Because in the South, You Do Your Christmas Shopping Early

I received a very nice email from my mother yesterday, reminding me that after two solid months of reminders, I still have not told her what Willow and Matt want for Christmas (my presents and Sydney's presents she's already purchased, the desires of daughters and toddlers likely more transparent than those of ever-changing five-year-olds and sons-in-law).

Do all mothers do this, or just Southern ones? To me, having to declare my Christmas wishes in late summer has its firm place on the seasonal calendar of my childhood with the other mainstays of spring cleaning, a week in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, in the summer, purchasing my Halloween costume from Wal-mart, and eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. I'm not the early bird that my mother is, or my Mama was (I don't remember anything about how my Nana shopped, although Mama surely acquired the habit honestly), but since I make most of the presents that I give to friends and family, right now there's a batch of spearmint and rosemary cold-process soap curing in the basement that, if it turns out well, will be Christmas presents for some, and this weekend's tomato sauce that I make and can will, if it turns out well, be Christmas presents for some others, so I'm no day-before-Christmas do-er, either.


So here, mother, and everyone else in the world, are some things that my husband and my daughter would like for Christmas:

The girls and I have been playing around with our small second-hand set of soft pastels enough to know that my Matt, a wonderful artist and a man who never buys himself ANYTHING nice, would probably really like himself an excellent set of soft pastels of his own:
Willow, too, of course, loves her art, and is as creative and natural an artist as any child could be. I consider it one of the most important responsibilities of my parenting to provide her with as wide a variety of enriching experience as possible, and to give her as many artistic tools and media as I can. How awesome would it be to have a few sets of these blank nesting dolls realistically painted by my Matt, a few sets "abstractly" painted by myself, and a few sets for the girls to paint, not to mention a few sets to keep naked?

Matt is currently in the habit of toting his to-do items back and forth to work in the dumpster-dived cut glass bowl in which I put those items--mail addressed to him, forms and bills, packages to mail, etc. I really would like the nice bowl to actually stay on the shelf on which it lives, dear. Wouldn't you prefer to tote your stuff in something a little more butch--a robot messenger bag, perhaps?

Willow's great love of dinosaurs is legendary by now, but one simply can't wear a dinosaur T-shirt every single day of one's life (this is my claim, not the child's). On the days on which one chooses to instead wear a Star Wars shirt, or a housefly shirt, or a camouflage or tie-dyed shirt, how nice to also be able to still sport a subtle, sophisticated shout-out to the awesomeness that is the dinosaur:

Matt's a good sport when people tease him about his beard, because he's such a nice guy, but frankly, his whiskers are just plain hot:

Will's dream is to have a playground installed in the basement, and I have to say that it doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Matt and I dream about installing in the girls' basement playroom a reading loft, a slide, and something great to climb on: As a digital designer, Matt does most of his work with a keyboard and a mouse, but he's also an excellent freehand artist, and undergoes elaborate permutations twice a week to transform our comic strip, which he draws by hand, into a digital document to send to the newspaper. He has wanted a really good computer stylus and tablet for several years now:
I don't know what it is so appealing about lots of tiny little things. I'd say that it's just a kid obsession, but well...you've seen for yourself my relationship with buttons. As math manipulatives at home or just for playing with--dinosaurs! Or ocean creatures! Or vehicles! Or fruit!
Star Wars plus delicious treats, two things of which Matt highly approves:

Both of the girls, but Will especially, have been really into acrylics lately. I've been making them use the cheap-o craft acrylics that are the best that I can afford, but for works like painting onto canvas or tole painting, how nice to have a set of really super acrylics:

The reason that I can always tell you in a heartbeat what I or anybody else wants is through my etsy Favorites or my wists. I like to keep track of crafty stuff I find online that appeals to me somewhat as a wish list, but also quite largely as inspiration--it's like my own little digital sketchbook, or scrapbook, of stuff to modify or emulate or think about or inspire. My etsy pumpkinbear favorites have all my favorite stuff from other etsy sellers, and my pumpkinbear wists have all my favorites of everything else.

What's the link to your etsy favorites and your wists?

For My Mother, Who Wants to Know What I Want for Christmas

jewelry (from SuchPrettyColors)

a book about making jewelry

warm hat (from 16BIT)

soap (from FlameWorks)

sturdy briefcase recycled from an old tire (from Used Rubber USA)

embroidery patterns (from Sublime Stitching)

Jar of stuff for the making of other stuff (from The Naughty Secretary Club)

P.S. Check out my tree hugger booklist over at Eco Child's Play.

Wist This!

Have I mentioned that I loooove my wist? Part of it is that scrolling awesomeness on the right side of my page, and if you click on it, it will take you to my big wist. Here it is. Some highlights:

This is Rusty T-Rex the Toddler Tee. It's screenprinted, a skill that, duh, I would love to learn. I can't believe this shirt doesn't come in adult sizes!

I sometimes make Scrabble tile necklaces for craft fairs (one time this crazy guy kept coming by and hassling me because I wouldn't give him a five-dollar Scrabble tile necklace for the change he had in his pocket. When he pulled his hand out of his pocket with the change, he also pulled out a big old prescription pill bottle. Then he yelled at me, and the husband of the woman in the next booth had to come over and protect me. The poor craft fair organizer said nothing like that had ever happened before--Bloomington can be kind of tame), but nothing like these. I love the black-on-white tile, and the metallic red spring-like fastener.

I'd also really love to learn beading and jewelry-making--all that wrapping wire, and making fastenings, and stringing beads. You know what you need for all that? You need tools! I especially love button bracelets. They tend to look really innocent and naive, but they can be quite sophisticated in their creation. I mean, look at the clean lines and subtle color scheme in this bracelet.

Don't ask me what I need another jar full of junk for, but doesn't this jar of junk just look awesome? It's full of little doodads and tchotchkes and cutie-pie thingies, plus jewelry findings to fasten them on to. I think it would be fun for collage-work for the girls, or cute jewelry for them, perhaps charm bracelets.

I'm always really happy when I check etsy for this blue skeleton plate and it's still there. I love it so much. The thing about etsy is, everything is one-of-a-kind, so you fall in love with something, put it in your favorites, think about it for a month, decide you can't live without it, go back for it, and bam!, somebody already bought it and it will never be yours. I still mourn for this pendant I saw once, with an image from a vintage medical textbook of a hand catching a baby emerging from the birth canal--beautiful.

What's beautiful to you?

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?