you should see the flow-chart slash mind-map slash to-do list I have created for myself. It is pure insanity! But now that all the bullet points are down on paper (and in the phone to beep reminders at me) I’m feeling much more peaceful.

I spent the better part of today applying to a handful of holiday shows…all very last minute mind you, so of course there will be a mega crunch of making things. It’s okay though. I tend to be more creative and prolific in my making when there is a deadline looming and a mile-high stack of things that needs doing at the same time.

This week will be spent making all the goodies I volunteered to make for my brother’s wedding: drawing/inking a robot wedding coloring sheet, cutting out a few wooden robot action figures, making a dozen or so little resistor butterflies, sewing a couple little robot softies and making a foamy flower arrangement. Mixed in with all the robot business I’ve got piles of half finished sheet metal magnets (Halloween themed!), enameled components waiting to be assembled into awesome jewelry (it’s awesome in my head anyway…) and some fiber/fabric projects to work on too.

Of all the work I need to do/make/finish, I am most excited about the doll make-over I dreamed up a couple days ago. Six or seven years ago I made a giant doll, she’s probably three feet tall, maybe four? Currently she has a simple face made up of button eyes and a skeleton key for a nose and mouth. I made her a dress that Laura Ingalls Wilder would’ve killed for. She is clutching a stuffed heart made from antique quilt bits. When I made her a million years ago, I loved her. And now I don’t. She’s been sitting on a chair above my credenza in the ‘puter loft for a couple years now collecting dust and the time has come for her to have a facelift and a makeover. I am going to turn her into a Catrina calavera complete with a painted and embroidered mask, silk flowers in her hair (when I decide how I’m going to do her hair) and a fancy new dress. I haven’t been this pumped about a project in a long time! Pictures to come in the next couple of days!

If you and I have had a conversation recently there is a very good chance I’ve made mention of Cardo’s Farm Project and farmers Dan and Amanda. Long story short? The Lyons’ Den thinks Cardo’s Farm Project and farmers Dan and Amanda are pretty awesome.

We were first introduced to Cardo’s and Dan and Amanda in May of this year via the Denton Community Market (another project near and dear to our hearts). Their tent display was eye catching: wooden crates, weathered boxes and baskets, mason jars full of wild flowers. Sort of country store homepun. And cute. I dug it. As we all know, I am a SUCKER for a good display and/or clever packaging. I wanted to buy my veggies from these people. Then Molly wandered over to Amanda asking her a barrage of questions (as busy-body four year olds are wont to do) and Amanda engaged her in conversation and offered her a piece of watermelon(?) radish instead of shooing her away. Then I really wanted to buy my veggies from these people.

Dan and Amanda invited us to come out the farm over the summer to see the farm. We went out a couple times to help with chores. We did some weeding; painted signs for their farm festival; picked vegetables from the field. Logan helped shovel manure and compost.

Farmer Dan even taught Logan and Caleb how to drive the tractor and then LET THEM DRIVE IT AROUND THE FARM. The boys still talk about it months later.

Dan and Amanda are young and smart and passionate about what they’re doing. Dan and Amanda have offered up samples of their fantastic veggies to our kids and as it turns out when someone other than your parents is handing you vegetables, vegetables are DELICIOUS. Even radishes and okra and rainbow swiss chard. Our kids have never turned their noses up to the usual suspects: broccoli, carrots, tomatoes (well, Caleb doesn’t do tomatoes), cucumbers, onions; but not in a million years would they have ever agreed to try a bit of raw okra if I offered it to them. Now everybody we know is eating raw okra like it’s going out of style.

Our kids are paying attention to the food they’re eating. This is a completely organic occurrence and a direct result of Dan and Amanda’s enthusiasm and patience. While Lynn and I pay attention to the food we are feeding our family, we have never really discussed it with the kids before…what kid wants to talk about how veggies are grown or where their chicken nuggets come from? Evidently, my kids do! Go figure. Another reminder to all of us as parents: just because our kids are young, doesn’t mean they don’t care, aren’t interested, don’t want to know. We have to feed their brains just like we feed their bellies! When there are fresh vegetables on the table, the first question they ask is, “are these from Cardo’s?” And since they’re asking about the vegetables, then they wonder about the steaks or the chicken we’re eating. It is amazing, really, and it makes me want to hand out high fives and hugs every time I see Dan and Amanda.

Farmers Dan and Amanda and Cardo’s Farm Project have Kickstarter campaign wrapping up this week and they need our support:

Every penny counts! If you decide to support their campaign in any denomination over $10 let me know and I will send you a set of note cards from my stationery line.

Send me an email at amy {at} aplcreations {dot} com with your name as it appears on the Kickstarter backers list, a mailing address and your card choice. I will trust you when you say you donated more than $10 . Thanks, friends! Go Team!

So the boys start back to school on Monday and Molly heads back the Tuesday after next. I’m sitting here wondering how it is even possible and what took so long at the same time. We had a great summer full of trips to visit family, market days and TONS of swimming. It has also been a summer of brutally dry and hot days which means we all get a little stir crazy being trapped indoors. Most nights it’s still 90+ degrees out at 9pm. We had days so hot things spontaneously combusted in the backyard:

Our poor yard is a wreck right now…here’s hoping for better luck in our fall gardening!

Lately I’ve been working on new stationery and jewelry designs as well as a handful of random projects that may or may not turn out the way I intended! I’ve been exceptionally terrible at taking and uploading pictures lately. My camera is FULL of pictures from all things summer and making, while at the same time my computer is practically FULL too. It is mind boggling how many bits and bytes one can accumulate over the years. There’s no place to store anymore pictures! Lynn has been offering to get a new desktop for me forever and I have been hesitant because I’m afraid some of my stuff won’t work on a new computer or I’ll have to shell out a ton of money to upgrade everything…technology makes me grumble sometimes. Sniff. Pout. I suppose it’s time to bite the bullet.

In other news, I finally got around to making a Facebook page for aplcreations.com so if you’re on FB head on over and click “like” for me! With the kids heading back to school I’m looking forward to getting closets and toy boxes purged and then finishing the rest of my website facelift and possibly loading some new work to Etsy. Though with all the bullsh reselling and mass produced garbage I’ve seen on Etsy over the last several months (okay, years) and the less than stellar press they’ve been receiving, I am debating on whether or not I should bother. Time will tell I suppose!

Here’s what’s cooking in the studio:
- more stationery
- I’m designing the poster for the Salsa Cook-Off being sponsored by the Denton Community Market at the first annual Denton’s Day of the Dead Festival.
- new enamel work
- new lampwork
- new metal work
- new leather stuffs (hair things and bracelets)
- new fiber stuffs (art quilts, felting, embroidery, etc.)

Hopefully next week will be full of photos of all this business going on! It’s always more fun with photos, right? I know .

July, yeah? We here at the Lyons’ Den have been busy with all manner of nonsense and some normal stuff too. So pictures of day camp swaps? Yes:

We swung by Legoland Discovery Center (panoramic photos courtesy of DerManDar iphone app…totally fun AND free! Thanks for the heads up, Mom.):

We visited my grandparents on the way down to Port Aransas. They have a new litter of kitties:

And lots of fruit trees fruiting:

While we were in Port Aransas Logan turned TEN. I have a kid with a double digit age. Time is flying. And I am getting old.

Among other things, we also made a surprise, last-minute trip to San Angelo (Happy Birthday, Poppa Lee!), took the kids to see Cars 2, plus the kids and I visited Cardo’s Farm Project to help with things like weeding and shoveling manure for the new fall field. If you’re local (or somewhat local) you can buy fresh veggies from Cardo’s at the Denton Community Market on Saturdays. Do it!

I’ve been making things like mad again so be on the look out for a couple posts about something other than mine and my little family’s running around of late!

that is my brain is addled…June has been crazy bananas with our market days:

I finished a bracelet project that will be featured in an upcoming book and it is super fun and super easy too (if I do say so myself). No pics of that one as it is top secret at this point .

We made a trip to Port Aransas last week for some beach time with Poppa Lee and Grandma Mardee, Misty and Ethan and his sister, Sarah. We missed Louis, Rose and Lillie!

Now we’re gearing up for a week of space themed cub scout camp. Our swaps this year are completely awesome. Lynn and the boys made bags of space junk/satellite debris (bits and bobs and chunks of recycled electronic stuff – super cool). I made some polymer clay planet mobiles (that GLOW in the dark!) and some wooden clothespin aliens. I’ll snap pics tomorrow in the day light. I might get them posted in the next week…maybe even tomorrow. Don’t hold your breath though…

You don’t know where to start? Well you are in luck! This Satuday, June 4th, the Lyons’ Den and aplcreations.com are sponsoring the Kids Tent at the Denton Community Market. We plan on introducing families to the wonders (heh) of letterboxing.

The kids and I carved stamps to plant on site at the market. I carved an event-type stamp that will be hidden in plain sight, tucked in my display somewhere. I printed up covers (cute vintage wagon image courtesy of justsomethingimade.com) with info about letterboxing and made pamphlet bound letterbox logbooks to hand out to kids who want to start hunting letterboxes. I cut up plastic erasers so kids can make a trail stamp if they want. We’ll have a box of stamps I’ve carved over the years for kids to stamp with. Fingers are crossed that all my stuff survives the day!!

For more information on letterboxing visit any of these sites:

atlasquest.com (this is my favorite site to use. No affiliation or consideration given, this is strictly my personal opinion).

letterboxing.info

letterboxing.org

Summer vacation has begun! Our June is jammed full of stuff leaving our July and August wide open (for now).

we swung by the giant Sam Houston statute on I-45
last weekend on our way home from Houston.

The 2010-2011 school year ended with Logan:

First graders do not get grades in the traditional sense which totally drives me nuts. I have a hard time looking at a report card that is roughly the equivalent of scoring an ice dancing routine. That is to say, subjective…before this somehow devolves into a rant about how much I hate the “teaching to the TEST” method that is going on in our schools now I’m going to stop.

Caleb didn’t have grades per se, but he did get all 3’s, which may as well be A’s for all intents and purposes. He also had all 3’s in his EXPO program (DISD’s gifted and talented which I could also spiral into a spitting rage about).

Now that our days are free to do what we want we’re getting ready to jump back into letterboxing again as well as swimming every day and riding our bicycles until dusk every night. We’ll be grilling food for dinner, making big salads with veggies from our garden and Cardo’s at the Denton Community Market and eating popsicles on the patio. It’s going to be fun!

Here’s the plan for the summer of 2011: kick the kids out of the house after breakfast, come back in for lunch and some reading time, head out for errands or a movie during the heat of the day (so somebody else can pay for the cold air), come home, go swimming, play with our neighbor friends, fix supper, veg out. Rinse and repeat. We’ll scatter some road trips in here and there and have company over too. I can’t wait!

Last Saturday was the season opener for the Denton Community Market. Aside from the high winds and my poor choice of attire for the unseasonably chilly temps I had a fantastic day. Several friends (and my mom too!) stopped by to say “hi” and to check out the market. Sales were brisk for my mini composition books, sun-catchers and stationery. Woot!

Enter the domino effect: I constantly have ideas brewing, but I rarely make time to do anything but jot down the idea (if that even). Well, this week I’ve been working like mad to get new inventory made and decided to execute some of my recent ideas. This, in turn, created additional ideas and before I knew it I was pulling out all the power tools I own making a huge mess and some pretty awesome stuff (if I do say so myself, heh). A crappy camera phone pic will have to suffice for now, but I’m getting ready to go down and take some “real” pictures shortly.

Sunday afternoon I decided to sit down and cut out eleventy smallish sheet metal shapes with the intention to make magnets now and ornaments later. After putting the cut outs through the paces to prep them, I painted them all and let them dry. As the magnets were drying I hunted through all the shelves and drawers of my studio to find paste wax for sealing the surface of the magnets. While on the hunt I thought through a pile of different ways to display the magnets. I found the paste wax, by the way, in the very first place I thought of, but the very last place I looked. I do not understand how my brain works sometimes.

More domino effect? Yes. Last week I decided I needed to make a big chalkboard sign to display in my booth for announcing future market dates, new arrivals and specials. Hello!? What is more awesome than a chalkboard? A magnetic chalkboard, that’s what.

Monday Molly and I set off to Home Depot to gather up flashing, mdf board and hardware. I used old fencing I’ve been saving for something since last summer for the frame. The fencing was hail damaged in the recent storms giving it a polka dotted look (my favorite!). I had the guys at Home Depot cut the mdf into three equal pieces. Once we were back at the house I scribbled down all my measurements and made my cuts. I only had to re-cut one piece and that was because the wood was too warped to line up properly with the other pieces of the frame. Hooray for measure twice, cut once!

I guess I need to get back to work. Fresh sun-catchers and new stationery are scattered all over every work surface in my studio at the moment! Come see me this weekend if you’re in the area!

I’ve been so excited about participating in this year’s Denton Community Market! May 7th was supposed to be the opening day. However, thanks to county bureaucracy it was postponed until May 14th. For whatever reason, I was not made aware of this change.

Imagine my surprise when I pulled into the parking lot Saturday morning expecting to see lots of other artists and farmers and gardeners setting up their tents for the day and I did not. Once the rage stopped melting my brain, I used my phone to pull up the website to see what was going on and discovered that opening day had been postponed and there would be a celebration day instead at a nearby location. I walked over to see what had happened to cause the postponement and was invited to set my booth up for the day if I wanted. Thank goodness!

I was glad to be able to set up, made a decent amount of sales and met some really lovely people too.

Since the list has carryovers from April, I feel like I should account for completion, partial or otherwise for all the bullet points.

1. I will use my good camera everyday. Well, it didn’t end up being used everyday, but I did pretty well at the beginning of the month . As the month got busier and messier, I was less inclined to tote the camera bag around with me. I do have a ton of photos to share…they’re just parked on the card until I can upload them.

2. I will get a banner made. I designed a banner, uploaded it and almost pulled the trigger. Then I felt pangs of guilt about hanging a digitally printed sign in my tent full of handmade art. So instead I went out and bought some canvas and a grommet kit. I have a stack of fabric scraps piled up waiting ever so patiently to be made into an awesome, handmade banner instead. That’s on the short list of things to do. THIS WEEK!

3. I will work on new designs daily during the week. Uhhhh, so it didn’t happen daily, but I did make a conscious effort to at least scribble ideas down in my notebook or type notes to myself in my phone if I couldn’t physically be in my studio to work.

4. I will get out for a walk every evening during the week. Crap weather and husband being out of town made this difficult to keep up with, but I did use the treadmill at least two or three times a week. Hooray for Netflix streaming on the iPad!

5. I will not overload my calendar with other people’s stuff this month. I NAILED this one. And I did not feel guilty about it either.

6. I will start on Teacher Appreciation gifts NOW. I did. However, we ended up scrambling on a couple things because our weekend plans changed up at the last minute and then I had a sort of last minute GENIUS idea. The PTA made it easy this year theme-wise. Monday: Desserts. Tuesday: Give a hug. Wednesday: Kid Art. Thursday: Write a thank you note. Friday: Bring a treat.

We made cookies and delivered them on Tuesday to their homeroom teachers, their special areas teachers, their librarians, Caleb’s speech teacher and EXPO teacher:

I really wanted the boys to make little monster/bug things and call them HUGS. But we had too much going on and they didn’t seem all that interested in thinking up ideas. Maybe next year.

The boys got to bust out the water colors to paint for their teachers. I failed to take any pictures…

Thursday the boys wrote their thank you notes. I wrote our thank you notes (from Lynn and me) on the first page of the recycled school flyer notepads we gave them this year. We gave the notebooks to the homeroom teachers, the school secretaries and the school nurse.

Last, but not least, my genius idea (if I do say so myself):

I made piñatas that we stuffed full of office supplies, candy, Crystal Light packets, and other things that might be handy to have at your desk! My original plan was to get the base piñatas made so that the boys could build on and turn them into whatever they wanted. However, the process ended up getting jammed up the first two times I tried it where I had to stop layering the paper to go pick up kids from school or take them to soccer and both times when I came back to finish up the balloons had slow leaks which made it impossible to continue on with the them. Pissed does not even begin to describe my feelings when we got home from soccer practice! By this time I was COMMITTED to executing this idea…I stayed up into the WEE hours of the morning Friday finally getting those things finished. I woke the boys up early so they could stuff and at least draw on the outsides before delivery. In the end, the boys were thrilled to deliver the finished piñatas and I know Logan’s teacher had a blast digging through all the goodies we packed in to the thing.

7. I will be more selective in my procrastination. I worked on this all month. It’s getting easier by the day. I am TRYING to get my kids on board with the “five minutes or less? JUST DO IT ALREADY” idea. It has been a struggle…

8. I will continue to cull my “collection” and make places for the stuff with which I cannot bear to part. It’s a work in progress…

9. I will remove the wallpaper from the powder room. Didn’t even think about this one. Not once, until today.

10. Clean the kids’ closets. Also a work in progress…

So. To recap my list for May:

1. I will get my banner made in time to hang at the May 14th Denton Community Market opening day.

2. I will work regularly and consistently on new ideas and designs.

3. I will exercise daily; whether it be a walk around the ‘hood, using the treadmill, working in the yard or the garden.

4. I will be more selective in my procrastination. Five minutes? JUST DOOOO EEEEET!

5. I will remove the wallpaper from the powder room.

6. Clean the kids’ closets.

And with all that wordiness, I’ll call it a night! Let’s reconvene tomorrow sometime for the not-quite-market day tale.