The Mommy Blogger Olympics

Look, somebody voted for me besides me!

I have to admit that I love these mommy blog contests, like this current one: the Parents Magazine Best Blog Awards. I'm in the running for Best Craft for Kids Blog (well, as in the running as one can be with two votes!). I don't even know what the prize is supposed to be, but I'm a writer--we LOVE to be read, we love to be read more than we love to write, some of us, and votes and accolades...well, my goodness, that must mean that one is being read, mustn't it?

Voting runs through the middle of October, so there's plenty of time to vote for me, or better yet, nominate your own blog! Or the blog of someone you love! And if you get one more vote than the one that you voted, well, then you win!

Top 25 Homeschooling Blogs

Yep, we're STILL in Florida! Endeavor's launch got scrubbed, so while we're waiting to see if the auxiliary heaters will get fixed in time for us to still see the launch before I HAVE to head home (cloth diapering classes don't teach themselves, apparently), we're hanging out in Orlando in a motel/water park. Orlando is weird.

In other news, check out my blog (and vote for me!) in the Top 25 Homeschooling Blogs search over at Circle of Moms. There are some great other homeschool blogs represented, so I highly recommend that you check it out.

Ignore the intro paragraph to the contest, however, because it is offensive:

When choices for your children's school come down to a badly run public school or an over-priced private school, sometimes your best option is to educate them at home.


Um, no. 


Homeschool isn't the last-ditch best option only for people who are unfortunate enough to have crap choices among educational institutions. 


Homeschool isn't better than public school only if the public school is badly-run.


Homeschool isn't better than private school only if the private school is expensive.


(I also have issues with referring to a private school as "over-priced"--just because a private school costs more than I can pay does not mean that the private school charges more for tuition than it provides in education).


Homeschool isn't the last-ditch choice, and it isn't THE best choice, and neither are well-run or poorly-run public schools, and neither are expensive or inexpensive private schools. 


Homeschool is a choice, just like all the others, and it's up to you to not simply default into a choice, but to research it, to think about it, and to MAKE that choice for your own family. If you choose to put your children into public school, then you can provide them supplementary educational experiences if you don't feel that the school is run well. If you choose to put your children into private school, then you can work more to pay more for an expensive school.


And if you homeschool...well, then you've got a billion more choices to make, every day. What will you learn? Where will you go? What shall we read? What games should we play? What would you like to make for lunch? Should we stay for an extra three days in Florida, to see if we can watch the shuttle launch?


Us homeschoolers, we have a word for those choices:


We call it freedom.

Little Pumpkinbear Links

Do you see it up there? It's a new-ish addition to my linkbar, and I've finally finished futzing with it (for a while).

My girlies are NOT allowed to surf the internet yet, and they're not allowed to visit web sites that contain external advertising, and they're not allowed to browse youtube unsupervised, and they're not allowed to visit most web sites that promote toys and other mass-market consumer culture products.

There are, however, loads and loads of educational web sites that the girlies ARE allowed to access, of course, and Little Pumpkinbear Links is the place where I keep them. My blog is one of my home page tabs that pops up whenever a child opens our internet browser, and from there, the child is able to find her tab and then scroll through her links.

If you've got a little pumpkin or bear about the ages of mine, then you're absolutely welcome to check out our links, too. I'll warn you, though--they tend to be a bit dinosaur-heavy.

Look Up!

I'm pretty stoked about my roomy new linkbar. I'm adding permalinks to the appropriate categories as I happen upon them, and new categories whenever I get a minute to add them (About Me? Recipes? Top 10 Most Embarrassing Blog Posts?).

Feel free to suggest something that needs a permalink. You know how much I love you busybodies, you.

We Have Easter Eggs, But He Has a Secret

You might remember how much I've decided that I love the Maine Wood Company (it's now Casey's Wood Products, but I'm SURE it used to be the Maine Wood Company)--I bought all the girls' simple dollhouse dolls there (although I can't BELIEVE that I didn't buy these Star Wars peggies off of etsy), and some dinosaur cut-outs for future kid crafting.

Well, somehow Willow learned about Easter--the egg hunts, the bunnies, the candy, etc. You know, all the important stuff. I figured we could just pagan it up to be a nice Spring celebration (although I sort of already did that with St. Patrick's Day, finding it too odd to be explaining to a four-year-old why we celebrate a holiday about Ireland). The beauty of making it a Spring celebration (just like in pre-Christian times), is that you get to keep all that important stuff!

And that is why I (over)ordered a LOT of wooden eggs from Casey's Wood Products this week. Now, some I want to felt over with my nice rainbow wool roving, and some I want to leave natural, obviously, but the other thousand or so?

The girls and I have been creating our own wooden Easter Eggs. And it RAWKS!

The first thing we discovered is that Sharpies work GREAT on these wooden eggs----you get great color saturation (and now, I do not know why I let the baby use Sharpies while wearing that dress), way less mess, and the marker tip allows you to get a ton of detail: Later I'll show you Matt's Mexican wrestler Easter egg--I am totally going to make him color all the girls' dollhouse dolls now.

Of course, though, it wouldn't really be our house if we weren't sloppily wielding some dangerously messy art supply, now would it? And so OF COURSE we got out the acrylic paints, too: In order to lessen the general level of mud-making (most of the wooden eggs are really quite inexpensive, but of course the girls gravitate toward the goose eggs, which are $2.25 each! Don't worry, though, because I'm going to steal the ugly ones and felt over them later), I limited the acrylic paints to two tones within the same color--red and pink, for instance, or blue and navy. The girls didn't seem to mind, and actually had fun observing the different gradations of pink their advertent and inadvertent mixing came up with:
Next on the Easter (uh, Spring) trail, I have to go over to Joann's tomorrow to buy elastic on sale, and I'm really really REALLY hoping to find this chocolate Easter bunny kit there. I loooove the idea of chocolate Easter bunnies, and hell, I'll eat one, but the chocolate always tastes cheap to me (unless it's also filled with peanut butter, obviously), so I'd be stoked to be able to make myself a yummy bunny with some nice dark chocolate.

Okay, in other news, last night I was doing some stuff on the Internet--I've been totally stressed lately, because some people on this etsy team I'm in are really taking this whole "political is personal" worldview, and basically acting the kind of crazy that you're supposed to just back slowly away from, NOT engage--and Matt walks into the room, sipping a cup of juice from a straw, and says, utterly out of the blue," Would it make you feel better if I told you that I have a secret blog?"

Did you get that, friends? Feel free to do the double-take with me. My husband has a secret blog.
If your husband told you that he has a secret blog, what's the first thing you would think of? Here are my top three: My Blog About the Cats I've Killed. My Blog About All the Little Boys Who Live in Our Neighborhood. My Blog About Funny Things I Do to My Wife While She's Sleeping.

But no, my husband's secret blog is way better. It's super-geeky, but super-awesome. It is--get this--a blog that he writes from the perspective of a super-villain wannabe (kind of like Dr. Horrible, but Matt TOTALLY denies the connection). It actually marries the crappest parts of our lives in a really cool way, since the super-villain wannabe is an academic, but is also tortured by student assistants and mired in bureaucracy.

Seriously, Matt doesn't want me to give you the link (his Google Analytics reads: 2. Me and him. And I thought my blog was underappreciated), but you will be so happy if you check out Super-Villainy. Only Matt says that you have to, HAVE TO start from the beginning, way back in September (can you believe that my husband has had a secret blog since SEPTEMBER???), and read the posts in order.

Oh, and he hasn't posted since January, but he says that's all part of the overall plot and his post tomorrow will explain everything. My guy, such an artist.

P.S. Want to follow along with all the rest of the messes we make? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Shout-Outs

First of all, a shout-out to Sydney's most favorite toy in the world, photographed by herself:She honestly hasn't seen The Land Before Time or any of its eight thousand sequels often--a sick day of her own every now and then, a sick day of mine every now and then--but they've really captured her imagination. She pretends about all those little cartoon dinosaurs all the freakin' time, using wooden blocks, or her fingers, putting them into time-out, whatever.

I was really quietly irritated about all of it for a while--I mean, here are two kids who can tell a brachiosaurus from a diplodocus and that a pteranodon and a plesiosaur are NOT dinosaurs, and here they are talking about three-horns and the sharptooth and "I'm not a long-neck, YOU are!"

But you know, I finally figured that Matt and I are certainly big enough fangeeks in our own right--comic books, Buffy, sci-fi TV shows--let the kid own her fandom. So while we certainly don't let Syd watch the shows all the time, I did do some web research and downloaded her a DIY mobile, and some masks, and some coloring pages from the Land Before Time web site, and put some easy-reader Land Before Time books on hold at the library, and even checked out ebay to possibly buy her more of those little plastic critters (not for love nor money, apparently).

So, yep, baby's a fangeek. And now the rest of the shout-outs are all about me.

So Matt came home from work yesterday, and sat me down at the computer first thing, and he's all, "Now, Newsarama and Comic Book Resources are the premiere comic book resources, blah blah blah, but Robot 6 is the most popular blog and blah blah blah, and so I was taking a break at work and thought I would check it out, blah blah, and in this one post I was scrolling down, and I see a link to a tutorial for making gift tags out of comic books, and I know you like that stuff, so I click on it, and what do I see? YOU!!!"

I guess Robot 6 was kind enough to pick up my post on Crafting a Green World about making comic book gift tags, and now I have officially impressed my husband.

In other news, I have warned everyone and warned everyone about how bad I am at interviews (this one time, after I won a spelling bee at my junior high, the five o-clock news interviewed me on television, and... it was not pretty), but nilochlainn was nice enough to risk it anyway and interviewed me for the INCrowd Team blog over at etsy. She asks me a lot of interesting, nice questions and I basically go on and on pedantically. Apparently you do not need to get me started about the concept of traditional "women's work."

And if I can go on about that, remember that my official field of study is actually medieval studies, and think about how much more it is possible for me to go on about a single field of study.

P.S. Check out my ode to Artist Trading Cards over at Crafting a Green World.

And If You, As Well, Like Things That are Free...

I'm taking a break from my Yourself Fitness workout (Five minutes of heel jacks? Really, Maya?) to participate in this meme I found at One Gal's Trash (she got it from Vintage Rescue Squad). It's super-awesome, because here's what I get to do:

The first 5 people who respond to this post will get something made by me...it will be my choice, but made especially for you. This offer does have some restrictions & limitations...

*What I create will be just for you, and it will, like most of my work, include recycled elements as primary components.
*I make no guarantees that you will like it...but I hope you do! Feel free to tell me the kinds of stuff you're most fond of, ESPECIALLY if you're a big, dorky fangeek just like me.
*You will receive this item before the end of the year...or sooner.
*You will have no idea what the item will be, or when you will receive it.

*****The BIG catch is you have to repost this Meme on your blog and put together something to be sent out as 5 surprises of your own. These surprises can be anything....a piece of art, a photo, a poem...whatever you choose...

On account of I have always wanted to be involved in my own pyramid scheme, of sorts.

So, friends, put on your thinking caps, send along this meme and then comment back here to let me know that you, too, will send a surprise into the lives of five more friends this year.

P.S. Look what I made! I'm going a little crazy with the comic book love, I know. These particular bad boys will be going up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop as soon as I've finished my workout, fed the girls lunch and gotten them dressed, written my lesson plans and homework for tonight, and baked beer bread and roasted tomatoes so that Matt doesn't feed the girls sauce-less tortellini for the THIRD night in a row while I'm teaching tonight--
--but if you happen to be local, I dropped 50 more over at the gift shop of the Waldron Art Center yesterday afternoon. My goal is to eventually inspire the entire town to walk around wearing non-sequiter comic book dialogue by the end of the year.

Hit the Big-Time

I sort of get paid for writing, now.

My newest gig is over at Green Options, a blogging community devoted to sustainable living. The blogs located under Green Options are each themed, and the topics range from politics to the arts to business and technology. I write under the Crafting a Green World and the Eco Child's Play blogs, and you'll be able to find me over there in each blog three or four times a week, earning some extra chump change and spewing my ever-ready opinions out to an even bigger audience--you probably didn't think I had even more opinions than the ones I unburden myself of right here, did you? Well, I do.

My first post? A manifesto, of course. And then I go off about zoos.

And what have my kids been doing while I've been posting on THREE blogs, and grading papers, and meeting with students, and washing the entire contents of our house in the sanitary cycle of the washing machine in panicked reaction to Will's pinworm infestation? Why, playing crazy games with numbers, of course!

During the Great Study Cleaning, the girls got ahold of some vintage Bingo cards I'd been saving for...something, and, always the ones with the awesome ideas, Willow cut the cards up into their individual numbers and the kiddos thought that this was just pretty awesome.

When I saw them playing so happily together with such an obvious learning tool, I tried to elbow my way on into their game with a little lesson on how to line them up in order from smallest to largest, but that lesson sucked, and it's so much better when you're just faced with a line of obscurely ordered items and you get to figure out the complicated pattern behind them for yourself:

Go see my big-bucks blog! See if you can figure out what word the Eco Child's Play editor had to correct my spelling of! See then if you can figure out exactly how many post-graduate degrees (hint: more than one) I have and I still misspell that word!

Love for Nie

I'm not so much into Jesus-lovin', myself, but I do love this blog by a Jesus-lovin', homebirth-having mama with four kids and, obviously, lots of kid-related adventures. For some reason I am always, for instance, thinking of this post and cracking up, because for some reason I, too, am always being subjected to the weirdest freak-outs by people of authority about my children. One of my mom friends who's a relatively recent transplant here and so far is just not feeling the small town love claims that Bloomington is the nation's home for displaced busy-bodies, but I, personally, get people all judgmental about my neglectful parenting everywhere.

Matt's theory about "neighborliness" in smaller cities and towns is that in a big city, nobody cares how you act because they'll never see you again, and anyway, they've got business of their own to take care of and they don't need to take time away from it to tell you your kid should be wearing a helmet while tricycling. In a smaller city or small town, however, people have a bigger stake in how you behave because they're likely going to see you around A LOT. I can't even tell you how many Bloomington people I've never met but who I know by sight because I see them every week at the library, the farmer's market, Bryan Park, and Joann's. When people see you around a lot, they'd probably prefer if your kid didn't always do annoying shit right in front of them or endanger her life so that they can't enjoy their latte for fear that the kid will fall off the top step and crack her head open and then they'll have to step in and call 911 and worry about minute rollover or whatever. Of course, in a small town those same busy-bodies will also sneak up to your house in the dead of night and leave a big grocery bag of cucumbers and tomatoes on your porch, so there you go.

Anyway...the blogger and her husband, and anyone knows that if you read someone's blog you feel as if you know them so well, were in a terrible plane crash last month and are very seriously injured. Here's the family-run blog about their recovery and the fundraising being done to help them--I'm not so much about the fasting in their honor, or the race, but I was all about the two-day benefit sale on etsy. New items will be added today around 1:00 pm-ish for those kicking it here in the Eastern time zone, but you should also check out the awesome stuff that sold yesterday.

Blog List

I'm sure this will be big news for you, but... I tend to be a little obsessive. No, seriously. I know, I know, I'm really subtle about it, but yeah, there it is. So, you know, if we get a DVD box set from the library, and I discover that I really like the series (hello, Joan of Arcadia!), I will watch all 36 or whatever hours of that series before I do anything else in the world besides eating, sleeping, and basic parenting. If there's a cookie cake in the house, I literally cannot settle down until that cookie cake has been consumed in its entirety. Preferably by me. The average time it takes me to read any good novel, no matter the length? About a day. You know, obsessive.

For a week now, I've been flat-out obsessed with making pillowcase dresses. I bought a few pillowcases at a Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale months ago and stuck them in the stash and in the back of my mind, and there they sat, but a few weeks ago during my forced felted wool stegosaurus sweat shoppe, I started thinking, "Pillowcase dresses. Pillowcase dresses. Pillowcase dresses." So I made the girls a matching set for their friend Phillip's birthday party last weekend:

It was fun, so I made another the next day. And another. When I ran out of pillowcases, we went to Goodwill--they're 99 cents there! I bought several, including one dinosaur-print(!). I knew I had it bad when on Thursday, dropping Willow off at a playdate, I bragged to my mom-friend that I'd made Sydney's little pillowcase shirt just that morning. In the afternoon, re-exchanging kids at the library, Noel noticed that Sydney was in a different pillowcase dress, and asked if I'd made that one, too. I said, "Yeah... About half an hour ago, actually." Oh, well. Sydney had another new hot-off-the-presses pillowcase dress for the Fourth of July parade, and then another one this morning for errand-running (Willow wanted to wear it, but Sydney said yes first. So I promised I'd make Willow her dinosaur-print pillowcase dress this afternoon). So, um...yeah. Obsessive.

Another thing I've been obsessed about lately is the finding and reading of crafty blogs--you know I list them sometimes here in the blog, but I tend to lose track of which ones I've mentioned. Hence the new feature I've been playing with, on the right above the archives and below the wist gallery: a blog list!!! Now both you and I can obsessively have handy not only the names and links of my favorite crafty blogs, but also snippets of their latest entries and a tag for how long ago they were last updated! Ooh, so helpful for keeping obsessively up-to-date.

Do you heart a crafty blog?

Friday Blogs

Every now and then, on the rarest of occasions, Willow and Sydney will forget to fight for a while. I'll be loading the dishwasher or folding clothes or whatever, and a silence will suddenly descend upon the house. My ears might ring for a moment, unused to the lack of "Mine!" "No, it's mine!" "I win!" "No, I win!" "Top it!" "No, you stop it!" I will, obviously, fear that the children have suddenly died. I'll tiptoe around the corner and sneak a peek, and see the girls not wrestling, not playing tug-of-war with a coveted toy, but reading books together, or playing with their toy cars, or having a dinosaur puppet show. When this happens, I consider it a holiday, and I immediately stop whatever drudgery I'm doing and go do something fun for myself for 15 minutes. Often I'll sit down and eat something (my favorite activity), or work on an art project for myself or the girls or a craft fair, or read a little, or mend some things, or check out some things on the world wide interweb.



Some of my favorite things to check out on the interweb are craft-related blogs--they're updated often, so there's usually something new, entries are short enough that I can get through them in the fifteen minutes before the books or cars or dinosaurs start flying, and I like seeing new stuff and techniques and ideas that other people come up with.



So here are a few of my favorite blogs at the moment (I might have mentioned a couple of these before):

• Crafting the Web: This blog focuses on handmade cards--lots of embellishments, sophisticated colors (I like myself some brown), and techniques.


• CraftStylish: This is more of a company effort--craft fair reviews, a variety of tutorials in a number of disciplines (teeny hat! wedding band pendant!), and references.


• Craftypod: This author is knowlegeable about art and local art happenings, is interested in gardening, and regularly shows off her project ideas and projects (I realllly want her to give me some of her Lily Pulitzer quilt pieces), sometimes with tutorials.


• Craftzine: There are a lot of really sophisticated objects and advanced tutorials here (Crafty Baby Mobile? Mabye not. Felt Doughnut? Awesome!), with looks at some really exceptional crafted products.


• Elsie Marley: The author writes about a number of her sewing (we both heart Built by Wendy) and home dec projects, many of them for children. She also creates some really fabulous stuffed animals for her etsy shop.


• Fluffy Flowers: I might have written about this blog before, but I can't pass up those cute stuffed animal close-ups.


• Hello! My Name is Heather: This author is living the dream as a professional crafter. Check out her tutorials, handily located on a sidebar.


• Little Birds: This author has great craft finds, inspirational personal projects, and fun photos of her kiddos.

Know more? Share!

Dinosaurs on Film!

It's only 2:30 and so far:

1. Since the little kid now has the high fever that tormented the big kid this weekend, we didn't go to storytime at the local library this morning, and so while the little kid napped fitfully in the other room, the big kid and I worked on the dinosaur quilt for her mid-July birthday. This consists mostly of looking at all the dino T-shirt panels and dino fabric we've collected, re-stacking and re-sorting them--she's not even four years old yet, and the big kid already knows the best part of sewing. We did make a plan, however. Here is the big kid's concept sketch of the plan:

It really is a pretty accurate sketch: basically, we decided that each T-shirt panel would be surrounded by a wide border of printed fabric. I'd like the border to have the pattern match perfectly on all sides and to be pretty seamless, like a picture frame, so a log cabin quilt it is!

2. After the little kid wakes up howling and we nurse, have snacks, read books, have more snacks, spill some milk, do some laundry, eat watermelon outside, read another book, and I bully the big kid into getting dressed (I may have raised my voice just a smidge, but honestly--what did she do with her toothbrush? We never did find it!) so my partner can come get her, he takes her to school and then puts the little kid down for a nap while I eat some Minute Rice and read some more of this awesome blog I discovered the other day. The author takes beautiful photographs, makes awesome recycled sweater creatures like I'm learning how to do, and is a self-taught sewist, as well. Her blog entry on the Simplicity 3835 shirt pattern actually sent me to ebay to bid on one for myself. If I win it, it will be my very first pattern ever, so don't snipe me, y'all, because I swear I always get sniped.

3. After I finish my lunch (it was actually pretty gross, so yay, calorie deficit!), I spend an episode of Friday Night Lights finishing up a super-large item for my Craft for My Kids swap on Craftster. I'm almost finished, with maybe one or two smallish-mediums or large-ish smalls to make for my partner's little girlie.

4. I go in to nurse the little kid back to sleep (Matt has gotten me into Superman, oddly enough, so I'm working my way through the Superman in the Sixties collection. It is so weird), then creeeep out, holding my breath, and actually have time to finish tweaking and printing the dino photos I'm going to put in the kids' downstairs bathroom. This is Sue, from the Chicago Field Museum:

These are some of the kids' dino toys. One night the big kid and I got down her Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (Smithsonian Handbooks) (gift alert: the kids totally need all these Smithsonian Handbooks) and she actually found the right picture for each of these dinosaurs and spelled their names for me so I could label their bellies with a Sharpie. This here is a velociraptor up front, and possibly a pachycephalosaurus behind it:

4. And now it's 3:00, the little kid is now sitting on my lap pestering me while I finish up, and we're about to go get the big kid from school. We can't go to the YMCA like we usually do because of the little kid's fever, we can't go to Sam's even though we need cookie dough for my last day of class tomorrow because my wallet is MIA, so if we're lucky we'll get invited to hang out with another mom and gossip while the kids run around and get dirty, and if not we'll come home and rock the neighborhood playground, and if those are our choices for spending the afternoon, then that probably just makes us pretty lucky in general.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

New Friday Findings

Lots of found stuff this week, a snapshot of what I've been up to: skill-building, kid-swapping, felt foods, craft fair applications, etc.

Brainstorming ideas for my Craft for My Kids swap, I came across this pattern for cloth baby shoes. I was always a weird parent, in that I never really got into baby shoes (or bibs, to many extended relatives' frustration--on a visit, a relative once tied a cloth napkin around my baby's neck when I wasn't looking), but I was actually thinking it might be really awesome to expand this pattern and try it out for adult slippers.

And here's a pattern for a little fabric house. Next rainy day, I can imagine making about a thousand of these with the kids, an entire city of little fabric houses to step over or, Godzilla-like, ON.

I found this blog during a Google Image search for felt food ideas--I love the fact that this author makes stuff for the kids, shops in thrift stores, and, ooh, scroll down until you see the Super Mario Bros. quilt--awesome!

In my search for indie craft fairs to apply for (or shop at!), I decided just to make a collection of all the ones I find, since they're still more rare than not. Stitch Rock, unfortunately, takes place in Florida, but I love its tag line: "bringing back old school crafting technique with new school flare." Black Sheep, also in Florida, also has a good one: "Be there or knit a granny square."

I could possibly attend something like the Detroit Urban Craft Fair--I'm thinking about driving-distance destinations with either relatives to visit or cool kid-friendly tourist stuff to do. That's how the St. Louis Rock-n-Roll Craft Show fits in, too, since they have a zoo and their hands-on science museum has animatronic dinosaurs.

And so you don't think that I haven't been reading real, live books this week, here are two I've been working my way through while drinking coffee or nursing: Bend-the-Rules Sewing: The Essential Guide to a Whole New Way to Sew, by Amy Karol, is such a useful resource for a self-taught sewist because it offers some pretty intricate projects that I can totally get into, but without using the technical language I never learned. I just realized, while flipping through it for an example, that there is something in here I am absolutely going to modify for my swap!--lips are zipped.

I'm still more of a peruser of knitting books than an actual knitter, but Twinkle's Big City Knits: 31 Chunky-Chic Designs, by Wenlan Chia, makes good perusing. Also peruse the list of errata, though, and no foul there, because manuals are hard to do. My editor, back when I wrote for The TCU Magazine, once told a story of being a proofreader among a team of proofreaders and being called to the carpet because 10,000 copies or something of some math book, like Advanced Geometry or something, had been shipped out and it took a high school kid, instead of an entire chain of command of publishers' employees, to notice that on the front cover, Geometry was misspelled. Anyway, I don't dress in girl clothes, and you know I don't really knit (yet), but for some reason I really love the downtown groovy sweater dress on page 16.

Know more? Share!

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!

Indie Craft Fairs

Sporting the strawberry hat I bought her at Renegade Fair!

I'm a really big fan of indie craft fairs. I find the modern DIY practice really fresh and appealing, and the vibe so different from your typical craft fair. So far I've enjoyed attending them and buying lots and lots of awesome stuff, and one of my goals for this year is to apply to some of the fairs in driving distance in order to test how my work might sell in a market that's really suited to it.

Here is a list of my favorite indie craft fairs:

I attended the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago this year, and it was quite a good outlet for some retail therapy. I bought loads of things, including a vinyl wrist cuff in orange and grey, knitted strawberry-top hats for both my kids, postcards, pins, and soap, and I studied the kinds of displays and marketing that the successful booths employed. It was where I figured out that my own displays need to look way more put-together.

The Bazaar Bizarre (I wish it was the Bizarre Bazaar, but I'm not in charge of all aspects of the world at large) is a winter event that I've never attended, but there's one in Cleveland, which is in driving distance, so I'm so there this year. Even though they're obviously not updated for the upcoming year yet, their sight is very valuable if you like to sell because they have lots of photos of past events. I flip through the vendor photos and gaze jealously at their awesome displays, and wish I, too, could make their awesome products.

Craftin' Outlaws also looks really cool, and is in good old Columbus, a driveable distance, but it seems like it might be really close in time to Chicago's Renegade Fair, which would be unfortunate. I can't spend the year tooling around in my RV from indie craft fair to indie craft fair until Matt and I retire. Or if we worked independently. Which would be great.

The No Coast Craft-O-Rama is too far away for me to attend, but it's another winter event. This is the thing I didn't get last year--I chose to sell at a sci-fi convention last Thanksgiving weekend instead of at the local craft fair's holiday fair, and I did well at the convention, but I might have done better at the holiday fair, because people love themselves some Christmas. I was opposed to the idea of making "Christmas" crafts because I generally only make things that I'm really into myself, and I'm not so into Christmas, but I was thinking I might try it this year. Christmas-themed stuff, anyway, if it doesn't sell, would also make good Christmas presents that would fit in with my handmade holiday ethic without the last-minute stress of actually making the handmade holiday. I noticed on etsy, too, that everybody but me made Valentine's Day stuff and it all sold like mad, so another one of my goals for the year is to figure out a schedule for creating for the big holidays.

Finally, the Urban Craft Uprising is also much too far away for me to attend, but I'm also a really big fan of the Web sites for indie craft fairs because they always provide links to the Web sites of their vendors, and I love indie craft Web shops as much as I love indie craft fairs.

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A Few of My Favorite Blogs

There are a few other blogs I know about that also explore the DIY culture, also from the perspective primarily of re-use and recycling. When I find a blog I really love, I tend to treat it like a must-read novel, starting at the beginning and reading it all the way up to the present, often in a great big glut over the course of a couple of days. Here are some glut-worthy:


Crafting the Web has a really great combination: some projects with tutorials, some product reviews, and the best of all--thoughtful advice about various topics involved in running an online craft business. Her suggestions for advertising an etsy shop are really useful, and it was a terrific post about the possibilities of starting an online crafting information resource supported by ad revenue versus an online retail store that inspired me to start this blog as the first step towards my own online business someday. Her projects aren't necessarily recycled, but since they're mostly paper-based, they tend to support well the re-use of papers.


Some of the projects at the Craftzine blog are too elaborate for me, and some utilize skills I haven't yet learned, but they're beautiful to look at. Many of the projects with tutorials use repurposed materials, and this site also often explores the art along with the craft, with posts about exhibitions and innovative designers.


Dynamite.com has project tutorials, often using repurposed goods, in nearly every post, and they also include workable recipes. They do a lot of fabric, paper, and yarn art, and they also just look really friendly, I think.


Perpetualplum's Weblog also showcases her recycled work, and she works at a level of skill and craftsmanship that I hope I can someday obtain. Her jewelry is intricate and beautiful and vibrant--and often made of buttons! She works with game pieces a lot, too, but her projects are just in a whole different world.


I really ought to submit my stuff to the Re-craft blog, which is dedicated to highlighting those etsy wares that are made of recycled materials. It's useful and inspirational to see what others make and sell, especially since I'm relatively new at online business and all it entails.


The Craftgossip Blog Network also posts primarily recycled products and artwork, but if something links to Craftster, you'll generally find an awesome tutorial and discussion there, and some DIY project books give me more incentives to annoy the aquisitions department at the Monroe County Public Library.

Rostitchery is the most beautiful, most perfect blog ever. I love it--she has a daughter, too, maybe a year older than Willow, and she's a brilliant seamstress, so she keeps me flush with dress patterns. I made a pillowcase dress for Sydney roughly based on one of her tutorials, only where she uses the sweetest, most flowery, and precious pillowcases, I sort of used an old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one. Sydney rocks it, of course. And it was her post about making her daughter some Max and Ruby stuffed "babies" that gave me the idea to try soon making my girls some stuffed dinosaurs (not like the ones I'd like to sell at the craft fairs this summer, but simpler and more satisfying to little ones, most likely).

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