I have been obsessing over this project for the last 6 weeks and have been so excited to take it out of the planning stage and actually start DOING it!  There were some things I wanted to figure out first though, where to start, how to proceed, what components should it have or not have, should there be a limit to how many women we study, a criteria for who we would and would not study? I asked myself all those questions and many more. At first I was going to limit to 5 women and complete it by my daughter’s 5th birthday. Then I started to make a list of women to choose from. It was clear from very early on that there would be no way I could choose only 5 women. My next thought was to study one woman a month until my daughter’s 5th birthday, that would give me 10 women to choose from. Something about that didn’t work for me either. So, in the end I decided to leave it open ended. We would learn about as many women as we wanted and whomever we wanted with no constraints on time and just see where this took us. A blog seemed like the natural way to catalog our progress, and so here we are!

It was so hard to decide who would be our first step, there are so many wonderful women to choose from! Ultimately, it boiled down to who I wanted to photograph indoors since this has been a crazy winter in Chicago and many other women I have specific locations that I’d like shoot at for their photos. This narrowed down the field and I chose Frida Kahlo.

I have long held a love for Frida Kahlo’s very personal and beautiful art from the moment I first laid eyes on her painting, ‘Little Deer’. It was my freshman year in college during an art appreciation course and I’ve been in love ever since. As I learned more about her through her artwork, biographies, and her diary throughout the years, my love for her grew. I even had a cat named Frida! What an extraordinarily fascinating woman! I wanted to share a little bit of her inspiring work and her life with my daughters. We read books, colored pages from the internet and a coloring book, and made paper dolls from a book and the internet. We also downloaded a fabulous app. Our studies were obviously limited, as Frida’s life contains a lot of adult content. There is so much more to her life than her paintings and the little bit of information I shared with my daughters, but hopefully when they are older(and more things are age appropriate) we will delve a little deeper!

The pictures were a lot of fun to take! I got the shirt and skirt on Big Sister from Rancho Alpino on Etsy, and the rest I scoured from around the house, and I painted the backdrop. When I started taking pics of Big Sister, Little Sister decided that she wanted a part of the action too! After several photo bombs later we borrowed some flowers from Big Sister’s hair, got a little dress out of the closet that Grandma brought back from a trip to Mexico, and found another of Mommy’s scarves for Little Sister and we were off! I’m so glad she wanted to join in, those are some of my favorite pictures of the girls together. When I was trying to direct Big Sister on how to stand and to hold her elbows, Little Sister was listening too. I had no idea, until I looked at the pictures when I was done, what a good little listener she was! So adorable! I’m looking forward to many more steps together with these girls!

My Two Fridas

Sisters

Sweet Sisters

My Frida in a Frame

Serious Face

Channeling Frida

Fun with Photoshop

Fun with Photoshop

Flying With Frida