Freefalling into Fifty, Because If You Don't Nearly Vomit On Your Birthday Then Did You Even Have One?

So, I just need to preface my story by telling you two things:

1. I would absolutely, 100% tandem skydive again in a heartbeat. It was WONDERFUL, I loved it, and dissociating myself back there got me through my last dental cleaning.
2. The literal first thing I did after touching ground and being unclipped from my instructor was roll over onto my hands and knees and dry-heave onto the grass. 

But I did not actually vomit!

But anyway! My fiftieth birthday earlier this summer was excellent. I ate a lot of cookie cake and spent the whole day with my favorite people, accruing experience gifts like a dungeon crawler collecting loot boxes (Guess what I'm currently reading, lol!). The little kid and I solved a murder mystery. Mr. Craft Knife and I decided to ride a ferry up the coast of Norway this winter so we can see the Northern Lights. And the big kid arranged for the two of us to go tandem skydiving, something that we've talked about together for years, but always with that sort of "someday, I wish" vibe.

Turns out that Someday, I Wish is an actual calendar date in August!

The big kid has always been my fellow adventurer--remember the time we strapped ourselves to cables and walked around on top of the CN Tower?--and given a choice among all the people on the planet, she's exactly who I'd want to throw myself out of a plane with.

I mean, look! It even says DANGER right there on her harness!

MY harness doesn't proclaim any such thing!

It was a perfect day for skydiving, and although it took a good two hours from arrival to flinging ourselves out of an airplane, sitting in the shade of an airplane hanger, reading my Matt Dinniman and watching parachutes meander down to Earth was a quite lovely way to spend an afternoon.

The big kid and I each got our own personal photographer for the trip, but since Mr. Craft Knife and the little kid had also wanted to tag along to watch us fall out of an airplane, I gave them my camera to take photos, too, so the big kid and I basically had a whole entire paparazzi experience. We got photos of ourselves from one side--

Fun fact: I wasn't sure what to wear, so I got onto Skydive Indianapolis' Insta to see what everyone else was wearing and then matched it, including cropping a pair of my leggings with scissors. I did a great job, because even my instructor is rocking the cropped leggings look!

--and the other!

You can't tell, but that's me BEAMING and waving from inside the plane. I was so excited to finally be off! 

My only previous look at the inside of a plane used for skydiving was in this SNL video--

--and shockingly, they don't actually look like the inside of a sound stage! This plane had two long benches running parallel along the inside, and we straddled those, facing the back of the plane, our instructors behind us, so they could busy themselves strapping us to them while the plane got high enough:

I'd had it in my mind that I'd better not forget to just double-check that my instructor had attached us before we jumped, since, you know, he was the only one entrusted with the actual parachute, but my god. When this dude was done, I was basically carabinered to him like I was in a metal-forward Baby Bjorn. When he was ready to skydive, he shuffled himself over to the edge of the plane, and I, too, found myself there like luggage strapped to the roof of a car:

My photographer did protest at how tightly he strapped on my goggles, though, and made him loosen them a little bit, which he did not want to do but after looking at my photos I am SO GLAD he did. Goggles so tight that they cut straight into the apples of your cheeks that are already doing weird things in the 120 mph wind are NOT a cute look for the photos that you paid a lot of good money for. The big kid's instructor kind of did her dirty that way, but hey--the important thing to him was that her glasses stayed on her face. And they did!

Anyway, guess who got to go first?!?

Check out my cool as hell photographer clinging like a spider to the OUTSIDE OF THE PLANE.

That's how she gets the shot of my face the first time I see the world this high and not through an airplane window!

Those fucking goggles! Very jealous of the proper skydivers who get to wear the cool-ass helmets.

And here we go!

I swear that I was feeling pretty normal about things, everything considered, but I cannot stop cackling every time I look at that photo. Omg my FACE!!!

The big kid was next, so her photographer also got a couple of shots of me while her instructor was shuffling them into place. Do I look less close to mental collapse in her photos from the plane?

Hahahahaha... nope!

Also, my head is supposed to be BACK. My instructor was griping to his co-workers on the flight up that none of his students had done a single thing he'd told them to do all day, and I guess I'm one of them. Sorry, Dude! My brain wasn't online for instruction-following just then!

This one's a little better, mostly because you can't see my face as much, lol:

And okay, to be fair, I had not exactly visualized what the jump would feel like, but I also had not anticipated that we would do so much tumbling end-over-end. It was fine, though! Just gotta let my dude get settled and release his drogue, and then it became the most insanely disorienting/best experience of my life:

All better!

So, to me, it actually did not feel like falling. Like, at all. It did not even occur to me at the time that I was falling. There's not really any perspective--even if you look at the ground, it's so far away that it doesn't look like you're falling towards it. It's just blue and white all around you, and honestly hard to see anyway partly because of those goddamned goggles but also because there's so much wind. Like, yes, you're feeling the wind because you're falling at terminal velocity, but if you've never done that before then that's not actually what falling feels like. So it's just weird and disorienting and awesome.

It's funny because the big kid actually did not prefer this part of skydiving. You'd never know it, though, because unlike her mother, who has a cartoon for a face, she is the picture of stoicism:

She still loved it, though! She just liked the parachute part better:

The freefall, though, was my own personal absolute favorite thing ever. Check me out--I'm FLYING!!!

The little kid made fun of me because in almost every photo my hands are locked into thumbs-up position. The photographer thumbs-upped me, I thumbs-upped her back, and then forgot that my hands existed and therefore never changed it up!

I'm pretty sure my instructor physically un-thumbs-upped my hands for me, lol. 

Sooo... I had a little bit of an issue when my instructor deployed our parachute. I was 100% completely fine through the tumbling end-over-end and the falling through the air belly-first at 120 mph, and even the jolt of the parachute was totally fine, but I guess then the instructors have to steer us over to the actual landing site, and they've got to do whatever parachute-steering maneuvers they have to do to get us in the right spot and make sure we're not knocking against the other parachutes, and so on. And for us, this meant that all of a sudden my happy freefall fun time was taken away and instead we did a bunch of spins.

A whole bunch of spins.

If there's one thing that you might not know about me but should, it's that I. Do. Not. Spin. My eardrums are kind of fucked up and my sense of being upright and on balance in the world is iffy at best. Spin me, and any hope that I will ever be able to rearrange myself properly on this planet is over, at least until after I've had some ginger ale and a very, very, very long nap.

So all that fun, all the flying in an airplane and then jumping out of a plane and then falling through the air like a goddess, and I'm taken out by some spins.

Meanwhile, though, look how Mr. Craft Knife got photos of us up so high!

My parachute is the one at the bottom. Apparently we are spinning AND we are sideways. I had no hope.

Leveled off, at least! And we seem to have stopped spinning, yay!

Here's a good shot of the big kid's parachute:

Right behind me out of the plane, and right behind me back on the ground!

So, um... did you notice anything about that photo of my beautiful, brave daughter parachuting to the ground?

Yeah...

But I did not vomit! I just really, really, really felt like I was going to.

Ugh. Of all the things that could have gone wrong, it had to have been SPINNING!!!

Anyway, NEXT time I go skydiving, I will take two Dramamine an hour before I jump.

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!

I Sewed Tiny Ruffled Capris Because American Girl Dolls Need More Camo In Their Wardrobes

You can take the redneck out of the South (or rather, she can flee it on her own two feet, lol), but you CANNOT take the camouflage out of the redneck's wardrobe rotation!

Not out of her wardrobe rotation. Not out of her child's wardrobe rotation, since the camo print fabric that I used to sew these eensy American Girl doll camo capris actually came from a pair of my older daughter's old camo pants--after she outgrew them, I obviously tossed them into my fabric stash, because that was some nice quality fabric, not to mention CAMO!

And, it turns out, not even out of her niece's American Girl doll's wardrobe rotation, since that's where these adorable little camouflage ruffled capri pants are headed. Here's a pic of the outfit in progress modeled by my most helpful buddy, this American Girl doll that I found at Goodwill for $7.99:

The kids don't mind when I dig out their dolls and dress them up as my sewing models, but I know how precious those dolls are to them so I don't feel quite comfortable just keeping them out and about all the time while I'm working. My little Goodwill buddy has been an awesome solution, and is even collecting her own little wardrobe of... let's call them "second-quality" handmade garments, ahem. 

One day I'll even figure out how to fix her frizzy hair!

The capri pants pattern comes from All Dolled Up, by Joan Hinds, which is hands-down my favorite 18-doll pattern book that I've used so far. Ruffled capris don't have quite the versatility of some of her other patterns (I have made about 5,000 of those T-shirts so far!), but I managed to put together a couple of different looks for my niece's birthday package.

The younger kid dressed this doll up in the layered T-shirt look for this photo, but the actual outfit that I sent my niece is the marbled purple T-shirt, sewn from an adult T-shirt, and the purple and black ruffled capris, sewn from a huge batik wall hanging that I found at Goodwill (I sewed another part of that giant batik into this witch hat!):

Actually, ALL of the components of this outfit, from the purple T-shirt to the batik wall hanging to the doll herself, came from Goodwill!

I paired the camouflage ruffled capris (with ruffles made from stash quilting cotton) with a T-shirt sewn from an old T-shirt of Mr. Craft Knife's that had also found its way into my fabric stash (mwa-ha-ha, because it was a really ugly shirt):

What I really need for this ruffled capris pattern is a shirt pattern to pair with it that can also be made from quilting cotton, not jersey knit. Then I could use the same fabric for the shirt and the ruffles, and the outfit would be so mitchy-matchy!

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 Field Cast Animal Tracks, Because If You Don't Field Cast Animal Tracks Are You Even a Homeschooler?

 

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

Have you ever been hiking and come across a really cool animal track? Maybe you don’t know what animal made it, or maybe you do know, but the track is just so perfect that you wish you could bundle it up and take it home to admire? Maybe you’ve got a kid who loves animals and nature, who could use a little hands-on science enrichment?

You need to know how to field cast.

Field casting is easy, requiring just plaster of Paris, used cardboard food packaging, masking tape, and water. It won’t take a ton of time away from your hike, and it’ll leave you with a great memory and a useful piece of scientific evidence for studying the real animals who’ve walked your path.

Here’s how:

1. Find an animal track. We’ve chosen to hike in the woods behind our house the day after a big rainfall, and my ten-year-old finds just what we’d expect to find: deer tracks!

2. Make a cardboard collar around the track. Cut strips of the cardboard food packaging about 1″ wide and long enough to completely encircle the track; tape pieces together with masking tape to lengthen them if necessary.

Tape the two ends together into a collar that will circle the track.

3. Mix the plaster of Paris. Although there are specific ratios of plaster to water that will guarantee a standard result (and I used to do all our field casting that way), I went on a dino dig earlier this summer and learned there how to simply eyeball my plaster mixture. In a throwaway plastic cup that’s at the end of its life, dump some dry plaster, then add some water and stir with a stick. You’re looking for a pudding consistency, better thin than thick, so continue to gradually add plaster or water to reach this approximate consistency.

4. Pour into the animal track. We always need two people for this, one person to steady the collar and one person to actually pour.

The thinner the consistency of the plaster of Paris is, the better it will fill the animal track without bubbles, but the longer it will take to cure–use your own judgment about how much free time you have to kill making field casts on your hike.

5. Remove the cast. When the plaster is firm to the touch, you can remove the cast and clean up your work.

The field cast will be dirty, but you can rinse it, and then label or paint it.

If you’d like to hang the field cast on your wall later (we do this sometimes), unbend a paperclip into a hook, then embed it in the plaster after you’ve poured it.

If you’ve got an extra-savvy kid who needs a science fair project, have them see what information they can learn about an animal based solely on its track. Height? Weight? Age?

This is also a great technique to employ if you happen to come across an animal track that you can’t identify. You might come up with the first conclusive evidence of the elusive Sasquatch, or the wily chupacabra!

Actually… I have a story about the chupacabra. Buy me a margarita sometime, and I’ll tell you all about it.

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!

I Sewed American Girl Doll Pajamas That Were Too Cute For the Birthday Box

To be fair, 1) my own children egged me on in my impulse to keep the most adorable pair of American Girl doll pajamas that I sewed ostensibly for part of my niece's birthday present, and 2) I did sew my niece another pair of American Girl doll pajamas to make up for it.

Can you look at that above photo and guess which pair of pajamas I ended up keeping for our own American Girl doll collection?

This one!!!!!

Once upon a time, the big kid had the CUTEST pair of jammy pants that I made from this flannel dino fabric, and I also made endless other kid things from it, from crayon rolls Christmas stockings. When the big kid got more into horses than dinosaurs for a while, the little kid took up the mantle of lover of dinosaurs, and then you know a homeschooling mom can't let any kid interest alone so I got involved, too, and the culmination of all of this seems to mostly have been that when I showed around this brand-new pair of flannel dino pajamas that I'd just sewn for my niece's birthday box to each kid in turn, each kid in turn's eyes got very big and they each said, "AWWWWWWW!"

And then they both started saying stuff like, "Our cousin [Name Redacted] doesn't even like dinosaurs! She likes rainbow unicorns! We should probably keep the dinosaur pajamas so she doesn't have to look at them. Ooh, can you make a little robe to go with it?!? Can you make a little dino stuffie for her to snuggle?" And so on and so on. 

Not that my arm had to be pulled very much, though--I think these particular pajamas are adorable and immediately coveted them, too!

What I'm actually going to do is dig through my fabric stash to see if I can muster up just enough of this dino flannel to make one more pair of American Girl doll pajamas, because I think I've found the only thing in our entire home that my kids would even possibly fight over after my death.

ANYWAY!

These adorable pajamas are the Monkey Pajamas pattern from All Dolled Up, by Joan Hinds. This book has so many classic patterns that I think are super versatile, including this one. You do need to figure out and add your own finishing bits, though, especially if you don't use a serger. I've got a lot of her patterns pretty well down pat by now, though, so I automatically top-stitch the seams, and figure out for myself what kind of fastening I want:

Tidily top-stitched shoulder seam!

The original pattern calls for the pajama top front/back to also be sewn from the secondary fabric, but I wasn't feeling it, at least for these pajamas. I think they look cute enough with a contrasting fabric just at the wrists and ankles:

Kids who want everything around them to look like it was dunked in magical rainbow unicorn vomit do sometimes get beyond that (case in point: my own kid!), so I didn't do every single piece of doll clothing for my niece in pinks and purples and sparkles. Sometimes you just want to throw on your comfiest pair of brown flannel pjs and kick back with a book in front of the fire!

Although these specific garments look VERY pajama-y, I think that both parts of the Monkey Pajamas pattern are actually quite versatile, especially as a basic top and bottom made from woven, not knit, fabrics. I need to dig through my stash to find some thin denim, which I think would be perfect to make doll jeans using this pattern, cuff and all. I'd probably omit the cuff on the top, though, if I was making anything other than a pajama top. I think it would work very well with novelty quilting cotton, though, particularly a small print that would look proportionate to the doll. Very Hawaiian shirt-esque!

Here's everything that I've sewn for my niece's American Girl doll so far:

• sleeveless dress with a gathered skirt
• romper
• blouse with puffed sleeves
• germ mask

Next up: capris with a ruffled hem!

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!

We Did The Entire Butler County Donut Trail In One Day Because Sugar Makes You Strong

 

.....or it does something bad to your A1C. My doctor definitely mentioned one of those!

Whatever. The point is, you know we love ourselves a trail! My favorite trails so far have been the Garfield Trail, where the kids earned fun patches for their Girl Scout vests, the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail, where we were promised T-shirts but they ran out so instead they gave us hats and Mr. Craft Knife was so distraught about this downgrade that the little kid designed us all our very own We Licked the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail T-shirts (Lactose Lovers Unite!), and the Dayton Aviation Heritage Trail, where we earned my very beloved Wilbear Wright who comes with me on all my travels now because his namesake used to love going new places (such as the sky!).

Oh, there was also the full year that I dragged everyone around on an Indiana Culinary Trail because I wanted a set of wine tumblers!

We love a road trip, and we'll take one on the stupidest excuse. Because if you don't make a stupid excuse to go on a road trip, then how will you discover that there's a restaurant serving authentic British cuisine north of Indianapolis? Or a giant rock in Southern Indiana that you can hike to AND buy an anthropomorphized version of on a T-shirt?

How, I'm asking how, HOW WOULD YOU OTHERWISE learn that people are simply allowed to build their own experimental aircraft, as long as they get it inspected by authorities to make sure that it's not literally just a flying bomb

I'm telling you my greatest lesson so far: if you don't follow life's off-beat trails, you'll never discover life's experimental aircraft that are allowed to fly at life's unmonitored airfields.

Also, it was the big kid's birthday, we were all in the precious same place at the precious same time, and we all had the whole day free. That in itself is a sign that it was meant to be!

Fun fact: we'd originally planned to do this whole Butler County Donut Trail not on the big kid's birthday but on July 5th, which we also all had free. But then when I went through all the donut shop websites to get their opening hours, I discovered... well... DID YOU KNOW THAT EVERY DONUT SHOP IN BUTLER COUNTY IS CLOSED ON JULY 5?

Genuinely, what is that about?

So anyway, a couple of weeks later, on a day that is safely not the day after a federal holiday, off we went upon a strictly ordered trail that maximized the somewhat limited opening hours of the busy independent donut shops of southwest Ohio:

It's funny, because this place had what would turn out to be my absolute favorite donut of the day. Actually, I think this thing is my absolute favorite donut of all time! I'm thinking about it right now and wishing I had it in front of me.

Here it is, in the photo below. Any guesses?

Nope, not the plain glazed that the big kid always likes. Not the fried cinnamon roll that the little kid tried. It's this glorious beast:

It is a giant croissant, flattened somehow and covered with chocolate ganache and chocolate chips. It was INSANE.

And it turns out that there were two Ross Bakery locations on our donut trail map, so I got two of them!

Organizational note: you can freeze donuts. We all basically ordered whatever we wanted at every stop, did not even attempt to eat it beyond the first couple of stops, and put everything into individual plastic baggies inside a bigger freezer baggie when we got home. To warm donuts up you can microwave them for a few seconds until they taste like they're hot from the fryer, or you can do what I do and put the plastic baggie with your morning donut in it out onto the kitchen table the night before to defrost.

If only I could remember what my doctor was saying about my A1C...

Oh, well. Maybe it will come to me after I eat 11 more donuts!

You know you've been on the road too long/eaten waaaaay too much sugar when you, as a family, cannot stop laughing about what is objectively a perfectly normal sign that you don't even have a decent photo of because the person who was supposed to be taking the picture did not understand the assignment. Regardless, there was a storefront for a pizza restaurant. With a bar. That proclaims that it is OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT. For the rest of the entire day, we were all, "Omg, it is 11 pm and I would like an alcohol. I wish there was a BAR that was OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT!"

"Well, *I* wish there was a BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT that also had pizza!"

"But only TRUE SLICES of pizza! Not slices of falsehood!"

"So you want, like, a combination TRUE SLICE PIZZA/BAR OPEN TILL LATE NIGHT?"

I dunno, y'all. We'd gotten up pretty early for this. We hadn't eaten any protein yet other than the bacon on Mr. Craft Knife's maple bacon pizza three donut shops ago. I think we were all a little loopy.

Actually, I just looked up that pizza place, and their tandoori chicken pizza sounds DELICIOUS.

Loopy as I was, I also lost my damn mind with glee when I discovered that Jupiter Coffee and Donuts was having a Summerween event that week!

I'm pretty sure I got one of every Summerween donut, though they're currently still in the freezer.

This was my second-favorite donut of the day. Something something sour cream something?

The beauty of us all being free this day to do the donut trail is that it was actually a weekday, so we could go straight to the Butler County tourism office with our completed passports to pick up our shirts.

On the way, we were all, "Omg, they're going to be so excited that somebody completed the trail! They're probably going to want to take photos of us for their social media--is everyone's hair nice? Ooh, what if we're interviewed? Should we have talking points?"

Lol. We had to STAND IN LINE to get our shirts, there were so many people there for the exact same reason. #notsoquirkyafterall 

But our goal was indeed achieved!

The kids never did inherit the passion for free T-shirts that their father and I honed during college, when people would put tables outside the Student Center offering free T-shirts for signing up for a credit card--AND WE ALL DID IT! I blame their disdain on the fact that 1) I don't think colleges (or the finance industry?!?) allows that kind of shit anymore, and 2) neither of the kids' colleges charge to use the laundry machines, so they do not know the joy of being able to put laundry off for one more day cause you just scored a free T-shirt.

Regardless, Mr. Craft Knife and I still hate doing laundry, and I personally think that these T-shirts are legit. There's a smiling cup of coffee!!! And the donut is holding a little flaaaaaggggg!!!!!!!

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!