I Drove 12 Hours To Visit Baron Von Steuben, The Queen of Afternoon Tea's Favorite Shop, and I Guess My College Student

You know, since I'm in the neighborhood!

Also, it was actually 13 hours with traffic, but that's fine because it gave me plenty of time to get acquainted with my newest Special Interest:

Omg Grant is struggling so hard with his alcoholism! I feel awful for him, and also increasingly exasperated every time he goes on another drinking binge. But he's so sad and lonely! He had to transfer stations to California, and apparently the most reasonable way there was to get on a ship and sail all the way around the entirety of South America, so he told his wife, Julia, that she shouldn't bring their toddler and her massively pregnant self along on the voyage. It was definitely the right call, because all the soldiers' children who did travel with them died, but still, it was months upon months before he even knew if she and their baby had survived childbirth, much less what the baby's name was, and that baby was two years old before he saw him for the first time. And meanwhile, Grant was completely unable to cope with how much he missed them and got so continually drunk that he had to resign from the Army, and then he was too broke to get home because he just keeps on falling for conmen. 

Also, Julia's family are slave owners, which is obviously a huge issue. And they HAAAAATE Grant! Grant's family also hates Julia, and to be honest it's a little bit funny but I'm sure it sucked so bad to live through. Grant's dad sucks, too.

ANYWAY, Grant and Julia will at some point in their future live reasonably close to the hotel I finally poured my creaky self into after 13 hours on the road:

Speaking of creaky...

You know who else didn't have a safe elevator?

THIS GUY!!!

So, yeah. I drove 12 hours (13 with traffic!) to visit my beloved child for a couple of days, but by "visit," I generally tend to mean that I want us to do a bunch of sightseeing at tourist destinations that I have chosen in advance, and we will yap constantly at each other and catch up on all our gossip, etc., while we do this sightseeing, with interruptions in the conversation only for the purpose of taking one million photos of the sights I brought us to see.

We therefore yapped our heads off while I admired and photographed the Grand Parade in its autumn splendor--

--and then we yapped our heads off while we got afternoon tea at the very first tea shop to ever earn a full 5 out of 5 stars in the Queen of Afternoon Tea's series, "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Yummy":

We agreed that those 5 stars were very well earned, although the prices have gone up since the Queen of Afternoon Tea visited:

Nevertheless, we thought our afternoon tea was well worth the price. Everything was lovely and comfy and relaxed (these are important criteria since our afternoon tea at the Wolseley in London, which was lovely but we have come to realize was NOT comfy and relaxed), our tea was delicious--

--the food was beautiful and also delicious--

Coronation chicken and 35th anniversary blend tea!

--and there was so much of it that I was still finishing up the last of the desserts two nights later, in one of the most delightful evenings spent alone that I can remember. Imagine a hotel room all to oneself, a VERY good book on one's nook (second book in a very good series, with the third book ready to go right after!), hockey on the TV, and the last few bits and bobs of this to munch on:

In short, it was just really nice to sit for an hour eating and drinking and people watching and discussing everyone we had each interacted with in the past 6 weeks and everything they had said and what we had thought about it and what books we'd read and how much we like Jack Wolfe's singing and when we thought we'd see him again and what show he might be doing at that time. 

The whole precious two days that I got to spend with my kid went just like that, yapping and shopping (she never brings enough clothes to school, even though I tell her every semester to bring more clothes!) and meandering around campus--

--poking around various interesting spots, like this autumnal photo setting that was just randomly hanging out in the sunken garden--

--or the obligatory old cemetery that MUST exist on every college campus--

--snooping around for interesting books in the library--

--eating SO much cafeteria food that I did not have to prepare for myself--

--and discussing the symptoms of alcohol poisoning just as some poor soul was loudly vomiting in the bathroom down the hall:

My favorite campus spot is the dye garden:

Cotinus coggygria makes yellow!

Flax also makes yellow.

The woad had gone to seed, so I grabbed a plastic sandwich baggie out of my backpack (one must ALWAYS travel with ample sandwich baggies--one never knows what one might want to contain!) and collected some seeds. I will be VERY excited if I manage to cultivate my very own woad plants from seed next year.

One of the dorms used to be an ancient office building, with these lovely interior doors with multi-paneled glass that let in tons of glorious light. But it turns out that dorm rooms don't actually work with giant windows in their doors, so every year the residents get to paint their windows however they like:

Residents tend to preserve the best ones, so some of these paintings have been up for a very long time!

All the halls have themes, and all the themes are unhinged. This hall's theme is Viral Internet Animals:

One of the nights that I was visiting, the dining halls hosted a Halloween party for their student employees, and the kid let me be her plus-one. She fetched me apple cider doughnuts and hot apple cider, and let me paint over the lines that she drew and even do a little bit of carefully-managed coloring in (ahem):

The most important steps were left to her artistic expertise, of course, because otherwise--

--our little Pottsfield resident wouldn't look so cute!

The kid kept her pumpkin to decorate her dorm room, and I left her to get ready for a Mean Girls movie night with her buddies ("On October 3rd, he asked me what day it was. 'It's October 3rd'") while I crashed back in my hotel room, because I needed my sleep for the next day's travels: New Jersey! Thomas Edison! Leaf peeping!!!

The worst thing about hotel rooms is how I'm always pretty sure I'm going to be axe murdered, but don't worry, because this elaborately constructed tangle of clothes hangers is actually not fragile and about to fall apart if touched but instead the key to my feeling of safety:

The BEST thing about hotels rooms is hockey on the TV!

Notice the leftover pastries from our afternoon tea. Not pictured: me in my pajamas, awesome book on my nook, Diet Sprite liberated from the dining hall Halloween party.

Next stop: New Jersey!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The American Girl Dolls Have Brand-New Halloween Fits

Because if you're not sewing detailed Halloween costumes for American Girl dolls, are you even a perimenopausal empty nester?

Actually... can I still say that I'm an empty nester when I have my college graduate living at home? Does it even count as living at home when she spends all her time either outside the house making pizzas for below a living wage or in her room applying to every job available for early career scientists?

And while I'm on the subject, what's with every job available for early career scientists actually requiring 1-3 years of professional experience? I get that three years is still "early" in one's career, but there really ought to be something in the world that a brand-new college graduate can do other than Americorps, which, I might add, also does not pay a living wage!

So, maybe I'm light on the empty nest these days, but I am VERY heavy on the perimenopause, as my active and palpable continuous rage informs me, and for some reason there is nothing that calms my perimenopausal rage like sewing doll clothes, so leave me alone and let me have my peace.

This American Girl doll skeleton costume is a basic long-sleeved T-shirt and full-length leggings, but before I finished each garment I appliqued onto it the skeleton bones that Mr. Craft Knife designed for me. The bones are cut with my Cricut from white jersey knit (upcycled from an old T-shirt) fused with Heat n' Bond, and I ironed the bones to the garments and then messily top-stitched them down with a free-motion quilting foot:

I took a couple of tries at this costume, and my second version was nice enough that I felt okay sending it to my niece, but I think what I really need to do is give up on my dream of fabric applique and buy some heat-transfer vinyl for the bones. 

I LOVE fabric applique, but the heat-transfer vinyl that I used for this Jack-o-lantern T-shirt made the finished garment look soooo nice and tidy! 

Mr. Craft Knife also drew this cutesy Jack-o-lantern face--he made a spooky one, too, but I only had enough orange T-shirt on hand to sew one doll shirt, and the cutesy face won! 

This is my first time trying heat-transfer vinyl and I nailed it on the first try, which means that the next five times I use it something will go terribly wrong for reasons that I will not be able to determine. 

The Sweet Valentine Dress from Doll Fashion Studio is tied with the skeleton costume as my favorite of these Halloween outfits:

I bought this cartoon Haunted Mansion fabric as a remnant once upon a time (I miss you, Joann!!!) with no plans other than to enjoy how cute it is, and happily, it also turned out to be just enough fabric for this dress for my niece, who LOVES herself some Disneyland!

I love how simple and classic this dress design is, though, so... yeah, I already have two more dresses cut out and waiting on my sewing room table. 

And of course, it's not a complete set of Halloween outfits without a witch costume!

The cape is the fleece cape from Bombshell Bling. Sewing the stretchy velvet to woven quilting cotton wasn't the most fun, but I got it figured out and I'm pretty happy with it. The hat is a paid pattern from Pixie Faire, but I hesitate to recommend it because I had to alter it quite a lot to get the cone and brim to match. The geometry just wasn't geometry-ing!

While I was finishing up these outfits, I also whipped up a big doll mask order from my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, and so I decided to multi-task refreshing some of those stale listing photos while I photographed these outfits. 

And that's why some of my doll mask photos are now a little bit Halloweeny!

Oops, I missed a couple of threads! Oh, well--that's how my customer knows it's truly handmade, I guess.

Fun fact: etsy recently updated some of its policies to ban AI slop, but it's doing it by WAY overshooting what's actually necessary, to the extent that shops will now be required to include one completely unedited photo in every listing.

Like... what?

If I had to include one completely unedited photo in this blog post, here's what that would look like, lol!

At least in my case, the editing is what makes the photo accurately represent my product!

Ugh, whatever. It's not like life isn't already just an endless succession of nonsensical hoops to jump through, anyway.

Oof, that sounded mean and depressed--must be time to soothe my perimenopausal rage by sewing those doll dresses I cut out earlier. Orrrrrr I could go to the gym and yell at the college boy trying to hog the leg press. Doesn't even matter which one, because there's always someone!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How To Carve a Quilt Block Jack-o-Lantern

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

Get ready to make your neighbors jealous, because you’re about to carve the craftiest Jack-o-Lantern on the block!

I love a Jack-o-lantern that shows off my personality, and now that I’m an perimenopausal empty-nester, that personality is apparently sewing, sewing, and nothing but sewing (Okay, I’ve also developed an interest in Civil War battlefields, but that one is so objectively cringe that I’m not ready to talk about it yet). Like, y’all. I used to like sewing back well enough when my kids were little, but now I am obsessed. I genuinely CANNOT STOP SEWING. I just keep thinking of new things I want to sew! I do not even have time to sew all the things I currently want to sew, and yet I keep on finding more things to sew!

ANYWAY, thanks to my possible midlife crisis that is resolving itself through sewing, obviously my Jack-o-lantern this year had to be sewing-themed. And the best way to make a Jack-o-lantern that looks like an obvious sewing project is to make it into a quilt block! Fortunately, carving a quilt block into a Jack-o-lantern is surprisingly easy, and absolutely much easier than a lot of more conventional Jack-o-lantern templates.

Materials

Here is everything that you need to carve your own quilt block Jack-o-lantern:

• pumpkin. Of course! A real pumpkin is obviously the most eco-friendly, but you can also make a very realistic, carvable pumpkin from papier mache. Carvable store-bought pumpkins are generally not eco-friendly, but if you can find one of those second-hand, then at least you’re saving it from the waste stream!
• pumpkin-carving supplies. Pumpkin carving is so much more comfortable with these janky-looking little plastic pumpkin carving sets! I did throw a tiny fit when my husband came home from the store with a cheap kit of plastic pumpkin-carving tools back when the kids were babies (I was DEEP into the “my babies shall not touch plastic” era), but I changed my tune as soon as I saw how genuinely easier it is to carve pumpkins with them, and we’ve used that same dang set every year for the past 20 years, so I should probably apologize to my husband at some point. I absolutely will not, but I should!
• measuring and marking supplies. The thing that I like the most about these quilt block carvings is that you don’t need a template. You can measure out your template right onto the pumpkin using a ruler or tape measure, and mark it with a washable marker. If you want your marks to be less vulnerable, use a Sharpie, and then wipe off any extraneous marks with an alcohol wipe or hand sanitizer.

Step 1: Choose your quilt block and draw it onto the pumpkin.

A surprising number of quilt blocks work well as Jack-o-lanterns, including Nine Patch, Shoofly, Eccentric Star, and Bear Paw. The trick I use is to leave approximately .25″ between the pieces I want to cut away in order to preserve the sense of the pattern being pieced together.

Choose an simple quilt block pattern that is easy to calculate and draw onto a pumpkin. This Friendship Star pattern, for instance, is super easy to measure out, with a square in the center, surrounded by right triangles whose two adjacent sides are the same length as one side of the square.

You can use a reference book like 5,500 Quilt Block Designs for inspiration, and don’t be afraid to eyeball a design instead of painstakingly measuring it out. Jack-o-lanterns are supposed to look a little wonky!

Step 2: Carve your design into the pumpkin.

Carve your pumpkin by cutting through the lines that you drew. I don’t understand why those little saws work so well, but they do! They also make it a LOT easier to cut these precise lines, especially compared to my pre-kid giant carving knife method.

Be careful when carving out thin pieces–I usually do this with one hand stuck inside my pumpkin, bracing it from the inside. Putting a quarter-inch between pieces gives you plenty of cutting room in case you accidentally over-extend a cut, but in terms of the worst-case scenario, you can stick a piece back on with a toothpick!

When you’re finished with your design, pop a tea light inside (or do what we do and make a little hole in the back to stick twinkle lights through), put the top back on, and enjoy your new quilt block Jack-o-lantern!

I LOVE my quilt block Jack-o-lanterns, and I think they look so pretty lit up on my porch at night. Now, onto my next project: sewing an American Girl doll-sized black T-shirt and leggings set and appliqueing an even tinier skeleton onto it! Stay tuned!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!