A First!

Yipee! Look at those fabulous feet. :) I got my first pedicure two weeks ago and see how cute they look in those shoes and in 3rd position (ballet) non-the-less.

My friend gave me a gift certificate to get a pedicure for my birthday last October and it has been sitting on my filing cabinet waiting... and waiting...

I haven't felt like I had pretty feet since about 6th grade when someone made fun of my really long toes. I remember looking down at them and realizing that my toes were very long- so long in fact that my second toe was as long as my friend's pinky finger.

Anyway, that gift certificate just sat there because I felt it was pointless to get a pedicure on feet that couldn't have much improving (how can you shorten a second toe?). Boy was I wrong. I can't stop looking at them. I have to wear shoes that show them off with every outfit and in every kind of weather. :) Now I see why people get pedicures. They are so fun! I think that Seth is now worried this may become a monthly expense. He's probably right. :)

Deck of Me- Week 11: Your Initial

So here's my letter K painting for Emily's challenge this week. I had visions of making it much more detailed and complicated, but ended up having fun making it more simple. Sorry if I've confused people with having the blogger name of "Penelope Crackers" because of course that's not my real name. I've always loved the name Penelope since I first heard it in 6th grade studying Greek Mythology. As a kid I was bummed out that my parents didn't give me a middle name so it was then that I decided that Penelope was my middle name. I would put it on everything, even when I graduated from college I announced my name at the microphone with a Penelope stuck in there (mostly to make my parents roll their eyes I think). So that's me... Karalenn Penelope. :)

A Slice of Nostalgic Pie

Well maybe I shouldn't post this because it's a bit embarrassing, but it's fun too (in a nerdy sort of way).... Yesterday, I looked in the top of my bedroom closet at my special white box that holds my wedding dress (from almost 8 years ago) and a blessing dress that I sewed for my little Kendyl and decided to get them out to play with them. The last time I got my wedding dress out (3 years ago) it sadly ended in tears because I couldn't zip it up (I had just had a baby a few months before that). I was actually quite a bit bigger then and have been working hard for three years to lose most of that baby weight that you can get from having two kids in a row.

So as I pulled it out and tried to slip it on I was nervous that it still wouldn't fit even though I knew I was smaller now. I was so excited when Seth zipped it up with a whoosh! It's the first time I have fit back in my wedding dress since our two girls have entered our lives! It was definitely tighter through the hips and stomach then I remember and looser in the chest area than it was 8 years ago, but I got it on. :)

I put on lipstick and earings and put my hair up in a weddingish hairdo. I also paraded all over the house and let my girls hold the train of my dress and made Seth take a bajillion pictures of me. I even called my parents and talked Seth into calling his parents to tell them that I was prancing around the house in my wedding dress. :) My oldest said excitedly, "What if daddy dies and then you have to wear this again?!" This didn't impress daddy very much. :)

My mom's life long best friend made this dress for me. She used some lace that my mom had for the top part. If you look closely you can see that it's hand made lace because it's a bit uneven. The lace, of course, is very old, because my mom has rooms and boxes of old trimmings, lace, fabric, etc. and it was just the right length. I sure am grateful my mom collects that kind of stuff.

What we also pulled out of the box was Kendyl's blessing gown. (Makenzie was blessed in a very old handmade gown from 1800 something that my mom still has). With Kendyl I decided to try to sew her gown. It was a new hobby at the time I was trying to develop. I made the slip underneath and then the dress.

Here's a close up of my two favorite things about her blessing gown. The handmade butterfly lace trim from around the turn of the century (another gift from mom) and the little flowers you can see dotting the dress that poke out. Those flowers were left overs from my wedding veil that my mom sewed into it. I had 9 left over that my mom didn't use and so I put them scattered throughout Kendyl's dress.

We were very nearly late for church because nothing seemed as wonderful to put on after playing in my wedding dress for an hour. Kendyl and Makenzie carried their dressed up dolly all day long and shared holding her at church as well. What a fun morning we had. I need to get that box out more often. :)

Deck of Me- Week 10: "Note To Self"

Emily's challenge this week is "Note to Self"- something to remember to do this week. Unfortunately, I immediately knew what needed to be taken care of... my monstrous pile of evil laundry. I went ahead and began this tonight so that I could dedicate myself to laundry tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day etc. :) I knew that if I didn't finish this card tonight I wouldn't get to that laundry, and we'll need underwear in a day or two (I know, too much information).

For my card I drew and painted it like usual, but the shirt and pants in the middle are pieces of fabric that I have stored away for making quilts for my girls someday (when Kristen decides to teach me how to quilt- she didn't know I was going to ask that of her :). So I guess I'm proud of myself because using fabric seems a little scrapbooky, instead of just painting.

So now, I have no excuses. Off to bed and then I have my lovely laundry awaiting me in the morning. Oh joy!

A Mess of Cards (what I've done so far)

I've been hanging my little cards from a piece of yarn across a wall in my bedroom. It's so fun to see them all together that I decided I wanted to see them all together on my blog (except for my fish one- it wasn't painted like the rest of these). It's such a feeling of accomplish-ment! To think that I haven't painted since college (7 years) like this because I felt like I wasn't good enough and it was scary and all it took was Emily's challenge to get me going again. It's not that I didn't try. I would sit down in front of my art supplies and just freeze. I didn't know where to begin and was scared that it would not be good just because I knew it wouldn't be as good as my husband could do. (He's an animator for Sony and a gifted illustrator). He would try hard to get me to do it again as well. I just couldn't get past my mental block. This challenge is small and with the themes it really helps me do it. Also there's no pressure if I don't get it done like I would have in my painting and figure drawing classes. It's wonderful and I feel glad to be back.

Since this challenge began sometimes I have felt the flood gates of creativity come rushing in that I haven't had axcess to for years. I've been writing down all my ideas so I don't forget them. I'm so happy to be painting again and to feel success with it and most of all... I love looking at them in my room and feeling proud of them and seeing that they are beautiful instead of cringing and thinking they aren't as good as someone else might do. They are beautiful because they are what is inside me and I can finally release what's inside me again in this way.

Deck of Me- Week 9: What Inspires Me

I find that I am always inspired by beauty. I love walking into a beautiful home, spending time with a friend with a beautiful soul, or being out in nature. I feel inspired to be a better person and feel happy.

Today while my girls were in school I tried something new... I went to the beach and brought this card and my paints to put some color on this design I drew the night before. It was such a wonderful moment. I sat on some rocks and put my feet in the sand while the sun was warm with a little breeze. I watched the waves and then began painting. The greenish-blue in my design is the color of the ocean today. I was so content that I couldn't help but sing and smile goofy the whole time I painted. It was a glorious moment that I'm determined to do more often.

So anyway this is what I was inspired to make, a pretty little design that feels calm and makes me happy and represents being inspired.

Week 8: Something I Miss

Something I miss very much is gardening with my mom in her simple, but beautiful garden. I loved watching her take care of her flowers while she would give me little helpful tips like where to trim the roses or how to find the seed packs in pansies (her favorite) and bury them together to make mixed colored pansies. We would find the little princesses in the middle of the pansy flower and make the lady holding the parasol with hollyhock flowers. She'd sing and hum the same songs in her sweet voice that I miss hearing. I love that the first thing I see whenever I can come home for a visit is her garden.

My favorite time of the year is spring when you can smell her lilacs and when all the bulbs (daffodils, iris, and tulips) are in bloom. Everytime I pass a "Double Delight" rose (my favorite) I think of my mom. It has the most DELICIOUS scent! mmmmm

My mom loves antiques! Old is better than new. That is why I wanted to paint the picture this way. I was inspired by some stamps that I saw, and so I made us dressed from an older time and tried to make it a little bit "Art Nouveau"- that's one of my favorite styles). I also painted it to look like toile fabric. Although my mom doesn't have long hair I chose that to keep with the style of the picture and time period. :)

Week 7: Shoes

This week's challenge is "shoes". The story of the ruby red slippers is special to me now because of where we live. The little home that we live in use to be on MGM's lot back in the 30's while they were making the Wizard of Oz. This house was the tailor's shop for that movie. Our landlady is the granddaughter of the tailor and she has memories of sitting by him while he sewed the munchkin costumes in this home. I like to imagine that his expert sewing spirit lingers here and when I sew he helps me along. :)

Our home is very special. It actually has two very large windows that go most of the length and heigth of the house on one side. Our tailor friend requested the windows to be that large so that he could look over the studio lot as he sewed. When he retired, he asked to live in his tailor shop. So, MGM picked up this little tailor shop by truck and let him pick where he wanted it placed. And, here it has stayed in a beautiful neighborhood with a rare, beautiful backyard in this crowded city.

We love being a part of this little history and it's fun to feel like we own a little bit of those ruby slippers. :)

(Does the black and white striped background remind you of anything from the movie? First person to guess right gets some candy.) :)

Deck of Me- Week 6: Love

Well I finally did another painting. I've had lots of ideas of things I have wanted to paint, but haven't felt like painting for a week or two.

For Emily's "Deck of Me" this week's challenge was: LOVE. Fitting for Valentine's Day. This image came immediately to mind. It's of me, my hubby Seth, and our two girls- Makenzie and Kendyl "secretly spying on the fairy kingdoms". (That's a direct quote from a song that Seth wrote on the guitar about fun adventures). So what I love first is my family and next is the magic we find and make together.

We're pretty into little magical stuff and playing pretend in this house. We're always finding places where magic has happened. I LOVE fairy rings! Seth proposed to me in a fairy ring that he made in a forest. He made his own toad stools out of clay and painted them and then hung twinkle lights all around the trees surrounding the fairy ring of moss and toad stools. He rented a prince costume and invented a glitter blower to fall on us and had beautiful music playing from the movie soundtrack of "Hook". (He hooked the lights and tape player and glitter blower up to a generator). He quoted a poem to me that he wrote as he proposed and got down on one knee. He designed my ring and it is a fairy ring of flowers and toad stools (and a diamond of course) :) It's the most beautiful thing!

Although we aren't as romantic, as often as we use to be, we still do some fun things from time to time and try to create adventures, i.e. for dinner tonight we all ate outside in our backyard at the table back there with candles and roses and turned on the white twinkle (fairy) lights in the trees and made up stories. If it had been just a little warmer we probably would have sat out there and played our guitars- we like to do that in the summer evenings. (With all the atmosphere, too bad the meal wasn't so elegant. :) I had been drawing and painting today so we all ate warmed up frozen burittos. -yum)

I'm so blessed and I LOVE my sweet husband and crazy fun girls (even when I'm cranky- which happens often enough). :)

This is my little Kendyl. She love Love LOVES painting her nails. She changes the colors constantly. It's so fun to watch her love being a girly-girl one minute and playing in the mud and acting like a dinosaur the next. She's learned to be free from her big sister who is whatever she wants to be as well.

I was thinking the other day about how I was when I was little. I loved dressing up and singing for pretend audiances and then the same day playing basketball with my brothers and their friends outside and taking off my shirt when I'd play like them. (Mind you- I was definitely under 8 years old- I thought that was the rule for playing basketball.) When I got older I loved sitting with my dad in the garage and feeling so important handing him different tools as we worked on cars (not knowing really what he was doing) and riding motorcycles in the foothills with him and my little sister on the weekends. All the while still loving to dress in cute clothes, being on dance teams, and thinking about boys and getting good grades and still playing other sports.

I like how girls can be girly-girly and tomboys at the same time. It's wonderful! It's great being a girl! LOVE IT!

Week 5: Use some ephemera from your week

An ephemera from our week last week was my daughter's loose teeth that came out. It was her little pass to some money! Oh shoot, I guess the definition is something printed with limited time use. I thought it meant just something small that was a pass to something (like a tooth is a pass to some money). Oh well, I was inspired to paint this little painting and I'm gonna use it. :)

Makenzie lost her 5th and 6th tooth and was visited by the tooth fairy. Kenz is very proud of the fact that she lost her 5th tooth while in a time out. I guess she had nothing else to do so she just pulled her loose tooth right out. In all the excitement we forgot she was in a time out and danced around and looked at the neat new hole in her gums. Now she is officially missing her two front teeth. Is there anything cuter than that? Not that I can think of. :)

It's always a surprise with Makenzie. Our poor tooth fairy has to go to so much work just to pay the poor kid off. I threw such a stink about wanting to keep Kenzie's first tooth she lost and not let that tooth fairy at it. So Makenzie came up with a great solution. It was that she would leave a note for the tooth fairy to please give her some money for loosing the tooth and put her tooth under her mom's pillow for that time. Works for me.

Four teeth ago the fairy found a note under Makenzie's pillow asking for a fuzzy, sparkly journal with jewels on it instead of a dollar. That poor fairy put her money back in her purse she was about to give to Makenzie and went out that night to several stores looking for such a journal. After two days she finally ended up finding a journal with a big "K" on it (for Kenzie of course) with jewels in the K. Makenzie seemed pretty happy about that. (phew)

Three teeth ago that fairy was so sleepy that she missed her accidentally three nights in a row (CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?) and felt so terrible that she gave her two dollars hoping that would make up for it. Makenzie was a little worried about the missing tooth fairy and felt sorry for herself, telling us that she was sure that everyone else who lost a tooth that week was probably getting a puppy and that mean ol' fairy kept forgetting her. The increase of payment by double made her feel better though.

This last time the tooth fairy led her on a treasure hunt for her money before Kenzie could ask for anything different.

I found the most adorable thing that we are going to make. Here's the link http://www.thetoymaker.com/Toypages/06gazebo/06toothfairyGazebo.html It's a little gazebo that you put together for the tooth fairy to come rest in when she stops at your place. Sleepy thing. It must be exhausting working the graveyard shift night after night. Come to think of it, we have a little lantern that I use as a decoration and put a little Tinkerbelle figurine in that the tooth fairy could sleep in if we just kick Tink out. hmmmm, I'm not sure how that will got over. Tink's a little feisty.
Anyway, this looks too fun not to make if you ask me.

So these are our adventures with this little fairy. We sure like her and how hard she tries to please this quirky and opinionated kid of ours. Heaven help us when Kendyl starts loosing teeth too.

Wishmaker

Well I couldn't help it. I had so much fun on Monday drawing and painting I had to do it again today. Maybe what I was inspired to paint today will fit into next week's art journal. We'll see... :)

The reason I painted this was because of something so adorable yesterday. I was taking my girls on a walk and we came across a wishmaker (dandilion). The way my littlest blows on them is that everytime she blows she gets to make a wish. So one dandilion can possibly make about 15 wishes come true- which is quite clever if you ask me. So on our walk my little Kendyl spotted a wishmaker from her stroller and Kenzie ran to get it for her. As I am pushing Kendyl along Kenzie and I stop our conversation because Kendyl is making the cutest wishes and making us laugh. Here they are as best as I can remember...

1. I wish for a princess
2. I wish for a pretty dress
3. I wish for a castle
4. I wish for flowers
5. I wish for leaves
6. I wish for lots of grandmas and grandpas
7. I wish for Santa to bring one more present (this one isn't new. Ever prayer, everyday, even if it's at meal time she prays/wishes for this.)
8. I wish to sit on Santa's lap. This time I wont be scared.
9. I wish for a lion

... and so on. It was such a sweet little moment that I wanted to document it. I was only going to post her wishes and then I started imagining her with her wishmaker in different fun places like nestled up by a tree, on the moon, and I even imagined her really tiny sitting on a dandilion pulling out the little puffs. I'll make that one sometime. Here is her making wishes for the moon. And the moon is quite pleased. :)

I just realized something. The moon is one of my all time favorite symbols! I could use this for my Deck of Me week number 4 instead of that fish thing I made. :)

A Deck of Me- Week 4: A Symbol You Love

Emily's prompt for this week is "A Symbol You Love". So here it is in a first grade class art project kind of way... a fish! A fish is the symbol for Christ and I also love that a flying fish is the symbol for magic. I love both things! (The butterflies and dragonflies help you know the fish is flying.) I was going to do a watercolor painting like I have done for all the other weeks, but I'm already working on a watercolor painting that my head is really into and I just wanted to have fun and try something different with this week's challenge. (Check later this week to see the little painting I'm working on, it'll be done- it's very whimsical- like the post below this) :)

This technique for this is something that I taught to my daughter's first grade class last week. You paint glue on a page and then stick little pieces of colored tissue to it in anyway you want. After it dries you cut out the shape of your object and attach it to a background paper. I knew I wanted to make my symbol be a fish and my daughter was the one who thought to make my fish this way because of the art lesson I taught in her class of making "Elmer the elephant". So Sunday night we all (Seth, me, and my two girls) sat down at our table and made our little tissue art fishes. It was so fun, messy, and carefree. I think Makenzie's turned out beautiful. Here it is.

I just wanted to crop this from my last painting so that I could make it my profile picture. :)

A Deck of Me- Week 3: I Am Statement

For Emily's challenge this week we get to make our journal cards have an "I Am" statement about ourselves. I have to say this one was easy shmeasy for me to know what I would do because I have a bit of a princess complex- in a NON high-maintenance kind of way. :) I happen to love all things princessy, sparkly, shiny, fairytale, magical, etc. I always have. I can’t help it. I love fairy tales, but along with that I have deep beliefs about God and that I am his daughter- a princess.

*small confession* I have a collection of tiaras that I love to wear around the house. I usually wear them while I am cooking or cleaning- no, not to feel like Cinderella. It’s because I am a stay-at-home mom and sometimes it can be a bit thankless and at times not very glamorous. There have been days when I have forgotten my worth and so to keep an eternal perspective, remember who I am, and feel proud of the choice I have made to be a mom and stay home with my girls I wear my little tiara. Besides it’s fun!

I had a wonderful time drawing and painting this today! Too fun. Also I’m so impressed with everyone else who is doing this. It’s inspiring to see what you all do. I’m looking forward to my little art time next week and seeing what you all create. CHEERS!