We Made Pretty Things with The Art of Modern Quilling

Syd is generally to be relied upon as my crafting buddy. Along with watching cooking videos on YouTube, it's about our favorite way to spend time together. Whenever a publicist sends me a crafting book, she's right in there with me, checking it out and then trying it out and seeing what we can make of it.

Our most recent score is The Art of Modern Quilling. This is the first time that Syd or I have ever tried anything to do with quilling, and it turns out that we're both super into it!

The book has instructions for making all the different quilling shapes, and they're all fairly easy to do, and much, much, MUCH easier after I figured out how to DIY a quilling tool from a coffee stirrer:

After that, making all the shapes was a piece of cake for both of us!

Can you find Syd's original quilling shape invention in here?

Syd most enjoyed the process-oriented activity of making all the quilling shapes, and we ended up with quite a collection that we can use for future projects:

I have some old Mason jar lid rings hanging around, left over from Syd's Christmas ornament project last December. I realized that if I cut the quilling strips to be 1/2" wide instead of 1/4", they would perfectly match the width of a Mason jar lid ring, so I used the lid ring as a form to make a project:

I filled the space with the main design that I wanted (I experimented with quilling old sheet music, and it looks okay as the background, but you can't, of course, see the notes. I'm very curious to try quilling color-saturated magazine pages next!), and then pressed in other quilled shapes until tension held the entire thing in the Mason jar lid ring.

To actually secure it, I brushed glue under the edge of the Mason jar lid ring as I was coating the entire piece with several coats of Mod Podge to seal it:

I really wanted to use polyurethane, but I can't find it in the house, and at -14 degrees outside, it would take a far more important reason than simply desiring my preferred sealant to make me go outside and dig around for it in the garage.

Not to mention that I suspect I'll be pissed when I find it, because I store my paints in the closet inside so that they WON'T get frozen, and if the polyurethane is in the garage then not only did someone borrow it without asking and not put it away properly, but also it's probably ruined. Because it's -14 degrees outside. And that stuff is expensive. 

So Mod Podge and a peaceable mood it is!

It's awesome to have another crafting skill in the toolbox, and I'm looking forward to seeing what future projects quilling lends itself to. I mean, cardmaking is a given, but I have a couple of flat picture frames that I thrifted but haven't refinished yet, and I'm toying with the idea that quilling on top of the frame would look really cool. Syd embellished a couple of very elaborate headbands recently using polymer clay; wouldn't quilled pieces, sealed very well (I sure wish that polyurethane was on my closet shelf where it's supposed to be right now!), be just as pretty?

Stay tuned!

P.S. Syd and I are always making something weird. Want to follow along and see what else we're working on? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Our Favorite Books of 2018

Around the middle of March, I started a project that I've had in the back of my mind for decades:

I began to record every book I read.

I've done this off and on (I still have a Goodreads account to prove it!), but no method ever stuck. And even this time, I tried a couple of different ways to record my reading before I came to the one that I like. I really wanted to make a cutest bullet journal-style artistic layout, but I'm not actually, you know, artistic, so the first one that I tried looked like crap.

Eventually, I taught myself how to make my books look a tiny bit more bookish, and now I'm happy, and I have a list of 58 books that I've read between March 13 and today.

Yay!

As a lover of books, something as simple as just writing down the title and author of every book I complete (I don't include the books that I drop before finishing, and I only write down comics if I've read a whole volume) is a game changer. All I have to do is look through the list, and it's easy to recall plots and settings and the details that make each book what it is. I can give people book recommendations now!

I can make a list like this!

I fully plan to require the kids to somehow record the books that they read in 2019, although I don't have any idea how I'm going to do this. They'll both rebel and "forget" and complain and refuse, and I'll go nuts in my mind knowing all the ones they're undoubtedly skipping. We'll figure it out, though, because it's so worth it. Too bad that I didn't do it this year, though--I'm confident that Will has read hundreds of books this year (if you doubt that number, it's just because you don't know this kid), and Syd has listened to perhaps as many audiobooks.

Don't bother wondering what my life is like with one kid constantly reading the book in her face, and the other kid constantly listening to the audiobook in her headphones. It's generally very quiet.

SYDNEY

Syd still reads kid books, but she made a decisive move into YA novels this year, too. She listened to almost all of John Green's books, although she admitted that she didn't really understand Turtles All the Way Down. She LOVED The Fault in Our Stars, though.

I mean, of course!

Unlike Will, Syd is happy to reread her favorite books. She still listens to Wonder every now and then, and all the Rick Riordans, although she's more into The Mark of Apollo books than the Lightning Thief ones these days. This year, Syd also loved the Spirit Animals series enough that she dressed as a Green Cloak for Halloween. 

I let Syd listen to The Hunger Games, and she cried so hard when Rue died that I let her listen to Catching Fire, even though I was worried it would be too scary. She was so worried about Peeta after that book ended that I let her listen to Mockingjay. Even Will hasn't read the Hunger Games trilogy (although I LOOOOOOVE it), because she's worried it will be too scary, the chicken.

The Little Prince

This book actually started out as a pick from the MENSA For Kids reading list, part of a book report assignment. But as I'd hoped when I gave the assignment, Syd LOVED this book. Of course she did. Have you re-read it recently? It's beautiful, and sad, and doesn't gloss over or try to explain the hardest mysteries of our burdens in life. It also has a fox, which is currently Syd's favorite animal, and it speaks to the intense relationship that one has with one's pet. Syd, who intensely loves and is loved by a certain grey tabby cat, understood what the book was saying about what it is to love an animal.

Foxtrot

Syd isn't quite as obsessed with Garfield these days, but she still reads Foxtrot over and over, and her shining moment in the sun was the day that she met Bill Amend, himself, and bought a signed print from him. Her grandparents gave her this boxed set for Christmas this year, and since then, I think she's read through the whole thing at least twice.

WILLOW

In some ways, it's easier to figure out what Will's favorite books of the year were, because they're piled all over our library bookshelf (yes, we have three entire shelves of a giant bookshelf devoted only to library books--that's how bad our habit is!), but in other ways, it's nearly impossible because she doesn't keep track of them, and reads so many that she can hardly recall them when asked for favorites.

Here's what she admitted when I pinned her down, though, although don't expect any summarizing or opinions. Apparently we're not conversing with mothers this morning...

To Kill a Mockingbird

Will didn't mention this book as one of her favorites, but she couldn't stop talking about it after she read it for a book report assignment. She had a LOT to say about Scout's naivety, and it inspired lots and lots of discussions about civil rights and racial bias, particularly in the southern states.

I can tell you the books that Will has recommended to me and that I always loved, too:

Everything All At Once

This book is so good! Will read it on a road trip and then handed to me to read on the same trip, so that every five pages or so I could pester her with my theories and predictions and beg her to tell me if I was right or not. She never would, though, because she has a strong moral tone when it comes to book plots.

Young Wizards series

I'd read the first book in this series, So You Want To Be a Wizard, years ago, back when I was taking a children's literature class in grad school for my MLS and had to complete an annotated reading log. I remember loving it, but I didn't research it further, and so didn't realize that there's an entire series! Will, however, loves all things fantasy, and so she reintroduced me to the Young Wizards this year, and patiently fielded all of my guesses and questions and excited discussions, and now it's something that we love together.

Temeraire series

Here's another book series that Will recommended to me, recently enough that I've only read the first two books, although I'm super excited because there are so many more! Will would hardly turn down the chance to read any book about dragons, but this series, she agrees, is something special. The way that Temeraire and his captain speak to each other is tender and sweet, the type of courtesy born of true love, and it colors all of the books with its gentle affection, giving emotional impact even to hard-boiled battle scenes.

Lumberjanes

This recommendation is recent enough that all the volumes are still on hold for me at the library, waiting for our next trip. Will tells me, though, that it's a terrific series, and combines Girl Scouts, one of my favorite things, with fantasy adventure elements--my other favorite thing!

ME

Anne of Green Gables series

The first few books of this series are made of magic. Anne is one of the most endearing characters in all of literature--flawed, to be sure, or otherwise you wouldn't love her, but so sweet and hopeful and brave that you can't possibly do anything but adore her. The later books in the series are... well, they don't star Anne, and none of the other characters who are introduced can make up for that. Will happily read the first few books, and then I encouraged her to muscle through the rest just to have a clear view of the series as a whole. Syd listened to the first couple, and I, of course, read them all for the dozenth time this year, getting through at least a couple while on Prince Edward Island itself!

The Invisible Woman

This book is a speculative biography of Nelly Ternan, a Victorian actress and most likely the mistress of Charles Dickens. It's likely that his relationship with Ternan is why he removed his wife from his home and refused to let her have any contact with their children, and she is definitely part, although not all, of the secret to the frenetic pace at which he traveled and spent, and why he seemed to continually lie about his whereabouts. More than that, though, this biography is about a Victorian woman, both subject to and flouting many of those conservative Victorian standards. She was an actress! She was unmarried! She was sexually active! And yet she was just as trapped by the web of these transgressions as she would have been living a completely conventional Victorian life. I admit that I did feel kind of sick about Charles Dickens after I read this, but hey. Celebrities, like anyone, are a lot more complicated than they'd like to appear.

Lethal White

I love the Cormoran Strike books, J.K. Rowling's mystery series. This one might be my favorite, as it ties up a long-running story arc in the series, but they're all fun, contemporary, genre-standard mysteries, far more well-written than you'd expect mystery novels to be.

Trapped: The Story of Floyd Collins

You guys, I spent a shocking amount of this year obsessed with Floyd Collins. I read about him during our trip to Mammoth Cave National Park, and then couldn't stop thinking about him for a long, long time. This book is quite thorough in telling his story, and also tells about the interesting history of travel and tourism in the years between the world wars. But mostly, it tells the horror story of a man trapped in a small cave, hardly able to be reached, entirely unable to be rescued (or was he?), left alone to die in the cold and dark and wet.

Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture

Outsider art is one of my interests, especially genre art. The art constructed as part of Christian-themed pop culture counts as outsider art, mainly because its fan base is more interested in the content than the quality, the theming rather than the technique. I had a lot of fun reading these chapters and then looking up the artists referenced. I listened to a lot of bad music, and it took forever for my recommended YouTube videos feed to recover, but it was worth it to watch an episode of a campy TV show about a Bible-based superhero.

FAMILY

Lord of the Rings

I've mentioned several times that The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy have been our family read-alouds for a long while now. We actually just finished the whole series earlier this autumn! After that, we did A Christmas Carol (we didn't love it a ton, but we did have a lot of fun making fun of it, so there you go), and we're ready to start the Harry Potter series together soon.


I'm already excited by our next year of reading. By this date in 2019, I'll ideally have an exhaustive book list for each kid, as well as me, to peruse through and wax nostalgic about all the happy adventures we've had.

Oh, and if you have any recommended books for us, please let me know in the Comments. We ALWAYS need new things to read!

Parenting Book Review: The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting

When I mentioned on my Craft Knife Facebook page that I was interested in learning more about parenting seen through the lens of game theory, one of the comments on my post was an impassioned rebuttal of using game theory to parent. The gist of the comment was that one's relationship with one's children should be collaborative, not competitive, and treating parenting as a win-or-lose scenario would be harmful to children.

That comment made me realize that many people don't understand what game theory is, which is a bummer, because game theory is AWESOME and fully relevant to a whole myriad of human interactions.

Game theory is essentially the study of strategic decision-making. So yes, it covers games and how to win them, but it also deals with how to achieve the optimal result whenever strategy is called for. And optimal result doesn't necessarily mean winning--if you want everyone happy, then that's your optimal result. If you want a fair allocation of Christmas presents or parental attention, then that's your optimal result. If you want your kid to grow up to be a good, honest, fair, friendly person, then that's certainly your optimal result!

So when I read The Game Theorist's Guide to Parenting (I had my local university's library inter-library loan it for me!), I wasn't trying to win parenting, but to see if they had any strategies that would, say, get my kids to stop fighting, or help me figure out how to teach my kid who's also a lying liar who lies how to stop lying all the dang time.

There is a chapter on lying. Spoiler alert: there is no quick and easy strategy to get your kid to stop lying, dang it.

There are LOTS of ways, however, to make sure that you're treating kids fairly, and that's actually the part of the book that I enjoyed the most. The authors emphasize that of course fair does not mean equal--if you give your kids equal slices of a half-chocolate, half-vanilla cake, but the kid who only loves chocolate gets vanilla and the kid who only loves vanilla gets chocolate, then that's not fair. So the authors go through tons of different ways to divvy up resources, and you can read through them and utilize whatever appeals to you. Bigger families might like the auction approaches, but I have long been a heavy utilizer of the I Cut, You Choose school of choice-making.

You know that one. Whenever you give your kids or partner a list to choose from, whether it's chores or vacation destinations or movies for Family Movie Night, but you've made the list and so you're cool with everything on it, that's I Cut, You Choose. It's my favorite.

There's also a good chapter on how to best utilize punishments and rewards, if you use them. For one, don't make a punishment that punishes YOU as much as it does the kid--for instance, don't automatically ground your kid from the car if it means that you're just going to have to play chauffeur yourself. Instead, think about what has the most impact from the kid's point of view. If they're misusing the car, then, perhaps they should pay for their own insurance, or gas, or drive Meals on Wheels for a while. That kind of thing.

But even the punishment/reward chapter is more invested in social contracts than purely cause and effect. Like, not how to punish your kid, per se, but how to help her fulfill the social contract that she made to you concerning how she would use the car. The authors claim that pre-committing to the consequences help enforce this. It's why school sports programs have academic requirements, and everybody already knows what will happen if a kid violates them. So the authors encourage bringing another person into your contract: if one kid steals the other kid's water bottle one more time, tell them both that she can also do that kid's dishwasher duty that day. Now you have someone else to help you enforce the contract!

Lying is one of my kid's main faults. She's always been very bright, and very bright kids do have a tendency to become manipulative, or resort to lying, simply because they can often make it work to their advantage. Lying is a hard flaw to correct, and the authors would tend to agree with that, because they don't have any clear-cut solutions. They do, however, have one piece of advice that I've since taken to heart: ask LOTS of questions, and get lots and lots and LOTS of details. The idea is that lying requires mental and emotional labor. You have to think through your lie, and maintain it while knowing that what you're doing is wrong. So in every tempting scenario, ask lots of questions. Solicit LOTS of details. If the kid is telling the truth, then there's no extra mental or emotional labor involved in offering more information. If the kid is lying, then even if you don't catch her in her lie (which I often don't, because like I said, my kid is very bright), then you're still making her work a lot harder than she would be working if she was just telling the truth. Ideally, that labor will eventually become so costly that lying is no longer worth it.

I have been trying this one, and I think it's working. It's best if I do the questioning in ways that don't sound like I'm trying to catch her in a lie, because then she just doubles-down with her stubbornness and she'd die before she let me win when she's being stubborn, but asking lots of questions and eliciting lots of details, as well as having a reputation for checking in and following through (which, by the way, is EXHAUSTING if you think about how much you ask a teen and tween to do independently without you having to check that they've done every single thing), is at least better than screaming and frustration.

Why is my kid so feral? Sigh...

Other chapters, such as how to help your kids learn to get along, or how to encourage them to do their best in school, weren't as relevant to me, and I fully admit that the voting chapter got a little over my head, but overall, I highly recommend this book, most particularly if you, like me, seem to have at least one budding little manipulative game theorist of your own.

The Best Sneakily Educational Gifts for Tweens and Teens

You know you want to buy your kids educational gifts! It only works, however, if they don't KNOW that the gifts are educational, or if the gifts are so awesome that they don't CARE that they're educational!

These gifts, hits with my own tween and teen from previous holidays, are so awesome that the kids either didn't notice, or didn't care, how much they learned. It's a gift-giving best-case scenario!

Universal Yums

I bought this monthly subscription box for Will for her last birthday, and we all LOVE it. Every month she gets a box of snacks from a different country, with a pamphlet explaining them, giving facts about the country, etc. And then we get to eat the snacks! It's a great way to sneak a little extra geography into your life, because after eating weird food from a country, don't you want to look it up on the globe, find a bunch of YouTube videos about it, and check out Spotify to see what its Top 50 hits are?

We do!

Robotic Unicorn

Tweens and teens who are into unicorns, dragons, and other castles in the sky aren't always into robotics.

At least, they think they aren't. Just wait and see how excited they get when they've got a real, live (for a very specific definition of the word...) robotic unicorn of their own to program!

LED Circuit Stickers Journal

Your tween and teen get an interactive journal that teaches them how to add awesome special effects to their notes or school projects or greeting cards or private writing or artwork. At least, that's what they think they're getting.

They're actually getting a pretty good basic course in circuitry and electricity. Whenever it comes up next in school or life, they're going to be surprised to notice that they're already experts!

Flying Lesson

Yes, a REAL flying lesson! Will's grandfather gave her a certificate for a one-hour flying lesson for her fourteenth birthday, and it is the best gift that she has EVER received. She got to practice take-offs and landings and take turns flying an actual Cessna with her flight instructor, and she learned so much about aviation in just that one lesson, not to mention all the math and map reading and physical skills that she used.

Dwarf Houseplants

This might seem like a super weird gift, but bear with me. Whenever I buy from a seed catalog, I always let the kids look through it, too, and if want they want isn't too expensive or unsuitable for our property, I'll buy something for them. A couple of years ago, Syd picked out this dwarf pomegranate plant, and it has been the best thing ever! We haven't actually gotten it to bear us a completely ripe pomegranate yet, although we live in hope, but it's been endlessly entertaining for Syd to watch it, and she does reasonably well at taking care of it.

Since then, we've kept a lookout for other interesting dwarf houseplants that we can nurture. They can live outside in the summer and then come inside for the winter, but since they're dwarf varieties, they don't take up a ridiculous amount of space. And, of course, the kids get to care for them, observe them, learn about them, and enjoy them. It's hands-on science and practical life skills!

I think we're going for a dwarf banana plant next...

Create This Book

Syd loves this book both because one of her favorite YouTube stars created it, and because, unlike Wreck This Journal or most other similar creative artist's notebooks, you don't mess the book up AT ALL while you're making it. Instead, you end up with a completely adorable complete creation. Even tweens and teens who don't consider themselves artists will find lots of inspiring prompts to play around with. And you can keep going back to it endlessly, it seems--I bought this for Syd back in June, and she's constantly tweaking pieces or adding new ones or further embellishing it.

Constellations Memory

Memory might seem like a game that's too babyish for tweens and teens, but I assure you that it is not. Here's a photo of Will and I playing this exact Memory game a couple of nights ago, while Syd was playing with polymer clay (an item in my Nerdy Gifts for Tweens and Teens post) and Matt was reading A Christmas Carol aloud to us:

Because we're nerds. This particular Constellations Memory game, which we've had for years and which I often bring on road trips to play in our hotel room, has so many cards that it's very much a challenge even for adults (you can remove some of the cards to make the game easier, of course), and not only are the illustrations beautiful, but they also sneakily teach you the constellations. Curious folks can go on to explore more astronomy, Greek myths, or stargazing resources.

Color Yourself Smart Series

These coloring books are like the adult coloring books that tweens and teens like, BUT they're sneakily educational! Will completely immersed herself in the dinosaurs book after someone bought it for her for some holiday that I don't remember, but there's a whole series of them to explore.

Contemporary Craft Kits

I think everyone should know how to do a large selection of hand arts, especially sewing, but most beginner's craft kits shoot themselves in the foot by making the stuff that a beginner is learning to create so CHEEZY! 

It's very much worth your time to look for a how-to-crochet, how-to-cross-stitch, how-to-sew, etc., kit with contemporary theming. The kids still pull out this particular stitch-it kit that I have for cross-stitching, not because the patterns are necessarily anything special, but just because they're good contemporary patterns that don't look out of place.

For those who are a little more advanced, the craft kits get even more awesome. Check out this Stitch People kit!

Blokus

We found the travel version of this game at Goodwill years ago, and even though we later also bought the full-size version (also at Goodwill!), this travel version remains our favorite by far. It's terrific for logic, spatial reasoning, and math skills, but it's also easy to learn and quick to play. We've whiled away lots of time with this game on road trips or while waiting for various appointments and activities to end. 

These are some of our favorites, but I'm always on the lookout for sneaky educational stuff to put on Santa's list, so if you've got a favorite of your own, please let me know!