The Story of the Polka Dots

Row of Beads
Originally uploaded by seeshells.

When I finished the sides and top, I had a small delema: I didn't know what I was going to put on the sides for decoration. Since I had used golden hues, and because autumn is probably my favorite season, of course fall leaves came to mind first. But I didn't want the project to be seasonal, I didn't want it to be something that was put away. So even though I could picture cute leaf shapes all over the sides of the box, I really wanted to think of something else.
I went to visit my Grandma a couple weeks ago, something I definately need to do more often, and I brought the project along, to work on while we chatted. I didn't realize until I was there, but I was almost finished with everything I could do before adding the decoration. I wasn't my Grandma's only visitor that night, my cousin A, and her youngest daughter were there for a while, too. I always think about how cool it is to have a large family when I see my cousins. Here was my first cousin and her daughter, around 5 or 6, I remember when A was about that age, and I was in Jr. High or High School, and would play games with her and put makeup on her when we visited Grandma and Grandpa on the same weekend. And when I was young, A's mom, my Cake Decorating Auntie, babysat me sometimes. My mother is enough older than my Cake Decorating Auntie that Auntie was just in elementary school when my parents got married. My kids are teenagers, and my little is cousin all-grown-up and her little daughter is just learning her alphabet.

Felt Circle Placement
Originally uploaded by seeshells.

My cousin's daughter was coloring intently during our visit. She was drawing T's, big fat T's. I asked her why she was drawing T's but she didn't really have an answer. Her name doesn't start with T, I mentally checked off her immediate family, nope, no T names. I asked her if it was "T" week at school, and it wasn't. And then I just realized that T's are just cool to draw. And she wasn't just drawing T's, each T had it's own world, with backgrounds of cities and trees. Fat T's with stripes or polka dots. So when I brought up my delema of what to put on the box for decoration, my cousin said polka dots would be nice, just like her daughter had been drawing.
Perfect! Before I left that night, I had cut out and sewn on the first dot.
The next day at work, I cut out a bunch more dots. I felt like that old comic book character, Dot, putting dots on everything.