(Somewhat) controlled chaos

our week in crafts

This has been another crafty, extremely busy week. Even though we’ve loved being outside in this gorgeous fall weather, the earlier sunsets and cool nights have meant more time inside in the evenings, and fall just makes us want to create things, maybe in preparation for the less-bright winter days we know are coming.

On Tuesday, one of the NC State graduate MFA students, Patricia Ndombe, led an art and poetry workshop inspired by Tiya Miles’s All That She Carried. Patricia talked about language as heirloom, her own family history, and then worked with us as we wrote poetry and embroidered both by hand and using the Hill Library Makerspace digital embroidery machines (which are really cool).

I love working with undergraduate and graduate students to handmake stuff outside of the traditional classroom—watching people put away their computers and phones for a couple of hours and just relax into sewing or drawing or writing, you see the stress of grades and work and life melt away. I want to find time to do more of this with our students—I am in complete agreement with Lynda Barry that we need to spend more time away from screens, making things by hand.

On Friday afternoon, Bea and Harriet and I made this awesome skull banner, inspired by one that I saw at their dentist:

To make it, we just cut out skull shapes (think keyhole or lightbulb), then painted big vacant eyes, triangle noses, and a variety of scary teeth in watercolor. We taped these to some string with masking tape, then hung them in the kitchen. I think the creepiest one might be the eleven-eyed skull Harriet painted.

Then yesterday the girls and I spent all day at their school’s Fall Fest (Richard is visiting Nana and Grandpa). They were both so excited that Bea wrote me this note in code. Can you figure out what it says?

Putting the Fall Fest together was a big undertaking by the PTA committee (led by Julie Ricker) and the school staff, especially our wonderful P.E. and art teachers, Ms. Bowling and Ms. Drechsler. It was the culminating celebration of our successful annual fundraiser (DIY for the first time this year), and a reminder of what a wonderful community we have.

Bea and Harriet go to a public, pre-K through 5th grade elementary school in a rural part of Chatham County, North Carolina. When Bea began school, there were almost 900 kids in her school—it was literally overflowing into temporary trailers, in part because of a fast-growing neighborhood (almost a small town unto itself, and where we like to do our mountain biking). A couple of years ago, the county finished building a new school on the border of the growing neighborhood, and most of the kids were assigned there. So currently, Bea and Harriet go to school with only a little more than 200 other kids.

Like Bea herself, the school is small but mighty. Every time I walk into that building or hear the girls talking about their days, I am awash with gratitude and amazement. I really felt that yesterday when we started setting up for the festival. The PTA had organized such an incredible, diverse array of talent from our local community—drumming by parent Diali Cissokho, a jumprope show by the Bouncing Bulldogs, a petting zoo of farm animals owned by one of our teachers, a bubble artist, an ice cream truck, an obstacle course, face painters, cake walks on the hour featuring treats by local bakers… I wish I could show you photos, but I stayed busy the whole time helping Ms. Drechsler with the art station, which was incredibly popular this year.

As a thank-you to every kid for trying out our new fundraising model (in years past, we used an outside company that rewarded kids with toys, etc), we screen-printed T-shirts with designs hand-drawn by the kids. There were four shirt designs to choose from—cute pumpkins, a spooky tree, ghosts, and bats. I made the screens from PDFs sent to me by Ms. Drechsler (see below for a Youtube video about how to do it), and we ordered gray, black, white, and orange shirts, and white, black, and orange fabric inks.

We set up a table of pre-ordered shirts (a PTA parent helpfully made stickers with each child’s name and heat-set instructions to place inside the shirts), and kids and parents got in line between other fun things. We were usefully stationed close to the giant inflatable slide and the popcorn booth. Then it was controlled chaos—young helpers (shout-out to Marion, Giselle, and Ophelia!), me, and Ms. D. scrambling between printing white ghosts, black bats, orange pumpkins, and black trees.

Two things that helped: we inserted old record albums into the shirt fronts to keep the ink from bleeding through and to create a stiff surface for printing, and we were right beside a chainlink fence where we could clothespin the shirts to dry.

In three hours, I think we printed between 150 and 200 shirts, and a few tote bags. We still have a box of shirts and bags to screen, and using a variety of colored inks on each screen is maybe not the most efficient way of doing things (ink has to be washed out completely to switch colors). If I did it again (and I think we certainly will), I’d choose one color of shirt (maybe dark gray, which looks great with so many colors and is smudge-forgiving), and one color of ink for each screen. Then I’d make a variety of kid-designed school logo screens in a contrasting color, and set up a fifth-grade helper letting kids screen this part.

But, it’s a learning process, and we’re so happy with how it turned out. Here’s Harriet wearing her new ghost tee:

And aren’t the Bouncing Bulldogs so impressive?

Did you figure out Bea’s code? A hint: the first sentence is “Hi Mommy!”

We have some great new books to recommend (thank you, Taylor!) and will try to post more this week. In the meantime, how are you spending your days and nights, Frog Troublers? Any fun crafts or good books to recommend? Have you voted yet?

I hope I see some of you at the Tiya Miles event at Hunt Library this Thursday!

P.S. I found this video helpful as for learnig how to make screens for printing: