My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: A DIY Balance Bike, and a Vintage Embroidered Pillowcase Refashion

a tutorial for converting a pedal bike into a balance bike

and a tutorial for converting a pillowcase into a summer top

with much bonus chick footage, apparently

 

In other news, the fabulous food pantry where we volunteer has big, wonderful changes afoot: it's moving to another, much larger space! With that space, it will be able to be open more hours, so patrons will no longer have to stand in line outside waiting to shop; it will be able to stock more food of a wider variety, giving patrons more options and power to make their own food choices; it will be right on a bus line, making it less stressful for many patrons to get there; it will have a bigger parking lot, so patrons in vehicles won't have to waste gas circling the block or risk getting a ticket; and it will just be BETTER, with a teaching kitchen on-site, loading docks, a pallet jack (my back says hallelujah to that!), walk-in storage coolers and freezers, and a small demonstration garden.

The pantry isn't *quite* as close to us anymore, but it's still not that bad at just about a mile. I'm fixing to go make the girls sandwiches for lunch, and then we're going to head down the road that mile to an orientation in the new space.

And, and, AND...

We're all going to ride our bikes!

I Ate a Lot and Then I Danced

Little girls wore their pretty pillowcase dresses to match my vintage sheet skirt--
--and we chilled at a great big mansion:
We were there for the wedding of Ashwin, Matt's high school best friend, to his lady Reva. Because I am a big nerd, I was so way super-stoked about the wedding, which was to be a traditional Gandharva vivaah ceremony (done according to the Dnyanaprabodhini prodecure, with some of the bride's Nepali traditions added in, as well), and because I am a really, really, REALLY big nerd, I am going to tell you all about it:

So first is the simaantapujan, which used to be the welcoming of the groom's party to the bride's hometown for the wedding, but for our purposes now it's this awesome groom's party parade, with drumming and dancing. That leads to the madhuparka, in which the bride and groom have a little honey and yogurt snack to calm them down.

Then comes the vivaah sankalpa, in which the bride and groom and their families pray for a happy marriage, and then they worship the statue of Lord Ganesh that's there, and then a prayer to the family deity, and then the bride and groom pray for a happy day--that's the Punyahavaachan.

Then Reva's brothers gave her away, which is the Kanyaadaan.

Then comes the Swayamwar. The bride and groom garland each other, then stand with a curtain in between them and their families behind them while some poetry is recited, and at the end of each verse in the poem, the guests throw rose petals at them.

Then the bride and groom take their oaths, which is the Niyama-bandha.

Then Reva got a necklace that shows she's married, and Ashwin put some vermillion on her forehead, and the couple put on Mangalsutra, necklaces to protect them from the ugly thoughts of other people.

Then Ashwin and Reva put some popped rice in a little fire, which is the Laajaahoma, and Reva stood with her right foot on a rock for a minute. And then Reva's brother symbolically twisted Ashwin's ear to remind him to be nice to his sister, and Ashwin gave him a present so he wouldn't get his ear twisted again.

The most beautiful part of the ceremony is the Saptapadi, in which the bride and groom take seven steps and make seven resolutions together, and then we get to clap for them.

Then is the Dhruvadarshan, in which the priest has the couple look north, to the pole star, and then is the Uttarang Homa, in which the couple prays for leniency in case they messed something up in the ceremony.

Then we get to go up and offer congratulations, which is the Aashirwaad, and that concludes the formal portion of the day.

And yes, including the parade, I'd say the whole thing took a good two hours, but it was outside, and if you were near the back of the tent you were quite free to carry on your own conversations or pop out to the refreshments table or let your kids run around on the grass for a while. Sydney played quietly with her toys for the entire ceremony, but Will had to go with mom and chill out climbing trees out of earshot for a while, after driving herself hysterical in shame and grief due to mistakenly leaning against a pillar and knocking it and a big basket of flowers over. Nobody cared but her, but she does tend to be her own harshest critic.

After the ceremony we wandered the estate for a while and had ourselves some cocktails and samosas and vegetable kabobs (this was possibly my favorite wedding ever), and then re-stuffed ourselves with even more delicious Indian food at the reception:
I'll tell you, I like anyplace that has a buffet, and if you have a buffet of delicious, authentic Indian food? Well, you've just won my heart.

Will crashed out before dinner, even-- but Syd held out----for a while:

The cake was actually really cool, as well, and although I was too drunk by then to get the whole story behind it----I did take some extra pictures, so maybe I'll find out later:

With our two little girls fast asleep on the sidelines, and ourselves full of Indian food and booze (well, I was full of booze at least--I was owed it, after the ridiculous wedding that took place last time we were in Cali), we then got to dance for an hour or so. Another awesome thing about this wedding? Contemporary Indian pop music. Waaaaay better than YMCA. Except for the parts where the DJ would turn the music down so that everybody else but us could scream the popular lyrics, it was perfect. Absolutely perfect.

And then both girls simultaneously wet their party dresses in their sleep, and Matt's suit jacket that Willow was sleeping on, and we got to carry them, urine-soaked and whimpering yet still asleep and thus dead weight, the quarter-mile down the path to the entrance of the park and then further on to the car. So yeah, my back kills today, but it was so worth it.

Tomorrow, we talk beaches.

It's a Wrap!

By all rights, the girls should have been tearing the house apart on this rainy day until we finally gave up and left to spend the day at the library or Wonderlab or wherever, but after a nice breakfast together and an hour or so spent dying dried pasta weird colors, the girls basically spent the rest of the day having one long playdate with each other, leaving me to blog and sew and bake banana bread and catch up with my reading (You should totally be my Goodreads friend, by the way). I know, I know--the life of a stay-at-home mom is dang hard. But today was not one of the days in which I wanted to tear out my hair by 10:00 am.

Hallelujah.

And that is why I am basically done with the yard sale wrap skirt I've been sewing from:



Basically=I'll tell you in a minute. And ad nauseum. And I know you want to hear all about the many and varied modifications I made to the pattern. First, however, I'll show you the photos that occurred during a break in the rain when I changed into my new skirt (I'm also wearing the new bra, and I offer the news flash that non-nursing bras are not as comfortable as nursing bras), took the girls outside, and asked them to take turns taking photos of me in my new skirt:

I'm trying to get my head in the shot:

Still trying to get my head in:Shot nearly missed me entirely that time:I took this one (and yes, I do have funky tan lines on my feet, and I do let my daughters paint my toenails, and those are acrylic paint stains on our sidewalk):I give up--who needs another shot of my face, anyway?I'm much more pleased with this skirt than I thought I would be, mid-sewing--and also, I NEVER wear skirts or dresses, but a wedding is an emergency, wouldn't you say? And I haven't ruled out making a peasant top out of this same fabric and wearing it with dress pants, either, so don't think I'm skirt-committed, now.

This skirt was made from part of a queen-size sheet that I found at the Goodwill Outlet Store--I bet it cost me no more than 25 cents. And there is enough left of the sheet to make a peasant top, I really think, although I might have to do part of the sleeves in a different fabric.

And yes, the fact of the sheet begs the question--yes, I did find both the matching pillowcases, as well, and yes, I will be sewing matching dresses for my daughters to match with me. The campy transvestite in me wants to make Matt a matching tie, too, so we can look like we're going to some creepy family prom, but I will definitely restrain myself and perhaps just hem him a matching hanky for his suit pocket.

For you fellow plus-sized ladies, my waist is about 36", and I had to add two entire extra panels to this six-panel wrap skirt. This means that I also can't use the waistband and ties part of the pattern, either. I haven't finished the waist, but I'm 99% sure that my solution will be a bias tape hemmed waist, and kilt pins (read: safety pins) to fasten the skirt. Instead of the hand-sewn rolled hem that the instructions also called for, I machine-stitched a rolled hem with a satin stitch set to a short stitch length, and I think it looks very nice.

Now...shoes?

My Pumpkinbear Etsy Shop is Presentable Again!

What with, you know, parenting and teaching freshman comp and cooking food and starting seeds and sewing presents for little-kid birthday parties and cleaning and writing my book proposal and making patterns for my book proposal and creating some Artist Trading Cards for my Craftster ATC WXY swap and blah blah blah, my pumpkinbear etsy shop was growing sadly neglected, and it was starting to make me feel antsy.

So off and on this weekend, in between the sewing and seed starting and stuff, I found some time to update. It didn't help that the weather turned (AGAIN!) and so all my photos are weirdly lit, but perfect lighting or not, they're up, and that's better than perfect lighting.

The fun thing is that I managed to update with a lot of really different stuff, some of which I've been sitting on for too long due to just doing other stuff. So I've got some vintage crafting stuff, like this crazy-awesome lap loom, with all its parts AND an instruction book, that I happened upon fortuitously one day:

Matt made his first digital collage sheet for me, just a simple one-inch set of the international breastfeeding symbol images that we use to make pinbacks, so that other crafty people with button machines can make their own fundraisers for their own natural birthing advocacy organizations: I sold off all my other comic book pinbacks and doily pinbacks, so I FINALLY relisted a set of each: I have to make some more of the black doily pinbacks before I can relist those, but I'm still on this random rainbow kick, and so I'm also absurdly stoked by my rainbow doily pinbacks.

And finally, now that I've gotten my T-shirt smock pattern all worked out to my satisfaction I'm thinking of changing it into a T-shirt apron for my book proposal (more gender neutral, don't you think maybe?), which pattern I'd also need to work out (pushing the proposal mailing back just a few more days, squidge squidge), but anyway, now that it's all worked out and happy I can enjoy sewing up some crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt dresses out of my crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt stash:

Captain America--such a nice guy. Too bad about Bucky.

P.S. Check out my expose on a big company that ripped off an indie crafter over at Crafting a Green World.

Because Everyone Needs a Dinosaur Dress

I've been working out this new pattern idea for making dresses/tops out T-shirts, sort of like the pillowcase dresses I make. Of course, figuring out a new pattern requires making up that pattern several times, and hence:

Velociraptor Dress

I think I'm actually liking this idea a lot more than the pillowcase dresses, because, duh, it's way more fangeek. It's tricky with the bias straps, though, because they ought to be all mitchy-matchy, but I hate to buy new fabric.

Fortunately, Mr. Velociraptor also has some pale green accents to complement the pale green fabric I used here:I'm making this pattern to include in my book proposal, but I'll also likely have a few of these dresses up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop this weekend after I'm satisfied with the way it's working, because it's a good way to use up my stash of awesome T-shirts.

Don't worry, though--I made the girl put on pants before I sent her to school:

Wedding! Wedding! Wedding!

There's nothing like how a wedding tends to take over everything in its vicinity, and it's not even your wedding. This weekend has been all "Wedding! Wedding! Wedding!", and I did not even attend the said wedding of one of Matt's first cousins, on account of they didn't invite children. Obviously I have been all about complaining about this and all the levels upon which it is wrong (philosophically, ethically, logistically, etc.), and in debates with child-free apologists, neither of the excuses of "That's just the way most people do it these days" and "Well, it's their wedding" fly with me. Firstly, I don't care if not inviting children is trendy right now. Barring real limitations (say, the wedding is taking place in a nightclub, or a porn studio), it's rude not to invite particular members of someone's immediate family. I see it the same as if the wedding read, "Blood family members only." See? Rude!

Not inviting children also doesn't apply as one of those wedding planning whims, such as whether or not to serve cake. It's a real inconvenience to the families invited, many of whom are already at great time and expense to come to the wedding because they love you so much, and they would feel terrible if they couldn't be there to see you. Mind you, the bride and groom did arrange a hella expensive group babysitting service for the duration of the wedding, and this actually would have been a fine solution, if this babysitting had taken place AT THE WEDDING LOCATION. But nope. The babysitting was to take place at the hotel at which the families were all to stay, and the wedding and reception took place at a winery a half-hour shuttle ride from the wedding, shuttles running from 4:00-5:00 and 9:00-12:00. Seriously? Seriously, no way for a parent to check on a child, no way for a parent to respond to an emergency phone call from the service, and it's expensive. None of the people who had family obligations to go to the wedding, but also had children found this appropriate. For instance, in this wedding the groom's sister has a two-year-old and a breastfeeding three-month-old--they're not invited. She brought a family friend with her from her hometown, paying her way, so her small children could be supervised one-on-one by a familiar face. Another first cousin has a four-year-old with cerebral palsy and a six-year-old--they're not invited, and they had to sit there in Seattle, where they live, and find a local babysitter here with medical training to babysit their son. They're both doctors, so they're pretty well qualified to take care of him themselves, you know. And then there's us, flying in from Indiana, only see the folks here for a week every year--my two-year-old isn't ready to have a stranger babysit her, especially in a group setting, and so while everyone else went to this wedding, I sat at home with the kids, a strange home with not many toys, no car, the kids upset because they want Daddy, from 3:30 pm until everyone got home after midnight. Superfun.

Maybe I'm alone in this last one, but I also think it's really weird to purposefully not invite children to a WEDDING. You know, a ceremony in which you celebrate the joining of FAMILIES. A bonding experience for a new, united FAMILY. You know who really adds meaning to the concept of "family?" CHILDREN! And you know, maybe you really do think that your dream wedding shouldn't include children. Maybe you don't think that parents would do anything to keep their kids happy and well-behaved in even a very formal setting, would bring small books and toys, would take the kids for long walks outside. Maybe you really think that all your loved ones with children, all these people who made such a special effort to come and witness your joy, would let their kids throw dinner rolls and shriek and spill stuff. If you really think that, then maybe you should be the one to make a special effort to plan a wedding in which this does not happen, to plan a celebration in which your young family members can be welcome and meaningfully included. They'd like the chance to wish you joy, too, you know, especially since they only see you for a couple of days each year.

Anywho.... Boy, I went to some great garage sales on Saturday! I don't know if they just have more awesome stuff in California than they do elsewhere, or if, since garage sales aren't as popular here, they don't get picked over like they do elsewhere, but man, did I score!

A Nightmare Before Christmas shirt for a T-shirt quilt: Lots of rubber stamps, and a white ink pad! How much do I love the sun stamps, and the Christmas tree? I love them a lot.
I don't actually do screen printing, but I did order some stuff from Dharma Trading Company for freezer paper T-shirt fabric stenciling (It will be waiting for me when I get home--whee!!!), and this would work for that? Elsewise, it's just awesome:

I was so excited to spy these little wooden embroidery hoops, because I've recently read about stretching great fabric in them and hanging them on the wall as art. Dinosaurs are possibly going in here:
Matching embroidered pillowcases for pillowcase dresses:
Dinosaur temporary tattoos! The sweeties warmed the cockles of my heart by both insisting that their tattoos be placed on their left ankles, "just like Momma." If only my tattoo was awesome like a dinosaur:
A quilted pillowcase, 20"x26". It has a commercial tag, but it still looks hand-quilted to me. Sweatshop?
And an awesome pair of red Converse sneaks for Willow for next summer, and this great book called From the prairie: A child's memories, which has patterns for cloth dolls and, get this, clothes for the cloth dolls. Righteous.

The girls were invited to the rehearsal dinner (run by Matt's awesome aunt and uncle), and they were, of course, charming and well-behaved:

I, of course, ate and drank everything I could reach--gotta get my money's worth, you know, since I'm not going to the wedding. Did I mention that my children aren't invited?

But enough with the preamble...I know you want to hear the gossip about the wedding. Well, Matt came home disgusting drunk, clearly taking my personal motto to eat and drink all he could reach to heart, and he could tell me unsatisfyingly little about the actual reception, because everything was all, "No, I don't know what the cake tasted like. I missed the cake because I was at the bar." Yuck. But he did tell me, and I later got all the dish, that the groom's sister, the one with the two-year-old and the breastfeeding three-month-old, actually missed her own brother's wedding. Baby Hunter became hysterical every time his Momma tried to leave him, and eventually, after many desperate attempts to leave, because obviously Karin so much wanted to watch her brother get married, he lost all composure and just had a huge nervous breakdown. Karin missed everything. She says, and of course she's correct, that this obviously wouldn't have happened if Hunter had been invited, because not only would she not have had to try to leave him, but she could have nursed him if he became upset and worn him to keep him happy and comfortable. It makes me really sad to think about how unhappy the situation was for her. Me, I'm not unhappy about the situation. I'm just resentful.

Next: Home! Home! Home!

The Pillowcase Dress Obsession Revealed!

I mentioned in a previous post my latest obsession for making pillowcase dresses. To illustrate the madness, my partner and I took the girls to the park this afternoon for a candy-bribed photo shoot. I have made a freakin' lot of pillowcase dresses, y'all.

One thing I really like about the pillowcase dresses is their versatility. It's partly the fact that for the armholes, I made a casing for a drawstring ribbon so that you can adjust the fit for length and width, but it's also, I think, the fact that the style is so classic that it works as a dress or a top. This dress that Sydney's wearing, for instance, would be a long dress on a one-year-old, probably, and would just get gradually shorter until it's a swingy little top on a five-year-old. On Sydney it's just the right length to show off her chubby little Sydney knees:I also like a lot how you can adjust the fit with the ribbon ties. On these matching dresses I made for the girls, I made them a little big on them on purpose, so I scrunch the underarm material down and tie the shoulder ribbons for a pretty high neckline: On this dress, though, I tied the shoulder ribbons really loose for a much wider neckline: And yes, because I'm totally nuts I made matching drawstring bags out of leftover pillowcase material for almost all the dresses:
I finally decided that I liked this narrow ribbon best for the shoulder ties. You can tie it in a really tight knot, if you want, so that your kiddo can't pick it out or so you can leave it the exact same size through several washes, or you can tie it in just a bow and be able to undo it quickly and easily:
This one, of course, is Willow's most absolute favorite. Is she too far away, or can you see the dinosaurs? Oh, and see her brand-new tricycle? Donated by a neighbor, after he bought his daughter a big-girl bike and then heard me holding court at the pool about our recent theft. I tell ya, people can be nice.
Do you see the cross-stitch on this pillowcase? It kills me!

So, yeah, that's a lot of pillowcase dresses for two little girls. We'll be keeping some of them, the matching dresses and the dino dress for sure, but I'm going to have to list most of these on etsy. I know there are lots more vintage pillowcases in the world, and I have to make room!

Blog List

I'm sure this will be big news for you, but... I tend to be a little obsessive. No, seriously. I know, I know, I'm really subtle about it, but yeah, there it is. So, you know, if we get a DVD box set from the library, and I discover that I really like the series (hello, Joan of Arcadia!), I will watch all 36 or whatever hours of that series before I do anything else in the world besides eating, sleeping, and basic parenting. If there's a cookie cake in the house, I literally cannot settle down until that cookie cake has been consumed in its entirety. Preferably by me. The average time it takes me to read any good novel, no matter the length? About a day. You know, obsessive.

For a week now, I've been flat-out obsessed with making pillowcase dresses. I bought a few pillowcases at a Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale months ago and stuck them in the stash and in the back of my mind, and there they sat, but a few weeks ago during my forced felted wool stegosaurus sweat shoppe, I started thinking, "Pillowcase dresses. Pillowcase dresses. Pillowcase dresses." So I made the girls a matching set for their friend Phillip's birthday party last weekend:

It was fun, so I made another the next day. And another. When I ran out of pillowcases, we went to Goodwill--they're 99 cents there! I bought several, including one dinosaur-print(!). I knew I had it bad when on Thursday, dropping Willow off at a playdate, I bragged to my mom-friend that I'd made Sydney's little pillowcase shirt just that morning. In the afternoon, re-exchanging kids at the library, Noel noticed that Sydney was in a different pillowcase dress, and asked if I'd made that one, too. I said, "Yeah... About half an hour ago, actually." Oh, well. Sydney had another new hot-off-the-presses pillowcase dress for the Fourth of July parade, and then another one this morning for errand-running (Willow wanted to wear it, but Sydney said yes first. So I promised I'd make Willow her dinosaur-print pillowcase dress this afternoon). So, um...yeah. Obsessive.

Another thing I've been obsessed about lately is the finding and reading of crafty blogs--you know I list them sometimes here in the blog, but I tend to lose track of which ones I've mentioned. Hence the new feature I've been playing with, on the right above the archives and below the wist gallery: a blog list!!! Now both you and I can obsessively have handy not only the names and links of my favorite crafty blogs, but also snippets of their latest entries and a tag for how long ago they were last updated! Ooh, so helpful for keeping obsessively up-to-date.

Do you heart a crafty blog?