, we had this TERRIBLE jellybean box with a spin wheel and various jellybeans that looked alike.  One might be apple pie, the other might be vomit—you spun the wheel to see the color you needed to choose and then took the risk with which kind you got.  (Is this brilliant or disgusting?  I have no idea who gave it to us.  The kids liked it anyway.)  When it came time to recycle the box, I couldn’t quite throw away the sweet little plastic spinner.  I could make something out of this.  What?  What?

Enter the chore wheel!

I now have the kids doing chores three days a week, and thus far am very happy with it.  They like spinning the wheel.  They have their favorite chores already (Zephyr and Inez like cleaning the window in the front door and Francis likes sweeping down the stairs), but they seem to be doing whatever they get without too much complaint.  They also seem proud of what they are able to do.  In addition to the chore wheel, I have the kids taking turns unloading the dishwasher—a job I loathe.  Zephyr and Inez work together and Francis does it on her own.  The little kids need to stand on the counters to put stuff away, and dishes show up in weird places, but that is a small price to pay for having someone else do the job.

One thing that I quickly noticed was that this chore thing takes A LOT of training time.  This is interesting to me for two reasons.  One is a “no-duh” sort of thing about me.  I am surprised that I am surprised that a 4-almost-5-year-old doesn’t just know how to scrub a toilet.  Of course he doesn’t know.  And if I didn’t teach him now, I would teach him….when?  I have to say that I would probably never teach him and just live my life pissed that my kid didn’t seem to know how to clean the toilet.  How much we parents expect without ever teaching!  The other thing is that this training time is not unpleasant.  At this age, teaching a kid how to hold a broom or get up under the lip of the toilet is not so bad.  The kids don’t mind, and the job is done really well with the kids AND me doing it together.

In short, YAY chore wheel!

Okay, now EXIT the chore wheel.  Bye!

right at 1 ft 4 inches.

I do not know why I trust you again and again.

Caught up in my excitement to see exactly how long something is,

I drag one vulnerable finger along your sleek flank and

you bite me, but not in a good way.

I am done with you.  I care not for what you say.

You are no longer my authority; do not wait for me to ask you for anything.

I will not be truly happy until you go out with next week’s garbage.

You see, back when we moved in, we found ourselves with a broken bed frame.  We needed a new one before Zephyr was born, and for environmental reasons, I wanted to buy a used one.  Like so many things that I do in attempts to make less of an impact on the earth, things devolved in a chaotic pattern where I couldn’t figure out how to fix it without doing the exact thing that I intended not to do in the first place, i.e., buy something new.  In this instance, I found the perfect bedframe on Craigslist, for a completely acceptable price…. only the frame was a queen, not a full.  No one had informed me that the full sized bed is considered like an adult twin; no one uses it much and it is difficult to find a frame for it these days.  No matter, I thought, I will simply get a new futon for our new-to-us frame.  The new futon is still lighter on the earth as it is all fabric.  The old futon will become our guest room bed.

But now I had the same problem in another room–a futon that didn’t have a frame.  In a completely insane (and stupid) burst of energy, (I think I was very, very pregnant and wanted to get things done, albeit poorly), I rushed to IKEA and bought a metal bed frame.

Then I didn’t like it.  It had this great curve to the headboard and footboard it that completely wasted a huge chunk of space in the tiny guest room.  You couldn’t really push it up against the wall with that curvature, and it looked silly.

Enter mia mama.  Mom saved the day by offering to TRADE us bed frames.  The cool metal one went out to their house where there is nothing BUT space and they sent us an antique brass bed that could be pushed up against the wall and looked cool.

BUT the brass bed was made for box springs and mattresses, not futons.  I tossed slats from IKEA down on the frame hoping that would work.

It sort of did… until it didn’t.

Every now and then the slats would shift and drop down under the frame sides.  I imagine that it sucked to be in the bed when this happened.  (Why does my butt suddenly feel lower than my knees?).  I realized that this was happening as every time I made the bed after people stayed here, I pulled the slats back into the correct position.  I tried to fix it with tape.  I tried to tie the slats into place with rope.  I tried many things, but could not get my head around how to fix this.  How does one bond wood to brass?  I surely did not know.

I started thinking that I needed to learn to weld.  The sides of the bed frame needed a lip, right?  When I finally put this plan into words, my father said, (using about .0001% of his brain power), “Why don’t you just screw a strip of wood to the underside of the slats on either side of the bed?”

Oh God.  So easy.  I could only think from the TOP of the bed, but my father was able to comprehend the BOTTOM of the slats.  Of course.

So I did it.

And now the bed slats do not drop down.  Hell, they don’t even move, those suckers are on so tight.

And I apologize to you, our guests, who suffered quietly through our collapsing bed frame.  Rest assured that it is fixed now and you may enjoy sleep at our house with your butt and knees and neck and head all at approximately the same level.

I have mixed feelings about invasive species.  On one hand, I admire the buggers.  They grow well.  They don’t seem to need much, and they can often fill in space where other plants couldn’t cut it.  They are determined, that is for sure, and I am not one to look down my nose at something that works so hard.

On the other hand, they are pushy.  They squeeze out native plants and don’t often have much benefit to animals, making them run out of control.  Some are actually impossible to control, like scotch broom, and though sort of pretty on a faraway hillside, are tyrants to live with.  Master gardeners and other such knowledgeable grey heads tell me they are bad, and I like to respect my elders.  Plus I like those master gardener types.  I feel like I should believe them.  They have the word “master” right their in their name.

This last week I had a huge chunk of time to myself where I simply dug out all the plants that had gotten too cheeky.  But instead of tossing them right in the yard debris, I carefully bagged them up for transport.  I even tried to give some away.

In the interest of being COMPLETELY HONEST (brad), I even clearly identified this one as an invasive.  I am not sure what it is, but within a couple years, it has nearly overtaken my entire front yard.

It’s hard for me to outright kill a plant.  I want to give it a chance.  It’s pretty.  It is usually one of the first things that blooms each year, but it is definitely a plant on the move.  What started as a sweet little patch of yellow is now marching across the yard.

There were some people who actually took my little plant home.  I mean, sometimes there seems to be a place for something that knows how to be prolific.  But I assure you, I am not totally stupid.  I once knew these people who cultivated the himalayan blackberries on their fence line because they liked the idea of berry picking.  I’m not that bad.  Yet.

Anyway, it was a good Christmas for my art.  It is hard for me to explain how I feel about making things.  And it is strangely tied up in my feelings about staying home with kids.  In a nutshell, it seems that the work of parenting these children day in and day out can be a little thankless.  I’m embarrassed sometimes trying to talk about MY life, because it sounds like the kids’ lives.  I don’t really lose myself in them (because I am far too selfish for that!) but I fear sounding like I am.

What is mine and just mine?  Making things.  Art work feels joyful for me.  I love creating, I love surprising myself at figuring out little projects.  I love RESULTS, which is a sensation that I don’t get from the children.  My friend Carmi calls it “product”.  She says you work and change diapers and help with homework and dress children and make food and clean the house…. and then you do it again without ever really seeing an end product.  She cans in order to see her product; to line it up and look at it and say, “Yes.  I made this.”  It is the same for me.

I feel like I am sort of arriving as an artist, not because I made such unique or amazing things, (although I was pleased with them).  It is because I did it.  Making the time to sit down and create has been a goal for a few years now and I feel like I finally made it happen this year.

Okay, enough philosophical blather.  Here is what I made:

A passel of Ugly Dolls

Yes, me!

Little clay houses to attach to soap packages

Pear chutney and a bar of soap topped with a ceramic house

These were tea party gifts---they looked nice on the table.

I also finished a felted hat for a friend, a crazy sweatshirt with a Japanese cartoon character on it for my sister, and made a fabric table runner for a cousin, but of course did not get pictures of any of this.  So goes it.  Maybe this year’s resolution will be to better photograph my projects.  Or maybe make something for myself?