i love it, i love it, i love it... The Other Me....

 It was the 'Hallowe'en Half Term' Craft Cafe on Thursday.

This marks the start of our 6th year! How time flies... and what a gorgeous sight to meet the children who have grown so much over  the years.

 Some of 'my girls' are too grown up now and this sort of environment is too tame for them. One of these girls came along to help me with the pom-pom spider table this time *waves at Jo* and that is such a warming thing. Community, Craft, Childhood,Friendship...

 And, with the passing of time, older children make way for new little hands and faces. I love meeting the parents and carers who all 'amaze' at how much effort their children put in to their works. I enjoy the barrage of questions about how and why!? we put on these workshops.

The continual comments to me "you should be a teacher, Kirsty - you should you know"

 There is another 'me'... inside me (if you know what i mean) and she is fat with happiness and home baking. She has 4 children of her own and a few fostered children. We sit round the farmhouse table 'Home Educating' and make models from Junk and obsess over making bird feeding fat balls.

For many years i thought that is who i would be.

 So, selfishly, The Craft Cafe is my way of slipping into that 'Other Me' skin and playing at that life for a while.

I LOVED it when 4 year old Meg was shouting Kirsty... kirsty... K I R S T EEEY at the other end of the room because she wanted help making a bead necklace and did i have "any more Sea Beads"? Who knows what she meant by Sea Beads? 5 months previous that child wouldn't join it without sitting on her Mothers lap and now she is hollering for help from 10 meters away.

 And generally, i am a person who hates chaos. I am not good with noise. I find children very hard work and i like to craft alone in silence.

So why, oh why, do i find myself stood in the centre of this mess - telling children how great their painty created mess is, positively welling up with pride for them and 'loving' my own centralness to all this madness?

It is the Other Me.

I like her. I would want to be her friend if i met her outside the village shop. I would want to sit in her messy kitchen drinking tea and having a gentle gossip. And weirdly, i would love to go home to my own neat little house afterward and enjoy calm and silence.

Maybe, this is the secret to our long enjoyed success of the Craft Cafe?

Many parents are putting on this Other Me overcoat? We are all enjoying the feeling of facilitating 2 hours of creativity and fun - where we all live in messy kitchens and let our children be crazed with creatvity?

Just thinking out loud..... x

Button BUGZ!

Let's hear it.... Ladies and Gentlemen... put your hands together for..... the Button Bugz!
IF you are coming to the OCTOBER half term CRAFT CAFE in Upper Boddington - then these might be on the Craft Menu. Mwah ha ha ha - (said in a sort of 'Hallowe'en' voice)
They are creepy, crawly, buttony and sprawly.

My LittleFish and i gave the recipe a trial and error run. They came out even better than i had imagined and they leave plenty of room for a childs own artistic interpretation! (we like them to take an idea and rrrrruuunnnn with it)

This is one side of those MINI selection cereal boxes - to give you an idea of the size of body you need. Don't make it much bigger or the legs might not hold up the body. Before you start, punch a few holes down each side. I made FOUR holes on each side of the body.

I told LittleFish to keep the holes FREE of stuffs when decorating. Obviously she didn't, so i had to rummage through the body's fluffs n' stuffs to find them again.

As demonstrated by my angel (below) stick lots of great stuff on the body, including many goggly eyes. Use whatever you have? pompoms, ribbon, tissue paper, eyes, pens.... always use good strong sticky glue.

I use this glue>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> for everything. Tis fantastic! water it down a bit and use it as a varnish too.

Cut 4 PIPE CLEANERS into 8 legs.... (who smokes a pipe nowadays?) and that is: EACH pipe cleaner in HALF for those who struggle with the maths :)

Thread a button on to the end of each bendy fluffy stick. They want to try and be the same length as each other - but the world won't stop turning if they differ in length muchly.

And... thread the un-buttony end through those holes i warned you about at the beginning.

They might not stand very well till the whole body is DRY - warn your child about this when they start to cry as the bug won't stand on it's own. This will get better - later.

COOLIO! me luffs the bugz. I'll let you have this idea and use it too if you like! i love crafting with kids. I could suggest you buy your buttons through me, but if this is not your first visit to the blog, you know that by now xxxx happy bugging people x

That's a good idea....
I'm not sure what they're actually doing. Something with paint / water / washing-up liquid. Blowing the bubbles and putting paper over the top to form bubbly pictures.
I think there is ONE rule only to this - BLOW do not suck!
(i love LittleFish's sideways glance here, checking out what daddy is doing)


yippee for bubble pictures!

not recommended for very small children - for obvious soap filled mouth reasons....

I have to talk about Julie Arkell...

There are lots of things that I love.....
Dressing up - Being with my Baby - Walking the dog - Tea - Sewing... (that list continues for an age and is evergrowing...) ...and on that list, very near the top, there is the work of Julie Arkell....

I don't even know what to say about her work.

It leaves me speechless.

I am utterly compelled by it. I look at this book alllllll the time. I think about her alllll the time. Images of her work pop into my head day and evening. I am so envious that I am not her but I am so grateful she is who she is otherwise she would never have produced such craft.

All i can do is show you a few images from the small booklet i have. Even if the quality of these photos were better or brighter, they still can't match up to the 'real thing'.

I'll try to tell you what her work makes me feel of:

Think about an eldery lady who has sadly passed away, and you have been asked if there is anything you'd like from her attic before they clear it all and sell the house. There are dusty trunks filled with old lace, postcards and buttons.... there are toys, handmade from paper, wearing woolly hats. There are rabbits - on wheels! that you can pull along with string. There are wooden block clowns with frightening inter-changable heads... you find old letters and postcards from seaside towns and brown-edged photographs of a slim man whose name has carelessly been forgotten. There is a whole world of childhood all huddled and stored in paper. The stories of Summer days spill onto the wooden floorboards as you remember the taste of home-made lemonade and the smell of someones old house-coat.

Twee? maybe. But i think there is also a sinister or 'sad' edge to her work that i fail to capture in words. The sadness is a sort of frustration, like when you can't remember the name of something and it 'kills' you to rack your brain!!

You might also think I am mad, and you know Julie Arkell's work and it isn't at all how I have described... maybe my descriptions say more about me than they do about the artist?
Ah well, look her up and see for yourself. Decide if you like her too?

Julie Arkell.

Born in London 1955

more stuff: http://www.earthangelstoys.com/html/julie_arkell_-_paper_mache.html

and here: http://theconstantgatherer.blogspot.com/2008/04/julie-arkell.html

and look at her here: http://lovelytextiles.blogspot.com/2008/06/julie-arkell-knit-to-embroidery_25.html she herself is beautiful... damn my envy of her brilliance.

Ahhh Julie Arkell, thanks so much for making the world a better place to be x