Crafting with Kids

Let me just say right from the start, this is not one of those feel good "Mom of the Year" type posts about all the wonderful creative things that can be done with empty yogurt cups and glitter. This is a post about what happens when you work really really hard on a project and one of your beloved, wonderful children decides to "improve" upon your work and you see the results and you want to walk right out the front door and hop the next flight to Tahiti.

I can laugh about this now... a little. OK, no, I still can't laugh about it, but I can think about it without my face turning purple. That's an improvement, right?

I made these buttons for the swap over at Feeling Stitchy. My partner was SunnySidey and she sent me the cutest package of buttons with Australian animals embroidered on them. You can see much better pictures than I could take of all the goodies she sent on her blog. The little button pouch is the cutest thing ever, and the candy was YUMMO!


She said she likes Japanese Zakka style, so I tried to do some designs I thought you might find on Zakka fabric. I browsed through her Flickr account and found a few pictures of her cute kitties, so I stitched them too. I learned that she is a fan of Kaffe Fassett so I picked up a couple of fat quarters of his fabric, some locally hand dyed embroidery thread, and sewed up a Buttercup Bag made with Ikea fabric.

I was right up to the deadline to get them in the mail, I had them all laid out ready to pack up, I just needed to buy some candy and off they would go, on their way Down Under. And just as I went to pack them in the box, I saw it. Purple marker scribbles, all over every single button. Lovely swirling squiggles, over through and around each design. I had never before understood the saying, "I saw red." But I did. I think I might have blacked out for a minute. Did I mention that I had already had to layout all the fabric and trace all the designs twice because Allison, my five year old, saw me drawing on the fabric and decided to "help" when I wasn't looking. I was calm and reasonable that time, because how was she to know that she couldn't draw on the fabric when she'd seen me doing it? So I explained that she could never ever do that, gave her some fabric scraps of her own to draw on, and I got the lightbox back out and traced all the designs over again and started stitching.

So anyway- it was disappearing ink, and it did finally eventually all fade away-- You can see the ghosts of some of the squiggles in the picture above. So the package went out late, Sam was very sweet and patient, and the box has now arrived safely at its destination!

But I still can't look at that purple marker without shuddering.