7 AM

I'm taking our dog for her morning walk at about 7 AM. last night we changed our time to summer clock, and so in fact today it was at 6 AM. 6 AM!! outside! no coffee!!! At least I managed to not forget my camera.

that's our yard. We have to move away soon, I'll be missing it. Even though we haven't managed to take good care of it.

At the end of our street there are fields and a quarry.

So much of what grows wild at the edges of the fields is edible. wild fennel, oats, mustard and some who's names I don't know in English and probably more that I don't even know about. Here's some yummy, sweet smelling fennel and some oats:

The wheat is still green, it's just the sun and dew drops that make it look ripe.

I hope these images will keep my mood up for the coming week. My partner is going to China for the whole week, I'm having a cold and generally I'm on low energy. I wish I could snap my fingers just like Mary Poppins and have this week over with.

Wallace & Gromit on the moon

by Hilel. I think he really got the shape of their spaceship right, and I love how he added Earth and the sun behind, along with some more distant stars.

And this:

One of my favorite musicians/artists, Juana Molina.

I love how she samples and loops herself and creates layers of beautiful music, a one woman orchestra.

I was looking through her different clips, trying to choose one, and it was amazing to hear how different every performance is from how it sounds on the albums. while performing she creates whole new songs out of the familiar basic elements. (it was hard to choose one, take a look at this other candidate for embedding)

(winter) desert vacation

My friend Y. came from Paris to start making her film about a place called Neot Hakikar, at the very southern end of the dead sea, where the biblical Sodom used to be. She and her partner and her cameraman spent 4 days there, and we joined them as babysitters for their 2 year old daughter. The weather was disastrous, we managed to arrive at the 5 yearly or so rain and storm weekend. In the desert rain might mean inundation - which nobody knows if or where might occur, so all the touristic spots were shut, just in case. so the first day and most of the second were spent indoors. Towards the second afternoon the kids were getting irritable and bored and so were we. We got in the car and drove to see the dead sea, worrying about floods and will we be able to get back. but everything was alright.

The dead sea is so beautiful and unworldly. But around it it's dirty and ugly. It seams there's nothing left untouched: electricity lines, building leftovers, pipes sticking out of the ground, and just standard human garbage such as nylon bags and plastic bottles.

The kids however didn't mind any of this and quickly got into stone-searching and mud-sinking mode.

Little E was sleeping in the car, and they could be just brother and sister again, that probably also served to calm them down a bit. 

Here they are checking out the salt:

and a second after this shot was taken they both jumped into mud, a lot of mud, with their fairly new shoes.

The next day we decided not to let the weather and outside circumstances ruin that last chance at a desert experience for us (well, for this visit at least), and went out, simply out near where we were staying, no big endeavor, no far reaching plans.

Hilel was really into climbing those soft rock mountains, the ground was much fun to walk on after the rain, it was soft like a mattress. 

 

The girls and I made a circle of stones together, in which many stories (by Amalia) came to life.

Later, at another spot, Hilel was very busy breaking off pieces of dried cracked mud and throwing them to see them shutter to dust.

Playing hide and seek, we found two circles of stones with some dry branches in them, someone made this in the middle of this nowhere. isn't it wonderful to find such things?

The highlight of the day for Hilel was climbing the mountain side and sliding down.

By the end of this day the girls became best mates at last, after 2 days of E. doing as she pleases and generally being two years old, and Amalia going nuts over it and not allowing her any of her stuff and saying over and over that she's "little". (Amalia will be three in April.. I guess for her scale E. is indeed so much younger, a year is a third of her life)

 

And here's Hilel discovering the Boom, on the way back to our normal, greener civilization.

weekend

I made a rabbit Friday, out of a man's shirt and some fabric leftovers. it helped overcome a deep weekend blues that jumped at me earlier that day and forced me into a strange driving away mood. coming back from my little private trip I stopped at the vegetable shop in Fureidis for some hot peppers, and they were selling freshly cooked, still warm vine leaves stuffed with rice. I bought a box of those as well, and felt so much better. an example of the vain, empty consumption culture that I'm part of :-)

Then I went home and made this fellow. I think I'll make a dress for him, but I can't stop thinking that he's a He.

Saturday we went to the children's Museum in Holon near Tel Aviv, but couldn't go in since we didn't call in advance. Isn't that weird? Anyway we spent the morning in a playground, then went for lunch at a Georgian food restaurant, Nanuchka. They have these pretty amazing lampshades:

And just a nice shot of O and A and some Staropramen.

spring time

It's only february but it feels like spring already... There aren't many reasons to be happy living in Israel these days. Politically we're going for a disaster, there's no water and there were almost no rains this winter, rent prices aren't dropping enough and the school system is terrifying for parents of a 5 year old. But at least we can enjoy sunny days like today, when every bug is crawling out and every bird is out singing and the air is full of humming and buzzing and the flowers are all blooming in pink and yellow and red and purple...

I made some corn and banana muffins with the kids (so helpful; near nervous breakdown) and we took them for a picnic in the nearby Ramat Hanadiv park.

Hilel was wearing a pair of very warm flannel pants that I finished last night - still there are some adjustments to be made to the pattern - the crotch is too low and there's something wrong with the pockets.

I'm tired... another episode of "the century of self" and off to bed.

peter and the wolf - a beautiful animated version, a bit grim and spooky. the ending is different from the original story, a more humane solution.

landscape to play with

I started making this landscape play-mat over a year ago, it was supposed to be a birthday present for my son who was about to be 4 (he's now 5 years and 2 months old and I finally almost finished...). I got the idea as I watched him play with an ugly road carpet over at a friend's house. This sort of play mats or carpets can be a great platform for inventions for children, but the way they are often done is somehow closed, there are too many details that have to do with a lifestyle that is not ours (ice cream and pizza parlors around every corner, not that we avoid pizzas and ice creams but I don't think they should make up the only cultural reference for kids). So I thought of making an open landscape with roads, and when playing the children can place different objects or dolls or whatever they feel like to make a story up. There's a mountain and a sea-shore, a lake, fields and meadows. in my kids' room there are baskets with stones they collected, shells, little animals and trees that I made or that somehow made their way over to us. it's fun to see how different bits and pieces finally find a place together in a game. It's still not finished, I'm planning to frame it with some other fabric. but I'm not sure if it would make it all too bound or limited. maybe when he's 6 I'll have the answer..

*the mess at the background of that top picture is an example of the embarrassing truth of our house.

top view with a zip line who's purpose remained a mystery. the red car did some dangerous driving on it:

waves and sea foam:

I used paper clips to help the trees stand upright:

To characterize a field, I created little pockets to place the vegetables in them:

Joanna Newsom

I think she looks in this video like a character from a mute film.

so magical.

I find her Ys album to be unbelievably wonderful.

(but it did take a while to get used to her voice.)

in fact I feel like putting this other video of hers here too. I want to create a little collection of videos that I think children can enjoy without having all those youtube temptations on the side bar that are often not at all suitable for them. so this one I showed my children and my daughter loved it. of course she doesn't speak any English, so I could forget about one type of content related worry..

super!

look what I found.

check out her flickr for more.

Felting workshop: day 4

On the final day we made hats. Again I left my camera at home and arrived 2 and a half hours too late... (morning traffic + frantic children). So again I only have pictures of the final product at home.

I had 2 grand ideas, one that Karmit dismissed immediately with a big lough (a 3D cloud hat with a rainbow and a big sun at the back) and one that I actually tried but abandoned: it was a rectangular hat with on the top a sun on one side and a moon on the other. the moon was going to be half black and half white, as if it's being lit by the sun, and I was going to draw trees and houses on the hat itself with pre-felted pieces. but making a half black-half white ball for a moon wasn't working at all, and after 2 different tries I turned to the final, simpler idea of a rabbit's ears hat.

I made a plastic template in the shape of the hats profile (only larger), and another template for the ears. first I laid the wool for the ears and sort of half felted them, except at their base, where they were to connect to the hat. I laid some white wool along the inside of the ears that remained unfelted, to imitate the furry bits of the ears. 

 

then I took the template out of them and placed them on the hat's template, opening and flattening the wool of the ear's bases. and then I covered the ear's bases and the rest of the template with wool and felted the whole thing. I used a plastic sheet to separate the ears from the rest of the hat, so they don't accidentally get felted together.

Finally I cut open the part of the hat's opening, took the template out and worked the middle line, where the template's edge used to be, until it looked seamless. then the fulling stage, to give it a good shape and shrink it to the right size. I stopped fulling when I could wear it and I kept it on my head all the way home, but couldn't resist shrinking it further to fit my children.

felting workshop: day 3

Unfortunately I couldn't be there at the second day, the day that was dedicated to stuffed felt animals. there's a Flickr group for this workshop and I hope soon there will be more photos available from the other participants. I forgot to bring my camera to the third and fourth day :-(, so I can only post photos that I took at home later. If there will be more process images later on on the group I'll link them here.

On the third day we were focusing on surfaces. It was hard to decide what to make, I saw the amazing animals that they had made the previous day and got all confused. finally I decided to make a felt drawing for my children's room. usually I don't like the aesthetics of the anthroposophic felt drawings, so it was a strange decision to take, and it was a hard project to dive into - because it is the material that dictates much of the look.

I was planning on a circular surface with a general whitish wash over a gradient from grey in the sky to brown on the ground, and 3 dimensional bubbles for clouds, and a tree. I soon discovered that a smooth gradient is almost impossible with wool. when laying thin pieces of wool and then felting, it just gets the shape of the wet wool, bunches of hair. finally it became mostly white.

I felted the clouds on half balls in various sizes and later took them out.

Halfway I was not very pleased with the the way the colors didn't work how I wanted, and I felt like I'm getting a regular felt drawing. but then I added the tree. I used pre-felted pieces of brown (for the trunk), greens and light brown (for the leaves) and orange (fruits), which I cut into rounds that communicated with the bally clouds. finally I was more at home in this more graphic precise world. but when I felted the rounds lost their shape and the little orange ones nearly disappeared. It seems that the orange I was using for them was not very cooperative in getting felted. I was using a thin net when felting, to keep the wool in place as much as possible. still, it moved around a bit.

At the end I cut the whole thing to a circle. I quiet like the tension between the organic forms of the felting and the hard scissor cut.

cheap organic