Ex Libris Juliae

Either to reflect my status as pretty much a PhD dropout at this point, or to more readily inspire my creative work, which is lately mostly focused on handicraft, I reorganized my bookshelves this evening. I moved, from their ready-reference position over my desk, my collection of foreign language dictionaries, grammars, and canonical book lists, and replaced them with my collection of mostly kitschy, mostly thrifted, handiwork books. My personal handiwork reference collection to date:

• Today's garage sale purchase--for 50 cents! All 101 have full-size patterns for foundation piecing.
• Happy Endings - Finishing The Edges of Your QuiltAnother garage sale purchase today, another 50 cents! This one shows rounded bindings, pieced bindings, pleats, points--you name it.
• Reader's Digest COMPLETE GUIDE TO NEEDLEWORK: Embroidery, Needlepoint, Knitting, Applique, Quilting, Patchwork, Macrame, Crochet, Rug-Making, Lacework (WITH COMPLETE ILLUSTRATED INSTRUCTIONS)This gift from my partner in the Bargain Hunter's swap has me pretty stoked by its section on rug-making. I've been considering making a rag rug from denim or old T-shirts...
• I'm not happy with the baby bottle pattern, which actually had caused me to not purchase this one earlier, but I love Jenny Hart so much that I can't stay mad at her.
• When I was crazy, literally crazy from studying for my qualifying exams (I later failed them--thanks, politically-driven, anti-family administration!) and I somehow convinced myself that I NEEDED to learn to solder, this book saved me. It saved me, y'all.
• Singer-Quilting by MachineI really like the clarity of the definitions and instruction in this book, particularly, again, for bindings.
• Sewing for Dummies I'm still too dumb for the more advanced instructions in here, but I'm totally making the sewn holiday cards.
• From the prairie: A child's memoriesFirst rainy day, the girls and I are going to make these rag dolls and doll clothes all freakin' day long.
• This is probably more eye candy than actual instructional book, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be satisfied with any block unless it looked EXACTLY like the perfect one in the book, and since the book blocks were made by the artists who made the Muppets, well...
• Things You Can Make for ChildrenHmmm...Should I make a loft bed with a slide or a smocked sundress?
• I kind of want to knit the flames and the devil tail on everything. Everything.
• Sew Fast, Faster, Fastest: Timesaving Techniques and Shortcuts for Busy Sewers (Rodale Sewing Book)Okay, her taste is a little tacky, but man, does she know her way around a shortcut.
• It's kind of my dream to find a vintage quilt made from this book--huge patchwork flowers in vivid colors, etc. If it clashes with everything, then it also kind of goes with everything, right?
• Woodstock Kid's Crafts The section on how to perform a play (Kind of a craft, sort of? Um, no) includes a photo of a small child with a cigar in his mouth and a Budweiser can in his hand. Awesome.
• The Woman's Day Book of Weekend Crafts: More Than 100 Quick-To-Finish ProjectsYou know what they think you can do in a weekend, women? A needlepoint lion. A stained glass lampshade. A hanging planter. A stuffed clown head for the nursery.

What does your kitschy library consist of?

Author/Illustrator

This afternoon, after biking back and forth from Montessori (uphill big-time on the way there, and then uphill again (?) on the way back) with a varying amount of children in the trailer, then vegging for just a little bit in front of the Numb3rs DVD set we checked out of the library while the girls did...whatever they did, I have no idea--I decided to actually, you know, parent for a couple of hours, so we dug out the markers and the crayons and the cardstock, sat down at our newly un-oceaned table (Don't worry--there's a whole new ocean set up on a big piece of plywood in the basement playroom), and made books. Little pamphlet-type books are a very simple prospect:

1. Fold a piece of cardstock in half to form a cover.
2. Use the size of your cardstock to determine the size of the typing paper you'll be using for the inside pages.
3. Fold each of the typing paper pages in half and nest them inside each other. For very little kiddos, three to five pieces of paper, equalling six to ten book pages, is plenty.
4. Put the cover over the inside pages, and staple or sew them together.
5. Give to a child, or take pencil in hand yourself, and say, "Here's a blank book. Tell me a story."

After the kitty's friends show up, they go to the park, the jungle, and the beach, eat about five different snacks, write letters to their mamas, and chase butterflies. The end.

May the Force Snuggle You Up and Keep You Cozy Warm

It seems like I've been doing nothing but this all day-- but there's also been a lot of time spent on this--
--and this--
--and, fortunately, a little time, just enough, spent on this:
Fangeek quilts make me so awesomely happy. I made this one just for fun for my etsy shop, but Matt eyed it so longingly that I think I may have a holiday gift idea for the hardest person to give a present to EVER.

What do you want on your fangeek quilt?

Library Findings

More trips to the library=more happiness.

The past two weeks, after a morning spent at the public library (storytime, craft project, gossiping with my BFF mom friend, picnic lunch), Matt has come by to pick the girls up and take Willow to school, and I've had a leisurely 45 or so minutes to thoughtfully choose materials for the girls, check them out, and then bike home to meet Matt on his way out again after putting Syd down for a little nap. It won't always happen like that, because there's too much pleasure for the girls in gleefully throwing everything they can reach into our library basket, but it's nice for now.

My most favorite choices this week:

• It's your typical "find the animal" type of picture book, except that the illustrations are made from stitched and embellished fabric--usually felt, but other materials for emphasis. It's absolutely terrific, with sequin eyes on the parrotfish and bead suckers on the octopus and embroidered lines on the clams. I'm absolutely inspired now to make the felt board I've been promising the girls for their basement playroom, and to furnish it with plenty of felt sea life.
• Aliki claims that this book is an amalgamation of several actual aquariums, but the Monterey Bay Aquarium directly inspires at least half of it. The girls recognized the outside walkway with the tidepool and the view of the bay, the cylindrical anchovies habitat in which they "swim and swim and swim in a circle circle circle," quoth Willow, the giant kelp forest, and the touch tanks. It was pretty fun to read the girls this book and they both keep interrupting--"I was there!" "I there!"
• How to Talk to Children About Art There are all kinds of interesting questions and discussions to bring up here, inspired by artwork from various periods, dealing with what's depicted, the physical environment of its creation, authorial intention as well as viewer response, and metaphors and symbols. A little advanced for my lot, but still.
• 52 Projects: Random Acts of Everyday Creativity (Perigee Book) These are more guerilla than crafty, asking you to do things like hang your own work of art someplace where people will think it's supposed to be, like a motel room or museum bathroom or apartment foyer, but the projects are inspirational and deal tenderly with one's memories. I totally should, for instance, photocopy all my college best friend's letters and mail them back to him, annotated.

Also, some non-library Web findings, because I love to waste myself some time--I mean, gather ideas from the work of others:

• Okay, is it weird that I still haven't picked up my to learn to embroidery, and yet I am THIS CLOSE to ordering two more of these embroidery sets, EVEN THOUGH I just spent 30 bucks on , also unused? But they're so awesome!!! Willow, I think because her little preschool girlfriend loves ponies like she loves dinosaurs, really wants ponies on her panties (??), and I'm torn between putting freezer paper stencil ponies on, or buying this Unicorn Believer embroidery pattern set and embroidering them without the horns. Which do you think is more awesome? Also awesome--realistic organs. I REALLY need to embroider the ovaries and uterus onto something. Anything.
• I am currently all about SewLiberated, the crafty blog of a Montessori preschool teacher, of all things. She recently left her position in Mexico, and I've been such a freak looking at her photos, going "Look, honey! They have the pink tower in Mexico, too!" Willow is pretty over it, but she gets to go to Montessori every day--I only get to peer in through the two-way mirror (Is that the right word? Wouldn't a two-way mirror be a window? Is it a one-way mirror? Or is that just a mirror?)

What have you found this week?

Scheduled

Where am I going to be on the weekends in the fall, when I sneak away from my evening freshman comp classes and masquerade as a non-teacher real person (Didn't you always sort of feel that your teachers weren't really real people--I mean, how could someone who got THAT into English GRAMMAR really be a real person?)? Here's where:

Saturday, August 23, 4:00-6:30: Cloth Diapering Workshop, Barefoot Herbs Barefoot Kids, Bloomington, IN. This is the funnest of workshops, because there's something about a big group of pregnant people and people with newborns that is just awesome fun. I give everyone a page of lecture notes, printed front and back in tiny print, and then I tell them every single thing there is to know about cloth diapers. I demo with dolls (the part where I hold the Cabbage Patch Doll upside down and shake her to show how well fitted diapers stay put just KILLS, I tell you), I show off my old ratty four-year-old diapers, I describe, in detail, the two different kinds of poop using a peanut butter metaphor--good times, people. Good times.

Do the joyful dance of vending at my first big craft fair along with me! Strange Folk is located just outside St. Louis, Missouri, one of my family's favorite places to play, and thus fits into my craft fair criteria of being indie, about a four-hour drive or close to family members, and including awesome stuff for the family to do around town and at the venue while I vend. I'm super-excited, but also weirdly jealous that although I'll be doing exactly what I've been wanting to do for a while, I'll have to miss out on the St. Louis Zoo and the St. Louis Science Center. Thank goodness The Container Store, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and Torrid will still be open when I'm done for the day.

Saturday, October 11, 9-1: A Fair of the Arts, Showers Plaza, Bloomington, IN. This is the last farmer's market craft fair of the year! My computer crashed and we went to California at around the same time, so I unhappily can't remember if I was on top of life enough to apply to the Holiday Market here, but I sadly think that maybe I didn't. Oh, well...I'm not really that into Christmas, anyway.

Saturday, October 18, 4:00-6:30: Babywearing Workshop, Barefoot Herbs Barefoot Kids, Bloomington, IN. This is the other of the classes I teach just to be near cutie little baby patooties, with the added bonus of occasionally being permitted to hold a really live itty baby while talking a parent through putting on a carrier, or maybe even wearing said baby myself for a minute, just to demo, you know. We work our way through all the attachment parenting standards--pouches, ring slings, wraps, mei tais, and the ergo. No Baby Bjorns need apply.

Whew! What are you up to this fall?

Nobody Can Call Me a Clean Freak

Yeah, yeah, yeah--I don't clean my house. Big whoop. 

I absolutely let a plate of uneaten spaghetti from last night's dinner sit on the table all day while I walk past it 800 times. 

When the kid runs by with a bath towel and spray bottle and announces, "I spilled the jam, but I'm a-gonna clean it up," I say, "Cool," and do not follow up. 

Every single day I angrily dig through a mountain of clean laundry up to my waist to find two socks for my kid to wear to school, and they DO NOT MATCH. Seriously, I'm over it. 

Events taking place this weekend, however, brought to light a very specific circumstance in which I do clean very well. See if you can find the pattern: I will happily clear off the floor, vacuum it, and then marshall the kids to help me mop with Murphy's Wood Soap... so that I have a place to lay out a quilt to be pieced:

 

This cleaning project is actually a biggie, because this section of floor has to be kept clean for DAYS--I have to lay it out to find a pleasing pattern, then after I piece it I have to lay it out again to attach the back, then after I stitch in the ditch each row and column I have to lay it out again to pin a new section, then I have to lay it out again to cut the binding to the right size, then I have to lay it out again to admire how awesome it looks when I'm done. 

That means that I have kept that floor section clean all weekend--I picked up the French fries Syd dropped, I wiped up the glue Will spilled, I vacuumed up the cat fur--it would seriously take all my freakin' time as a stay-at-home mom just to keep the freakin' floor looking good if I cared that much every day. 

Then last night, in a feat of strength and energy nearly unprecedented in this house, I untaped the butcher paper on which the kids have been drawing on top of the table for a couple of weeks, rolled it up and put it away (Hello, wrapping paper!), wiped the tabletop clean, blah, blah--so that today we could do this:

 

Um, and what is this, you ask? Well, we've just gotten back from California--this is our new ocean. The actual ocean material is some stash fabric donated by the kids' grandmother, and the kids have so far drawn on it--

--(Beluga whale, don't you know?)--and added shells from a big box I scored at the free day of the Monroe County History Center garage sale last year--

--and I printed and cut out and pasted together these photo-realistic fish and marine mammal 3D models from this awesome CD-Rom we checked out from the library last week--

 

and the kids added their toys, of course:

 

The rock that the seal is sitting on totally cracks me up. 

So the kids have been literally obsessing about this ocean all day, and it will probably be weeks before we can actually use our big table again. 

And sure, we did eat our dinner sitting on the floor again tonight, but the kids have also been poring over shell encyclopedias, and swimming their cut-out fish all around the house, and this morning, when a neighbor lady came running over from her house across the street because she saw Will climbing on top of the car and couldn't imagine that this child's mother knew where she was at the time (she and I hadn't met yet, obviously), she was greeted not only by the sight of me sitting on the porch steps cheering said child on, but also by Syd, naked, running around in circles in the yard shouting "HUUUUMP BAAAAACK!!!!!" over and over again. 

 Actually, I probably should go clean the house some more, in case Child Protective Services stops by for a little visit tomorrow. Should I show them the ocean?

Why Christmas Isn't Really in July

I may possibly have been bailed upon by my partner in Craftster's Christmas in July Stashbuster Swap--either that, or something bad happened to her. Online buddies are probably beyond the last to know when tragedy strikes. I'm very bummed, because my partner was a knitter, and she had a stash of HARRY POTTER HOUSE COLOR YARN!!! Oh, some things are just not fair. I did possibly bring it upon myself, however, due to my intense desire to always be right. You see, I got into a little tiff with the organizer of the swap on account of this rule that when you're involved in a swap, you have to post in the swap forum at least once a week. I suppose it's so the organizer knows you're still alive and crafting, but I think it's a pain to have to have one more weekly chore to remember related to what is supposed to be a fun activity, and, since nobody wants to actually talk in the forum about what they're making, because they want it to be a surprise, the forum conversation tends to be non-crafty, and I really just don't want to be required to post weekly. My counter-argument is that since posting and crafting are two different animals entirely, weekly posting is no sign that you're actually doing your swap work and will send on time. Case in point: I posted maybe once, after I was basically forced to, and I sent early. My partner posted weekly just like she was supposed to, and she's apparently dead in the water. So there.

Anyway, here's what I made for my partner. Her family has six, count 'em six, holiday trees, and I made a set of ornaments for each tree. The littlest kiddo loves to color, so his set is made from crayons melted into heart molds, with an ornament hanger melted into the back of each one:

The little girl's favorite colors are blue, pink, and purple, so I hand-sewed her set out of blue denim, and added pink and purple beads:

I forgot to photograph the other little girl's set, but her favorite color is red, so I made her ornaments all from different red fabrics--faux fur, silk, plaid flannel, felted wool, etc.

The eldest kiddo likes red with black, so his set is made from felted wool:

The main tree in the house is decorated in blue, silver, and white, so I also made a set of ornaments out of my blue glitter vinyl. I really liked how these turned out, although vinyl doesn't photograph well:

I also really, really like the fangeek set of ornaments I made for the "handmade ornaments" tree. They're all sewn from black denim with black beaded hangers, but each person in the family has a front and back T-shirt transfer of their own, personal fangeek obesssion on their own ornament.

The littlest kid loves Pokemon: Pikachu is on the other side of his ornament, of course.

The little girl likes the Junie B. Jones book series: A cover from another of the books is on the other side of her ornament.

The other girl loves Green Day (awesome kid):

A photo of the entire band is on the other side of her ornament.

The eldest kids loves Magic, the Gathering:

Another player's card is on the other side.

My partner's husband loves Aqua Teen Hunger Force:

Master Shake is on the other side of his:

And my partner loves Harry Potter, especially Slytherin House:

The other half of this battle scene, depicting the good guys, is on the other half of her ornament.

Eh, it was fun to make stuff for other people, even if I don't hear back from my partner's family to see if they liked it. It is good practice for Christmas, anyway, you know--sending lovingly handmade gifts to family members who don't send thank-you notes, or watching them open presents you spent hours on and not totally fawn over them--not that I make gifts for other people in order to be fawned over. Ahem. Yep, happy Handmade Holiday!