I Bought a Vintage Disney Puzzle off of Ebay

So, you know, that's about how I'm doing during this pandemic!

I've actually been looking for this Disney Fantasy puzzle, manufactured in 1981, for decades. I don't really remember gobs and gobs from my childhood, but one of my most vivid--and happiest!--memories is working this puzzle with some of the adults in my life at my grandparents' giant wooden dining room table.

The funny thing is that I remember the puzzle being super challenging--like, it had EVERY Disney character on it! So many Disney characters!--but I was probably only about 5 or 6 years old. 

And the puzzle actually only has 300 pieces!

Fridays after our school day and Matt's work day have ended are what I've come to think of as Happy Hour. I set up a new puzzle and a podcast (Welcome to Night Vale or The Magnus Archives are current family favorites), or some coloring and an audiobook (we're currently medium-way through Dracula), or just crosswords and Syd's Spotify playlist (she's no longer heavy on the Billie Eilish!), and, most importantly for getting the kids' buy-in, SNACKS. Matt makes the adults cocktails, and we just hang out around the table and chill. 

It turns out that a 300-piece puzzle is just about perfect for chilling around a big table on a Friday night, with margaritas and Cheez-Its and Zebra Cakes (because SNACKS!).

It took one to two adults and one to two kids about two-and-a-half hours to put together this puzzle--

--and it's just as adorable and interesting as I remembered!

Syd asked, "Where are all the princesses?", and that's one of the most interesting things, because in 1981, there weren't many princesses! 1981's Disney was still very much associated with anthropomorphized cartoon animals:

Alas, all the racist characters are present--see the crows from Dumbo? And the Br'er animals from Song of the South?

But you've also got some pretty deep cuts from the other Disney cartoons. When is the last time you've seen Clarabelle Cow?

Syd also noticed this one--why the snot is Tinkerbell's dress PINK?!?

Ugh I love it SO MUCH!!! I don't know what happened to the one that I had when I was six, but this one I am keeping forever, and I am FOR SURE going to put it together again while watching Disney movies when we buy a month of Disney+ later this summer (HAMILTON IS COMING TO DISNEY+!!!!!!!!!).

But only the movies that came out by 1981. And not the racist ones.

I'll let you know what color Tinkerbell's dress is!

P.S. If you, too, remember liking Disney circa 1981, this 1981 Disney newspaper is hella cool. I *might* have gone to Disney World the first time around then (although the only thing that I remember about that trip is the Main Street Electrical Parade, particularly Pete's Dragon scaring the shit out of me), so it's interesting to see what was going on!

Goodbye, Mothering

I almost feel like I'm selling my babies' babyhood:



I'm selling endless mornings hanging out in the playroom at Bloomington Area Birth Services, flipping through their Mothering magazines, engaging in fascinating conversation with other new mothers about the all the minutiae of our precious babies.

I'm selling a second round of those endless mornings, flipping through the same Mothering magazines, this time much less fascinated by the minutiae discussed by the first-time mommies around me. Diapering? Sleeping? Is she eating enough? Eh, I worried about all that stuff the first time around.

I bought my own subscription, I read every single article, I looked up the authors to read what else they'd written, I examined every ad, then looked up those web sites--it was my first (not nearly last) experience of feeling aghast at the prices put on unfinished wooden toys, or the kinds of woolens that can't be put in your washing machine.

I'd mark certain articles for Matt to read, and he'd come back to me, magazine in hand, saying things like "One of their kids had chicken pox and so they got all the other kids in their playgroup sick ON PURPOSE?!?". Ah, silly boy, with his own first (not nearly last) experience of some unique parenting perspectives.

I kept these magazines what feels like forever, gathering more, lending them out to pregnant friends, getting them back a year later sometimes and rediscovering them myself.

It's always sad to give away something else that signifies, to you, that you don't intend to have more children (especially if you kind of maybe might want more, just a little). Selling our cloth diapers felt the same, as did putting out the turtle sandbox, and the Duplos, and the board books at our last garage sale.

Of course, when I was looking through these magazines to write their description for my ebay listing and I found the magazine for Sydney's birth month and year, I set that one aside from the sell stack altogether. When she's a great grown-up girl and she reads for herself the parenting magazine that I was reading the month that I gave birth to her, will she be touched? Amused?

Or horrified like her poor father?

Buttons, Buttons, I've Got the Buttons!

So my Matt spent practically the entire day slaving over the computer--he formatted my laptop, reinstalled Windows, reinstalled all my software programs, futzed over drivers that wouldn't install correctly, futzed some more--rendering my computer and himself virtually useless in all other regards all day, during a month in which I have online grades to record, book proposals to write, blogs to post in, an etsy shop to update, research to do, and finally, FINALLY everything is reinstalled and I'm back in the game.

And if the internet is acting wonky again (which was the ORIGINAL PROBLEM, remember?), well, for now I'm inclined just to overlook it and be grateful for what I have.

In other, CRAFTY news for a change, I've been reading and re-reading , and whining to everyone I see all about how in all the other crafty blogs I read, everyone in those blogs is just swimming in vintage buttons, and I have like five buttons, total, that I ripped off of an old Gap shirt (from Goodwill, of course, not The Gap, not that you care) of Matt's before transitioning it into a dishrag.

I couldn't stand it anymore. In a shocking move and a nail-bitingly tense auction, I bought over two pounds of buttons on ebay: This auction actually went a little higher than most of the vintage button auctions tend to do, because of two reasons:

1) The seller, who clearly had no idea of the awesomeness of what she was selling, just sort of mentioned in passing that most of these used to be her grandmother's buttons (DING! DING! DING! DING!)

2) In the sort-of blurry photo of a bunch of the buttons spilled out of the Ziploc bag onto a table, you could see studded all over the pile beauties like these: And now they're mine, ALL MINE!!!

Come on, even if you're not one of my crafty friends, you gotta love a shot like this one:P.S. Check out my shout-outs on Craftzine and Recycled Crafts! Remember, only make plant markers out of vinyl miniblinds that were made after 1996, or you and your loved ones will all die of lead poisoning.

Webbings

No fear--I redid my botched project this morning while the girls played with toy cars on the study floor and it totally looks even more awesome than it did before (I hope my swap partner thinks so, too!), and then I made another item for the little girl in the swap, and then I tried it on Willow, and then Willow begged me to make her one exactly like that one, so maybe I'll be making another one tomorrow...

My big adventures, lately, have been in the perusal and purchase of dinosaur fabric to include in the dinosaur T-shirt quilt I'm making for the girls this summer. I don't usually frame the T-shirts in my quilts, because I tend to like the simplest presentation for what can often be very busy or dramatic and large squares--
but with this dinosaur quilt I thought it might be fun to frame the shirts by showing off the diversity of dinosaur prints available--something along the lines of this quilt, but my designs are generally very bold and I plan to use a variety of fabrics for the framing.

I've already blogged about the numerous gorgeous dino prints I covet on the Web, and how they're all far too expensive for my meager budget. What's a girl to do? Ebay! My maximum price for each item, product + shipping, was $10, and now I've got this:

and this:

and this:and, awesomely, this:This latter I'm going to back and bind and hang as a tapestry in the basement bathroom off of the playroom, which the girls and I are currently painting a combination of aqua green and Incredible Hulk green. The other fabrics will be ample, I think, for the full-sized quilt I'm planning, plus some pillowcases and perhaps extra for dino quilts to sell.

It's really kind of crazy how dinosaurs have grown on me since Willow's own obsession began, way back when. Natural, though, considering that since she's three years old and I'm her mother, I spend as much time reading about them, looking them up on the Web, watching documentaries on them, visiting them in museums, and making up stories about them as she does. I might like them more than cats now.

In other news, I've now joined the community of awesome people with a wist. What's a wist, you ask? It's a Web thumbnail list, indexed by keyword, accessible to anyone. In non-librarian terms, you can put thumbnails of stuff you like--stuff you want to buy, stuff you want to make, stuff that inspires you--on your own page, and anyone can view them, search them by keyword, link through them to the original site, etc. This is my wist. What's yours?