It occurs to me that I somehow have not shown you the majestic costume I put together for Becky’s 5th grade Explorer Museum project. I say “put together” rather than “designed” because truthfully, she did all the research and all the designing. I just made the patterns and sewed the thing together.
Her school does this neat project where each kid picks an explorer and then does a whole living museum exhibit kind of thing (I think it would be even more cool if they did this with a group that wasn’t largely European dudes who were responsible for an awful lot of mass genocide and slavery but I digress). They put together reports and “artifacts” and journals, and then the parents show up and the kids all have to tell us about their explorers. It’s very involved.
Becky decided to be Ponce de León. I may have strongly suggested ol’ Ponce because I was under the misconception that he had the cool hat and 1/2 cape outfit. Not true. His hat is totally dumb, and no cape at all (okay, he’s wearing a cape in this picture, but in most renderings there’s no cape). I don’t know who I was thinking of, but it sure wasn’t Ponce de León. There’s a fairly ubiquitous rendering of the man wearing a chest plate with a fancy slash-sleeve shirt underneath. Several statues of him also show him wearing matching shorts. That Florida heat, I guess.
So we went to the fabric store and picked out a heavy blue-gray upholstery fabric for the tunic/armor, and yellow and red fabric for the sleeves. The kid’s a stickler for accuracy. We got home and I started planning this thing out, and I quickly realized that I had never done slash sleeves before. A quick whirl around Pinterest and I was all set with a nifty tutorial for Snow White sleeves.
We had already decided that the sleeves would be connected to the “armor” rather than part of an undershirt, and after some discussion we decided to go with short sleeves rather than long. We rounded up a pair of plain black boots (her feet are almost as big as mine already!!!) and I whipped up a quick crocheted beard. I am super, super pleased at how it came out. But more importantly, Becky was really happy with it, which was the goal.
I give you: Juan Becky Ponce de León!
A couple more shots:
For the past few months, I’d been habit tracking on a monthly basis, which was pretty, and made it easy to see a big picture of how I was doing at building particular habits. The only thing was, I’d forget to do it for a couple of days. Some months, I let it go completely for the last week or so of the month. Which made it much less useful as both a track and as a reminder. So when I decided I needed to jump back on the habit building wagon in order to make this blogging thing happen, I thought about ways to track weekly. This is my first attempt.
I mean, not really. Compared to, say, Bill O’Reilly I’m actually pretty awesome. But I just can’t seem to remember to write blog posts. Typically what has happened in the past is I have post ideas but technical issues. Or I don’t have any post ideas at all and I just stare at the screen and then post something short and silly…kind of the blog-post equivalent of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Which isn’t super great, but at least it’s something. I’m genuinely not sure what my issue right now is — I’m completely flaking out on posting at all.
I had strawberry shortcake for breakfast today. I’m not super proud of it, but I wanted to blog about strawberry shortcake and the other day when I made it for me and the kids, I made these gorgeous, decadent towers that fell over long before I had a chance to capture their majesty.
Good grief! I finally fix my posting issues and then forget all about posting! I’m not gonna lie — I’m a little disappointed in myself. BUT, I am now re-committing to this 365 project. I’m not going to start over, I’m just going to move ahead from here. And I’m going to post my very favorite motivational poster here, just to remind myself that we all stumble sometimes. What matters is that we get back up and keep going.
Up here in the Dirty Jerz, people seem to be all about the red sauce. Which I get — it’s very versatile. You can have it plain, with meatballs, with sausage, whatever you want. But growing up, we always had meat sauce, and I vastly prefer its richer flavor. Plus, it eliminates a step from things like lasagna and pizza…I don’t have to make meat for those, because it’s already in the sauce!
I may have found a workaround so that I can upload pics from my phone, which has been the big killer on this whole blog-every-day thing I was trying to do. Basically, if I can’t upload directly (or mostly directly) from my phone, it means it’s something like a 5 step process just to get the photos. That’s not even including the writing part. So, here goes. :: holding breath::