You Had Me at Dust -OR- I May Have Missed Your Point, but Found Mine

Oh, Twitter, how you make me giggle inappropriately at times.
I just saw this in my feed: "Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return." Trying to use Lent to remain grateful for this short life.


And I immediately think of the icky mass of gray dust I just wiped off a section of the tile in the 1/2 bathroom downstairs. And that was only one section. And there are three more full bathrooms in the house. And 10 more rooms, not counting walk-in closets. And the entire house is dusty. Or worse. And I start giggling thinking "And you shall wallow in dust all the filthy days of your life. You wrteched, wretched person." And if we're all dust eventually, then holy shit! How many fomer people are drifting through my house, being reborn as dust bunnies?! Next stop after the catcombs...Eileen's house! (It isn't usually this bad. The last month has just been a crazy blur...of many, many things. But somehow manic cleaning has not been one of them.)

So, as usual, there was a point, but my mind has warped it and I am now giggling. Seize the dusty day. Or something like that. :-)

Upcycled SnowBear! or the VoicesOnTwitter Made Me Do It

It's snowing in Texas! Giant snowflakes have been falling for much longer than I've been awake today. It's a snow day, so both monkeys were home to frolic in the white stuff. After general snow shenanigans, building a snowman was first on the little taskmasters' to-do list. Since Mommy's mantra is "No things in moderation", it quickly became apparent that a crane was going to be needed to lift the upper snowman parts into place. Um, yeah, the neighborhood was fresh out of cranes today, so half of the middle section actually made it up and onto the snowman.

While I was rolling the bottom section, I realized that quite a bit of dead grass was attaching itself to the snowball. And then I giggled because I was inadvertently making a hirsute snowman. And then I really laughed when I thought about telling @JonasFiel and @leewaters that I was blaming them for the SnowBear. And then I remembered that was only 50% as funny as I'd thought it was. *sigh*

The adornment is where the upcycling comes in. His sideburns are seedpods from what I'm pretty sure is a locust tree behind our backyard. His spiffy green hair is courtesy of the remaining green leaf lettuce in our fridge. (It had been well on its way South, so I'm glad it had a little ArtStopover on its way to the compost pile.) Luckily I did finally go grocerying yesterday, so we actually had a  traditional carrot for the nose. The moustache is also a seed pod.

For those of you familiar with my Chester Street scarf project, the scarf is made out of two shades of brown lining that I ripped out of wool skirts or jackets before I felted them. Yes, I keep all of the linings for future last minute projects. A few of you may recall that an offwhite skirt lining made excellent sleeves for LittleMonkey's Pirate Costume. The one I sewed in less than 45 minutes before we left for the Halloween Party. Because she was all set to be a princess, but once she saw her brother dressed as a pirate, she *had* to be one too. I'm happy to report that I did pull the costume off, because I'm crazy like that.

Ah yes, back to upcycling for the SnowBear. When you felt wool, you get lovely colored giant masses of fluffy wool in the dryer's lint screen. And since I'm a crafty packrat, I have a little collection of the nicest of the large masses of it, because you know, it's bound to come in handy. I figured I would use it to stuff the mushrooms I still haven't finished making, but today I realized it was destined to be my SnowBear's beard! (Stuff the felted wool mushrooms I'm making. Hee Hee, not the kind of stuffed mushrooms that you eat!)

Oh, I also snipped some of the skirt lining and used it for his eyes. I had tried using dried sunflower centers that were on the long dead sunflower bush in the garden, but they didn't work so well.

We also built a couple of partial snow forts, Little Monkey made snow angels, and we generally had a blast playing in the snow. Note to parents: You really need to enjoy the snow when your monkeys are little. And by 'enjoy' I mean pelt said monkeys with snowballs and by 'little', I mean while they're too little to actually damage you. Mwahahaha. :-) Oh, I was nice. Mostly. I'm just planning on staying inside once they finally get the 'pack snow into a ball' and 'actually hit what you're throwing at' thing down. :-)