Homemade

I wasn't the only one who was crafting away at Christmas time! Wanted to share with you these super-cool soy candles made by my friend G. She's a thrift-store shopper extraordinaire and found some really fabulous containers for the candles. I also got some mixed cds from friends C&D - have been incessantly listening to Ingrid Michaelson, Girls and Boys.Now, here's a blast from the past... saw some awesome jewelry made with Shrinky-Dinks on Etsy, and had to run out and buy my own. Here are some of the things I've made so far. Think will turn them into key chains or necklaces. Fun, huh? Hope my da' doesn't mind if I share this poem I wrote for him for Christmas:

You built a house in the tree
with wood from my Grandpa.
It was red, and peeling, and wonderful,
there was a ladder, and a trap door, and a pail
that we used to raise and lower things.
It was everything a tree house should be.

In the summer
we slept in the tree house
with neighborhood kids.
Well, we started the night in the tree,
looking at stars
listening to the silence of a sleeping street.
In the middle of the night,
or maybe nine-thirty in the evening,
we climbed down and went to our beds,
shivering.

Not along ago,
you and I tried to draw the tree house
together.
The challenge of perspective,
of point-of-view,
was too much.
How did we forget to take a picture
of your creation?

My grandma can barely watch old videos of her family
playing in the lake, tan and beautiful.
She avoids the screen.
“It doesn't capture,” she says, “How wonderful it was.”

Photographs don't tell the whole story.
We had dogs and days with no pictures
but I remember them well.
We never could have captured
how fun it was.