So Easy, Even Small Children Can Do It!

Look at my little urchin--CLEANING THE RUG! Our rug always needs cleaning, but after an "incident" this morning (I'll spare you the horrifying details, except to tell you that it involved Sydney and a diaper, and I almost barfed), the rug NEEDED cleaning. I've probably mentioned before that I am obsessed with --I use some recipe from that book every day, I swear--so this afternoon I made up the Carpet Cleaner recipe (subsituting baking soda for washing soda--washing soda cleans better, but is a little too caustic for our house) and started scrubbing. Willow, seeing me up to something that doesn't immediately look like drudgery, is immediately all, "I want to help!" Help away, kiddo!

It's just about my favorite aspect of natural cleaning, particularly making your own cleaners--the kids can actually productively use them to help me clean, and since I know exactly what's in the cleaners and that they cost about a penny to make, I know that they're not harming themselves or the house or wasting money when they begin to clean a little, um, boisterously. Sydney likes to take the spray bottle of vinegar and tea tree oil, for instance, and spray, well, everything--walls, tabletops, couch, cat, floor.

When she does that, I think, "Oh, good! The baby's cleaning."

Babywearing Baby

When Willow was a baby, Matt and I wore her nearly all the time in a couple of ring slings I'd made--blue plaid for him, purple stripes for me. Babywearing is terrific for the baby's emotional well-being, physical stimulation, intellectual growth, you name it. Ring slings are terrific for wearing babies, newborn through sitting up, because they're adjustable, versatile, and comfy. They're not great for older kids, however, because their weight isn't evenly distributed--then you need something more ergonomically correct. By the time Willow was a toddler, however, about Sydney's age, I'd completely stopped wearing her, and that's because of this:

See the package hanging around my neck? That's Sydney, taking her turn at being worn in the ring sling. And that's why my back has been killing me, now that Sydney is almost two and therefore almost a big girl. Thus begins the search for the big-girl baby carrier.

The mei tai is my big-girl carrier of choice--it's a soft Asian-style carrier, modified in the US to be easier to put on independently (traditionally, Asian mommies were never alone with their babies, and traditionally, American mommies nearly always are). You can wear your kiddo in front or back, vertically, with weight distributed over your shoulders, across your back, and around your waist.

There are a lot of really beautiful mei tais being made by stay-at-home moms just like me, only they sew better and have better taste. McKenzie Shields of Bunchkin Designs makes the most beautiful baby carriers I've ever seen, with lots of rich brocades and gadgety doo-dads. I also really, really like the mei tais at Babyhawk, on account of their awesome punk fabrics. The only problem with this terrific assortment of beautiful mei tais, all of them exactly what I want? They're super-expensive, as they ought to be, and I am super-poor.

I was super-sad for a while, lusting after the awesomeness of the mei tai, but what you have to do when that happens is remember your convictions. I don't buy things new; I craft them using recycled materials. Never mind that I've never made anything this complicated before and don't have the materials to make one now. I need a padded and beautiful fabric for the back--Matt's Aunt Vicki gave Willow a Hawaiian-print baby quilt, actually from Hawaii, when she was born, but the girls haven't used it in a year. I need some long, long straps, made out of a bottomweight fabric or home dec material--I'm never going to fit again into the half-dozen pairs of jeans I wore between Willow and Sydney, and even if I did, hell, they wouldn't be in style.

I was inspired by Jan Andrea's site years ago when I designed my ring slings, and she also has these terrific instructions for a mei tai, but mostly I just fiddled around. I quilted the shoulder straps to the back, and bound all my edges in denim to keep from having to hem and turn, except for the straps, which I topstitched around but I'm going to let the edges fray because that will be very cool. It's not perfect, but I did make it, and instead of ninety dollars it was free, and it's perfect for me and my almost big girl:

Craft for My Kids Swap

I am rocking this new swap that I joined on Craftster. In it, I get to make stuff for my awesome partner's awesome kids, and she's making stuff for my awesome kids. So if you're wondering why I haven't been posting my projects, it's because I don't want to spoil the surprise! I'll post everything when the swap is over, however, with tutorials when necessary.

Doing a craft swap is really excellent for a lot of reasons. Chances are, if you have a craft that you really enjoy doing, you do it a lot, and that results in a lot of finished projects...a lot for you, a lot for your family, a lot for your friends, a lot for your kids' friends, etc. For instance--and this is not something I'm making in the swap!--I loooove to solder, and particularly to make pendants out of old postage stamps sandwiched between microscope glass. So I made myself some out of some cool stamps, I made Willow a couple of dinosaur stamp ones, I made all the grandmas necklaces and all the great-grandmas ornaments out of a photo of the girls, I made some of Matt's cousins necklaces of photos of their respective babies (and only received a sweet thank-you note from one of them!), I made a couple dozen dinosaur and superhero ones to post on etsy...and now, whenever another mom compliments me on the necklace I made from the girls' photo, I say, "Give me a little photo of your kid, and I'll make you one, too." I have also offered to do everything from patch another child's torn pants to making my daughter's dance teacher her own no-sew tutu to making my librarian friend's son a [insert item I am crafting for my swap] of his own. So having another recipient (especially a willing one!) for something I love to make allows me to keep indulging in a relaxing and useful pastime.

Craft swaps are also really excellent as motivation for learning new skills. In my very first swap, I learned how to cut out quilt blocks not with a template, but with a clear gridded ruler. I also indirectly learned how to use fusible webbing. In this swap, I've so far modified an existing pattern and created my own take on a certain baby item and learned (sort-of) to sew Velcro (sticky needles!), and I plan to create some new patterns/recipes for new items before I'm finished. It's part of my obsessive personality that I really, really, really like to learn new things, so this, for me, is the best thing about crafting.

Finally, who wouldn't want to have, in exchange for these pleasures, a few beautifully handcrafted items lovingly made just for you (or in this case, your kids)?

Let There Be Light

Ah, the ease with which stern resolutions fade happily away. Seriously, I am going to clean off the living room table one of these days really soon, but in the meantime, I just got home from a Hillary Clinton rally at which Bill himself spoke, not that I actually got to see Bill speak because he ran three-and-a-half hours late and I had to leave two hours before he actually arrived to go get Willow from Montessori, but still, I went. Here's a photo of a crazy old coot to prove it:
So anyway, Adobe Lightroom is the miracle program that's going to replace my eight-year-old bootleg Adobe Photoshop that suddenly refused to function or reinstall correctly a few weeks ago--I suspect that something in my Microsoft auto updates was actually some sort of sniper program for bootlegs, and although Matt calls this unduly paranoid, he certainly can't come up with a better explanation. Lightroom is Photoshop, only geared toward "professional and serious amateur" photographers--I'm a serious amateur, y'all! It's pared away all the gadgets and tools that are useless to you if all you use Photoshop for is photography editing, and at the same time it's made all the tools you do use for photography editing readily available and more intuitive--for instance, the access points for tone and color and level changes and stuff are always on the screen, and you can scroll down through them, and you can always see your histogram and how every change affects it, which I think is really helpful for developing an internal and intuitive model for editing. Ooh, and you can make metachanges to an entire group of photos, like if you know that all the photos you took at a certain shoot need additional exposure, you can make the same change to all of them at once, saving time. And you can overlay a grid that will allow you to crop to your magic thirds, and you can set it to crop at a particular ratio, say an 8x10 photo, and however you move your crop around or expand or narrow it, it will stay at an 8x10 ratio, which is awesomely less maddening than in Photoshop.
Developing a photo, and the creative additional changes you can make, is really important, because even a well-shot photograph, especially when taken spontaneously in an uncontrolled environment, will need a lot of tweaking to make it perfect. Take this photo that I took of the girls after school on Tuesday:
It was a really grumpy day out, and the light was just lousy. This is pretty much how it looked right then, but that's not the moment I wanted to capture. But after half an hour with my freshly installed Lightroom, not even having read the manual, this is the moment I captured:It's still not perfect, of course--I actually have to read the Lightroom manual, but it's much closer to what I wanted it to be.
Photography is really important to me, and having a good digital editing program that I can use on my laptop is as crucial to me as having an excellent (though bell-and-whistle-less) digital SLR. A digital darkroom is less expensive than a physical one, it takes no time away from my family, it's better for my health and for the environment, and frankly, although old-school photographers are going to freak at this, it allows much more scope for creativity. When I was a postpartum mom, my camera gave me something creative and intellectual to do while following Willow around all day to library and park and Wonderlab, Sydney in the sling, instead of sitting around looking and feeling like a bored, mindless slug. One of the many things I want to leave my daughters are thousands of beautiful, loving photos of them, showing them just what awesome kids they were and what precious childhoods they had. And when they ask why I'm never in any of these photos, I'll say, "Momma took these photos of you. Momma was looking at you the whole time."

A Clean Floor

Something I should admit: my house is filthy. Like, really filthy, can't walk on the floor without stepping on stuff filthy, filthy as in barely sanitary, filthy as in I'm always sort of vaguely fearing the sudden, unexpected visit of a social worker who would step in the doorway, take a look at the filthy living room, and snatch my babies away to foster care filthy. Sure, I want to clean, and sure, I do clean, every single day, but mostly I do other stuff--play with the girls, read books to the girls, do art projects with the girls, grade papers and create lesson plans, sew, read, garden with the girls, eat delicious things, goof around on the internet--you know, stuff.

But part of being committed to an environmental ethic is a commitment to not filth up your living space. How different is filthing up my own house to filthing up highway medians, or the oceans, or the atmosphere? It reflects and teaches my children an irresponsible attitude to one's living environment, and to one's possessions. Although it might not seem so, an environmental ethic should be very concerned with stuff--we should be mindful of our possessions as one of the many aspects of mindful living. We should, obviously, have few things, but those things that we do have should be really important to us. When something is important to us we keep it rather than disposing of it for a new or "better" something, and when something is important to us we take care of it, keeping it nice and in good repair so that we don't have to dispose of it and purchase new stuff.

So this morning I got disgusted with myself and my house and decided to make a change. In the morning, I took "before" photos of one filthy part of my home, and made a vow to straighten it, organize it, and clean it before bedtime. And so I give to you.....my study floor and the things it contains:

• Pizza Express cup
• construction paper
• crayons
• Legos
• miniature bead path
• lid for Tupperware container that's supposed to hold crayons
• two books that show diagrams of the insides of stuff
• paint pens
• collage materials (ie. stuff)
• foam letters and letter cut-outs
• basket that's supposed to hold miniature racecars
• pipe cleaners

• cat
• stickers
• more construction paper
• more crayons
• Sydney's artwork of fingerpainting on construction paper
• wool leftover from Fatty Stegasaurus creation
• fleece blanket leftover from dino quilt creation
• another Tupperware lid, this time for colored pencils
• Ziploc bag of collage materials
• Ziploc bag of stickers
• cloth book of color recognition in French
• Willow's artwork of stickers on construction paper
• book cover separated from book in previous photo
• record bowl
• matching dinosaurs game piece
• more construction paper
• filing box holding computer equipment
• more Legos
• Longman's grammar
• scooter
• dinosaur
• top of a racecar storage box
• stacking tower pieces
• purse for dress-up
• cropped edges trimmed from photos
  
• wrapping paper from purchased hook-and-latch kit
• fleece blanket trimmed from dino quilt
• more construction paper
• miniature race cars
• library books
• My Pretty Pony from my childhood, now Willow's
• romance novels leftover from a freshman comp class project
• bottle of vinegar used for cleaning the glass in soldered pendants

I'm actually surprised to see that hardly any of this filth is actually mine. Hmm. So I worked away at the floor off and on all day, in between reading books and playing with the girls and going to the library for storytime and drawing on construction paper and making it into fans with the girls and telling each other "April Fools" and gardening out in the cold and working out at the YMCA and making dinner and eating dinner, and here's what I finally have:

Glorious. Mind you, the actual floor itself still looks like crap, partly because the previous owners had a really pissy dog or something and also didn't put down tarps when they painted the walls white and partly because the girls and I use the floor as our work surface for all sorts of projects and I'd just rather refinish the thing in ten years than harp at them over spilling paint or glue or being momentarily careless with markers or scissors--I'll get into my manifesto about children's art in today's society some other time.

And here's what happened literally five minutes after I'd finally finished:

Willow's rubber ball bounced under their art cubbies and Matt and the girls began scraping everything out from under the cubbies onto the floor in search of it. Just after this photo was taken, Matt turned to me and said, "You forgot to clean under this," and I replied something that is unprintable and is largely why Willow is able to swear so impressively, although I usually blame that on Matt's dad, a former Navy sailor. But then while I sat across the room and muttered to myself some things about husbands, Matt and the girls picked up all that stuff and put it away, which he certainly wouldn't have bothered to do if the floor had been otherwise covered in stuff, and later when Willow emptied all the crayons out of her big crayon box looking for chalk she put all the crayons back, another thing she definitely wouldn't have done if the floor had been filthy. Thus encouraged, tomorrow I tackle the livingroom table.

Remaking Vintage Jewelry

I solder myself and the girls a lot of butch jewelry out of microscope glass and postage stamps, but I haven't yet gotten into beadwork. I read how-to books and arts and crafts books regardless of whether or not I practice that particular craft, however, and so I was pleasantly surprised to find, while reading by Lindsay Cain, a short how-to on remaking vintage jewelry. The most I've ever done with this was to replace a set of my Mama's handpainted yellow beads that Papa bought her in Italy during the war with fishing line instead of rotting thread, but the possibilities here seem pretty sweet. I've seen a lot of recycled jewelry on etsy, for instance, that uses other objects--pop tabs, dominoes, paperclips, keys, etc.--to make beautiful jewelry, but I think it's the same ethic as remaking clothing to take tacky jewelry and make it awesome.

Buzz Buzz Designs is one Web shop that does exactly this--the artist's work seems to be specifically informed by the recycling ethic, and utilizes vintage costume jewelry to make fine new things. I'm especially fond of this vintage Lucite sphere on a vintage aluminum chain.

I also like pequitobun's shop on etsy: this artist's stuff is partially vintage and can be pretty punk rock.

Femmegems itself also offers this really cool jewelry makeover service: you can ship your own vintage jewelry to them and they'll remake it for you into something awesome. Awesome.

Starry Pants and Who and Grrr Panties

If you don't want to buy new stuff all the time, it's really important to be able to turn clothes you don't want to wear anymore, for whatever reason, into clothes that you do want to wear. One of the problems that our family has is that we never dress appropriately for messy activities--as a result of our on-again, off-again home improvement activities (which will result, I think, primarily in lowering the future selling value of our house), we have purple paint (yes, an actual room of our house is actually painted purple) on not one, but two pairs of gym pants and one work shirt, and blue paint on one ringer tee. Now, the work shirt will need to be turned into a floaty summer dress for one of the girls, but the other clothing items are going to benefit from handmade fleece appliques. And by handmade, I mean stars that I unevenly sketch onto fleece and then cut out and sew over permanent stains with a zigzag stitch. Fleece is a nice choice, I think, because it won't ravel even if you don't stitch it well, and I like the way it stretches a little as you sew it--you know how I hate for things to look precise. So here are my favorite pair of comfy red pants, confined to the to-be-mended shelf for too many months because of its stupid purple paint stains, finally mended and made happy again:

I think it turned out pretty great. The grey sweat pants, appliqued with an X, still need some work since, as Matt pointed out, the X is placed so as to seemingly mark a spot located directly between my butt cheeks...

Thin cotton T-shirts make good panties, and here's an example from Goodwill that is now Willow's favorite pair of panties, although she wears them backwards because she likes to look at the owl, not have it on her butt:

Here's a shirt from Matt's closet, a Christmas present from his mother, which was a little too fancy for a guy who wears only soccer or comic book shirts outside of work, and is now a pair of panties for me:

Grrr!

More New Findings

Here's what I've been looking at this week while nursing Sydney, sitting in the back of the room during storytime at the library, or hiding in the bedroom during my 20-minute off-duty time when Matt gets home from work:

Threads is pretty much entirely over my head, but since I'm only really just becoming interested in sewing or altering clothes for myself--I sew quilts, things for the house, and clothes for the girls all the time, but subsist, myself, in thrift store clothes in which fit isn't always my main priority--I read it anyway, in search of a place to begin. A peasant top, perhaps?

I have a button machine that makes 1" buttons--I bought it because there's a terrific profit in buttons, since they're quick and easy to make and popular to sell--but I just as often make buttons to give as gifts or for Willow to wear or to put on my own backpack. I use a 1" hole punch to take button graphics out of magazines, picturebooks, or vintage papers, but being inspired by badbuttons.com, I'm trying to convince my partner, who is a grapic designer, to make me some awesome original designs.

by Tsia Carson, is a terrific DIY book that introduced a load of new projects to my to-do list: Kool Aid Yarn, Recycled Yarn, Bag o' Bags, Knit Hammock, Shrink Plastic Necklace, Button Cuff, Embroidered Screen Door, Rice Table, whew! Her pattern for T-shirt panties could very well be the trick I need to improve my own pattern, which for some reason results in panties that keep getting more granny-like every time I make them. She also has this terrific Web site, SuperNaturale, which has tutorials and showcases of designers and projects focused around a frugal and sustainable craft ethic. A lot of this stuff, obviously then, makes use of recycled materials.

Another encyclopedia-like book, and this one is vast, is The Crafter Culture Handbookby Amy Spencer. It has about a billion projects, many of them made from repurposed materials, and not just the obligatory refashioned T-shirts and button jewelry but also Chinese lanterns from colanders, brooches made from teeny fabric scraps, the pillowcase dress, and so on.

Know more? Share!

New Findings

Like a superhero, I'm a stay-at-home mom by day, and an Indiana University composition instructor by night. Now, many parents think it's a point of pride that they haven't had time to crack a book since their kids were born, or at least that's what aquaintances often tell me when I talk about what I've been reading or doing. I'd go nuts, though, if I didn't have some mental breaks throughout the day, and I think it's good for the girls to see me engaged in my own interesting, mentally healthy activities while they do the same, especially since they know that they are always welcome to join me in anything I'm doing, and I'll find a way for them to legitimately help. It's funny that if they see me making anything, from using the sewing machine to cutting out photos at my desk, they want to help, and they're always coming at me with picture books to read to them, but they never ask me to read to them from what I, myself, am reading. And some of my stuff has pictures!

Anyway, here are some great resources I've found this week:

I checked out some back issues of Sew Newsfrom the Monroe County Public Library, and while much of it is way above my head, some isn't. I generally like the stuff I sew to look casual (sloppy), but this magazine encourages me to take more care with my cutting, pinning, and matching of thread colors. I might actually do real buttonholes now, for instance, or maybe do zippers the right way. Their web site is difficult to navigate, I think, but the Sew News Library page includes some articles from the print magazine, and some patterns and tutorials. I read through the tutorial on making your own bra, even though it's way too complicated for me, with happy fantasies of someday sewing my own bras out of recycled awesome clothes. How much would I love a bra made out of a Darth Vader T-shirt, for instance, and I bet nothing really gives as much support for my huge bosoms as denim!

By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art showcases the work of several artists for whom handicraft is a crucial part of their work--knitting, embroidery, hand-sketching, sewing, etc. I found it especially interesting that the book showcases so many artists who do this, implying that this is a trend today. The artists' work seems to show a backlash against modernization and mass consumerism in their personal, often imperfect, handiwork, but they at the same time show a reliance on such modern technologies as Photoshop, computer drafting, and Kinkos that rewrites the traditional handicraft experience.

Letterghost over at Craftster reconstructed some beautiful dresses and a Spiderman T-shirt for herself, and when I asked her how she always got her reconstructed sleeves to look so normal, she pointed me over to WhatTheCraft.com, which has excellent tutorials for sewing your own stuff, pattern-free, when you otherwise don't totally know how to, you know, sew so much. My ultimate favorite is her tutorial for figuring out your own baseball sleeves, which I absolutely love, and are apparently called raglan sleeves. Who knew?

The Recycled Craft Ethic (A Manifesto)

I've thought a lot about this: why I create, and what I create with. I create to be powerful, to make for myself in my own way what companies would want me to purchase. I create to have beauty in my life, to make my environment and that of my partner and our daughters beautiful. I create to show love, to share my creativity and give my time to friends and family. I create to calm myself, to be with myself or with my daughters in relaxation and enjoyment. I create to challenge my intellect, to work out problems very different from my academic and home lives. Or really, I just create because I like to.

What I create with, however, is also very important. I'm unwilling to buy new materials with which to work, because my family doesn't have the money to spend for them and because we have a practice in which we do not buy new goods unless necessary. I'm also concerned about consumerism, commercialism, wastefulness, and the environment, and I want to teach my daughters to also be careful and wise here.

And so I create with things that others before me have used. I create with ephemera, such as board game pieces, or trash, such as plastic grocery bags, or damaged goods, such as holey T-shirts and felted wool sweaters. I find it rewarding to create and to live up to an ethic that is useful and good.

So serious! This doesn't reveal at all that what I really do is make dinosaur T-shirt quilts for my daughters, and Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt panties for myself, and necklaces out of Scrabble tiles; that I flit from project to project, the infinite variety of second-hand goods enabling my attention deficit; that my house is utterly filthy because I'd rather string beads with the girls than pick up the stepped-on jelly sandwich, that when my eldest daughter, Willow, asked why we were going to Joann's and I replied, "To buy a zipper," she chided, "No, Momma. We need to make that."

How would one go about making a zipper by hand?