I Glued More Things to My House

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 Wallpaper on the Wall

Buntings are on my mind for some reason. Here's my newest vintage wallpaper bunting in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, made with my much-treasured vintage wallpaper and my much-, much-treasured vintage beads:

While I'm on the subject, I also have in mind buntings made from comic books, buntings made from dictionary pages, buntings made from Shakespeare, and child-decorated buntings.

I like where this is going.

DIY Treat-Filled Paper Easter Eggs To Send To Your Daughters in College

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

These treat-filled paper Easter eggs are a low-waste way to celebrate!

Of COURSE I still make my college kids Easter baskets! I mean, they may be away at school and having grown-up adventures, but they still like candy and LEGOs!

However, while even plastic Easter eggs are okay for a kid’s Easter basket, since they’re used year after year, I can’t get behind mailing high-waste holiday packaging to someone living in a dorm room. I don’t want to spend the money and space mailing it, and my kids don’t want to figure out what to do with it after the two seconds it takes to open it and eat the candy.

My favorite solution? Upcycled and easily recyclable PAPER!!!

It comes entirely from my stash (which means it’s something I’m actively trying to get rid of, ahem–recovering craft supply hoarder checking in!), it’s lightweight and easy to mail, and the kids can pop it into the recycling, sans guilt.

Here’s what you’ll need to craft your own treat-filled, guilt-free, easily recyclable paper Easter eggs:

Materials

• paper. The papers I upcycled for this project are pretty enough to be Easter eggs, but it honestly doesn’t even matter if they’re ugly because the important part is the candy! I used old scrapbook paper and vintage wallpaper samples, but I also had some old sheet music that I was eyeing. Book pages would be cute, or if you’ve got little kids at home, put them to work coloring in some Easter egg designs onto white paper.
• candy. Choose something that won’t get stale, if you’re also putting these into a care package. Jellybeans are a good choice, although just between us, I didn’t really like the ones you can see in the photos. I thought they’d taste like gummy clusters, darn it! Starburst jellybeans forever!
• needle and thread. I used my sewing machine for all the stitching in this project, but it could also easily be hand-stitched. A running stitch would work great!

Step 1: Trace an Easter egg template.

You can of course hand-draw an Easter egg template, but I generally just do a Google Image search. Place a piece of white paper directly onto the screen over the image you’d like to trace, and then trace it in pencil. Don’t use a pen or marker, no matter what, because we don’t want marker on our computer screens!

The template I’m using in this project is 5″ long, which is just the right size to comfortably hold 20 jellybeans. If you want to put in a different amount of treats, size up or down accordingly.

Step 2: Cut two paper Easter egg pieces per Easter egg.

Trace your template onto paper, then cut two paper Easter eggs for each finished Easter egg that you want to have.

The image above contains some Easter eggs made of scrapbook paper and some of vintage wallpaper samples.

Step 3: Sew the eggs almost all the way around.

If you’re sewing this on a machine, switch to an older needle since sewing through paper doesn’t do a sewing machine needle any favors. Set your machine to its longest straight stitch. If you’re hand-sewing, any thread works, but embroidery floss is very pretty!

Put the two Easter egg pieces together PRETTY SIDES OUT! I forgot to do this once and was very annoyed at myself, grr.

Start near the end of one of the longer sides, then sew a scant 1/4″ stitch about 75% of the way around the egg. Don’t backstitch at the start or end of your stitch line, since in my experience this tends to tear, or at least wrinkle, the paper.

Stop your line of stitching near the top of that same long edge where you started, giving yourself plenty of room to fill the Easter egg with treats. Again, don’t backstitch, but instead just gently remove the Easter egg from the machine.

Step 4: Fill the Easter egg with treats.

The stitched ends that make the opening will be a little unstable without the backstitching, so just be mindful as you gently open up the Easter egg and fill it with candies. There’s enough candy inside when the Easter egg looks full but you can still put the paper back together at the opening neatly. If the Easter egg is overstuffed, the paper will overlap unevenly, so just take candy out piece by piece until the opening is smooth.

Step 5: Finish sewing the Easter egg closed.

Carefully put the two pieces of Easter egg back together evenly, then finish sewing it closed. You’ll reinforce those unstable thread ends by starting your stitching several stitches before the opening, and ending it several stitches after the opening.

Your paper Easter eggs are now so pretty, and they hold so many nice treats!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Matt's Anniversary Present: A Smash Book

It's been fifteen years since I, a sophisticated junior at TCU, looked at that cute but goofy freshman at Mike McCaffrey's Anti-Valentine's Day party and thought, "Hmmm...I think I'm going to trick that boy into thinking that it's his idea to go out with me."

And the rest is history, the history of kids and cats and cross-country moves and used cars and visits to the beach and drinking margaritas and watching way too much sci-fi together.

To celebrate fifteen years together, I defaced a vintage children's book, because nothing says "Happy Anniversary!" quite like graffiti and hot glue:

a Before picture: I found a coloring page from "The Last Unicorn" for Syd to color. It's an inside joke that all I did as a child was watch a bunch of weird, dark cartoons, and inappropriate 80s-era comedies that were on HBO, and it's my mission to introduce Matt to all of them

for a while at IU, until they changed their budgetary policies to both boot me out of my associate instructor position (and thus, indirectly, out of grad school) and forbid Matt to work any additional jobs in the university at all other than his current one, he and I did a comic together for the student newspaper. Our friends all appeared, and our parents, and our cats. It's one of my all-time favorite things that I've ever done

The year before we got pregnant with Willow, Matt and went on this CRAZY road trip across three-quarters of the United States. Seriously, we were gone practically a month! We almost got arrested on a beach literally five minutes after getting there, and we kept having to sleep in the car, and we'd eat in these freaky buffets all the time because then we could be full enough to not have to have another meal that day, and I brought along all these travel memoirs of couples that we could read to each other as we drove, but in every single memoir the experience of travel basically destroyed each couple's marriage, and we saw everything in the entire world, it felt like

Matt's introduced me to every awesome graphic novel ever written, except I stopped reading this particular one below when it got really rapey

 Fifteen years is kind of hilarious, because when I look back at those photos from when we were dating, we look like babies

Like this photo of us with our friends. We're babies! We're in my first apartment, which I first shared with this guy friend of mine who later went kind of schizo, accused me of slamming my car door into his every time we were parked next to each other (which I didn't do) AND of replacing his gigantic bottle of Pert Plus with a giant bottle of hand lotion (which I also didn't do) AND sent this threatening letter to my parents telling them that he was going to sue me if I didn't pay him back $250 for all the D&D books that he'd left in the apartment when he finally moved out AND he put a password on our telephone account in secret before he moved so that he could switch the account for free and I had to pay to set up a new account AND he stole that old gold velvet and horsehair couch that we bought together without even asking for it. I loved that couch!!!

I asked the girls to draw pictures of all of us, and to write down some reasons why they love their Daddy. The reasons for both girls generally revolved around activities such as wrestling and treat-buying

I had to look the word "occasion" up in the dictionary, because all of a sudden I couldn't remember how to spell it 

 paint, glue colored with acrylics, text printed onto photo paper, a fussy-cut piece of vintage wallpaper, and LOTS of glitter

more text on photo paper, and vintage sheet music with a few applicable phrases circled in Prismacolor marker

and the cover, which is just a glory of random stuff--paint, stencils, paper doilies, die-cuts, twine, Sharpie, and a few images from the ill-fated original book left uncovered

It was so pleasant to put this book together that I finally understand why some crafters spend so much time scrapbooking rather than performing more reasonable activities like, you know, making skirts out of pillowcases or finding weird ways to dye play dough. The physical present was for Matt, sure, but the real treat was for me, spending weeks reliving all the happy memories of our fifteen years together, suddenly making realizations along the lines of "Hey, Matt has NEVER done his share of the dishes!"

He's always been good at presents, though (except for that fake opal ring in San Antonio business--who the hell gives his girlfriend of three years a fake opal ring on the trip that they're taking to San Antonio to celebrate being together for three years? Don't you think that when you've been dating for three years, and you're on a special anniversary trip, on VALENTINE'S DAY for Pete's sake, and you hand a girl a ring box, and inside it is a fake opal ring, and it's not even a fake opal engagement ring, just a generic fake opal ring, that she might not react with pleasure and gratitude?!?). This year for our anniversary Matt bought ME a panini press, because he knows I'm a big nerd who wants to make paninis all the time.

Seriously, don't you want to come over for breakfast today? I'm making cream cheese, chocolate chip, and banana paninis, and if you stay for lunch I'll even make you a turkey bologna and mozzarella panini. For dinner it's pulled pork and avocado paninis, with strawberry, cream cheese, and powdered sugar paninis for dessert.

DIY Decoupaged Wall Plates

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

You’ll have the prettiest, most mitchy-matchy wall plates with this easy upgrade!

The cheap plastic wall plates that cover every light switch and outlet in my house are also veeeerrrrrry old, which is obvious from their dingy off-white color.

Unless interior designers in the 1980s were super into everything looking like it smoked two packs a day?

Yes, new wall plates are cheap, and even cute wall plates are pretty cheap. But that’s part of the problem, because even if I donated my gross old wall plates and bought cute new ones, nobody is going to then buy *my* chainsmoker-chic outlet covers and light switch plates when they can also buy cute new ones for just a few cents more!

The good news is that I’m not dealing with any of that nonsense. Instead, I decoupaged my wall plates, and they now look awesome and, most importantly, like they’ve never touched a single cigarette in their entire lives!

Decoupaging a wall plate is one of the simplest DIY projects there is, and even simpler if you’ve ever done any kind of papercrafting. But even if you haven’t, this project is SO easy that it’s pretty much impossible to mess up.

Here’s how to decoupage yourself a new outlet cover or light switch plate!

Step 1: Source your materials–especially terrific paper!

For this project, you will need:

• wall plates, squeaky clean and dry. Oils from fingers can disrupt proper adhesion of the glue, so wash your wall plates with dish soap and water, then let dry. And don’t forget that safety always comes first! Cracked or undersized wall plates absolutely DO need to be replaced.
• paper. This is going to be the star of the show! ANY paper that can handle glue will work for this project. Scrapbook paper is fine, but so are old book or magazine pages, sheet music, or anything with a similar weight. For this particular project, I’m using vintage wallpaper samples from a sample book I thrifted once upon a time. I never really found a great use for the contents of the carpet sample book I thrifted at the same time, but I have used the snot out of that wallpaper sample book over the years!
• Mod Podge. Any PVA glue can be substituted, because you’ll be sealing the decoupaged plate separately, regardless.
• water-based polyurethane. I spray clean and disinfect my light switch covers, so I need a beefier sealant than Mod Podge. I love to keep a quart can of water-based polyurethane kicking around my supply closet at all times to serve all my sealant-based needs!
• scissors, craft knife, and awl. You can use a sharpened pencil instead of the awl, but you can’t get by without the scissors and the craft knife.

Step 2: Glue the front of the plate to the back of the paper.

It will feel upside down, but I think the paper adheres more evenly if I lay it face down on the table, coat the front of the wall plate with glue, and rest it face down on top of the paper.

Press evenly on the back of the plate to make sure that the entire front is adhered, then flip it over and use your fingers to smooth out any bubbles by coaxing them off the edge of the plate.

Finish by trimming the extra paper away from the plate, making sure that you leave enough around the edges to cover the sides of the plate.

If you’re doing proper decoupage by adding additional layers of paper or cut-outs or other embellishments, you can wait and do it as the last step before sealing the finished plate.

Step 3: Cover the sides of the plate.

When you trimmed extra paper away in the previous step, you left enough to cover the sides of the plate. One side at a time, coat the back of the paper with glue, then use your fingers to press it down and mold it to the narrow side of the plate. Don’t tuck it under the back–you can trim any extra again after the glue dries.

Each additional side you work on will require you to fold the edge of the preceding side’s paper under, just like you’re wrapping a present. When you get to the last side, you’ll need to fold both edges under, so add extra glue as necessary.

Step 4: Cut open the holes for the light switches or outlets.

You’re also going to cover the interior sides of these openings with paper, but it will be easy!

Face the plate down on top of a self-healing cutting mat, then use the craft knife to cut through the paper covering each opening as if you’re cutting pie. If your opening is rectangular, you can get away with four slices of pie, but if your opening is circular, you’ll want to cut it into more slices.

Coat the back of the paper with glue, then use your fingers to fold each paper pie slice neatly over the side and to the back of the plate.

Trim as needed to avoid covering any screw holes.

And speaking of those screw holes…

Step 5: Open up the screw holes.

From the back side of the plate, use the sharp tip of the awl or a sharpened pencil to make a tiny pinprick or dent in the paper covering each screw hole, then from the front use the same tool to poke a proper hole. No glue needed!

Step 6: Seal the wall plate.

Follow the directions on your glue package for the drying and curing time of the glue, then follow it up with two or more coats of your favorite water-based polyurethane sealant, also following the directions on the package for dry time and cure time. My polyurethane, for instance, required additional coats separated by at least two hours from the previous coat, and a cure time of a full week before subjecting the wall plate to full use.

My light switches themselves are clearly still gross (any tips for getting old paint spills off of a light switch?), but the light switch plates are beautiful!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Pumpkin+Bear Paper+Dolls

Fortunately today was bright and sunny and happy and pleasant, so after a looong morning running errands--Learning Treasures for blank slides, slide covers, elastic cording, and the tiny plastic animals that the girls generally spend their allowance on; Hobby Lobby for adhesive cardstock and science magnets; Kroger for a passel of groceries, including nutritional yeast, soy creamer, and celery with the leaves on (another experiment in the making); and Costume Delights for one x-small youth ballet outfit--Willow found herself crashed out on the couch, reading a Black Stallion book and listening to the Oklahoma! soundrack, and Sydney and I found ourselves out in the front yard, conducting a photo shoot for the felt paper doll set in my pumpkinbear etsy shop:

I'm not in love with the white felt background, but...eh. You do your best and you call it good.

I've got some pretty cool vintage wallpaper buntings to also list this weekend, and possibly more cut-out pinbacks, but I've also got tomatoes to buy and then can, and pesto and cookies to make, and a celery experiment to conduct, and some jingle bells to string on elastic cording, and some more antibiotics to beg out of the Humane Society for the foster kittens, so we'll see what I get done.

Whatever it is, though, I'll call it good.

And Then We File Them Away Neatly

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.

I Lost the Babies, But in Other Ways I Am Organized

Willow and Sydney had a playdate this morning because I wanted to get some work done. Specifically, I wanted to grade papers all morning, not read books and play board games about dinosaurs and see if the laminator will laminate leaves and playfight with sticks in the front yard and maybe watch a segment of Mythbusters--these are my favorite things to do of a morning, true, but grading papers? Must be done.

So we invited an adorable little schoolmate over to play with the girls, and there was much running up and down stairs and in and out of the house, etc.--your typical playdate. At one point in the morning, however, Sydney came in and asked for a snack, and so I thought I'd find Willow and the little friend and see if they wanted a toasted cheese quesadilla, too (the little friend claimed, however, that she isn't allowed to eat snacks at other people's houses, but that's a later story). I didn't see the girls upstairs, so I ran down to the basement playroom. No girls. I figured I must have missed them somewhere upstairs, so I ran back up and looked in all the rooms, calling their names. No girls. Now I figured I must have missed them downstairs after all, so I ran back downstairs, and looked in the bathroom off of the playroom and the closet under the stairs, calling their names.

No girls.

So now I think that they must be hiding, so I run back upstairs and look really well in all the nooks and crannies in all the rooms, calling their names sternly and announcing trouble to come if hiding places are not revealed.

No girls.

And now I start to panic. I think of all the places in which a mischievous hiding little girl or two could come to grief--did one girl lock another in a Rubbermaid bin made empty due to our recent organization, and then panic, herself, and hide? Could they have climbed into the broken dryer and then passed out? Emptied the chest freezer of food, hidden that food, climbed inside the freezer, and shut the door on themselves? Drunk a full bottle of hydrogen peroxide and crawled underneath the kitchen sink to die? I run back downstairs, like an IDIOT, and check the dryer, and the freezer, and the nook where the furnace lives, and the space around the chimney.

NO GIRLS.

And now I think, I HAVE WASTED TOO MUCH TIME. Whatever has happened, I have wasted lots of precious minutes running back and forth, while these children are in danger or dead. So I run back upstairs, heading straight to the cell phone so that I can call 1) 911 2) Matt 3) the little schoolmate's mother.

And as I pass the hall closet, which I have looked in at least four times in the past few minutes, I hear "gigglegigglegiggle." And from beneath the winter coats and behind the stroller and sturdy boots crawl Willow and her little friend, just giggling as hard as they can giggle.

And that's how I had my first heart attack.

In other news, the expansive organizational project of the girls' bedroom and our study/studio, the two messiest rooms in the house on account of they are constantly inhabited by three of the four messiest people in our family, is finished. I didn't finish grading papers this weekend, but I did finish putting all my favorite things, and all of the girls' favorite things, into clear plastic bins with sturdy lids. And then I labeled those bins. And, um, color-coded them. Because if you're going to do something, you might as well overdo it.

Here's part of the closet in the study:
You can see the bag in which I keep my teaching materials for my cloth diapering classes; the bin containing acrylic, oil, and tempera paints; the bin containing bulk colored pencils, the big jug of Mod Podge; the smaller box of plaster of Paris; four rolls of contact paper; the bin containing the one-inch pinback button machine and all its parts; the bin with all our hole punches; and the edges of small bins that contain seashells and artist trading cards. Oh, and at the very top, my brand-new and best-beloved Cricut, which I'll rhapsodize about some other time soon.

Here's another view of that same closet, if you can believe it:

You can see the big bin of bulk crayons, with our various pads of artist's papers stacked on top of it; bins of popsicle sticks, wooden cut-outs, and river rocks; the box of activated charcoal that, combined with the river rocks, goes into our terrariums; a bigger bin with all our paintbrushes; a small bin of pom-poms (and perhaps googly eyes); and bins of scrapbook embellishments and blank puzzles.

You probably can't see the labels on these bins, but every bin is labelled. And every bin has, below the label, one of three things on it--YES, NO, or WITH PERMISSION, and is underlined with either a green, red, or yellow marker. One of the main things I wanted to accomplish, as well as actually having a place to put all my crap, is to help the girls understand what materials they have access to. I take their roles as collaborators in our shared art and as artists in their own right very seriously, and I wanted to reassure them of what supplies they're permitted to use unsupervised, what they must be supervised to use, and what is off-limits. Basically, only the vintage beads, the jewelry findings, the soldering supplies, and the scrapbook embellishments are forbidden. The most important distinction in my mind is the WITH PERMISSION from the YES, or, for Sydney, the yellow underline from the green underline.

Bigger shelves elsewhere in the study hold bigger stuff:

Here are bins of blank papers, vintage papers, purchased scrapbook papers, scratched/warped vinyl record albums for crafting, and bulk markers. On top of one of the bins is a huge book of wallpaper samples--this is lots of fun for flipping through.

Even my desk received its fair share of attention, desperately needed, with a couple of nice, big paper bins labelled--

Although I'm not sure why I marked them NO--you'd think I'd welcome the help of anyone who wanted to do my paperwork drudgery for me...