white picket fence

nighttime drawing

Right now I have a few paper projects in the works, but I can't settle into any of them. A little mini book, a new art journal. I want to work on them but it never feels right. Fits and starts. I'm so itchy though. You know that feeling? All day long I think about drawing or painting or just MAKING SOMETHING. There are so many projects in my head that it hurts. I literally get a pang in my chest when I think about all the things I'm not doing.

Of course, I AM doing things. They're just things like making toast. Disclipining. Sweeping all day long so the dang ants don't overtake our house. (Side note: if there is a single tiny morsel of food on the floor a little ant parade comes marching in to take it away. There are 2 small children and a dog in the house. There is never NOT a morsel of food on the ground. So that's the story of my ant battle of late.)

But the time I do have is the night time. That precious sliver between the children's bedtimes and mine. And it's just a little sliver, since I'm not one of those sleepless warrior moms that can get by on less than 7 hours a night. 

So in the evenings I get into bed and basically lurch at my drawing book. I can't get the pen to the page quick enough. Doodles. Lettering experiments. Rough attempts to actually draw things that look real and not like weird cartoons (this mostly means portraits of Stephen Colbert or random stuff from commercials)

I have to remember not to leave my books out during the day or they get scribbled on. 

And drawings of my new favorite animal: the Musk Ox. Do you know about these things? They're badass. I discovered them while watching Frozen Planet, which I cannot recommend highly enough. Fascinating and beautiful, plus it's given me so many new animals to learn about. And draw!

they make the house smell nice too.

We've had a steady stream of bouquets in the house lately, mostly harvested from this spring's early flowering bulbs and bushes in the backyard. Or Trader Joe's $3.99 specials. When it comes to flowers, I'm a simple girl. Give me a few wildflowers in a mason jar over $70 worth of red roses anyday. 

ragamuffins.

Before I had children of my own, I never spent a lot of time with really little kids. I saw my nieces sometimes, and I babysat a little when I was in high school, but basically, I only saw kids in passing. And I hate to say it, but I honestly thought the cute and tidy kids I saw on TV or in magazines were pretty true to life. Yeah. Dumb. 

Kids are DIRTY. We just get SO DIRTY all the time. And I know I wrote about this before, but I just can't get over it. The three of us are like Pig-Pen, the character from the Peanuts cartoons who's always enveloped in a cloud of dust. But guess what? I really, truly, do not mind. I want my kids to have fun and I'm pretty sure kids think dirt=fun. 

So this is us. Dirty, snotty, messy haired. . . but still cute! 

Real life. 

I love the kids faces in this and I even kind of love that I didn't quite make it into the photo. 

And poor Norah. Who can blame her for being gross all the time? She's in that exploratory 1 year old stage; she wants to go everywhere, touch everything. The blooming tulips and new hostas are too tempting for her NOT to crawl through a bed of mud and leaves. 

Though I am happy to say that pretty soon after these photos were taken, I decided giving everyone a long bath would be the best use of our time, so the kids went to bed all clean and shiny and happy. Post-bath squeaky clean kids are pretty cute too. 

time capsule: ages 21, 22, 23

I don't consider myself a hoarder. Clothes, household items, magazines, clutter-y stuff. . . all those I can get rid of easily. Off to Goodwill you go! 

But. I'm kind of a memory hoarder. I found a box in our attic while looking for my passport the other day. Inside I found a treasure trove of STUFF from my early 20s: from my senior year of college to my first years in Chicago. I don't think I'd opened it since we moved to this house 7 year ago, so it felt like a time capsule. 

Full of notebooks, old photos and postcards (I was already a collector of weird old stuff, even 10 years ago), letters, pictures, art projects, meeting notes, phone numbers, post-its. . . you name it, I kept it. 

This little metal case originally held chocolates. When I opened it, it literally spilled with stuff. Photos, bus tickets, lire, business cards, those free advertising postcards they had at all the bars in Rome. 

"DJ Friendship" was my on-air name at the college radio station. And there's a little setlist for one of my radio shows. 

Such a random set of photos I found in this box: childhood pictures, photos my mom sent of relatives, and some college photos (that group shot is my Rome classmates and I at a buffalo farm where they made fresh mozzarella). I found that little playing card on the ground in a park near the Tiber River. 

One of my little robots. Katie Licht: drawing things with eyepatches since 2002!^®

A "family photo" my friends and I had taken at the Wal Mart photo studio in Iowa City. 

I saved the case stickers on all the CDs I bought. I either put them into my notebooks or stuck them on my car's dashboard. Don't CDs seem like so long ago? 

I found a few lists in these notebooks that are either comforting or disheartening. Comforting in the knowledge that I really haven't changed much. Disheartening in the fact that I'm still working towards some of these goals (write more letters! make more art! how many times have I written those things in a to-do list?). I really like the last one there: "Figure out what happened to my youthful self confidence."

No, that reading list is NOT too aggressive, not at all, 22 year old self.

I also find it reassuring that even in my chaotic early 20s, I was searching for discipline: "run & attend church regularly." 

Nothing like Joni Mitchell lyrics doodled in a work notebook to perfectly encapsulate what my life was like at age 22. 

And this: a polaroid from my 23rd birthday lunch with my co-workers. 

I think my plan now is to put the lid back on and not open it again for another 7 years. In the meantime, there's at least half a dozen boxes in the attic or my parents basement full of the same kind of stuff. I just can't bring myself to get rid of it, but who knows what will happen to all of it? Will my kids or grandkids want it? I like to think that maybe I'll keep it and donate it all to a thrift shop 50 years from now, and make some vintage-loving girl's head explode. 

smarch!

This past month will forever be remember by me as Smarch. Smarch = summer March. 

Sometimes we went outside in the morning before we even changed out of our pajamas, and some mornings the kids got so dirty they needed baths by 8:30 am. Norah's hands and knees were stained brown from crawling around in the grass. I feel like we were in constant Ragamuffin mode: dirty, barefoot, trailing mud into the house. We chatted with our neighbors, went on walks, looked at bugs, listened to the birds, poked around in the dirt. That's summertime.

And it's times like these I wouldn't trade my life as a stay at home mom for any office job. I feel so lucky to able to take advantage of beautiful days and live in nature a little more, and encourage my kids to do the same. (Poor Norah, she's already tired of being inside for the cold and wet days of the past week. She spends a lot of time pointing at the door and crying.) 

postcard swap 2012

So. You know I draw all these little weirdos all the time. For the longest time, they just sat in my sketchbook, mostly black and white, and I didn't really think about it. But I love drawing them and I know they're really cute and original. So I'm starting to feel like I need to do something with them. 

After I signed up for Hanna's postcard swap, I realized maybe this would be a good chance to fuss around with my little doodles and see where else I could take them. 

I started the process by marking off 2 4x6 rectangles in my sketchbook and filling them with characters, just in pencil at first. (Usually I draw directly in pen.) After I was happy with the arrangements, I traced everything with pen. I made photocopies of those pages, there's something about the translation of pen to toner that I really like, I feel like it enhances my line quality in an interesting way. Then another photocopy of both pages onto cardstock. And then the coloring began. 

Instead of coloring them all in the same way, I decided to work on some different color studies. I think the ones I like best are the cards where the drawings stay white and the negative space has a color gradient. What do you think? 

I also did a little bit of collaging on some of the cards. Again, just playing. Just seeing how different elements work together. 

Off in the mail they go today! Only a little late. . . .

happy birthday Norah

How has this been a whole year? 

From this:

to this:

And then. . . 

And now:

Oh, my little baby girl. Not such a baby anymore.

(I think I'm gonna need to have a good cry sometime today.)

friday afternoons

Let's count the number of things in these pictures that are probably not ideal. Bed not made. Kids hanging out in parents bed. Kids watching TV. Book on bed indicates I probably wasn't paying full attention to kids at some point. Boy drinking a soda (it's an IZZE though, so really. . . that's not a biggie, right?). Boy drinking a soda in bed. Baby precariously crawling on bed while mom holds camera. 

BUT. It also looks like they are having fun. So that's alright by me. And let's be real. . . sometimes by Friday afternoon the week has worn me out and the only remedy is piling us all into the big bed to watch PBS kids shows and just decompress for a while. Right?

january pages (part 2)

You guys. Check out that yearbook photo of kids in an art class in 1971. There's not much about it that I don't love. I made this page about how I've been missing school a lot lately. It's been reallly hard for me as a stay at home mom to feel like I never get more than 15 minutes in a row to focus on anything. It just makes me so scattered. What I wouldn't give for an entire afternoon in the library or the studio. 

A page for David. 

And one for Norah too. This gardening manual from the 50s is full of the BEST photos. 

There are a couple pages from this set that have hidden journaling in little pockets or envelopes. I'll confess, I used to think "hidden journaling" was kind of a cop-out, like, why would you make an art journal page and not just let it out for the world to see? And I still feel that way, kind of, but you know what? Envelopes are fun. It's a different user experience to interact with the pages instead of just looking at them. Plus I don't have to worry about my handwriting being sloppy either. Double win. 

Also, check out that SWEET vintage scallop trim. I'd never seen anything like it and found it in a big bag full of ricrac and bias tape at goodwill. Total score. 

I'm already missing this series of pages. I think I had more fun working on it than anything in recent memory. I'm kind of art project-less right now, or rather. . . I have about ten things I want to do but can't focus on any of them. But isn't that always the state of affairs with me?

february recap

Let's not talk about how it's already March 8 and I'm still talking about February, okay? Oookay. 

A little shopping. For as many tops or skirts I have from Anthropologie, I've never been able to find a dress there that actually fits, is flattering, and seems worth the 3 digit price tag. I did end up with a cute sweater though. 

Thrifted sheet fabric, soon to be part of some new art journal packs in my etsy shop. 

I assigned myself some memory work as part of my Lenten daytime internet fast, something to take up time I usually spend online. A psalm a week seemed like a doable amount but I'm behind already. My confirmation memory skills have obviously declined since I was 13. 

Kids on the Amtrak on our way to Minneapolis. Our weekend there was so fun, we enjoyed walking around downtown, and of course seeing all my family at the wedding was fantastic. Oh, my family! All so funny and quirky and comforting to be around. I wish we didn't live so far away. (I do highly recommend Amtrak for medium-length trips with little kids. It was amazingly better than being stuck in the car for 8 hours, and you know David just went nuts for it.)

One, or rather two, downers about the trip: I took most of my photos on my iPod. . . . which I left on the train on the way home. Bummer. And we're pretty sure Mike's iPod was stolen sometime in the train station. Bad weekend for our family's technology collection. 

My paper Valentine's Day garland, which was left up for weeks after Valentine's Day. I really liked it though. And guess what? I'm an adult, I own this place, and I can do whatever I want. Boom! to that.