Why Christmas Isn't Really in July

I may possibly have been bailed upon by my partner in Craftster's Christmas in July Stashbuster Swap--either that, or something bad happened to her. Online buddies are probably beyond the last to know when tragedy strikes. I'm very bummed, because my partner was a knitter, and she had a stash of HARRY POTTER HOUSE COLOR YARN!!! Oh, some things are just not fair. I did possibly bring it upon myself, however, due to my intense desire to always be right. You see, I got into a little tiff with the organizer of the swap on account of this rule that when you're involved in a swap, you have to post in the swap forum at least once a week. I suppose it's so the organizer knows you're still alive and crafting, but I think it's a pain to have to have one more weekly chore to remember related to what is supposed to be a fun activity, and, since nobody wants to actually talk in the forum about what they're making, because they want it to be a surprise, the forum conversation tends to be non-crafty, and I really just don't want to be required to post weekly. My counter-argument is that since posting and crafting are two different animals entirely, weekly posting is no sign that you're actually doing your swap work and will send on time. Case in point: I posted maybe once, after I was basically forced to, and I sent early. My partner posted weekly just like she was supposed to, and she's apparently dead in the water. So there.

Anyway, here's what I made for my partner. Her family has six, count 'em six, holiday trees, and I made a set of ornaments for each tree. The littlest kiddo loves to color, so his set is made from crayons melted into heart molds, with an ornament hanger melted into the back of each one:

The little girl's favorite colors are blue, pink, and purple, so I hand-sewed her set out of blue denim, and added pink and purple beads:

I forgot to photograph the other little girl's set, but her favorite color is red, so I made her ornaments all from different red fabrics--faux fur, silk, plaid flannel, felted wool, etc.

The eldest kiddo likes red with black, so his set is made from felted wool:

The main tree in the house is decorated in blue, silver, and white, so I also made a set of ornaments out of my blue glitter vinyl. I really liked how these turned out, although vinyl doesn't photograph well:

I also really, really like the fangeek set of ornaments I made for the "handmade ornaments" tree. They're all sewn from black denim with black beaded hangers, but each person in the family has a front and back T-shirt transfer of their own, personal fangeek obesssion on their own ornament.

The littlest kid loves Pokemon: Pikachu is on the other side of his ornament, of course.

The little girl likes the Junie B. Jones book series: A cover from another of the books is on the other side of her ornament.

The other girl loves Green Day (awesome kid):

A photo of the entire band is on the other side of her ornament.

The eldest kids loves Magic, the Gathering:

Another player's card is on the other side.

My partner's husband loves Aqua Teen Hunger Force:

Master Shake is on the other side of his:

And my partner loves Harry Potter, especially Slytherin House:

The other half of this battle scene, depicting the good guys, is on the other half of her ornament.

Eh, it was fun to make stuff for other people, even if I don't hear back from my partner's family to see if they liked it. It is good practice for Christmas, anyway, you know--sending lovingly handmade gifts to family members who don't send thank-you notes, or watching them open presents you spent hours on and not totally fawn over them--not that I make gifts for other people in order to be fawned over. Ahem. Yep, happy Handmade Holiday!

I'm a Wench

So I managed to convince my partner to drop me off at the eastside Goodwill last night while he took the girls to the post office to mail off an etsy package and to ask, again, about half our mail that we're sure went missing while it was being held for us there (Netflix sent me Yoga for Indie Rockers on July 31! And have it I do not!). I don't usually go to Goodwill this late in the week because, since I usually only buy from the 50%-off color of the week, it gets picked over, and for a while I was feeling pretty grumpy and uninspired--I found a red tie-dyed T-shirt but it wasn't particularly awesome, I found the Unofficial Guide to Buffy but I thought I already had something similar at home, I found an awesome purple velour blanket but it wasn't on sale, etc.--but then, THEN, you will not believe what I found. A FREAKIN' REN FAIRE DRESS!!! A Ren Faire Dress!!! Velvet and silk, corset tie in the back, push-up bosomness in the front, long skirt for prancing around the maypole and swinging while acting saucy.

But I'm a curvy girl, you say. Does it fit?
IT LOOKS AWESOME!!! Matt was a sport and took this photo of me at 9:00 last night--I'm not fun to take photos of, on account of I tend to critique people's photography techniques while they're photographing, and then I have to preview all the images and delete the ones I don't like, and then we pretty much have to start all over again, don't we? But I love this shot of my new awesome dress. My two favorite parts of it are how you can see the hole in the side of the dress that I need to mend, and the Goodwill tag sticking up out of the neckline. And, of course, I love how I look in my awesome new dress that I am now going to wear absolutely every single place I go for the rest of my entire life.

Friends, this dress cost me $3.99. Sometimes, life can be so good.

Back in the Saddle

It feels good to be back in the swing of things, still home recently enough that daily life doesn't yet seem like drudgery. After all, I've been able to CRAFT again! I put aside schlogging away at my Ravenclaw house scarf until booth-sitting at my next craft fair, and made some real recycled crafts in the last couple of days. I finally thought of a use for some little panels my mother cross-stitched on recycled denim:

And since it's nearly the end of summer (sigh), I'm running low on my wool sweater collection, so I sewed up a few of these babies out of pretty much my last big pieces of felted wool: Do you recognize this doll as the handknit Ecuadorian sweater I scored at my Goodwill Outlet expedition?

The girls seem to have settled back into the routine here pretty well, too, which is nice, since they were starting to get pretty crazy those last couple of days in California. We went to the library for Say it in Spanish with Miss Nancy, a superstar who can breastfeed baby Mateo while singing and playing her folk guitar, and we checked out the following items:

• Eyewitness: OceanDVD
• Born to AddCD
• Echoes of Nature: Ocean Waves CD (I think it has an actual recording of the waves at Pebble Beach!)
• Reading Rainbow Seashore Surprises computer program
• Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
• Lemons Are Not Red (Ala Notable Book(Awards)) (Neal Porter Books)
• Fish Clip Art CD-Rom
• Colors in Nature: Yellow
• Triceratops Gets Lost book and CD
• A Busy Day for Stegosaurus book and CD
• Velociraptor: Small and Speedy book and CD
• An Alphabet Of Dinosaurs
• Orange by Sarah L. Schuette
• Seashells by Adele Richardson

Can you tell what the girls are interested in this week?

After school I wanted to engage the girls in an art project so I could clean, but nothing I suggested (decorating paper bags to use at my craft fairs, painting on butcher paper, drawing pictures on cardstock for thank-you notes, etc.) struck their fancies, so I ended up printing out dinosaur coloring pages from Geoparent. Filling in coloring pages is a really lousy art activity, but it can be a pretty good activity for other learning objectives--map work, absorbing how different dinosaurs look, associating words with letters, etc.

And then I cleaned, and then we went to the post office to mail an etsy package, and then we went to Goodwill, and then we got pizza, and then we watched our ocean documentary, and now Matt is putting the girls to bed while I gear myself up for putting my textbook order in at the IU Bookstore. I really should get on it, because school starts in, you know, two weeks. But it is a loathesome activity, and now I think I will put it off until tomorrow.

What activities do you find loathesome?

...Jiggety Jig

Ah, the joy of being home! We couldn't find the housekey when we arrived home last night around 10:00 pm, but I managed to break in the back door all by myself (hmmm...mental note to FIX said back door this week), and there was only one weird smell in the whole house, from a bag of garbage Matt had put on top of the stove to take out before we left. Ew.

Our collective favorite activity upon homecoming is to collect all the gathered mail, and although neither my order from Dharma Trading Co. nor my swap package for the Christmas in July Stashbuster swap has arrived, my entire order from Dick Blick has made its happy way to our house--and I do mean happy.

We're a family pretty well dedicated to creativity and lifelong learning, so art supplies are dead important to us. Now that we have some serious storage in the basement (as soon as we, um, build the shelves), I chose to invest in some serious art supplies--class packs of markers, crayons, and tempera paint, as well as a few novelties, such as sun printing paper and blank puzzles, and, of course, a gallon jug of Mod Podge for me.

Class packs are actually pretty sweet. The markers and the crayons each contain numerous sets of 16 colors--with two kiddos, I bring out a set for each of them, labelled by kiddo, store the rest, and replenish when necessary. The paint set has a gallon jug for each color, with a lockable pump and a billion little paper cups:
Obviously, though, the box they came in is the funnest toy:Willow had this idea of drawing the entire map of the United States, so I dutifully pulled up a map online for her to copy:Her California looked pretty good actually, perhaps since we've been studying it so much lately; as for the rest of the fifty states--well, she is only four.

In other education news, Montessori starts tomorrow for Will. Our other home projects this week will likely include more map study, identifying some rocks and shells collected in California, helping me create things for a super-big craft fair I'm doing in September, and a trip to the library to check out every color book they have for Syd--I think it's weird that she doesn't have her colors down yet, but Matt thinks I tend to work with both of the girls mostly at Willow's level, and thus I haven't been doing enough color labelling for Sydney. We'll see...

Wedding! Wedding! Wedding!

There's nothing like how a wedding tends to take over everything in its vicinity, and it's not even your wedding. This weekend has been all "Wedding! Wedding! Wedding!", and I did not even attend the said wedding of one of Matt's first cousins, on account of they didn't invite children. Obviously I have been all about complaining about this and all the levels upon which it is wrong (philosophically, ethically, logistically, etc.), and in debates with child-free apologists, neither of the excuses of "That's just the way most people do it these days" and "Well, it's their wedding" fly with me. Firstly, I don't care if not inviting children is trendy right now. Barring real limitations (say, the wedding is taking place in a nightclub, or a porn studio), it's rude not to invite particular members of someone's immediate family. I see it the same as if the wedding read, "Blood family members only." See? Rude!

Not inviting children also doesn't apply as one of those wedding planning whims, such as whether or not to serve cake. It's a real inconvenience to the families invited, many of whom are already at great time and expense to come to the wedding because they love you so much, and they would feel terrible if they couldn't be there to see you. Mind you, the bride and groom did arrange a hella expensive group babysitting service for the duration of the wedding, and this actually would have been a fine solution, if this babysitting had taken place AT THE WEDDING LOCATION. But nope. The babysitting was to take place at the hotel at which the families were all to stay, and the wedding and reception took place at a winery a half-hour shuttle ride from the wedding, shuttles running from 4:00-5:00 and 9:00-12:00. Seriously? Seriously, no way for a parent to check on a child, no way for a parent to respond to an emergency phone call from the service, and it's expensive. None of the people who had family obligations to go to the wedding, but also had children found this appropriate. For instance, in this wedding the groom's sister has a two-year-old and a breastfeeding three-month-old--they're not invited. She brought a family friend with her from her hometown, paying her way, so her small children could be supervised one-on-one by a familiar face. Another first cousin has a four-year-old with cerebral palsy and a six-year-old--they're not invited, and they had to sit there in Seattle, where they live, and find a local babysitter here with medical training to babysit their son. They're both doctors, so they're pretty well qualified to take care of him themselves, you know. And then there's us, flying in from Indiana, only see the folks here for a week every year--my two-year-old isn't ready to have a stranger babysit her, especially in a group setting, and so while everyone else went to this wedding, I sat at home with the kids, a strange home with not many toys, no car, the kids upset because they want Daddy, from 3:30 pm until everyone got home after midnight. Superfun.

Maybe I'm alone in this last one, but I also think it's really weird to purposefully not invite children to a WEDDING. You know, a ceremony in which you celebrate the joining of FAMILIES. A bonding experience for a new, united FAMILY. You know who really adds meaning to the concept of "family?" CHILDREN! And you know, maybe you really do think that your dream wedding shouldn't include children. Maybe you don't think that parents would do anything to keep their kids happy and well-behaved in even a very formal setting, would bring small books and toys, would take the kids for long walks outside. Maybe you really think that all your loved ones with children, all these people who made such a special effort to come and witness your joy, would let their kids throw dinner rolls and shriek and spill stuff. If you really think that, then maybe you should be the one to make a special effort to plan a wedding in which this does not happen, to plan a celebration in which your young family members can be welcome and meaningfully included. They'd like the chance to wish you joy, too, you know, especially since they only see you for a couple of days each year.

Anywho.... Boy, I went to some great garage sales on Saturday! I don't know if they just have more awesome stuff in California than they do elsewhere, or if, since garage sales aren't as popular here, they don't get picked over like they do elsewhere, but man, did I score!

A Nightmare Before Christmas shirt for a T-shirt quilt: Lots of rubber stamps, and a white ink pad! How much do I love the sun stamps, and the Christmas tree? I love them a lot.
I don't actually do screen printing, but I did order some stuff from Dharma Trading Company for freezer paper T-shirt fabric stenciling (It will be waiting for me when I get home--whee!!!), and this would work for that? Elsewise, it's just awesome:

I was so excited to spy these little wooden embroidery hoops, because I've recently read about stretching great fabric in them and hanging them on the wall as art. Dinosaurs are possibly going in here:
Matching embroidered pillowcases for pillowcase dresses:
Dinosaur temporary tattoos! The sweeties warmed the cockles of my heart by both insisting that their tattoos be placed on their left ankles, "just like Momma." If only my tattoo was awesome like a dinosaur:
A quilted pillowcase, 20"x26". It has a commercial tag, but it still looks hand-quilted to me. Sweatshop?
And an awesome pair of red Converse sneaks for Willow for next summer, and this great book called From the prairie: A child's memories, which has patterns for cloth dolls and, get this, clothes for the cloth dolls. Righteous.

The girls were invited to the rehearsal dinner (run by Matt's awesome aunt and uncle), and they were, of course, charming and well-behaved:

I, of course, ate and drank everything I could reach--gotta get my money's worth, you know, since I'm not going to the wedding. Did I mention that my children aren't invited?

But enough with the preamble...I know you want to hear the gossip about the wedding. Well, Matt came home disgusting drunk, clearly taking my personal motto to eat and drink all he could reach to heart, and he could tell me unsatisfyingly little about the actual reception, because everything was all, "No, I don't know what the cake tasted like. I missed the cake because I was at the bar." Yuck. But he did tell me, and I later got all the dish, that the groom's sister, the one with the two-year-old and the breastfeeding three-month-old, actually missed her own brother's wedding. Baby Hunter became hysterical every time his Momma tried to leave him, and eventually, after many desperate attempts to leave, because obviously Karin so much wanted to watch her brother get married, he lost all composure and just had a huge nervous breakdown. Karin missed everything. She says, and of course she's correct, that this obviously wouldn't have happened if Hunter had been invited, because not only would she not have had to try to leave him, but she could have nursed him if he became upset and worn him to keep him happy and comfortable. It makes me really sad to think about how unhappy the situation was for her. Me, I'm not unhappy about the situation. I'm just resentful.

Next: Home! Home! Home!

Ah, the Exploratorium! Engaging science activities for kids with ADD! Seriously, it's a huge warehouse filled with hands-on science activities, designed for flitting from one to another, all of which can be manipulated without having to so much as notice the concept that drives them. Right now, our kids love it--Sydney is still at the stage where mere manipulation, cause and effect stuff, is happy for her brain, and Will has the deep focus to concentrate on one single activity for half an hour at a time, undisturbed by the mania around her, before wandering off to another one. So, among other things, we sat in a photo booth and chose videos of people relating their own particular "sound memories," made three-dimensional shapes from geometric figures edged with Velcro, used hands and tools to draw designs on a rotating wheel covered in a light layer of sand, used a column of air to hold a beach ball aloft, played drums to accompany a Nirvana song, and etc. Matt and I always try to give a simple explanation of what's going on with each activity, but if we homeschooled here, we'd probably come all the time but steer the kids to activities that illustrated just the couple of concepts we were interested in focusing on at the time.

The symmetry mirror was fun to moon over-- --the rotating curtain made me nauseous, but not the kiddos--
--Sydney mesmerized herself, and perhaps fried her brain, in the light wand camera--
--and we seem to not be able to go a day without a visit to Crissy Field:
Before we hit the Exploratorium, however, we drove around the city for freakin' ever (no left-hand turns! Argh!) looking for The Curiosity Shoppe, a crafty little store I've been dying to visit. We only had three quarters (30 minutes), so I shopped really quickly, and fortunately found nearly everything I'd been eyeing in their online shop. I bought this birdhouse kit made of laminated cardboard, the Sublime Stitching book (I justified this purchase of a new book because it's got iron-on embroidery transfers in it--those get used up! Logical, right?), and inexplicably, not because it's not awesome, because it is, but because it was insanely expensive, this card catalog card. I am a library nerd, but still. I've had to retroactively justify the cost by asserting that I'm going to matte and frame it in my study. The justification engine is fully functional, you see.

I was a little sad that they didn't have the Built by Wendy Simplicity patterns that I've been wanting. They had some, but I specifically want the Slim Pants, Capris, or Shorts pattern, the Pants pattern, and the Jacket pattern, all in my curvalicious size. Odd because the online shop shows them in stock, but then I probably should have just asked the proprietor--that's what regular people do, isn't it? Ask shop proprietors when they need help? Not just quietly slink off? Huh.

The fam did manage to figure out how to make only right turns to get to the Out of the Closet thrift shop, however, where I contemplated buying a massive old store mannequin, but finally settled on Singer-Quilting by Machine. As a self-taught seamster to whom straightforward skills like, oh, zipper sewing, still seem impossible, I appreciate myself some how-to manuals.

Boy, I got a lot of knitting done!

There have been a lot of out-of-town relatives around, on account of the wedding to which my children are not invited. When out-of-town relatives sit and gossip, I knit and eavesdrop.

Next time: Garage sales! Rehearsal dinner! The rant about the wedding to which my children are not invited!

Beaches! Beaches! Beaches!

Back in landlocked Indiana, we heart ourselves some beaches. We happily go to Monroe Beach (volume alert!) and Indiana Beach and pretend, but a real, live beach? With an ocean and everything? And tide pools? And pelicans? I love it so much it makes me sick.



Pebble Beach has tide pools you can clamber around while the surf awesomely (or terrifyingly, depending on whether or not you can swim...ahem) cascades over the rocks a few feet away: Near the tide pools were all these big crabs hidden in the rocks, but if you sat very, very still for a while, say, looking at a starfish, they would creep out and do weird things with their mouths and go click, click, click, just like in The Dark Crystal.



Pebble Beach is made up of the leavings from a rock reef offshore, and it's a very nice sound when the waves move in and out. There are supposedly some very interesting stones here, because you're not allowed to take any of them:

But dance on them you can:

Davenport Beach, where some of Grandpa Bangle's ashes were scattered, is a more traditional sandy beach:

Add to that a visit to a real freakin' ORGANIC STRAWBERRY FARM, and the day was pretty well set, don't you think?

Care to see the third 24 hours of knitting?

I neglected to mention previously that I am not using the Cascade 220 that the instructions in call for--Uncommon Threads (sound alert!) didn't have those exact colors, but one of the shopkeepers whipped out this massive book of yarn samples and picked out for me the two same colors in Nashua Handknits Creative Focus Superwash. Hella expensive, though. Is knitting seriously this expensive, y'all? One of my secondary projects is now officially to figure out how to reclaim wool from ugly knitted sweaters.

Next time...Exploratorium! Boutiquey San Francisco craft store! Gay thrift shop!

Frisco Has Fits

You should totally never call the city "Frisco," by the way, unless you're a tool. But Yerba Buena was a hit, of course, with all its green space and pigeons to chase and awesome murals and painted tiles:
The Modern Art Museum, unfortunately, was so not a hit with the under-five set that Willow had a hysterical tantrum after a total of about eight minutes--a record? Back to Yerba Buena! I gave Willow a meaningful lecture then, the subject of which was the fact that since she was one, her dad and I have visited every children's museum, hands-on museum, zoo, and dinosaur resting place within a four-hour drive of wherever we've been, without complaint. Unreasonable, then, that the single time we'd like them to accompany us to an "adult" museum, she has a fit? Will did not agree. It turns out that I don't have kids who are as eager to engage in intellectual and cultural pursuits as I am, happily wandering the modern art museum, sketchbook and crayons in hand, or sitting, rapt, at the opera, weeping at all the right parts, re-enacting the death scenes later with the dress-up clothes. Off to Crissy Field.
Crissy Field rocks real hard.

This brings us to the second 24 hours of knitting--stop looking at how I messed up the color change!
Next up, beaches! Beaches! Beaches!