working portrait

My children and I sifted through just a few layers of The Finished Art Box-- the magical box where art "ages," and after a series of months it no longer holds the same emotional impact on the artist. The art-makers needed to find me a grocery bag full of shredded paper for Paper-Making in my fiber arts workshop at Art Camp. (Art Camp is very small, very zany, and my children are madly in love with all things Camp just now.)

A few inches into the crammed box, the grocery bag was quite full of shredded artworks and lovely scraps of origami paper, when we discovered this "journal entry"-- it's written from Brendan's perspective, but Madeleine obviously wrote it for him in the format her school uses for The Sentence of The Day.

That's me-- I'm the one connoted by dark curly hair. I'm working on a table covered by a white tray that collects water in a trough that drops below the edge of the table: see?

On the date noted here, Brendan and I crafted a reversible bowler hat by layering a small basketball with carded wool. The inside design is an orange sky with a bright bluebird singing over pink flowers, and the exterior design is an ocean of goldfish and purple fish, with bubbles and some seaweed. He wore the hat for a week, to church, to bed, everywhere, before he became so protective of it that it's no longer allowed to leave the house!

To craft the hat, the wool designs are topped with a stretched stocking, then the ball is rolled for a very long time in the tub, atop a layer of soapy water. Later when the ball is removed, there's still a lot of scrubbing to shrink the hat to a very hard felt. Brendan worked about an hour and a half on it, and I scrubbed after that.

The hat project is from Harrisville Designs-- the kit makes two hats if the wool is divided carefully. Harrisville writes terrific directions and I can't commend them enough.

Great project for a rainy day!

I'll try to find a photo of the blue bowler to add here...