Baby Steps

The Youngling walked! His daddy put a toy on the floor just out of reach and he took 5 steps forward, unaided, to pick it up. We're so proud. And a little bit smug. He's only 9 months old.

We wanted to commemorate the occasion, and it just so happens we had something suitable that we'd been meaning to get round to since Christmas. My sister, The Excited One, gave us a baby hand print/ foot print kit. 

The kit contains: 

- some lightweight modeling material that I don't know the name of

- a tiny rolling pin, which turned out to be too little for what I wanted

- a circular cutter, which we discarded

- a little red ribbon, which now lives in our craft box

You're supposed to make two circles with a print on each (one hand and one foot) to hang on your tree, but it's September so there is no tree. Also it's taken us so long to get around to this that The Youngling's foot prints are too big to fit in the circle provided. 

I pressed the modelling stuff out into a flat splodgey shape, and The Artivist stood The Youngling on the splodge. One at a time, I pressed his feet into the stuff to make footprints. 

The Youngling was fascinated by what we were doing, and looked pretty pleased with the result, though it is difficult to know if he really understands what we we've made as his only word is 'boop'.

We left the prints to dry overnight and then I painted them. We went for yellow, with orange for the prints themselves. The Youngling likes yellow, plus it looks like footprints in the sand. 

Once that was dry, The Artivist wrote a note on it so we'd always remember when The Youngling first walked. 

Finally, I glued a fitting onto the back and hung it on the wall amongst our family pictures. 

To Buxton!

In 2015, my friend The Imaginator set off for a 12 month working holiday in the land down under. Her life took a couple of detours including getting engaged to an Australian and creating two tiny Australians (The Smalls). This year she finally found her way back onto British soil, just in time for lockdown. 

Now that COVID has died down a little we figured it was safe to meetup. So yesterday I packed The Youngling and The Artivist into the car and set off for Buxtonland.

It took a long time to get there. Buxton is further from Wigan than where I used to live. When we arrived The Imaginator presented me with this wombat. 

Her to do list when she left included that she should 'bring us all a wombat', so I was most pleased this hadn't been forgotten (although I believe she is yet to 'solve cricket', which was also on the list).

We had lunch in the pub where The Imaginator works, and the meat there is supplied by the butcher's shop where The Australian works. 

The Youngling sat in a pub highchair and happily munched on some of the tiny mushroom and spinach sandwiches we'd brought for him, only dropping a couple of pieces on the floor and refusing a minority (which he ate later). The vegan pie I had was good but a bit on the small side. The Artivist regretted not ordering a second helping of chips. The Australian was unimpressed with his meat being undercooked. The Smalls weren't interested in their food.

After lunch we went to the park. They have 2 kids' play areas there - we visited both. The Imaginator explained they've found it best to go to the enclosed play area first. That way The Smalls tire themselves out a little and are less liable to running off when they later go to the bigger play area.

The Small Small did like to run off. She escaped from the enclosed play area 3 or 4 times but each time was recaptured by the Australian. The Big Small was happier to stay in one area for a while before moving on. The Australian taught me that the key to finding your kids in the park is remembering what they're wearing.

The Youngling didn't do any running off because he's not learned to run yet. Hopefully when he does, he will still have a preference for brightly coloured t-shirts. He did have a nice time staying with the grown ups and practising his walking, getting to know The Imaginator. And he had a go on a lie-down swing with The Small Small.

After the park we went to The Imaginator's house for a cuppa. I'd almost forgotten how steep her road is. She lives at the top of the hill, next to a field of sheep. The Artivist made comment about how it must feel to leave your house in the morning and see 90 sheep starting at you.

We saw The Imaginator's parents - Manray and The Inquisitor. Manray introduced himself to The Youngling and helped him practice his walking while The Inquisitor asked The Artivist lots of questions about where he's from and whether he dropped out of uni, and what roads we'd used to travel over from Wigan. 

Then it was time to go home. It's a long drive from Buxton to Wigan and we were going to have our dinner late, which would've probably meant getting The Youngling to bed late, but The Artivist was ON IT and ordered us a takeaway from the car, which arrived at our house about 5 minutes after we did. 

It was a good day, and we arranged it just in time - as of today gatherings of more than 6 people are illegal in the UK because COVID. Hopefully it won't be too long before we can all meet up again, but maybe I'll just have to arrange seeing The Imaginator without any kids stealing our attention or something. 

Wildflower Lawn

Do you know what lawns are for? They're for rich people to show off how much land they have and don't need. 

Well, that's not much good for our house. We're environmentalists. Aside from growing our own food, we want to use our land for growing plants for insects. So, way back in March, The Artivist and I started work on turning our front lawn into a wildflower meadow. 

We dug it up. Not completely, we just wanted to remove some of the grass and dandelion roots to make room for our new flowers to put down their own roots. 

We had these Beebombs that we'd been given for Christmas, so we scattered some about, along with some other seeds and we waited. Over the next few weeks, we saw a few pieces of bee bomb taken away by crows. We didn't see much sign of any flowers. 

We tried some more Beebombs, this time germinating them in water and then placing the seedlings carefully on the lawn. Still after a few weeks they hadn't taken. 

We learned from our friend The Allotmenter that many wildflowers don't do too well in nutrient rich soil. There's a flower called yellow rattle that drains soil of nutrients and it's useful to plant alongside other wildflowers for this reason. There are yellow rattle seeds in the bee bombs, so we hoped that if they came through, the other flowers would follow. 

Eventually, in early June, we saw a few yellow rattle flowers pop up on our lawn. 

And, sure enough, we soon started to see some other flowers coming through too. Vetch, buttercups, chamomile.

Later we saw nasturtiums, poppies and cornflowers.

It's not quite the full wildflower meadow I'd had in mind... yet. But it's coming along nicely, the bees and butterflies seem pretty keen on it already and I think next spring we can expect a nice array of flowers to bloom all of their own accord. 

Making a Nursery

Helloo, lovely readers. Long time no posting... sorry about that. There's so much to catch you up on, I'm mostly not even gonna bother.

I have a new partner. He's a writer, performer and activist. An artivist, if you will. And he's not really all that new. We have a baby together, and we've been painting his bedroom. We went with a classical elements theme - earth, air, fire and water, one element on each wall. Since we're in lockdown, we've been taking turns to play with The Youngling while the other paints.

We started last Monday, painting the gloss first. Always do the gloss first (if you later spill emulsion on gloss paint, you can just wipe it off with a wet cloth). We had some leftover from another room. It's called light rain. When we pulled back the carpet to paint the skirting board we found a laminate floor underneath which the previous owners had spilled emulsion paint on, so maybe we'll be able to clean it up. That would be good because the carpet needs throwing away really. 

On Tuesday, we worked on cutting out stencils. We printed some pictures and I used my craft knife to cut them out. 

 

On Wednesday we painted the ceiling like a sky. It was already white; we painted it blue, leaving out some cloud shapes. The Artivist has dyspraxia, which can make things like painting pictures on ceilings a bit difficult, so I painted the outline of the clouds and the perimeter of the ceiling, then The Artivist filled it in.

 

On Thursday, I painted the fire wall (to protect us from viruses). I wanted to make it fade from yellow in the middle of the wall through orange to red at the edges. I mixed my red and yellow paints together in a few different ratios but they came out more pink than orange. I suppose my yellow wasn't vibrant enough (I wanted a sunshine shade but they only had one called Banana Spilt). So The Artivist ran to B&Q and got some fiery orange paint, and I got painting. 

First I did the red edges, the yellow centre, and an orange ring in between. Then I poured some orange paint into a bucket and started working my way outwards from the orange to the red, occasionally adding red paint into the bucket to create this gradient effect. Then, starting with a new bucket and adding yellow paint this time, I worked inwards from the orange circle to the yellow centre. 

While we had the orange and yellow paints out, I painted a sun around the light fitting. 

On Friday, The Artivist painted the Water wall. We poured a few shades of blue and green, plus some white into an old washing up bowl. We barely mixed the paints because he wanted to create a multicoloured effect, which is pretty easily achieved by dipping the brush in a different place within the bowl for each stroke. The end result is fantastic. I love his waves. 

On Saturday, The Artivist painted the Earth wall green. Then he painted a tree on it. He was a bit nervous of getting it wrong at first, and not long after he'd started felt it didn't look right, but as he added branches he gained more confidence. He even worked up the courage to layer in a few more shades for a textured bark effect, and thought he'd ruined it but I think it looks great and after a little break he came back to it and began to agree. Later, we added some tufts of grass and flowers. 

I painted the Air wall a greenish-bluish-grey named Tranquil Dawn, then I painted a tornado. 

There's going to be a dragon on the fire wall so on Sunday I painted its breath. I made a bit of a mess of it at first (I think I was going for a flame at first, which is silly because dragons aren't candles) but I managed to save it. 

There's going to be a family of ducks on the water wall, so I painted a rock for them to stand on. 

 

I mixed some shades of green paint and dabbed them onto the tree to create an impression of leaves. 

 

This Monday was stencilling day. We stenciled some perching birds onto the tree using my homemade stencils, and some leaves using some stencils The Artivist bought online. 

We stenciled flying birds onto the air wall. One bird's feet didn't come out well so I touched it up by hand. 

  

We stencilled the dragon onto the fire wall. I had cut a stencil for a Phoenix too, but didn't really trust it (too flimsy) so I used it to draw a Phoenix on the wall in pencil, and I painted it by hand. 

We stencilled fish onto the water wall. They didn't turn out too well at first because my homemade stencils are made of cheap paper and aren't that good, but we gave them outlines with sharpies and now they look great. 

And we stenciled a family of ducks (I left their feet out of the stencil and added them by hand). And a couple of flying ducks.

On Tuesday we tidied up, putting away all our paints and cleaning our dozens and dozens of brushes. 

On Wednesday we spent an entire day scrubbing the surprise laminate floor, and it came clean and is usable.

On Thursday we put up the curtains, lampshade (remember this?), a nightlight and some pictures. We've bought a new rug, which really ties the room together be having colours from every wall. We put paper leaves on the tree, which have messages from our friends and family.

It's been a busy two weeks and we're really really pleased with the results. The room looks brilliant, and The Youngling is mesmerised by our artwork. Hopefully it won't be too exciting for him to sleep in.