How to Make a Fuzzy Ball Christmas Ornament

The kids and I made the cutest Christmas ornaments ever quite by accident:

I was attempting to make a wool dryer ball (which I did, and I'll show you how another time!). I didn't want to use wool roving, so I was instead using wool yarn. I made a giant pompom out of the yarn, and was about to stuff it into some old tights, tie it off, and toss it into the wash, but Syd got to it first and started playing with it.

I let her play while I worked on another, and she played with the wool yarn pompom so much that she unraveled all of the yarn strands and turned the pompom into a adorable, soft, fuzzywuzzy fuzz ball. We have a couple of these now sitting on random tables as fidgets, but the cutest couple I strung up on the tree as ornaments, and we adore them.

And here's how we made them!

You'll need some chunky yarn, 100% wool. Something like this wool yarn would work, although ours is this wool from We are Knitters.  

Make a giant pompom around your hand by holding the end of the chunky wool yarn between two of your fingers--

--then wrap the yarn loosely around your hand approximately 50 times:

Slip it off of your hand and use another piece of yarn to tie it off tightly in the middle:

Cut through the loops and you'll have yourself a giant wool yarn pompom!

The pompom would be super cute as a gift topper, but if you play with it a while, fidgeting it around in your hands (which won't be hard, as it feels super soft and awesome!), the yarn strands in your pompom will unravel, and now it will look like this:

Ugh, I love it so much!

To make your wool fuzzy ball into an ornament, thread a nice color of embroidery floss through that tie in the center--

--and tie it into a loop.

It's so pretty!!!

We're not really ornament buyers, and so although we've got a few store-bought ornaments on our tree, I do love that the vast majority of our ornaments are vintage ones from Mammaw and Pappaw's Christmas tree when I was a kid, and homemade ones from our years celebrating Christmas together as a family.

I'm really crushing my goal this year to have an ornament for every single branch of our Christmas tree!!!

On the Knitting Spool

You'll have to excuse the overindulgent number of photographs that I took during a single morning activity, but I finally got a kid interested in the knitting spool ! Per usual, all it really took was for me to sit down, some nice wool yarn that needed to be reviewed at hand, with the full intention to figure out the knitting spool for myself.

Me, sitting alone, engrossed in my own business? That's a certain invitation for at least one little girl to pop over and declare a desire to be included. My pleasure, little babe:

I admit that I bought this particular knitting spool YEARS ago (before I knew that they're a do-able DIY project--perhaps something to do when both girls want one at the same time, in the inevitable future), and included it in Willow's stocking at Christmas. She showed zero interest in it, and it languished, completely ignored, on the activity kits shelf (I'll have to show you that sometime) until late last year, when I snuck it away, still unnoticed, and put it into Sydney's stocking. She, at least, sat down with it and tried to learn it, but couldn't get the knack, got frustrated, and back to the shelf it went.

Less than four months later, she got the hang of it in minutes: 

She worked for quite a while before setting it back down, making herself a nice little length of cord in the process--

--and while she didn't really find it the best fun ever, I don't think, and hasn't expressed a desire to work with it again, at least now her memory of the knitting spool involves her mastery of it, and witnessing what you can make with it, so that next time she needs a nice bit of cord, for all those things that you need a nice bit of cord for when you're a little kid, she'll hopefully remember that you can make a nice bit of cord using the knitting spool, and that it's a do-able project, and where is that knitting spool, anyway...

Knit Picks is actually giving away three skeins of this 100% reclaimed wool yarn that we used over at Crafting a Green World, and there will be TWO winners(!!!), so you should totally head over there and enter to get yourself some yarn. As for a knitting spool, did you know that you can MAKE one?

Nifty!

So all I needed to do was take a couple of photos of these Knifty Knitter lap looms so that I could list them in my pumpkinbear etsy shop:
And then I was all, "Wow! These looms are gorgeous!" And then I got REALLY carried away:

There's a possibility that I might start Willow with a this summer when we're in the car so much, and I, of course, have my Ravenclaw scarf that will likely be finished when I'm an old, old lady, but these Knifty Knitter looms are, alas, nothing but eye candy for me.

Although it is nice to have a photographic model that doesn't whine or make weird faces just as I'm snapping a photo.

Afghans Aren't Safe Around Me, Either

I freakin' LOVE the summer! I was able to cook, play a dinosaur board game with the girls (Yep, they do make them--we have three), do some yardwork, gaze in wonder at the incredible foods on This is Why You're Fat (I'm not sure if that stuff is supposed to look delicious, but it totally does), blog, and destroy an old, re-gifted afghan in order to sew this completely impractical but soft and summery dress for my kiddo:
I actually even sewed my first pattern for it, sort of. A couple of weeks ago at Thrift Shop (my newest fave, and where I also bought the upholstery sample books that I've been crafting the crap out of), I picked up some vintage sewing patterns that I thought looked pretty easy:

Awesome, right? It's something that I totally know how to sew already, but creating the pattern pieces myself would just be a pain in the butt. Awesomely as well, all the pattern pieces are present! The jumper pattern was even completely uncut until I got my hands on it, although the jumpsuit pattern was clearly well-used, which is also good, because I can assume that it works.

I say that I only sort of sewed to a pattern, however, because I used the front and back pattern pieces for the jumper but I didn't bother with the notches, the interfacing, the buttons, or the instructions--I already pretty much knew how I wanted to sew the afghan, so I'll save the real-live jumper business for later, I suppose.

I'm very pleased with how Will's dress turned out (eventually--it took the entire afghan to get there, which isn't exactly as waste-less as I like to flaunt myself, but now that I know what I'm doing the next thrifted afghan will have a fate that includes at least TWO dresses, and perhaps even three. And also? A couple of bonnets. And maybe a little matching bag).

Which is good, because the baby's all, "Where MY pretty dress, Momma?"

P.S. I FINALLY figured out how to turn my button alphabets into digital downloads. Check out the 8x10 button alphabet digital download and the 4x5 button alphabet digital download over in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

The Red Cross Gives Me Stuff

Yes, it is my office hours, and so yes, I should be grading stuff, but I just had a ten-minute consultation with a student about her Project #2, and that calls for a half-hour blogging break, right?

In half an hour, I can tell you that today, I baked Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Brownies with my squabbling girlies. I hosted a playdate for one of Will's little girlfriends, during which they dragged out every toy owned by either of my children, all of which had been put back in their appropriate spots by me the night before in preparation for said playdate. I sewed ornaments for our Halloween tree while watching season 4 of Numb3rs. At 4:30 pm, I took a shower. I spent half an hour looking for two tutus and one pair of ballet flats. I read some of , which is so far even better than the Twilight series (we're politely pretending that the final book of that series didn't happen, aren't we? Good). But before all that, way at the crack of 9:00 am, the girls and I took their child-sized real metal shopping cart and a big cardboard box over to FREE DAY AT THE RED CROSS BOOK SALE!!!!!
I wrote in a previous comment that I was torn between taking my girls to the children's section or the crafts book table first, knowing that while visiting one, the other would be thoroughly picked over. You know the solution to this problem? Nice old lady volunteer. She took the girls to the children's section and helped them choose books while I gave the crafts table a quick once-over, then ravaged the nature tables for plant and animal books with good illustrations for collaging. The nice old lady system wasn't perfect, as she limited them to picturebooks and her selection was a little religion-heavy (eek!), but I snuck back later and got all the cool stuff, too.

Look at the awesome morbid Santa illustration--he's all grey and dead-looking, and are those badminton birdies falling all around him? I found some other books with Christmas-y scenes, as well--we have about five ornaments in our house, and I'd like to make a ton for our tree and as gifts, maybe with an image decoupaged to each side of a die-cut or cardboard cut-out and then mod podged.

I also found a ton more records for future record bowls--ten or so old-school Disney movie soundtracks and a dozen or so Christmas albums, some old atlases for the girls to cut up when they're decorating the big maps they like me to print out for them, a couple of cheezy craft books that might have some cool projects in them and also might not, lots of vintage children's books, LOTS of books for the cutting and coloring bin (If you and your kiddos don't have a bin of outdated old books to use in art projects, you are totally missing out on some serious awesomeness), and some random kid's book with this most fabulous illustration:

I don't really knit myself, and so I don't know what to do with this fabulous illustration, but it is totally fabulous, right? I'll think of something.

Beaches! Beaches! Beaches!

Back in landlocked Indiana, we heart ourselves some beaches. We happily go to Monroe Beach (volume alert!) and Indiana Beach and pretend, but a real, live beach? With an ocean and everything? And tide pools? And pelicans? I love it so much it makes me sick.



Pebble Beach has tide pools you can clamber around while the surf awesomely (or terrifyingly, depending on whether or not you can swim...ahem) cascades over the rocks a few feet away: Near the tide pools were all these big crabs hidden in the rocks, but if you sat very, very still for a while, say, looking at a starfish, they would creep out and do weird things with their mouths and go click, click, click, just like in The Dark Crystal.



Pebble Beach is made up of the leavings from a rock reef offshore, and it's a very nice sound when the waves move in and out. There are supposedly some very interesting stones here, because you're not allowed to take any of them:

But dance on them you can:

Davenport Beach, where some of Grandpa Bangle's ashes were scattered, is a more traditional sandy beach:

Add to that a visit to a real freakin' ORGANIC STRAWBERRY FARM, and the day was pretty well set, don't you think?

Care to see the third 24 hours of knitting?

I neglected to mention previously that I am not using the Cascade 220 that the instructions in call for--Uncommon Threads (sound alert!) didn't have those exact colors, but one of the shopkeepers whipped out this massive book of yarn samples and picked out for me the two same colors in Nashua Handknits Creative Focus Superwash. Hella expensive, though. Is knitting seriously this expensive, y'all? One of my secondary projects is now officially to figure out how to reclaim wool from ugly knitted sweaters.

Next time...Exploratorium! Boutiquey San Francisco craft store! Gay thrift shop!

Frisco Has Fits

You should totally never call the city "Frisco," by the way, unless you're a tool. But Yerba Buena was a hit, of course, with all its green space and pigeons to chase and awesome murals and painted tiles:
The Modern Art Museum, unfortunately, was so not a hit with the under-five set that Willow had a hysterical tantrum after a total of about eight minutes--a record? Back to Yerba Buena! I gave Willow a meaningful lecture then, the subject of which was the fact that since she was one, her dad and I have visited every children's museum, hands-on museum, zoo, and dinosaur resting place within a four-hour drive of wherever we've been, without complaint. Unreasonable, then, that the single time we'd like them to accompany us to an "adult" museum, she has a fit? Will did not agree. It turns out that I don't have kids who are as eager to engage in intellectual and cultural pursuits as I am, happily wandering the modern art museum, sketchbook and crayons in hand, or sitting, rapt, at the opera, weeping at all the right parts, re-enacting the death scenes later with the dress-up clothes. Off to Crissy Field.
Crissy Field rocks real hard.

This brings us to the second 24 hours of knitting--stop looking at how I messed up the color change!
Next up, beaches! Beaches! Beaches!

Berkeley Has Dinosaurs

Berkeley has dinosaurs:
And ample opportunities for knitting. Here's the first 24 hours of my Ravenclaw scarf, from Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter:
You can see that I messed up the color change--I was supposed to change colors, knit two rows, then tie the new color on, but I added the silver, knit two rows with both, then thought, "Huh. That looks like crap." Knitting must bring out my anal side, because I actually thought for a minute about unraveling the silver and trying again, but I don't unravel--I've barely begun convincing myself to rip out missewn seams on the rarest of occasions. Eh, it adds character. And I did teach myself circular knitting in the very back seat of a minivan driving over the mountains, and I'm prone to motion sickness, so there you go.

Next up, San Francisco! More knitting!

P.S. It didn't take long for the unicorn band-aids to see some action:

I can't convince the girls to try out the skull-and-crossbones ones, however; guess they'll be for me, darn.

Our trip to the Monterey Bay Aquarium went something like this...



... Um, yeah, and we saw lots of fish, too.

While in Santa Cruz, I bought these unicorn band-aids and , which are awesome. And they actually stick, which is much more than I can say for the crap rainbow bandages I bought from Wal-mart one time when I was trying to help the girls rock their ouchies without contact from media characters. I have also, due to California's depth of stores, finally managed to make a pilgrimage to Torrid, the store of awesome clothes for curvy girls. I restrained myself, in this crazy spree of buying actual new clothes (It felt weird, the nice fitting room and the mirrors and the privacy, and the tags with the sizes RIGHT ON THEM, and not searching for stains--actually, I didn't like it very much), to stuff that I obviously couldn't make or modify myself, and thus I ended up with, among other treasures, this skull tank top (Me? A tank top? But it fits!) and this pair of denim capris with skulls embroidered on the cuffs (Me? Capris? But they fit!) and, um, this other skull tank (Sort of a theme here? But seriously, you don't know how many fat clothes I've seen with stuff like Tweety Bird on them--skulls make waaay better fat clothes), and a couple more things, and yeah, one more thing with skulls.

In tomorrow's update--dinosaurs! Yarn store! And the grand revelation of the first rows of my very first real knitting project! Oh, and we're going to Berkeley.

More Sightseeing, Less Crafting

A long blog silence, but here we are in California, sleeping in Matt's childhood twin beds (lucky they're not still bunked), chasing seagulls (Willow refers to them as "sea eagles"), watching the girls bond with their grandparents, and visiting every hands-on children's museum in the Central Coast. At the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose, I learned an interesting fact about my hometown-- --Sydney and Grandma Janie had a tea party--
--I tried to get one of those photos of my family in the room with the altered proportions so that they look all weird compared to each other, but certain members of the family would not cooperate--
--and the "paint your own face" face painting booth was a BIG hit:
So no, there hasn't been much crafting, but I do have plans, at least, to visit Uncommon Threads tomorrow (beware of the stupid baa-baa noise when the page opens) to get the exact colors of Cascade 220 yarn that I need to make the Hogwarts House Scarf (I'm a Ravenclaw, don't you know) from . I have my brand-new circular knitting needle in my possession, and I'm sure that if I could just do the exact same stitch about eight billion times in a row, like I will with this scarf, then I'll finally be able to remember how to do it the next time I knit. Is it too ambitious to be thinking about House Scarves for the whole family for Christmas (Matt and Sydney are Hufflepuffs, and Willow is a Gryffindor)?

I also found the most awesome book in Matt's mother's house, and after I asked her to make the quilt for the girls, she told me I could just have the book (and make it my own damn self, darn it). But how amazingly, awesomely awesome is ? I am really, really excited about making these blocks using only thrifted/vintage materials. You have to watch out, though--the layout for the applique is spot-on for the character blocks, but the actual block illustration is just an example of what your block *could* look like with a little more creativity and skill than the book provides. For instance, the Fozzie Bear block is made with the actual fabrics used to make, you know, Fozzie Bear--good luck with that one, home sewer.

And last but not least, my Sublime Stitching Stitch-It Kit is sitting there patiently in my luggage, waiting for me to whip it out and learn some basic, yet valuable, embroidery skills. On account of that's what vacations are all about, right? Ooh, and visiting local thrift stores!