Craft Knife

Outsourcing My Quilt Designs

2009-12-07T16:35:00.002-05:00

I'm sewing a T-shirt quilt for my little cousin Katie this Christmas (this is no secret, or otherwise I imagine she'd have been asking her mom, "Where are all my T-shirts?"). After cutting out all the pieces for a one-block quilt from Katie's T-shirts, Willow found me on her bed yesterday, about to lay out a design for the quilt on top of her comforter. Will asked if she could lay out the quilt, instead, and never one to turn down an offer of unpaid labor, I agreed:
The final design certainly wasn't the kind of pattern I would have made it into, but it wasn't random, either, and although it's not something that I'd permit Willow to have free reign on in a quilt for a paying customer, she adores her big cousin Katie, and I was happy to give her the chance to add something permanent to Katie's world:
Sydney served as photo-documentarian for the event, catching Willow deep in concentration as she figures out some key detail in her layout:Catching me taking the pieces back up in the exact right order to ensure that I sew them correctly:And then catching us in post-layout celebration:
Now it just needs to be pieced, backed, bound, and wrapped.

Sweatpants, Skirts, and Teaching Tops

2009-12-06T07:34:00.002-05:00

One thing about living in a university town and working at that university is that you meet a lot of undergrads. Matt works with interns and the Student Alumni Association club, and as for me, I've got 40 or so freshmen that I engage in conversation and woo into some semblance of understanding of the analytical process and its reflection in rhetoric for three hours twice a week, not counting office hours.

And when you talk to undergrads that much for that long, you 1) gain a terrific understanding of popular television (I swear, half my students are writing their final papers on The Girls Next Door), and 2) do NOT gain an understanding of contemporary fashion. Um, why do I want sweatpants with words written on the butt?

And leggings came back? Seriously?

And apparently (because we had an entire conversation about this), you're still supposed to tan in the winter, but not as much because you don't want to get too dark, and you have to REALLY tan, like in the booth, because everyone can tell when you've spray-tanned because it DEF looks orange.

All this is to say that I don't dress like a freshman, but I bet you could have figured that out on your own. If there was a Torrid in town I'd probably throw my second-hand shopping ethic out the window--hell, I'd probably have my own Torrid card the way my mama used to have a Dillard's card because she bought so much there--but until then, I rely on the Goodwill 50%-Off Storewide Sale days and going through every piece of clothing in the store to find a few pieces that I like. So I bought low-rise cargo pants and a couple of tops designed to show off the tons of money that I have invested in a really great bra (my friend Molly calls these "boob tops").

I bought Matt a few more pairs of sweatpants, because he likes to go to the gym every night while I'm putting the girls to bed (chapter from whatever book we're reading, episode of Meerkat Manor, sitting in the dark goofing off on the computer while playing Pandora and waiting for snores).

And I bought the girls skirts:
And skirts:

And yet more skirts: Syd is the one who is obessed with skirts and dresses (dubbed "quitty kwothes"). Will likes herself a pair of good, soft pants, but will also wear the same dinosaur T-shirt for as many days as it take for me to get sick of it and rip it off of her body. Sydney will change entire outfits four times a day, easy (each time putting the entire old outfit in the dirty laundry, unless I catch her. This is one of the reasons that I'm teaching the girls to do their own laundry this month), and actually has a knack for putting together really interesting outfits that somehow work.

And she only has a few skirts, mostly Momma-made and thus all of the same style. So I skirted them up.

Also bought during the sale: a keyboard that may or may not work for lessons, so we'll do some research before the return period is up; a picturebook of Longfellow's Hiawatha poem; a tiny little loaf pan (Matt is all, "What are you going to make with this?" "Um, tiny little loaves?"); and yet another little horse.

Still on the must-buy-secondhand list: ice cream maker, new-ish crockpot (there are tons of older crockpots in thrift stores, but they're supposed to be fire hazards or something), and a black hoodie and an AWESOME cool-looking grey denim jacket with a stripe on the sleeve to replace those same articles of clothing, both bought previously at Goodwill, that I have left at one time or another in my classroom on campus and thus lost, leaving me broken-hearted.

Although if some other freshman stole my clothes, that does mean that they were up to their trendy freshman standards, I suppose.

DIY Wipe-Off Handwriting Sheets for the Littles

2009-12-04T13:04:00.003-05:00

As it is now December, I should be concentrating on making gifts for family and friends, and shepherding the girls through making their gifts, as well, but something about being required to work on a deadline just makes me...rebel.

And so that's why, even though my To-Do list for yesterday read, partially, "take girls to gymnastics, buy coffee creamer, answer student emails, grade Project #5 rough drafts, START KATIE'S QUILT," I instead, while loading the dishwasher (for the second time that day), had a brilliant idea for making some wipe-off handwriting/vocab sheets for some of the books that the girls have been especially into lately.

And after I finished loading the dishwasher, instead of getting out the template for cutting out the pieces to Katie's quilt, I dragged out an old handwriting tablet and the laminator and immediately made ten or so wipe-off handwriting/vocab sheets.

To do this, you just need a child's handwriting tablet, a nice fat marker, and a laminator. Children's handwriting tablets are larger than your typical notebook paper, so if you're using a laminator designed for that particular width, you will need to trim your paper before you begin.

On the left side of each line on the tablet, write a vocabulary word yourself in your best printing (ugh). Make two pages of vocabulary words, because you might as well make your handwriting page double-sided. I themed mine based on the books the girls and I have been reading over and over lately--Little House in the Big Woods, with words like "Ma," "Pa," "Laura," "Mary," and "Minnesota;" Bambi, with words like "Bambi," "Mother," "Father," "Faline," "Gobo," and "Old Prince;" The Nutcracker, with words like "Tchaikovsky," "Clara," "Nutcracker," and "Sugarplum Fairy," and "The Night Before Christmas," with the names of all the reindeer, of course (it's "Donder," not "Donner"--did you know?).

Line up two pages neatly back-to-back, and then laminate them. Because I've organized most of the girls' paper-based activities into a file folder box, I stapled a file folder into a pocket, and stapled an envelope on the front of the pocket to hold a dry-erase marker and a flannel cloth for wiping off the marker.

And then, the next morning while you're reading the newspaper and drinking a nice, big mug of coffee, your girls can practice reading their pages:
Using a dry-erase marker, they can trace over your words:
They can copy your words: And when they're done, they can wipe the marker off with their little flannel cloth:

Because this is how I enable myself to drink an entire cup of coffee in peace.

When It's Raining Outside, Jump Around Inside

2009-12-03T09:54:00.004-05:00

Most of our local gymnastics studios do this completey ingenious thing--a couple of mornings a week for an hour or so, they open up their entire studio to free play by preschoolers. All the equipment, all the space, all the stuff. At four bucks per kid, it's an activity that's too expensive for me to take the girls to regularly, at least not when there are so many good free activities geared to preschoolers nearly every weekday morning, but one gym, Rising Star, occasionally offers this open play time free for an entire month.

And thus begins our month of regularly-scheduled antics:I never took gymnastics classes as a child, so a lot of this stuff I'm just guessing at, but I think that this long trampoline must be used for practicing floor routines, like flipping and stuff:

The deep pit of foamies is probably a likely landing spot for vaults, jumps, or high bar work, but it also works for belly-flopping and wallowing:My favorite thing about the open play time is that, unlike most of the other activities for small children that we do regularly--storytime at the public library, Discovery Time at Wonderlab, puppet shows and teddy bear tea parties and such--I do NOT bring a book to open play. I wear my yoga pants and my sports bra, and I will happily wait in line with a bunch of three-year-olds for a turn on the giant trampoline. And that time that I got stuck in the pit of foamies and couldn't quite haul my own butt out and that stay-at-home dad laughed at me, I didn't even care.

Because by god, that pit of foamies RULEZ!!!

It's also funny to see how much braver my kids are than I am. Oh, how I long to fling myself from the top of the pommel horse like a cat on a sparrow:Will does any kind of leaping and daredevil work, but Syd seems especially fond of the balance beam these days:And of course, she's perfectly happy to swing for just as long as anyone is willing to push her:So, do they look like they're having fun, or what?

And we get to go back again on Friday!

Kids' Card Making: The Super-Simple Sticker Card

2009-12-01T13:54:00.005-05:00

After playing around all they wanted to with the collage cards and the paper doll cards-- --the girls still had just a couple more cards that they needed to make for their Kids Craft Weekly Christmas card swap, so I pulled out the stickers:

I go back and forth on stickers--sometimes I hate them and think that they're wasteful and cause too much mess and aren't a creative tool, and other times I think that they're fun and portable and pretty mess-free and can be used quite creatively. My opinion on this depends, I think, on how many stickers we have in the house and, if we don't have any stickers in the house, how long it has been since we've had some.

The last time I bought foam stickers was last year during a big post-Halloween sale, I think, so there's been plenty of time for their absence to make my sticker-heart grow fonder. And I have been making it a habit (for a while, now, so hopefully it's not just a phase!) to be much more disciplined with the girls and with myself about keeping our environment neat and tidy--and boy, that's a lot of work, but it is nicer not to have sticker wrappers all over the house. Or uncapped markers. Or library books. Or whatever else I used to be too tired to keep up a constant hassle about.

However, with this last sticker purchase the stars aligned, and I bought a LOT. It was one of those Black Friday businesses when I was already at Michael's (I just happened to be there, you know, just to pick up a few things, only to find all these people standing in line just to get in the store! Weird!), and so their entire stock of foam stickers was marked down by 50%, and I had a coupon in hand for an additional 25% off of my total purchase, which meant that each of the sticker sets that I bought for the girls was $3, not including tax.

And that's why the girls have on their art shelves not just the Christmas set that they used to make their last Christmas cards, but, um, a dinosaur set, and an alphabet set, and an outer space set.

And in a month or so, when I am sick unto death of all these damn stickers again, I'll remember that at least I didn't buy the pirate set or the princess set. So there.

Just a Simple Photo of My Girls

2009-11-30T18:25:00.004-05:00

The girls' Christmas cards (from their Kids Craft Weekly card swap) are in the mail right this minute, but the very last thing that we needed to do before sending them off was to take a photo of the girls to include with each card. Since neither girl is really up to writing a personal note in each card I thought it would be a nice way to bring them to life for these little recipients who have never met them--and I wanted to sneak in my blog's address, because you know how much I love attention.

I allotted two minutes right before it was time to walk out the door for school for this task--the girls are clean and dressed with hair and teeth brushed, and anyway, how long can it take to snap one decent, normal photo?The winner!
Now all that's left is managing the level of hysterical excitement until our own card swap cards start arriving in the mail.

Kids' Card Making: The Paper Doll Card

2009-11-30T09:51:00.004-05:00

The cards for the girls' Kids Craft Weekly card swap are all finished up, and the monkeys are sitting at my feet right this minute writing up some semblance of a signature and holiday greeting (after one card, Willow abandoned her planned "Happy Christmas to all" as too time-consuming and began to make do, instead, with "Will"). When they're done with that, it's the momma's job snap a photo of the two angels looking angelic together and send it to the dadda, whose job it is to add my blog address to the bottom of the photo and print off ten color copies and bring them home to the babies, whose job it will be (with the momma's supervision) to stuff the envelopes and seal them, and then we'll all go off to mail them together.

I had planned to sneak in some geographical learnin' this week all about the places that the cards are going to--everywhere from Australia to Ohio--but I have the sneaking suspicion that I'll be unable to peel the children's eyes away from anything overtly CHRISTMAS!!! this month.

This set of paper doll cards was extremely time-consuming to make, but the girls LOVED it, and worked absorbedly on the activity until they'd run out of doll clothes, which I couldn't cut out from the Cricut as fast as they could glue, especially with all the turn-taking and choosing of scrapbook papers and outfit choices, etc. etc.

You can do this kind of card with any sort of homemade or boughten paper dolls, of course, but since the girls and I happen to be obsessed right now with our new Paper Dolls Dress-Up Cricut cartridge (bought for a song during a Michael's doorbuster, at least, and well worth it), that is of course what we used.

It's tricky to get exactly the right size of paper doll with the Cricut, however, if you're measuring by width, because the Cricut offers measurements only by length. For instance, I didn't particularly care how tall these paper dolls were, but I did need them to be a little less than 3.5" wide, because I wanted our cards to fit in standard envelopes. So I actually had to experiment a little with various heights until I discovered that a 5"-tall paper doll is just a smidge less than 3.5" wide. Fortunately, the girls were happy to take over my mis-fires.

The nice thing about the Cricut, however, is that once you know the height of your paper doll, you can just input that same measurement to cut out all the clothes and accessories that are proportionate to that doll, so I could use 5" for everything from the hairbow to the Christmas tree. I don't use that feature as often with the font catridges, because if I want a single lower-case p, I generally want that p to be exactly the size I want it, not proportionate to the upper case P that I'm not going to print, but with the paper dolls cartridge, it's an extremely useful feature.

I've been playing with using the Cricut cut-outs as templates for making paper dolls and clothes out of recycled papers like magazine pages or comic books, and I have some big plans of also using them as templates to cut out some things for the girls' big felt board, but these Christmas cards are all done with scrapbook paper:
I tried to plan for the cards to be at least winter-themed by asking the girls to choose clothes and things that someone would use in the winter. Sydney was really bad at this, but with her, you never can tell if she's not doing something because she doesn't understand the concept, or because she'd just rather do whatever the hell she wants--either way, it's an activity to repeat a few times. Will enjoyed that aspect of the game, however, and came up with some fun cards:

The card swap is for children of all ages, and whereas when the girls did their Artist Trading Card swap they were sorted into a group of age-mates, here I think that at least some of their partners are quite older than they are. For that reason, I did want the cards the girls' sent to be fairly neatly done and reasonable as Christmas cards, and so although I obviously didn't direct or criticize their work, I did sort the cards into a small stack for the swap, and a biiiiiig stack to send to our own family and friends.

Grandma Beck might better appreciate Sydney's card, which consists of about 40 items of doll clothes glued smack on top of one doll with a big mound of glue, which was then colored on, than some anonymous ten-year-old in Canada might.

When a three-year-old works for most of an hour on ANYTHING, I don't care what it ends up looking like--it's automatically a masterpiece.

Paper Dolls, or, Ode to My Cricut

2009-11-29T20:23:00.004-05:00

On Thanksgiving Day, after a DELICIOUS early Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy-schmancy local restaurant (Sydney was all, "Why does that man keep give me more water?" I'm all, "That's a waiter, sweetie"), we finished just in time to load our full bellies into the car and drive across town to the Michael's store, which was opening with its Black Friday sales that Thursday from 5-8 pm. I had the sales flyer, which listed one of the doorbusters as Cricut cartridges on HUGE sale, and an additional coupon for 25% off my total purchase, and additionally, I was stoked that I wouldn't even have to consider waking up early on Friday.

We get to Michael's just a couple of minutes early, and there's a line waiting for the store to open, but up we trek in our fancy clothes, happy to just stand around and digest for a bit. A few other people line up behind us, and then this other lady walks up, and as soon as she gets to the back of the line she starts announcing, over and over, to whoever is listening, I suppose, that she can't believe that there's a line to get into Michael's. She just happened to drive over to pick up a few things, she announced, because she just happened to notice that it would be open, and she never dreamed that people would actually line up just to get in. She didn't even know what was supposed to be on sale, even, and look, she's just wearing the same clothes that she wore to make Thanksgiving dinner.

When the doors finally opened, Matt swears on his life that she shoved him trying to get inside.

I've never been to a store right when it opened for Black Friday before, and it actually was a little hairy, because I guess everybody wanted these pre-lit artificial Christmas trees that were stacked right by the door, but the beauty of being on a team is that I left Matt and Syd to grab a cart at their leisure and negotiate their way in, and Will and I dodged past the tree-hoarders and jockeyed for position in front of the Cricut cartridge display.

The other middle-aged female scrapbookers were sweet as pie there, of course, but were grabbing up cartridges like CRAZY, so Will and I basically grabbed up whatever we were even halfway interested in, too, and then took them all over to a quiet place for a closer look. I was plenty okay with the prospect of walking my unwanted cartridges back to a sales clerk for the opportunity to browse in peace.

I made some very careful choices, spent my entire remaining Cricut allowance (I'm relying on my swagbucks for my Cricut upkeep allowance), and ended up with some cartridges that the girls and I are THRILLED with.

And, obviously, they're the nerdiest of the cartridges. We turned up our noses completely at all the Tinkerbell and Winnie the Pooh nonsense, and ended up with, along with a couple of awesome fonts, a cartridge that has maps of the continents and countries and various icons from those locations (including lots of farm die-cuts, Willow was delighted to see--now we can make a silo!), a cartridge that does maps of the states AND their correct flags AND their correct birds (this was one of the cartridges that made me want to buy a Cricut in the first place, I'm that big of a nerd), a cartridge that does a massive menagerie of animals, and a cartridge that does paper dolls.

Hell, yeah. A cartridge that does paper dolls.

It organizes them by all these random costumes, so there's a bride and groom, for instance, and a cowboy and cowgirl, and a caveman and cavewoman (I know--whatever), and for each costume it's got a couple of options and some hair and some random stuff that would go with that costume. So, you can cut out a wedding dress for the bride and also a three-tiered wedding cake, and for the caveman you can cut out a volcano and also about four different dinosaurs (hmmm.....who do I know who loves dinosaurs?)

Needless to say, we have been playing with this cartridge ALL WEEKEND.

You can put the paper doll tabs on some of the clothes, but not, you know, the wedding cake or the palm tree or Santa's sleigh and stuff (did I mention that it has Santa and Mrs. Claus and an elf, and the requisite sleigh and reindeer and junk?), so the girls actually prefer to play with everything laid flat on the table, in these little two-dimensional scenes, and they've snookered me into cutting out for them tons of different outfits from scrapbook paper.

Here's one of Sydney's favorite outfits:
It's the shirt and pants to the groom's tuxedo with Frankenstein's hair, I think? And obviously, drawing the features on the doll itself is something of a highlight.

Here's Willow's favorite doll and outfit so far:

I'm not sure why all their doll selections manage to look sort of ghoulish AND sort of tranny chic, but there you go.

Oh, and the woman in the line in front of Michael's? Matt claims that she was checking out at the register next to us (an hour after she went in? So much for "just dropping by for a few things"), and he could hear her telling the cashier all about how she was so surprised there were so many people rushing in here on Thanksgiving, she just happened to be there herself and couldn't believe all those people standing in line before the store was even open, etc. etc.

Yes, lady, it's one of the lamest things a person can choose to do, to stand in front of a Michael's before it's even open, waiting to buy scrapbooking toys, but if you're gonna do it, hell, you might as well own it!

I wonder if I saw her again when I went to Joann's at 7 am on Saturday for THEIR Cricut doorbuster?

A Family Block-Building Enterprise

2009-11-28T21:53:00.004-05:00

Our little town's Christmas lighting ceremony, in which the mayor turns on for the season the lights that extend from the courthouse to the roofs off all the buildings on all four sides of the town square, as well as the seasonal streetlights and the Christmas trees sponsored by various charities, has something for every kid. If you're a big kid who's way into the lights and the ceremony and the festivity, then that's what you've got in spades:
However, even if you're a little kid, and you're mostly just about "What is going on right NOW and how will affect ME?"...well, the guy who hands out the programs also has an ample supply of candy canes:We actually stayed in town for Thanksgiving in part, this year, so that Matt could go into work on Friday and save that extra vacation day. However, the Alumni Association unexpectedly (at least to Matt--I'm never quite sure how knowledgeable he is about basic company info like that) closed its offices on Friday, so we've had an extra-long holiday with our man, and we have all been THRILLED. The weekend's not even over, and not only has he cleaned the gutters and enabled me to go shopping ALONE and put up all the Christmas lights, but I can tempt him into staying up late with me much easier with nowhere to be the next day, and he can tempt me into goofing off for long periods of time much easier, knowing he'll be around to help out later.

Matt and I together are even bigger nerds than we are apart, so when we all got out the girls' ridiculously large number of building blocks (seriously, it's ridiculous, and yet if I walked into a Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale tomorrow and saw another thousand, I'd buy them in a heartbeat), while the girls did normal stuff, like build themselves a block city with block buildings and block people and block cars--
--Matt and I had to use the crazy-fancy Kapla blocks I bought years ago at a Wonderlab sale (if you're a block nerd like us, Kapla blocks are where it's AT!) to build a tower that touched the ceiling:Seriously, it touched the ceiling. Here's the view from up there, courtesy of Matt standing on a chair and holding the camera up above his head:I wanted to leave our tower up all night, but Matt feared a middle-of-the-night bathroom trip or curious cat rub that would cause everyone in the house to bolt upright in their beds, so here's the rapid-shot view from my camera, which can take several photos per second:
My favorite part is the expression on Matt's face. Yeah, if he's going to look like that and he KNEW the crash was coming, we were right not to risk a middle-of-the-night demolition.

Kids' Card-Making: The Collage Window Card

2009-11-26T23:38:00.002-05:00

It just wouldn't be Thanksgiving without the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV!
It's so fun to have the kids at these ages, because they don't have a huge memory for most things. Therefore, remembering, myself, how delighted and surprised they were to see the huge balloons in the Macy's parade on TV last Thanksgiving, I had my camera ready to catch the new delight and surprise on their faces when they saw the balloons this year.

They didn't really recognize any of the characters that the balloons were supposed to be ("CheeseBob!!!" shouted Willow, when the Spongebob Squarepants balloon came around a corner), but just the concept of HUGE BALLOON is apparently enough to thrill a kid.

Of course, in other ways it wasn't a typical Thanksgiving at all. For instance, our nice big library table, instead of being set for the traditional meal, spent the day looking like this:
All the better to spend the day making Christmas cards with, my dears.

It's been fun to try out several new and different card-making strategies with the girls this month. Some--the window card in which they create their own cut-outs, the window card in which they paint one panel with watercolor paints so that it can show through the window--are complete failures. Others, such as this window card that uses strips of wallpaper in a behind-the window collage, worked great for the five-year-old, the three-year-old, and the 33-year-old.
When the girls do art, of course I like to keep the level of instruction as minimal as possible and just let them go to town with whatever art materials they've got (while keeping intact the rules about not contaminating the paint jars with other colors, not marking on someone else's work, etc.). Even when we do something like this, which is really more of a "craft," I still like to keep the number of instructions and step-by-step directions and parent work down as far as possible. I don't like children's work that is too crafty or obviously parent-directed--there aren't just a lot of ways to make a Santa out of an upside-down white handprint and some red construction paper and googly eyes, ya know?--but I also would like the children to send some Christmas cards that can be recognized as Christmas cards by anyone, not just her parent who can interpret the scenario under which the smear of orange tempera on a playing card was created.

For a full-on collage window card tutorial you can check out my tute on Crafting a Green World, but it really isn't that hard to figure out: tri-fold card, cut-out window, artful collage across that window--

--and a judicious amount of white glue.

And then, once we've got a few of these under our belts (two for Will and one for Syd is about the limit), plenty of time to make even more cards out of leftover wallpaper scraps, pink cardstock, the hole punch, and an extremely generous amount of white glue to hold it all together.

When Cursive Handwriting Comes to Play

2009-11-23T11:52:00.003-05:00

Even before I had Montessori girls, I looooooved the Montessori garage sale that the school holds every spring--in the National Guard Armory, it's so big. At a garage sale hosted by a fancy-pants private school that's at the same time so child-centric and child-led, you can expect to find loads of not just once-expensive snowsuits and excellent books and all the other stuff wealthy parents provide for their kids, but wooden toys and dress-up clothes and well-cared-for board games and puzzles and craft kits and fabulous educational materials, as well.

Last year, among some of my random (and REALLY cheap purchases--another benefit to the sale is that parents work it, and some of them have NO IDEA how to price thing) purchases were a drill-operated lathe and a complete set of large cursive sandpaper letters, mounted nicely on wood. I had figured that I would either end up crafting or decorating with these letters, or that they'd come out to play only much later in my children's lives, after, you know, they both knew their print letters, for instance.

However, Willow found this alphabet during the massive study/studio reorganization and asked that they be put as a choice on the shelves in their bedroom. I complied, and there they sat for an additional long while, but this weekend I guess the urge finally hit (don't you know that feeling?), and Willow suddenly came up with a slew of activities that she wanted to do with the letters.

Since Willow doesn't know her cursive a from her cursive z, Momma got to help, and it was quite fun.

First, Willow wanted to make a "long line," so I gave her the letters, one by one in alphabetical order, showed her how to trace it with her finger (sandpaper letters are big in Montessori, so Will has this concept down cold), had her tell me what sound(s) the letter makes, and then she put it in its place in the line:
There were a few moments of angst when it was discovered that t was missing, but at last it was found, safe and sound, in the car (?).

Then Will wanted to play "games" with the letter line, so while I sat all nice and comfy down past z, I'd tell Willow what letter I wanted her to point to, then release her to run as fast as she could down the line, point to the letter, and run as fast as she could back to me, where I'd catch her:
After a while this transitioned to me spelling out a simple word (bed, say, or cat) and sending her running to point to all the letters in order, then after she ran back to me and I'd caught her she would sound out the word she'd just spelled.

And all I had to do was sit on my butt!

Will's next big plan was to draw all the letters on a really long piece of paper. The really long piece of paper we had (of course!), but I wasn't sure if Willow had yet seen in her classroom how you could do rubbings with the sandpaper letters, so I showed her how, and it was such a big hit, waaaaaay more satisfying than leaf rubbings for little hands, that drawing all the letters was immediately abandoned and instead each letter was traced in its place on the long letter line: Each in a different color, of course:

And after that I foisted off on Matt the next project, which was to write underneath the line, in handwriting "very pretty," the verse "Now I know my ABCs; next time won't you sing with me?".

And then Matt made us popcorn and margaritas (virgin for the littles, saucy for the bigs), and we all got into bed and watched the old-school Doctor Dolittle until half of us fell asleep--Willow and I, unfortunately, which was probably not exactly the half that Matt had planned on when he made me a nice margarita, but what can you do?

Tonight perhaps we'll try an early bedtime for the littles, and THEN margaritas.

Turkey Cards from Monkey Girls

2009-11-22T09:55:00.002-05:00

Here's what we did with the hand turkeys: While the girls were at school, I scanned their turkeys, re-scaled them to 4"x5", and printed them in color on plain typing paper. I cut down a piece of 8.5"x11" cardstock to make a card about 5"x7", and glued the turkey prints to the fronts of the cards. They still needed a little something-something, so we used our letter punches to punch the word "TURKEY" on the front of each.

In case, you know, you couldn't tell what you were looking at. Which I admit is a distinct possibility.

We might use this same format for at least a couple of the Christmas cards that we'll be making this week for the Kids Craft Weekly handmade card swap. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to have the girls start making cards before we got our recipients list this morning, but the girls now have until December 1 to make ten cards, so I'll be thinking today about how to set up the activity so that it does NOT resemble a sweatshop.

The girls desperately wanted to give all their cards to friends at school, but I forced them to write out a bare minimum (in our house, that generally equals 2) to actual relatives. Can you tell which relative this one is for?

Okay, if you were up to that challenge, here's a way harder one. Can you tell which relative this card is for?

Happy Thanksgiving, Uncle Chad!

Which Photo Will Win?

2009-11-20T14:27:00.004-05:00

For some reason, I really enjoy the photo contest that our local newspaper runs every year. They always have some theme, and tons of people enter, and it's never totally clear by what exact criteria the photos are being judged, but everybody gets to be in the online photo gallery!

I missed out on entering for the past few years, but the last time I entered, in 2006, the theme was Christmas (or Winter? Or Winter Holidays? Surely not Christmas...). Anyway, here is my photo that was given an honorable mention and published, in the NEWSPAPER, on CHRISTMAS DAY:It kills me that I used to get to snuggle with kiddos that young.

The theme for this year's photo contest is Down to Earth, soliciting photos that depict "some aspect of the natural or built environment in the state." They have to have been taken in 2009, duh, and in Indiana, duh, and it's a little vague exactly what sort of photo manipulation is allowed, but to be on the safe side I kept it pretty vanilla. I also added my own personal criteria that I wanted either one or both of the children to be in the photo, but that the photo shouldn't focus so much on the child, but on her environment or, better yet, her interaction with her environment.

Here are the seven that I've narrowed myself down to, in chronological order with the year, from Monroe Beach in February to Anderson Orchard last month:Beyond that, however, I'm having trouble deciding. Which do you like best?

My Cold-Process Soap Has Cured

2009-11-19T13:45:00.002-05:00

Check it out!After letting it cure for six weeks, then using a bar in the shower every day for a few days, I feel it's safe now to pronounce my cold-processed soap a success. There are a few things I'll change next time--I probably should have pared all of my bars before I cured them, because I'm not in love with their lumpy tops compared to their knife-straight sides and bottoms, and, it might be my nasty cold talking, but I'm also not in love with the way that the lavender-spearmint essential oils cured. It smells almost too sweet, now. On the whole, however, I'm definitely making soap again, and soon.

I did end up liking the soap I molded in my silicon heart molds----but not liking the soap molded in my silicon Lego mold. I think that spells the death knell for the Lego molds, therefore, because I didn't like it with crayons or glycerin soap or even muffins, either, and after a good scrubbing you'll likely see the big and the small Lego molds up for a few bucks in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

For this batch of soap I used a kit and recipe bought from The Kitchen Girls. Although I'm grateful that I had the kit the first time, to sort of baby me through, I won't be using that recipe again or buying another kit. Instead, here is a selection of the library soapmaking tomes currently residing in my house:

Out of these, I think that I'm going to use a basic cold-process soap recipe from The Soapmaker's Companion--perhaps the Soap Essentials recipe, or the hemp soap recipe, or the sunflower oil soap recipe--but make it without essential oils or dried herbs.

The independent hardware stores (but not the big-box ones) have the lye that I need, and I'm hoping that I can get most of the oils, the olive and coconut and whatever, either from a sort-of nearby restaurant supply warehouse that might have super-low-grade olive oil and such, or from Sam's Club. Whatever I can't get locally, Scott at Barefoot Kids said he could order online for me, and Barefoot Kids already has all the dried herbs I'd want to use in their brick-and-mortar.

After my basic cold-processed soap has cured, however, I think that I'm going to try hand-milling that soap in small batches (this is also called rebatching) to make the scented, herb-infused specialty bars that I want. There's a great Homestead Blessings DVD tutorial for this, if you can get past the denim skirts and gender role stereotyping and blessings of the Lord stuff, which I pretty well can if I'm in the right mood. Rebatching will keep the essential oils from altering their scent like they did with my cold-process experiment, and I like the idea of being able to make a single bar at a time of whatever random stuff I take it into my head to make soap out of.

Since rebatching also avoids the possibility of lye exposure (unless you messed up your soap in the first place), I'm thinking that's how I'll be able to include the girls in my soapmaking.

Although they do make a mean melt-and-pour glycerin bar already.

Talk to the Hand Turkeys

2009-11-18T13:46:00.005-05:00

I still have papers to grade and children to give an after-school snack to and two more classes tonight to teach, not to mention meals to prep and a house to clean and other miscellaneous nonsense to look after, but my biggest accomplishment today so far has been Christmas shopping at the Wonderlab. I always buy from them during this week every year, when they double the member discount in their gift shop. And thus I am now the proud owner of two large bouncy balls full of glitter and snowglobe stuff (for little stockings), two small bouncy balls full of glitter and snowglobe stuff (for a future holiday--Easter, perhaps?), a farm magnet playset and a horse show magnet playset (for little stockings), a dinosaur magnet playset and an ocean magnet playset (for the next plane trip, whenever that may be), and a magnet playset of tangram mosaic tiles (to be set exactly between little stockings for sharing, because it was expensive).

Combined with the summer sale at Learning Treasures, which provided my secret stash of miniature chalkboards, dot painters, and blank books; the local comic book shop, where I bought a few Owly comic books; a friend's Usborne book party, where I bought a couple of sticker books; the Chronicle book summer sale, at which I bought a couple of very nice puzzles; and Daiso, where I bought some Japanese magnets and other tchotchkes, the little-girl present closet is full. I pull from that closet for holidays, long trips, and anytime a little girl has to go to the emergency room. We're still on the look-out for a full-size electric piano keyboard (suitable for piano lessons) for both girls and a Willow-sized bicycle for Willow, but those big-ticket items will have to wait until fate thrusts them, second-hand and reasonably-priced, into our path.

To add to the festivity of the secret shopping day (after spending the morning at the Wonderlab with the girls, I dropped them off at school and then went back to the Wonderlab to shop, mwa-ha-ha!), I encouraged the girls to make hand turkeys this morning while I drank coffee and read the newspaper.

Willow's turkey

Sydney's turkey

I scanned these, cropped them to 4"x5", and I'm going to print them and use them to make Thanksgiving cards for the girls to send to some friends and family this weekend. I keep a sort of list, so wherever they get bored and are finished scrawling "HAPPY THANKSGIVING" and their name at will be where they pick up with handmade Christmas cards, and wherever they get bored at with Christmas cards will be where we pick up with Valentines, and if you don't make it by Valentine's Day, you basically have to wait until next winter for a handmade card.

In other news, check out my awesome little cousin. He's a tuba playa in a marching band, an art form that I don't exactly get. It's a hold-out from the Civil War, I think, when formation fighting was incredibly important, and has simply been translated, through the centuries, into formation musical instrument-playing:
The flag corps and the liturgical dancers I can't integrate at all into my theory.

And Then We File Them Away Neatly

2009-11-17T21:31:00.004-05:00

I have no context for the following picture, except to note that this is my typical view when blogging or editing photos or writing lesson plans, or otherwise attempting to work on my computer: Picture the computer keyboard directly under the cat (whose name is Ballantine), madly pinging away with irrelevant commands, or perhaps picture the cat lying directly on top of one hand trying to type on the keyboard. If it's morning, change the location to the living room library table and insert an opened newspaper in its usual place directly under the cat, with the most interesting article on the page being the piece of the paper most obscured. This is how the cat ensures that I still love her, even though I have two human children, as well.

In other news, the girls and I have been goofing around a bit lately with our newest novelty--file folder games. We first saw the link to the free file folder games web site on Chasing Cheerios, but we've since become fans in our own right, downloading and printing out and making far more elaborate (vintage wallpaper and plastic laminate are required for nearly every paper craft that occurs in this house, apparently) quite a few of the games, including an alphabetical order game that uses pumpkins for Sydney and an animal alphabet set for Willow to spell with. There are plenty of math games on the site, as well, which I'm excited about because that's the subject that I feel like I'm the least likely to offer casual daily enrichment for the girls in.

Making and playing with the file folder games has served to get the girls interested in their assortment of paper and laminated paper games and playsets again, everything from simple laminated alphabet letters or animal silhouettes to play with, to a large variety of matching games--
--to the various puzzles or other activities that we've downloaded and then personalized together:

I've come up with a neat idea for a child-made matching game that I'm going to try out with the girls this week. If it works, I'm hoping we can use it for Christmas gifts for little cousins, and I'll post a tutorial and perhaps a template for the benefit of all the other little cousins out there in the world.

But the best thing that this new interest has led us to is a vastly better organizational system for these paper-based activities. Previously, I'd been storing each activity or set in a Ziploc bag on a shelf in the girls' room, where it soon gets lost and/or forgotten about. However, these file folder games naturally beg for a hanging file box to store them, and it was then an easy task to round up all these other playthings and assign them to file folders in the bin, as well. And THEN I moved each of the girls' random activity pages (nearly all of them from the free Dover samples that I get each week) from clear plastic bins to folders in the file box, so that now they take up less room!

I've read about some homeschooling families, unschoolers usually, who never have their kids do "worksheets." I even read one book by an unschooling mom, I forget which (tell me, anybody, if you recognize it from the story I'm about to tell), in which anytime one of her children asked to go to public school she'd give them some worksheets to sit down and do quietly, and they'd soon realize from this that homeschooling was way better.

I'm sorry, but I think that's messed up. Mind you, we're not homeschoolers, much less unschoolers, but we LOVE worksheets over here. I love crosswords and puzzles and brain teasers, and my kids love worksheets and activity pages and copy pages and sheets of math problems and whatever else they can do. I mean, I don't enjoy sitting and filling out my taxes or medical forms in triplicate or anything, but seriously, who doesn't love a challenging worksheet?

They're good for your brains, my friends. They keep you from getting Alzheimer's.

Super Etsy

2009-11-15T13:32:00.004-05:00

Sometimes good product shots require more than one photo shoot, I've mentioned. So after school on Friday, I drove the girls over to the ginormous playground at Lower Cascades Park, and put the superhero capes that I wanted to sell on them before saying, "Go play."

It was perfect weather, in a perfect playground, and we happened to stumble upon a group of some mom aquaintances meeting there (including the blogger behind Blog Schmog, if you're familiar with that one), so the girls even had a few playmates that they knew to frolic with.

I snuck in probably the barest minimum of what you could even generously call "product" shots, but I figure the most important things for potential customers to see, anyway, are how much freakin' fun it is to play with superpowers:

For a while when the girls were babies I had this thing for collecting fleece baby blankets--they were just so simple and so practical, and you could pick them up for a song at thrift stores--and I accumulated quite a few, none of which I would part with no matter how many times Matt would suggest that the babies were no longer babies anymore.

I'm glad I'm a packrat, because fleece baby blankets are PERFECT for superhero capes. Seriously, perfect. Although only the blue with polka dots fleece superhero cape and the patchwoork with elephant applique superhero cape are up right now in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, I do have several other cool blankies in the line-up, but the absolutely most coolest thing that I'm trying out in my shop is a listing for a custom superhero cape from a kid's own outgrown fleece blankie. I'm hoping that other people might think, like I do, that transforming a kid's old baby blanket into a superhero cape for them to treasure all over again is a fun idea.

I'm also trying out offering a free monogram on each cape (using my good old upholstery swatchbook, of course), although I'll have to remove that aspect from my listings if I get as busy before Christmas as I'd like to be.

I have a couple of other things that I want to kick into gear for my pumpkinbear etsy shop in the next few days--an ad spot on Craftster, some more listings, a coupon for my shop available to Craft Knife followers--but for now I'm going to bake a strawberry half-cake and grill some halves of veggie dogs and Amy's burgers.

Because, as a certain baby will tell you, she is, after all, three-and-a-half years old.

I Glued More Things to My House

2009-11-14T21:27:00.003-05:00

Searching for something novel the little girls could make for a friend's birthday party today, I dragged down my first-generation Crayola Crayon Maker from a high, high shelf and showed them how to use it. I never really found the crayon maker that fun or satisfying to use (hence its years-long residence on the high, high shelf)--I think it's fiddly, painfully slow, and prone to error.

The girls, however? Fascinated:
And in all honesty, other than having to seal the crayon mold with duct tape each time to keep the liquid crayons from leaking through the leaky crevices, the crayon maker does still work as advertised, and Will and Syd could work it independently from start to finish--isn't that the main benefit to the light bulb line of craft toys?

And yes, I put it back on a much lower shelf today, to facilitate easier child access.

In other news, I've been gluing things to my house again:
I scored a huge swatchbook of vintage wallpaper at the Upcycle Exchange during Strange Folk, and after discovering (by means of trashing my Cricut cutting mat) that it's all waaaaaaay too brittle to craft with, I decided to decoupage it to the built-in bookshelves in one living room wall.

I know it looks kind of crazy--

--but for me, really, it's rather sedate. First of all, the bookshelves are small, so it's a controlled explosion. Second, all the wallpaper swatches come from the same book, so their colors and patterns are largely complementary. Third, since the living room walls and trim are blue, I just used the wallpaper swatches in the blue color scheme. And fourth, the two shelves done up with florals are moderated by two shelves done up in non-florals.

See? I'm practically falling asleep, it's so sedate.

P.S. In case you, too, want to ruin your house's resale value (as if that hasn't already been taken care of for you), here's my tutorial for vintage wallpaper decoupage over at Crafting a Green World.

More Than One Photo Shoot is Usually Necessary

2009-11-12T19:24:00.003-05:00

In preparation for a big update in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, I've spent the past couple of days taking tons and tons of photos of my stuff, glorying in still being able to take sunny outdoor shots, however chilly, before the long winter of grey indoor shots comes into play (my big winter plan is to build an indoor photo studio, btw).

Etsy photo shoots are a lot of work, especially with two little helpers--a half dozen photos here, before pushing the girls on the swings and then heading home for lunch, a half dozen photos there, in a sunny spot on the back deck just before the baby melts down, a half dozen photos on a pretty brick wall that we pass while walking to campus one afternoon. I generally have to utilize careful cropping, or a generous amount of retakes.

For instance, in this photo of a blue and polka-dotted superhero cape that I'm going to hopefully put up in the shop tomorrow (and offer a free upholstery fabric monogram with it, for as long as I have time to make them and mail them before Christmas, so tell your friends!), I meant for you to see Will running around and enjoying the cape and acting all super in it:I did not, of course, mean for you to see that she's running around and acting all super in Rose Hill Cemetery, where we found ourselves YET AGAIN late this afternoon after gymnastics:
I swear, I cannot stay away from that place. I wonder how the caretakers feel about people camping there?

Duct Tape Removes Warts

2009-11-11T21:26:00.002-05:00

Y'all, don't think bad about me, but I used to have a wart. It's gone now, but it was totally gross. Just ask Matt--I was all the time showing it to him and saying things like, "This is so gross, look at it!"

It was a plantar's wart, I think, and smack on the bottom of my foot, which tells me that I need to start wearing sandals when I go to the public swimming pool, and it was crazy-painful to walk on, so much so that I was actually popping ibuprofin every morning just to take the edge off.

I tried that over-the-counter wart removal stuff, which just peeled away a bunch of skin which then callused and became even more painful to walk on, and I tried the doctor's office, where a physician's assistant froze it but told me that freezing didn't always work and told me to use duct tape.

And so let me tell you--duct tape is the business. You put the duct tape on to cover your wart, and then every now and then you rip it off and put on a new piece. You can leave the tape off for a while every now and then to let your skin rest, and the whole process does take a while. But it absolutely works.

Nothing happened for a couple of days after I started putting the duct tape over the wart on my foot, but then, on like day three, all these other tiny little warts suddenly started erupting all around the original wart--my theory is that this was other places where the virus was embedded in my skin, and the duct tape was just bringing them all to the surface at once, instead of one-by-one over time for the rest of my freakin' life.

Some people say that the wart will turn black and then fall off with the duct tape, but this isn't what happened with me. All the little warts, and the larger plantar's wart, turned to dead, callused skin, and then, every time I peeled off the duct tape, I would also take off some of this skin. Sometimes the tape would peel off a huge, thick chunk of skin, basically showing how deeply the wart had been embedded--seriously, it was crazy-deep, you should ask Matt--and then leave this huge crater in the bottom of my foot. It was disgusting. And also awesome.

The duct tape didn't hurt, although I've actually been trying this process on Willow, now, for a plantar's wart that she also has on the bottom of her foot, and she doesn't like it when the tape peels off part of the wart, although I think that it may just be the unpleasant sensation of peeling skin that she's reacting to, not actually pain. And it's working on her just the same, although I'm taking my time with the process and letting her foot have plenty of time away from the duct tape, as well.

And when we've used up all our duct tape on all our weird and disgusting skin ailments? I kind of want to make us some commemmorative duct tape roll bangles.

Walking on warts makes feet sore, so we both liked warm footbaths with tons of apple cider vinegar and a generous amount of tea tree oil and epsom salts, as well. But what doesn't a nice, warm footbath cure?

In other news, the girls and I have been spending an oddly large amount of time at cemeteries lately:

I've gotten really into photographing old headstones, because I'm weird and weird people have weird hobbies, apparently. I love looking at the entire landscape of an older cemetery, however--I mean, doesn't that photo above remind you of a sort of post-modern Stonehenge, with the huge chunks of limestone all skewed and plunked down into the green grass?

Once after visiting Stonehenge, I planned this elaborate hiking trip to visit all the mysterious standing stones all around the countryside in Great Britain. And then I grew up and got less weird, but I think I'm cycling back around to more weird again, so perhaps that trip will make it back on my to-do list someday soon.

Super Girls

2009-11-10T21:52:00.002-05:00

One of my biggest pet peeves is parents who throw a birthday party for their child and say, "No presents, please."

Dude, it's not your grandpa's sixtieth birthday party--let your four-year-old get the prezzies!

Perhaps I'll feel differently when the girls are older and there's a birthday party every week (although there nearly has been for the past couple of months), but frankly, I have ALWAYS loved to get gifts for kids. When my baby cousin Katie was born I was all of nineteen, and I vividly remember having the best time picking her out a little outfit with watermelons on it at Gymboree. I remember how awesome I felt when I scored my little cousin Zack's most coveted Rescue Hero toy for Christmas, hidden behind some less popular toys on a shelf at Wal-mart. Another time I bought him a stuffed hedgehog that could really roll up into a ball, and I bought Katie teeny-tiny little panties with hearts on them at Baby Gap, and once Matt and I went in together on a cool little batting machine that had Zack throwing a tantrum by 11:00 am on Christmas morning because he couldn't hit the freakin' ball.

I've coalesced my present-buying strategy a bit over the years, into one in which I no longer actually buy presents, and I get an even bigger kick out of it. Last Christmas, with Matt's help, I made Katie a set of bookmarks with quotes from the Twilight books on them, and I made Zack a redneck T-shirt quilt--John Deere logos, and Gone Fishin' illustrations, and a lot of camouflage. This year Katie has requested a T-shirt quilt made from her own T-shirts, and Zack's present is still a secret, but can you say Tuba Playa?

Anyway, I don't attempt nearly that level of meaning when I make presents for the girls' little friends on their birthdays, but a five-year-old is a five-year-old, and they all like pretty much the same stuff. I've made buntings for kids, and crayon rolls, and play dough, but for Willow's bestest little friend's birthday this weekend, a friend who has been a bestie for enough holidays that I do believe I've already given her a bunting and a crayon roll AND some homemade play dough, a new awesomeness was in order:
I'm super-excited, because I have been wanting to make the girls superhero capes for EVER. It took a while to figure out a pattern that pleased me (it's all about putting the proper angles on the trapezoid), and it took even longer to figure out the kind of closure that I wanted, but I think I nailed it. The capes are a little on the narrow side, the better to keep out of kids' ways, because the lamest thing around is to be flying around all super and to get caught in your stupid voluminous cape. But the closure? The closure?

Let me tell you about the closure.

I thought about ties, and these work pretty well because you can do them loosely, but I don't know a single kid who can tie her own shoelace, much less her own cape under her chin. Snaps are a sure-fire way to get a kid to hang herself from a tree limb or a chimney post or something, and Velcro? I dislike sewing Velcro, although I will under duress.

Instead I, and this is brilliant, used super-stretchy narrow elastic, stretchy enough that a kid can actually pull the cape on over her head, and stretchy enough that if she did snag herself on a fence, there'd be plenty of give to get herself untangled. Hello, Montessori independence!

So yes, one for my girl, and one for my other girl, and one for a little friend whose party is next weekend, and one for the little bestie, which looks like this:

It's monogrammed with her initial on it in upholstery remnant fabric (washed on the sanitary cycle first and hot-dried, because there will be no running dye on my watch), and on top of it are resting the girls' presents. A few months ago, feeling like I was sort of bogarting the whole birthday present business by taking it upon myself to make the present for each of their friends myself, I made up a rule for them:

When attending a friend's birthday party, my child must do one of the following:

Buy the friend a present with her own money (the only money around is earned by doing chores, mwa-ha-ha!).
Make the friends a present with things found around the house.
Give the friend something of her own.

And that's why Willow bought her friend, with money earned sorting laundry, a set of Halloween yo-yos and a Christmas candy, and Sydney gave her the yellow ball with sparkles in it that is almost her favorite toy.

A super birthday, then, for a super friend. And I am absolutely going to stock my etsy shop this week with some capes made from fleece blankies, with the option of a free upholstery remnant monogram, and perhaps I could have done that today, but I didn't.The super girls had some super stunts to do over at the park, you see, so we were far too busy for money-making.

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

2009-11-09T21:36:00.002-05:00

I am not enjoying teaching right now, or grading papers, or dealing with the idiot student who thought it would be a good idea to steal some other idiot student's paper and pass it off as his own and now I have to fill out paperwork and meet with the Director of Composition and THEN meet with this student to give him his big fat F in my class before I can give papers back to any of my other students, and if you think those students are happy to have their grades delayed then, boy, you don't know students these days.

When do you think I'll get a nationally-mandated minimum wage for being a committed stay-at-home parent who engages my children and exposes them to enrichment opportunities and cooks them nourishing meals and constantly strives to do better by them? Cause I'd really like to stop moonlighting with these college students--they'd rather be moonlighting somewhere else as well, anyway.

In other news, my own happy kids are rockin' their own school, as usual. One of the sweeter traditions, in a classroom full of sweet rituals and traditions (don't take my word for it--the Montessori birthday ritual is gorgeous everywhere), is to have each child draw a self-portrait twice a year, just before the fall and spring parent/teacher conferences. The work table has a mirror set up in front of it, and blank paper and colored pencils, and the older children (and even the youngest ones, by the spring self-portrait), add a sort of handwriting sampler at the bottom. It's a fascinating look at how a child sees herself, and fascinating how that perception evolves over the months and the years.

I posted Willow's self-portrait at four years and ten months, and so here is her self-portrait at five years and nearly four months: Such an evolution in that kid!

Now, it's possible that Sydney didn't quite understand the purpose of the self-portrait work, since this is her first time, but frankly, I think she understood it quite well, and thus I think that her self-portrait is a pretty clear reflection of who my kid is inside:Yep, that's my kid. Her sister is introspective, socially cautious, and very concerned with understanding the social script of any situation. Sydney, however, is an extrovert who craves attention, and is extremely socially clever, particularly in regards to manipulating situations to achieve an optimum outcome. At the parent/teacher conferences Matt discovered, through shrewd questioning, that the two sub-teachers in the girls' classroom have apparently been unwittingly letting Sydney basically do nothing in the classroom except wander around and hang out. One teacher tells Sydney to hang up her coat. Sydney looks at her blankly, so the teacher demonstrates the activity, in the process hanging up her coat for her. This happens every single day. The other teacher demonstrates a new work to Sydney, and then asks if she'd like to try it. She says no. This happens every single time.

"She's very observant," noted one teacher.

"Observant, my butt. A Montessori classroom is not a cocktail party. It's an experiential education lab, and it's very expensive. Get the kid playing with something."

They promised they would.

We Habitually Paint in the Nude

2009-11-07T19:01:00.003-05:00

Actually, I don't paint in the nude. I habitually remain fully clothed the majority of the time. Ask Matt--it's one of his biggest pet peeves that I wear clothes to bed, for Pete's sake--and you get a better idea about the sort of nudists that I'm related to over here.

And that's why, even though I wore my painting shirt and painting pants when I repainted the trim on one living room wall this Friday, and even though I have made my daughters smocks and aprons from T-shirts and their previous artistic endeavors have resulted in an ample number of clothing for them that could be described as "painting" clothes, Willow painted like this:
and Sydney painted like this:
And yes, they're painting with the same interior wall paint that I'm painting with at the time, but I did come to my senses enough to convince them to paint on the backs of old record album covers on top of newspaper on the floor--we are going to be making legitimate wall photo frames from cardboard record albums covers (feel free to look forward to the forthcoming tutorial), but I doubt that these particular covers will make the cut, since the girls were vastly more interested in exploring this new wall paint medium by smearing it as much as possible over as much as possible. Skip ahead to the dual shower, because it was inevitable.

But of course that's not all: later that night I asked Matt to finish some touch-up painting while I put the girls to bed (one chapter of Little House in the Big Woods followed by one twenty-minute episode of Meerkat Manor on Netflix, followed by me sitting in the dark in a chair next to the bed, playing Pandora while goofing off on the Internet and waiting for a harmony of deep breathing), only to emerge an hour later to this: Matt pretends like he doesn't have any painting clothes, you see, because when he paints nearly naked he gets his hands dirty AND you can see more of his muscles: win-win for all concerned.

But lest you think that all I had to entertain me during my long day of wall-painting were a couple of games of The Roving Workman and the Lonely Housewife, rest assured:

If you can paint the trim around a wall, you sure as hell can paint criss-crossing stripes all over that wall between the trim. And if your husband objects, hand him the paintbrush and tell him to pretend he's the roving workman again.

Finding My Photography a Home

2009-11-05T09:53:00.002-05:00

Well, it's not even really photography. I mean, some of it is--I have a whole set of the alphabet created from photographs of cemetery headstones that I'm working on this week--but most of my printwork consists of handwork pieces scanned at super-high resolution and cropped and color-corrected in my usual photography workflow.

What do you call that? Mixed media? Still life? No idea.

Anyway, with my vintage buttons alphabet I've had several download options available on my pumpkinbear etsy shop for a while now, but for a while now I've also been looking for some good print-on-demand options. My printer has good color and tone, and I'm reasonably happy about using it to print stuff for myself, and especially using it hard to print on freezer paper and fabric and whatever (knowing that if I do eventually break it from making it print on something weird, I'll get to buy myself a new one, yay), but I'm not confident enough in the durability or stability of its work to print so much as a greeting card for a friend with it, much less an art print or something to sell. At two different craft fairs this year, the same woman wanted to buy some prints I'd made for the girls and just had on display, and I was all, "Um...no."

I also don't particularly desire, anyway, to make or buy prints of my work and then sell them--my overall goals in life as well as crafting are to sell stuff and get rid of stuff, not buy stuff and then keep it on hand hoping to sell it later on.

So, yeah. Print-on-demand.

I decided (finally) to try out ImageKind, because I lurve their main company, CafePress--it's another overall goal of mine to someday woo my overworked graphic designer husband into putting some of his cooler free-time sketches on CafePress, but strangely enough, he balks at being stretched too thin.

After much futzing and fiddling, I got a profile (I'm Pumpkinbear there, of course), and a gallery of my vintage button alphabet:

I mostly imagine it being used for its high-quality printing process on greeting cards and notecards and postcards, but I have to admit that it is pretty fun to play around with all the high-priced matting and framing possibilities, and then get a preview of the fanciness that can be had for just a couple hundred dollars:

High-falutin', huh? And I'm quite happy to have this checked off of my to-do list, because now that I have a place to put them, I get to start on some other pieces that I've been wanting to start on...

Don't you love how completion of a to-do list leads to another to-do list?

Babies in Diapers, Babies on Film

2009-11-03T13:52:00.002-05:00

Babies in diapers sitting:
Babies in diapers fleeing:Babies in diapers with Velcro:

Babies in diapers with snaps:

Babies in diapers getting bribed with whatever I have around to bribe them with:

I did a little photo shoot over at Barefoot Kids this weekend for a cloth diapering tutorial that I'm writing up. It made me realize that just as I didn't take enough photos of my baby girls breastfeeding, I didn't take nearly enough photos of them in their comfy cloth diapers. I still have a few of their diapers for my teaching stash, but not any of my own handmade wool recovers (what did I do with those? Who was so awesome that I gave them my own wool recovers, and yet so un-awesome that I don't even remember anymore?), and I have absolutely zero breastfeeding mementos, although to be honest, I NEVER, NEVER WANT TO SEE MY OLD NURSING BRAS AGAIN!!! I didn't even try to pass them on, or take off the bands or the elastic or the snaps to re-use. I JUST THREW THEM IN THE TRASH!!!

To be fair, I was nursing one to two people continuously from 2004-2009, so those bras and I were done with each other by the time Sydney weaned herself.

And also? You should totally see my new bras. Underwires and everything.