Playing with Play Silks at the Park

I've seen a lot of methods proposed by the crafty mommy bloggers for getting good photos of the kids with your handmade stuff, but the strategy that works best for me when I need to set up a photo shoot, such as this one for my Dharma Acid Dyes review over at Crafting a Green World, is to take the kids and the stuff to the park, then simply stand back and click my shutter a lot:

Seems to work well, yes?

Tie-Dyed Socks on our Feet

Nobody, and I mean nobody, matches socks around here.

A giant hamper of clean socks lives in the closet. When Matt and I need clean socks, we dig through the hamper until we find a matching pair--it's very annoying. The girls are far less troubled, since when they need clean socks, they simply dig through the hamper until they find two socks that fit--no matching necessary, apparently. Well, Sydney, who is our clothes horse, does tend to search until she finds two "pretty" socks, but again, they definitely won't match.

For a long time it's been my dream to make sock matching an occupation of the past. To that end, for the past year or so I've allowed our sock supply to dwindle drastically, neglecting to replace holey or outgrown socks, until we each have just a few left. Then, I restocked us all with plain white socks from Dharma Trading Company.

Then, I set up the fabric dye in squeeze bottles--

--and spent an afternoon on the living room carpet with the girls tying off socks with rubber bands, and then we dragged them all outside and off we went:

The girlies each also tie-dyed white turtlenecks, hand-me-downs from an acquaintance that had just a couple of light stains on them:

Yes, I accept free stuff even if it's messed up. That's how my kids will be wearing tie-dyed turtlenecks this winter!

Poor Matt arrived home from work that afternoon to the horror of a backyard full of fabric dye and mess and just more mess. I won't say that he was thrilled to jump in, but he let himself be persuaded, taking just long enough that we wouldn't know that he was secretly going to enjoy himself:

Did I mention that tie-dye is messy?

I know you're supposed to wear gloves and all, but I don't like the feel of them, and what am I supposed to do with the girls? Encase them in head-to-toe plastic aprons like serial killers wear to chop up their prey?

Eh, we were just colorful for a while:

I let them fester in plastic bags in the yard for 24 hours, then gave them a good rinse--look how pretty!

And after a wash and a dry, we have a new season of socks!

To try it for yourself, you can check out my tie-dye tutorial over at Crafting a Green World--if you dare!!! Be forewarned that once again, I horrify my fellow green crafters by not using butterflies and flower petals for dyes--green crafters can be so cute with their righteous indignation.

P.S. Love family-friendly crafts? Then you'll love my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Fashion Show Project: Sydney's Dress

Let me begin by saying that yes, I am as horrified by Toddlers and Tiaras as you are, and no, I have no desire to ever walk on a runway, myself. Like wearing make-up, dresses of any sort, or basically anything other than jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, and combat boots, runway modeling is just another one of those girl-type dreams that I had nothing to do with.

For my little girl, however, it's another story entirely, as fashion is queen in her four-year-old mind, and so, bravely smiling but with many secret qualms, I entered us into our town's Trashion/Refashion Show.

I like the idea of showing Sydney that real fashion is, at its essence, about creation, not consumerism. That fashion design is empowering. That dressmaking is a skill, and an art. Never mind that I don't really care about real fashion--the kid does, so that's where we're homeschooling for a while. Whether or not our ensembles are chosen for this juried show, it's now our mother-daughter project to refashion ourselves a couple of runway outfits.

I put Syd in charge of visualizing her design. Here it is:


Please pay particular attention to the tall crown, the color scheme of bright fuschias and purples, the sleeve and arm detailing, and the butterfly wings. Those will be important later.

For a refashion entry, the entire ensemble must be constructed almost entirely from fabrics originally constructed for another purpose. Syd and I went to Goodwill one fine Sunday and found the perfect selection of fabrics for her design. We chose one main fabric, the centerpiece of her design, and then two other fabrics for detailing and accessories. I was worried that Syd would want to adhere so strictly to her original drawing that we wouldn't be able to find anything that would match closely enough, but the true trouble lay in dissuading her from being so delighted in every single thing that she saw that she wanted to completely alter her design to fit every new fabric. The main fabric, however, was an easy pick--here it is, just graduated from its former life as a woman's skirt:

Here it is, reincarnated:

I chopped off the skirt on both sides and then sewed it back together to fit Sydney's high chest measurement. I kept the entire length of the skirt, and so the dress is now about knee-length on Syd. The skirt had an invisible zipper in the back, which is now the zipper to the dress--I goofed on my seam allowance a bit, and so the dress is alarmingly snug, but Syd says it's comfortable, and fortunately the fashion show, if our outfit is chosen, is in just a couple of months.

Out of the extra material that I cut off of the sides, I preserved an entire length of the lace-embellished fabric--I finished the seam on either side of it and used it as a halter strap for the dress:
The tulle shrug is sewn across the entire length of the halter strap; it used to be part of the skirt's underskirt, shown here:

I like the extra bit of tulle at the neck because it covers Syd's shoulders, and I think it looks really nice from the back:

Syd is THRILLED with her outfit so far, and I'm relieved that it turned out so well. There were a couple of shaky moments during construction, and if our outfit is chosen for the fashion show I plan on bringing my entire sewing arsenal in case of last-minute emergencies.

Next up--a crown!

Barter and Trade

I've been bartering. Inspired by Radical Homemakers, a book that I didn't even really like that much, I've found myself setting up trades for lots of things lately, saving myself money and getting stuff that I appreciate in exchange for something that somebody else appreciates.

Also, no tax!

Here are some of my more recent trades:

• a baby bag for a book bag
• blog post editing for cookies
• photography for cornstarch
• fabric for fabric

In that last one, a lady at a craft fair admired the novelty prints that I use in my I Spy quilts so much that she offered me three bags of stash fabric in exchange for some 2" quilt squares in novelty prints for a charm quilt that she's sewing. I'm also sewing a postage stamp charm quilt for myself, and I occasionally offer postage stamp charm quilt sets in my pumpkinbear etsy shop--

--so it was no problem.

Now I need to find a way to barter for babysitting, a travel chess set, some yardwork, candlemaking lessons...

Stash Upholstery Leaves for Its New Home

Sending stash out of my life makes me happy. It makes me happy not so much to just get rid of stuff, but to know that this stuff, that I collected, scavenged, was given, bought for a crazy-cheap price no telling how long ago, turned out to be useful after all, and off it goes to its new home.

Hence my happy goodbye to my early-in-the-week project, 24 crayon rolls that I sold wholesale through my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop (way less money for each crayon roll, but way more money total than I'd usually earn at one time--does that make sense?) to a tourist shop up north:

The inside of each crayon roll is made from stash fabric that I was given by a women who saw me at a craft fair and thought of me when she cleaned out her own sewing space; the thread is stash, a combination of large spools bought at 50%-off at Joann's and smaller spools in prettier colors that I inherited from my partner's grandmother; the stash elastic is also a combination of some bought on sale, some inherited, and some picked up for free at a local garage sale; the crayons are stash, bought for anywhere from 20 cents to 24 cents for a 24-pack at various back-to-school sales this summer; and, finally, the upholstery fabric for the crayon roll fronts is stash, of course, leftover from the several large books of upholstery samples that I bought from a local thrift shop.

How much do I love those upholstery fabrics?

So much.

My favorite thing about my stash is the myriad of uses that present themselves solely through its existence in my life. That fabric from a craft fair friend did sit for a while on my shelf until I needed a nice, sturdy, plain fabric to back the wild patterns of the upholstery, but the crayons have made themselves a luxury in our home, accompanying gifts, being taken on car trips, being opened any time it would just be a nice treat to have a new box of crayons. And that upholstery fabric? It's been art rolls, birthday crowns, monogram wall hangings, scrapbook embellishments, bookmarks, and I don't even know what all else.

My newest idea, now that I've been scanning everything lately, was to scan some of those upholstery patterns as I was sewing up the crayon rolls:

Isn't that kind of cool? I'm thinking I could use it for digital scrapbooking, which I'm not that into (right now...) or other kinds of digital design work.

So now it seems that I have an electronic stash, as well.

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!

Spoonflower Swatched Me!

Happy Free Swatch Day, indeed! You can check out my Spoonflower pumpkinbear profile (be friends with me, in case I ever design something for real real!) for these designs that can tile and expand, but here are the scans of my designs on my swatches! Mind you, they look like scans, which on my scanner means lousy, but here they are in my hands, and that's what's important:

Here's a photograph of the rocks at Pebble Beach that's done on organic cotton:
I didn't intend this to tile in any way, which is good because it won't do so neatly, and I can't think of any way within my current Photoshop design skills to rig it, although my Matt could, I'm sure. So for photos, since I don't have a wide-format camera, the biggest I'd probably do is a fat quarter, which for a detailed photograph of what is basically a texture, like this one is, would actually probably be pretty cool.

And here's a scan of buttons, also done on organic cotton:In retrospect I should have done a swatch of something super-saturated with color, because the tone on both my designs is pretty muted, but the color transfer is accurate (I used LAB color, which Spoonflower suggests). Something like this would actually work as a larger print, but there would have to be white space between the buttons so that I could tile them, and I'm thinking that I'd definitely want to use a better background--perhaps a vintage print, or some scans of old book pages?

Anyway, I'm exhausted but done teaching for the week, and now I get to sew.

And watch Mythbusters with the girls, while kittens sleep on us:
The best thing about being a working girl is that I get a real, live weekend again!

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?

Fabric Findings

Although I work primarily from recycled materials, I do sometimes like to pad out my pieced quilt tops with new fabric--it's especially useful when I'm working a quilt to a theme, such as Batman or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I'm having trouble finding enough T-shirts to piece an entire top, but it's also valuable in expanding or highlighting a theme, for instance with the dinosaur T-shirt quilt that I'm making the girls, which will consist of large dinosaur T-shirt squares surrounded by frames made of a large variety of printed dinosaur fabric (I hope). To date, I buy fabric almost exclusively from the local Joann's store, but I've got several online fabric store crushes:


Bugfabric.com has the best thematic collections: dinosaurs is obviously my favorite (particularly this one--awesome!), but they also have space/monsters, and lots of penguins and monkeys and dolphins and robots all mixed into the other categories.


eQuilter.com's dinosaur selection is a little more cutesy, but they still have a good selection of "realistic"-looking prints. This one's pretty funky, and I like these big ones, but Willow would quibble that meat-eating and plant-eating dinosaurs never walked around that close together!


This Japanese dino print from one of my favorite etsy shops, sweetflavor, is my favorite of all, I think. The dinosaurs are iconic but also really kid-like.


I've been thinking I could make my Fatty Stegosauruses a little more high-end and pretty eco-friendly by upgrading the batting to something organic or greener. So far I like the idea of this fiberfill from Mountain Mist--it's made out of...corn?

Know more? Share!