The Yorktown Owens: Arthur's stuff

Showing posts with label Arthur's stuff. Show all posts

12.3.11

17.2.11

Haunted PBJ

Arthur loves scary things. Haunted Mansion at Disney World, Scooby Doo monsters, The Dark Crystal, Goey Ghost (his creation), scary Lar-Lars (also his creations), and Halloween...he adores them.

4.2.11

Arthur was helping me shop on Etsy before Christmas and went nuts over a Blythe doll. Unfortunately, we couldn't afford one and I didn't really want a knock-off.

We were wandering through the store tonight with Taeh and Arthur declared, "I want that one!" and pointed to a little Blythe doll smack in the middle of the Littlest Pet Shop dolls (which we also really like). He picked out two; one came with a scooter. They are little bitty versions of the originals, but he is super happy and up way too late playing with them.

He named this one Alice Annisenis.

And this one is Pepper.

30.1.11

Block Party

17.1.11

Arthur's favorite things

According to him:

Chocolate milk
French fries
Pizza
Ketchup
Little People
Cake
"Puppy" Doo (Scooby Doo)
Loud music
The Beatles
Arthur
Quack quack (favorite sound) "That a duck says"
Pee Wee Herman

15.8.10

Arthur's Yellow Submarine Bedroom

These are actually old pictures from when he was very little. His bedroom has changed a little since (Arthur hasn't slept in a crib in ages). There are a few newer ones mixed in.

We live in a 1920 Craftsman home, so we have issues with space and making decor fit. When we found out we were expecting Arthur, we immediately decide on the Pepperland theme.

Justin's dad created this mural for us. He used a projector to project the image on the wall and sketched it, then painted it. Justin, who grew up with murals painted by both of his artist parents on his walls, helped with the project. The rest of Arthur's nursery wasn't put together until several weeks after he came home from the hospital. Since he was sleeping in our room, we still had some time to work on it.

If you couldn't tell, I am a huge fan of things that refract light from the windows.

Thrifted porthole mirror and Beatles plate.

Album Cover.

Yellow submarine painting done by a relative.

Quilt made by Justin's mom on the rocker I picked up at a garage sale.

That's baby me and a Christmas ornament I picked up at the Tulsa State Fair.

A gift from our doula, Joey Mechelle Stenner.

Those are real drums next to the air organ. They have been really abused.

Homies collection, chalkboard, papel picado I created for our ofrenda in honor of our preterm daughter and other women who experience preterm loss.

I hope you like it. It's nowhere nearly as cool as this Yellow Submarine nursery or this bedroom, but we love it. It makes a fun spot to play.

8.8.10

Table Collage Revamp for Roo

We love our neighborhood. Our neighbors are amazing, lovely people and constantly doing nice things for each other and looking out for one another.

Case in point, during the terrible ice storm of 2008, I was pregnant and giant and slipped on the ice. Although our street was an ice-carved ghost town, three women rushed from various homes to my aid within seconds. It was astonishing.

One of those women was our next-door neighbor Mary, whose son is former city councilor Eric Gomez, and they are both all around great people. Recently, Mary loaned us a little kid table her grandchildren had outgrown, an indefinite loan as she might want it back if she has any munchkin additions to the family. Arthur loves it: it's just his size and he loves eating meals there, drawing, even reading the newspaper (we're not sure why or how that works either but he enjoys it nonetheless).

The table is great, but the kindergarten classroom primary colors, its taped and battered reminders that it's been well-loved, and Arthur's own artistic additions to it were starting to grate on me, as the toddler hub has become a staple in the great room. If the table was to stay, something must change.

And then, as I was trying desperately to arrange the back room of the house, which has since Arthur's birth become our communal craft/sewing/music room (literally my violin hangs on the wall above my Singer and next to a giant Kustom amp), the Mod Podge spoke to me.

I popped over to Mod Podge Rocks to see if I could find something similar to what I was envisioning, where I found terrific inspiration from cuteness diva Kristi. A short phone call to my girlfriend Eva, a couple of Cuba libres and a dozen and a half stories about our adventures in the crazy Jamestown house in the 90s later, we had this in the works:

We pillaged my wrapping paper, scrapbook paper, paint samples (Arthur picks them out and "buys" them when we go shopping at the home store...he loves it and the checkout clerks are happy to "scan" them...I've been hanging onto them like any good Level I hoarder waiting for the right change to use them) and vintage greeting card collection for colors and patterns and even characters we loved and then mod podged them to the table. Because the surface of the table is a bit puffy, they kept wanting to peel up, wrinkle, and bubble, so it was something of a challenge, but we were hardcore.

When we finished the job, we attacked our table with stickers and other clip art. We even hit it with a few inked-up stamps. After Eva left, I coated the whole thing with glitter podge.

Although we plan to coat it with the world's thickest layer of polyurethane, the final project looks like this up close:

I will probably finish the chairs later this week when I can recruit more Eva. The best part is that it took about an evening and was super extra fun to have the kids help while we sat around chatting it up.

If you try this project, be sure to poly coat it, and post a link to pics for me!!!

Find lots of cool mod podge projects on Mod Podge Rocks.

10.7.10

Ekphrasis

Today's word is ekphrasis.

Or shall I begin by saying:
Speaking of William Carlos Williams...

An ekphrasis is when a writer interprets visual art as a literary work.

This post is a lesson in Analysis 101. My three favorite toga boys were into ekphrasis. Here's a little William Carlos Williams for you; it's one of my favorite poems of all time, and one of my favorite works of art, and one of my favorite myths.

The story of old Icarus and Daedalus goes like this:

Daedalus was Icarus's daddo. We'll call him Papa D. Papa D was one of these super smart extra talented types you call when you need anything done crafty. He built a big old disco for the god of wine's wifey, for example...it would have taken some serious skills to please the queen of the original club kids (by the way, I came of age in the mid-90s and I thought club kids were amazing...my interest in them was piqued when I was with my folks at Wal-Mart late one night and there were maybe three young people in costume [I believe one was a skeleton but we are talking twenty years ago here] and one of my parents commented something about "It's the Club Kids." My dad was working for Barraza a lot those days, one of the formative Tulsa scene guys, and these were his younger days...I can bet he would have come into contact with them at SRO or perhaps IKON, both places I was too young to reasonably hope to get into and certainly not with my dad running security there...but I digress...).

So Papa D was such a rock star at building and making things that he was a popular guy. Meanwhile, the King of Minos married a lady with a penchant for bestiality (don't be so shocked...the ancient Greeks were freaky like James Brown), and as a result of her animal love she'd borne a son only a mother could love, the Minotaur. In fact, crafty Papa D had even created for her a special wooden cow contraption to climb into so the bull would want to get with her, but that's another story. But what do you do with your wife's bastard man-bull-beast child? Build a labyrinth. And who you gonna call to build it? The Bob Vila of Athens (or Crete, depending on whose version you hear), Papa D.

So Daedo created this rocking labyrinth to keep the ugly stepchild in and all these other cool gadgets and whatsits and naturally started to get a little self-absorbed. Everything was going great until his nephew came along and one-upped him a few too many times, inventing both the saw and the compass. Suddenly, everyone was hot for the new kid in town, and this Papa D could not abide, so he did what any nurturing uncle would do to resolve their differences...he shoved him from the heights of the Acropolis. Fortunately, they were on Athena's turf (Athens), and she, a woman who was super into gadgetry and gizmo-ery, turned the nephew into what we now know as the partridge. Needless to say, she was super pissed at Papa D. She banished him, and to make matters worse, the labyrinth came back to bite him in the arse. The king of Minos imprisoned him and his son on Crete so he couldn't tell anyone about the king's Dirty Little Secret.

Papa D, being a smart man, made some wax wings for him and for his son, Icarus. He warned Icarus that if he flew high, the sun would melt his wings, but for poor Icarus, this was just entirely too tempting. Like his daddy, he got bit by the narcissism bug, and high on himself, flew so close to the sun that his wax wings melted and soon he was just flapping his little arms, until at last he fell down and became shark bait or fish food or whatever.

The lesson of the myth is, "Don't get too big for your breeches," as my mom would say, and if you look at Williams' interpretation of Bruegel, their common footnote seems to be, "When you do and those little old wings melt, people got other stuff to do than worry about your little legs kicking around in the sea." So remember, people, only fly your wax wings on overcast days. And wear a life preserver. Without further ado:

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning