Garden 3: Family Portrait

Not about the garden, but it takes place there.

Lego homage to my son's favourite dubstep artist, Sonny John Moore, AKA Skrillex

The one thing I ever stole in my life (on purpose) was a 2X4 piece of yellow Lego. I took it from the house of a friend, hidden in my sock. It hurt my ankle a little, and rubbed my conscience a little more, but replacing it seemed impossibly risky. And then we moved.

It's love

There's not much you can do with one piece of Lego, regardless of the size or colour. My parents would surely have been more than happy to provide me with some, had they known, but I didn't ask, and they didn't guess. That lone block travelled with us from house to house and town to town to town to city, useless as only one piece of Lego can be. It ended up in a box of donations. I wish I had kept it just a few years longer; I would have given it to my son. Many of his sweetest gifts to me have been made of Lego.

Which brings me to vacuum cleaner bags. I admit it: I sift them when they're full. It's the Lego! I know it's in there, and I can't bear to throw it out! Classic Lego, or Lego Friends - all over the world, where there's a vacuum cleaner and imagination, there's Lego.

Can my house be that filthy?

It's not a job I look forward to - the puffed up, surprisingly weighty bag might sit on the back porch for months before I get to it - but nary a sift occurs that I'm not glad I did it. 

Three days ago, during a session of "To the End of the Yard and Back" (an after-dinner exercise in which my family and I attempt to get from the kitchen, to the alley and back to the house, while engaging in appropriate social interaction), I deftly orchestrated the first family sift. I have been steadily working to hand over to them the jobs my family is capable of doing for themselves. Rescuing aspirated Lego was next on the list. 

I expected mass disgust and outright refusal, but it went surprisingly well. Sitting in the grass, I showed them how to slash a big X in the bag with the kitchen scissors (NOT! my sewing shears!), revealing the contents: a detailed, if dirty, portrait of our family. 

Life is a vacuum bag of debris; you never know what you're gonna find

Aside from 7 pieces of assorted Lego (both kinds), we found: a Polly Pocket purse; a purple hair elastic - the good kind; a dime; three types of pins; a tiny screw lost while modifying a Nerf gun; a tube of whipped eggnog Lipsmacker (No! Wash it first!); broken glass; popcorn kernels; bread clips; unidentified, random plastic toy parts; several lavender syringe needle caps, alcohol swabs, and needle safety tabs; thread. Whoo! Bits of paper from my daughter practising how to hold a pair of scissors. Lots and lots of hair. (Trying not to breathe.) What is that...? The peeled-off backing from numerous stickers, a plastic sock staple, some tape, some Solvy scraps, cardboard bits, two Kleenexes, ew. Uh... more thread, more Solvy, more popcorn. And we've got pencil sharpenings, feathers from the duvet up in our bedroom (need to mend that)... There's a sequin, more Solvy, more feathers, another needle security tab. A Dubble Bubble wrapper - one of dozens brought home by my son from Cogmed. A pill bug carcass - my daughter likes bugs. Vector - we all like Vector. More needle tabby thingies, more bread clips. Oh: another nice hair elastic! A Q-Tip - gross. OK! Enough! Gross...

When it was finished, my son thanked me for the tutorial.

Garden 14:  Harvest
Garden 13: Abandoned Stuff, Things of Beauty
Garden 12: Death and Potential
Garden 11: Japanese Maple Tree and Sedum (?)
Garden 10: Foxglove and Weed Digger
Garden 9: Veggies and Sweet Pea 
Garden 8: Gnomes and Slugs
Garden 7: The Lady Next Door
Garden 6: Euphorbia and Rusted, Metal Things
Garden 5: Cement Bench and Wallflower
Garden 4: Maryjane
Garden 2: The Neighbours'
Garden 1: Lilac Bush and Abandoned Cans

Humatrope 1: Ingredients

Wasteful packaging - each needle has two caps!

Tonight is the night I've been waiting for: after four months spent gathering materials, I will finally begin the fun part of my Prader-Willi Syndrome sewing project.* Tonight I begin to play. This is going to be so much fun!
*Never heard of Prader-Willi Syndrome? Neither had I

The materials are the waste from my daughter's nightly Humatrope* injections - white, felt-like alcohol swabs and lovely lavender or aqua syringe caps, one per day. I did my usual thing for those four months: I sewed, and volunteered for Our Social Fabric. Some of the debris from these activities was saved, too: all the snipped-off thread tails from the sewing room garbage can and all the plastic pearls found in the dust pan at OSF. I'm curious to see what all this garbage turns out to be.
*There are no medications that work to curb the never-ending feeling of hunger that is the hallmark of PWS, however Human Growth Hormone can greatly improve the quality of life. Born with naturally flabby, flaccid bodies, HGH turns fat cells into muscle, lethargic kids into healthier, stronger, more active ones. As a byproduct, more calories are burned, and the child - whose calorie intake is severely restricted by a bizarrely slow metabolism - can eat more food. Almost like a typical kid

For a rough idea of how many would be needed, the swabs were pinned to the mannequin as they became available.
The diamond pattern is not quite doing it for me...

The plan is vague: some kind of quilted, layered collar, possibly beaded. A temporary foundation of plastic-like Heat-Away Solvy will provide structure until the thing can stand on its own. The Solvy will eventually be removed by heating. Though it is easier to manage the sturdier sort of stabilizer that rinses out when wet, I don't want to out, out any damn'd spots by accident.

I've been so eager to get to the construction, the accompanying article is already finished. I hope to post updates as the project goes along - which I hope is steadily - though that's doubtful, free time being at a minimum.

The next step: deciding the best way to assemble it, which will, in turn, affect the design. I'll need to make a swatch, to test if what I'm hoping to do will work. The plan is to use a darning foot to machine-embroider the swabs and threads with Words of Love and Admiration that will hold them all together. One anticipated challenge: the Solvy is delicate and crumbly and will probably tear under the herky-jerky motions of the darning foot. In that case, freehand embroidery won't work and I'll have to go with classic diamond quilting. Straight lines shouldn't be too tricky.

The "ink" for writing the words of love

Thread colour? Don't know. Understated white? Classy, but not really me. More likely, whatever colour there happens to be in any bobbin that no longer has its matching spool of thread. I'm constantly looking for excuses to empty bobbins...

How it will fasten is unknown. I had planned to use a real Chanel button found by my son on the floor of the electronics section at a Costco, but he told me recently it's disgusting to put that beautiful button on something made out of bloody alcohol pads. He wants me to save it, instead, for a companion piece inspired by 25 Cogmed sessions and the Dubble Bubble* that got him through it. He's right, of course... Never mind; plenty of time to give thought to the closure while I'm testing the sewing technique.
*Did you know there are 20 calories in one piece of Dubble Bubble?

If I had a tail, I'd be wagging it. Tomorrow I sew!

Humatrope 2: Test Swatch and Scoliosis Brace

Humatrope 3: Foundation, More Brace

Humatrope 4: Lost for Words
Humatrope 5: Hello Little Girl in the Bullet-Proof Vest

Humatrope 6: Three Distractions
Humatrope 7: From the 13th Floor
Humatrope 8/Sewing Tip 8: Tassel Tutorial