I Saw the Aurora Borealis Above My House

What a year of wonders it has been!

Honestly, the total solar eclipse alone would have been enough of a celestial wonder to sustain me at least through the rest of the year, but I have been spoiled with riches, because last weekend there was also the Aurora Borealis! ABOVE MY HOUSE!!!

And it turns out that the Aurora Borealis even works when there are clouds!

I mean, it definitely would have been better without the clouds, but thank goodness it still works with them. It might have even made it more spectacular in some ways, because never before in my life have I seen parti-colored clouds at night.

I used a long exposure for these photos to pick up all the Northern Lights that I could, so these photos are for sure brighter than we saw in person, but still, it was pretty bright! It wasn't so bright and distinctive that if I'd wandered outside having no idea what was going on I'd be all, "Ooh, the Aurora Borealis!", but it WAS bright enough that I'd definitely have been like, "Um, WHAT is wrong with the sky?!? Why is it pink? Are we experiencing a nuclear attack? Do we now have aliens?"

Without the long camera exposure, it looked more like this:

See? If you walked outside at 10:00 pm and you didn't know what was up you probably wouldn't immediately clock Northern Lights, but you would know SOMETHING was happening. Aliens, probably. Perhaps nuclear war. So it's nice that I did know what was going on, because instead of ducking and covering I could then be all, "Family! Come hither to experience magic and wonder with me!"

The family *kinda* experienced the magic and wonder with me for a little bit, but their patience for magic and wonder is far inferior to my own, I'm sorry to tell you. They were like, "Cool, pink sky! Someone tell Nick Drake! [two minutes pass] ...welp, now we've seen the Aurora! Bye!" and then they went back inside to their various unmagical and wonder-free pursuits. 

I, however, was going to be damned if I let a second of celestial magic and wonder pass me by, and fortunately, that's why god invented the lawn chair! It was also the perfect evening--cool and breezy (darn those clouds!), the frogs from the swampy backyard bellowing mating cries to compete with the distant sounds from the drive-in next door and the even more distance sounds of the racetrack a few miles away, early enough in the season that I didn't have to swat mosquitos--it was just about as good as springtime in Indiana gets.

The photo above is my greatest triumph--there's a little bit of camera shake, oops, but there's also the Aurora Borealis lighting up the Big Dipper, and in the bottom right of the photo I even caught a meteor!

I still want to see some proper, cloud-free, way-up-north Northern Lights one day, but these particular Northern Lights were a delightful, unexpected, probably once-in-a-lifetime-in-Indiana gift that I'm super happy got tacked onto my year.

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!

My England Travel Journal Is... Excessive

 It took an extra six months and a final boost of half of The Crown Season 3 on DVD, but my England travel journal finally went from this--

--to this!

It might be just a tad overstuffed...

The actual travel journaling didn't take six months, but I also wanted to incorporate all of my favorite family photos from the trip and some of the ephemera I'd collected. 

And then at the Half-Price Books Outlet one day I found an old Eyewitness Great Britain, the kind where every page is illuminated with all the little pictures and maps and infographics, and things got a little out of hand.

So the book may indeed be morbidly overstuffed, but now I'll never forget the name of the delicious ice lolly that I got at the ice cream truck after making it down from Glastonbury Tor without having a heart attack--

--or the excitement/exhaustion of our first day in London, and how maybe some of us possibly wanted to curl up on the grass and die in front of Big Ben, but we rallied and toured Westminster Abbey instead:

If I ever want to remind myself of the floorplan of the White Tower, or reassure myself that yes, the Uber Boat schedule IS completely impossible to interpret and no, I do not EVER want to get back on that boat again no matter how lovely the Tower Bridge looks from the water, all I have to do is turn to my travel journal!

I can also use my travel journal to remind myself that I DO want to go back to Canterbury one day!

And, of course, anytime I want to debate with myself about which of the approximately 1,000 photos I took of my family at Stonehenge is the most marvelous, I can just flip through my travel journal and admire them all:

It's the perfect final chapter to a perfect trip!

I don't think I've got any massive trips coming up this year, not with all the fun my partner and I are going to have adding a second college tuition to our bill schedule. 

But we ARE going to New York City for a couple of days later this winter so I can finally see Hadestown on Broadway...

Okay, and my Girl Scout troop IS currently planning a spring trip to Boston...

And my younger kid and I might need to do some college visits after acceptances and financial aid offers come out...

And my older kid might be studying abroad next Fall, and if she does, well, it *would* be nice to go visit her...

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Upcycle Photographs into Stickers: Three Methods That Really Work

 

I first published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Upcycle your old print photographs into stickers, and you’ll unlock a whole new way to display and enjoy those magical memories!

I don’t do a lot of crafting with print photos anymore, so I was a bit dismayed recently when I found a huge stack of 4″x6″ photos leftover from my scrapbooking days. Gotta clean out my closets more often, I guess!

I recognized all these photos as ones that I have digital copies of (I’m still not ready to talk about The Terrible Hard Drive Erasure of 2017…), so I could have just tossed them all into the recycling. But yikes, how wasteful would that be?!?

Mind you, I have no problem tossing stuff that I truly want to toss, but Past Julie clearly spent time and money on this photo order, and all the photos are of my adorable babies, now almost all grown up, and our fun traveling adventures. As far as I know the Jedi Training Academy no longer even exists at Walt Disney World, so that photo of my tiny padawan winning a light saber battle against Darth Vader himself deserves a fate much more exciting than the recycling bin!

Also, there is genuine terror in her eyes in that photo, and I laugh every time I look at it. Kid was pretty sure she was fighting for her life up there!

I have fun crafting plans for most of these surprise photos, the first of which is stickers!

Here are three easy methods for upcycling print photos (and book pages, wrapping paper… just about any paper works for this!) into stickers, along with the pros and cons of each method.

Method 1: Adhere a photo to an existing sticker.

Pros: Quick, materials are easy to obtain.

Con: Stickers are low-tack.

If you’ve got a sheet of printer labels on hand, you can have your own photo stickers ready to go in minutes.

These stickers will be pretty low-tack, so cutting the photos down a bit will reduce their weight.

Use an excellent white glue, like Aleene’s Tacky Glue, to adhere the photos to the front of the label sheet. Let the glue dry, then cut out the photo stickers.

Glossy photos don’t make the best stickers right out of the gate because of how easily they show smudges. To solve this, laminate the front of each photo by sticking a piece of clear tape to it.

Fair warning: I, personally, am MISERABLE at jobs like this. One of my teenagers even installs all my screen protectors for me because she can’t stand looking at the state of my phone screen, all bubbles and trapped lint, when I do it myself. I had to cut down that photo above right because I somehow managed to trap a giant cat hair under the tape, sigh. So be super careful with your own tape lamination!

Method 2: Paint the back with Aleene’s Tack it Over and Over Again glue.

Pros: Most eco-friendly, least use of additional materials, stickers are repositionable.

Cons: Most time-consuming method, requires a specialty supply.

This is my favorite way to make stickers. It’s super easy, and I used to do this to make re-usable stickers for my kids from old book pages, toy catalogues, and our drawings all the time–tbh, I think the bottle I used for these stickers is the same bottle I was using way back then!

To make these re-usable stickers, cut your photo to size, then coat the back with a VERY thin coat of Aleene’s Tack It Over And Over Again glue. I like to do this on top of parchment paper, so I can brush excess glue off the edges of the photos and onto the paper:

Let these photo stickers dry for about 24 hours, then peel them off the parchment paper. Even though they are repositionable, I like to stick them to wax paper to store them.

Method 3: Use a store-bought sticker maker.

Pros: Makes the highest-quality stickers by far.

Cons: Most expensive, least eco-friendly.

I wouldn’t buy one of these for myself, but I do use the snot out of the Xyron Creative Station Lite that I bought for my kid back when she was a tween. She creates a lot of art, and I thought that she might like to make stickers and magnets out of her own little art pieces… and she does!

But yikes, this machine is made entirely of plastic, and each cartridge is made from more plastic. Please feel free to spam me with suggestions for more eco-friendly models!

I will say, though, that the stickers this machine makes are WONDERFUL, easily equivalent to good store-bought stickers. We’ve worked with materials as thick as food packaging cardboard, and the stickers always come out well. This cartridge even laminates the top of the sticker, so glossy photos remain smudge-free.

Ugh for all that plastic, though!

I wasn’t excited to find these photos in the back of a closet, true, but I have to say that I am excited to have a fun little way to display some of them! It definitely brings a bit of magic into my daily grind to catch a glimpse of a happy memory and a sweet kid or two.

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Inside the Greenhouse of My Dreams

The local university has a teaching greenhouse that's also open to the public during certain hours. I am OBSESSED with it, and during a recent college break my college kid kindly agreed to go there for the hundredth time with me. 

She and I love going places and looking at stuff the most!

My college student kid spent most of her childhood longing for a little pond. I could never quite figure out how to make it happen for her (my newest dream project that I probably won't make is a dry stream bed!), but if you give me a giant greenhouse, I will!

The corpse plant actually flowered this summer!

Someone local clearly has a homemade vanilla extract side hustle going on!

I really want a bird fountain, but we have West Nile in Indiana now, and I have a horror of adding more mosquito breeding spots to my already mosquito-heavy yard.

When I brought the kids here when they were little, they were always SO fascinated by the real cotton plant!

My teenager recently observed that I "don't like to do things alone," and while I was stung by her observation... she's not wrong. The problem is that once upon a time, I had two kids living at home who liked very different things from each other, but quite a lot of the same things as me, so I became used to always having a pal for every activity. Library podcast+craft night? I brought the big kid. Concert? Little kid. Play? Both kids, but the big kid would actually enjoy it. Shopping for novelty holiday items? Little kid. Museum? Big kid. Fancy coffee date? Little kid. Hike around the lake? Big kid.

So now I keep having these fun things that I want to do, but half of the time, when I think about it, there's nobody I know who would want to do the thing with me. I could make some friends, I guess, or wait until my big kid's next college break, or just suck it up and go by myself. So far, I've relied on the second solution, but I know I've got to work my way up to numbers 1 and 3, as well. Because earlier this week, I said to my little kid, "Hey, do you want to come with me to a concert featuring a band that you know nothing about but that I was flat-out obsessed with when I was 12 years old?"

The teenager said something along the lines of "That sounds sick. Bet"--I forget the exact words, but it was some kind of teenager-speak affirmative. I was SUPER stoked, because she is the best concert buddy... but then when I actually looked at the tickets, it suddenly occurred to me that the concert? It's in late August! By late August, this kid's possibly going to be away at college, too! Both of my pals, two-thirds of the people I talk to on a daily basis, are going to be out of my pocket and out in the real world by September.

Do you want to start taking bets on what my mid-life crisis is going to look like?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

My Girl Scout Troop Earned the Ambassador Photographer Badge on an Overnight Trip to Cincinnati

 

And we had such a fun time!

Back when my multi-level Girl Scout troop was younger and very actively earning lots and lots of badges, we followed the philosophy that not every activity got you a badge. Sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Brownies earned badges for, and sometimes we all worked on stuff that only the Juniors earned badges for. It was always fun regardless, and there were always lots more chances to earn badges later.

I do NOT follow that philosophy with my older multi-level Girl Scout troop. Up until her graduation, my now-college kid was still pretty active in earning badges independently, but the rest of the troop isn't interested in badge-earning unless it's something that we all do together. And considering that we only meet once a month or so, and many of those meetings are for travel planning or service projects or day trips or Higher Award stuff, not badge-earning, I really want to make our few and far-between badge-earning opportunities count for everyone.

So on this overnight trip to Cincinnati, the Ambassadors AND the Seniors all earned the Ambassador Photographer badge (when we earn a Senior badge together, I find an equivalent badge, whether it's official, retired, or "Council's Own," for the Ambassadors to earn). I rewrote the badge activities to better support the activities we'd planned and the skills the kids would get the most enjoyment out of learning, and off we went!

Step 1: Explore photography resources.

The kids were NOT super excited when, standing in our meet-up spot of the grocery store parking lot at the crack of dawn, just after throwing all their gear into the chaperone cars and just before getting themselves settled in and falling asleep for the two-hour drive, I pulled a GIANT stack of photography resource books out of a tote bag and divvied them up. 

Just a little light reading for the trip to Cincinnati!

These were all library books, and I tried very hard to choose ones that would be interesting to the kids, so I don't think it was too tough of an ordeal to have to endure. Here are the books we explored:

The goals were to see plenty of beautiful photos on a variety of topics, to build context for the history of photography, to get curious about various photographic techniques, and to be inspired to take their own beautiful photographs!

Step 2: Take animal/nature photographs.

The Cincinnati Zoo was the perfect place to practice taking nature photographs! 

The kids who are already well-practiced in photography concentrated on taking interesting photos from interesting angles, but most of the troop really just seems to use their smartphone cameras to take pics of their friends and their cats, so they concentrated on taking well-composed, well-focused photos. It's more difficult than you might think to take a sharp photo of a far-away animal!

While at the zoo, one of my Girl Scouts borrowed my DSLR and took what is possibly my all-time favorite photo of me:

Just me hanging out in the turtle enclosure with my turtle pal!

Step 3: Take city/architecture photographs.

Cincinnati is MUCH bigger than our pokey little college town, and there were lots of interesting things to photograph as we walked around on our own and with our food tour. The nice thing about architecture is that it stands still for you, so all the kids could concentrate on sharp focus and interesting framing.

I like how my college kid, now official Troop Helper to our troop, picked this interesting angle for her shot:

Step 4: Take food photographs.

Is there a more important skill in today's society than that of taking beautiful photos of your food?

We upped our food photo skills on a guided food tour through downtown and Findlay Market, concentrating on taking appetizing, Instagram-able photographs of all the various small plate items we were served:

My own photography was helped by the fact that I quickly got WAY too full to actually eat all the delicious food I was served!

Step 5: Take river/bridge photographs.

At the edge of downtown Cincinnati, there's a pedestrian suspension bridge that crosses the Ohio River to Covington, Kentucky. We walked it as a troop, taking lovely photos of the vista across the river and of the bridge, itself.

I don't think that I tend to take very nice vista photos, a deficit that I prefer to blame on my basic kit lens:

I found a weird sticker of a camel to photograph, though!

One of my Girl Scouts entered a photo contest using a photo that she took on this bridge, and it looks freaking amazing, all crisp lines and saturated colors and interesting details. You will not be surprised to learn that she won first place in her category with that photo!

Step 6: Embellish/display photos.

Yes, there are only supposed to be five steps to earn a contemporary Girl Scout badge, so just call this my insurance that even if a kid skived off of a step, she'd still do enough work to fully earn the badge.

Besides, we had a whole evening in our Airbnb to hang out, and there's nothing better when you're hanging out with your buddies than doing lots of craft projects!

My co-leader and I brought all the supplies that the kids needed to create photo stickers and magnets and embroidery floss-wrapped Mason jar lid photo ornaments. It was my excuse to get even more use out of my sticker maker!

Because we obviously wouldn't have our photos from the trip to work with yet (I've been eyeing portable photo printers but I just can't convince myself to pull the trigger on one), I'd asked the kids to upload 6-12 previously-taken photos to a shared Google Drive, then I got them printed and brought them with me to the Airbnb. 

The kids did a lot of baking and chatting and watching TV and playing games and snacking, but they still managed to find time to make themselves stickers and magnets and Mason jar lid ornaments!

If we'd had more time to play around with this badge, I would have loved to have the kids collaborate on a photo book of our Cincinnati trip. I love the idea of them incorporating all of their photos together to make one souvenir album, and I think something like that would be a sweet memento. But these big kids are busy, and after we got home from our trip they had to move onto all of their schoolwork and college applications and extracurriculars and part-time job. Instead, I encouraged everyone to upload their photos to our Shared Google folder so we could all see all the beautiful photos everyone took on our overnight adventure to Cincinnati!

Here are some more photo display and embellishment ideas that I have my eye on for future projects:

• photostrip bookmarks
• DIY Polaroid picture
• Polaroid photo coasters
• marble magnets
• Memory game
• popsicle stick photo charm