Yay, Record Bowls! Tutorial Included

I cooked up a batch of craft fair record bowls this weekend, so I thought I'd write up a tutorial, perhaps for the every single person who comes by my craft fair booth, looks at and lavishly praises my record bowls, holds them up to the light and admires them and talks about what they'd put in them, then says, "How did you make these?" When I give the very vaguest of replies as to how to make record bowls, these people invariably say, "Okay, thanks," put down the record bowl they're holding, and leave. Now I can say, "I have a tutorial on my blog," and hand them a moo business card with my etsy shop and blog addresses. Then, not only will people come to my etsy shop and my blog, but if they read the tutorial, they'll see how much work goes into making a record bowl, and they'll way rather buy one from me for five bucks than go to all the trouble of making one themselves. Score.

How to Make a Record Bowl (or Ten)

1. Take out at least one of the racks from your oven, put a metal bowl upside-down on the remaining rack, and preheat. Depending on your oven, you're looking for the magic temperature somewhere between 200 degrees and 250 degrees--you want the temperature hot enough to soften your vinyl record enough to make it really pliable and you want it to do this in a reasonable amount of time, say five or so minutes, but you want the temperature cool enough that it does not cause the vinyl to noticeably release toxic fumes into your house. The vinyl will always release some fumes when you heat it, but if you can smell it, or you get a headache or burning nose, or your pet bird dies, your oven is too hot. I always use lots of ventilation when I do this, and I never work for more than half an hour at a time--less, if I let the kids help. And seriously, vinyl fumes will kill pet birds.


2. Gather your materials:

You'll need oven mitts to handle the record when it's hot, and a selection of pots, pans, mixing bowls, plates, and cups with which to mold your record bowls. I like to gather a large assortment and then experiment with different combinations for different shapes.

3. Put a record in the oven on top of the upside-down metal bowl. Keep an eye on it, and when it droops down like the record in the photo--

--take it out with your oven mitt and...

4. Plop it quickly in a bowl or pot to mold it into a bowl shape:

If you make a little mark with a Sharpie at the dead center of the pot you're using, you can find that mark in the hole in the middle of your record, and have a perfectly symmetrical bowl. You can also experiment with forming the sides of your record by nesting another bowl, cup, or plate on top of the record in the pot. A nesting bowl slightly smaller than the one you're using, for instance, will form the sides really smooth and flat, and a plate placed on top of a record bowl that you're molding inside a large casserole dish will make a sort of record platter with a nice, flat bottom. Here I used a cup for this somewhat narrow record bowl to keep the sides of the bowl from coming in too much: Remember that you've maybe only got a minute, tops, before the vinyl stiffens back up and you can no longer work with it, but you can always reheat it for another go.

5. When the vinyl is cool to the touch, pop it out of the pot and admire:

Here's the entire collection that I started making yesterday evening while Matt and the girls cleaned out the car in preparation for going to the drive-in and that I finished this morning before breakfast while they watched a little PBS: Man, I wish I owned a record player.

At Last, a Tie-Dyed Quilt!

Finally, I managed to photograph my newest tie-dyed quilt, and as soon as I measure it, it'll be online on etsy. I took the photos just a little later in the afternoon than I'd prefer (magic hour isn't perfect for product shots), but I'm pleased with all of them, really, except the whole-quilt one. Magically delicious:

Bead It

The little kid has been taking these awesomely deep, long afternoon naps lately, giving me and the big kid time to work with materials that the little kid finds more pleasure in, um, tossing about while squealing with joy. Yesterday we strung beads on necklaces, but today we worked with Perler beads.

Perler beads are these crazy plastic beads that you arrange on a pegboard and then iron to fuse together, making flat and colorful shapes. When I first saw them I was pretty resistant to the idea of buying these new plastic materials in all the different colors you'd need, just to melt them, but the big kid worked with them on a visit to extended family and we acquired a large bucket of them there, and I bought the kids a small set on sale at Joann's for a treat one day, so somehow we're pretty well set anyway.

Obviously, what I want to make most from Perler beads is old-school Nintendo stuff,  like coasters or magnets or just the little figures that you could probably do a lot of stuff with. Old-school Nintendo and Atari images are extremely well-suited for crafts like beading or cross-stitching, because you can transfer the image pixel-by-pixel. Ah, 8-bit video! 

I haven't yet used my Michael's gift card plus 40% coupon to purchase one of these versatile large pegboards, however, so the big kid and I made ourselves a beautiful heart and star on the smaller pegboards. I thought the shapes, with coordinating colors, might make interesting decorations in the house--stars in the kids' bedroom, for instance, with the ceiling painted like a sky, or pink/purple shapes in the playroom, with its pink/lavender walls. These here are my first attempt, though, and I realize now after actually, you know, reading the instructions that I didn't iron well at all--you're supposed to only iron for 10 seconds and in a circular motion, whereas I ironed for more like 30 seconds, just bearing down hard, and I didn't flip the shapes over and iron the other side, which you're also supposed to do--and I'm not terribly pleased with the color choice in my creation, the heart, but the big kid's creation is awesome. Can you tell what it is? 

A turtle, of course! 

The big kid doesn't yet have near the manual dexterity to actually manipulate these teeny little beads (they do sell Big Beads for preschoolers, which would be cool if we ever found them at a garage sale or thrift store), so she mostly handed me beads and told me what to do with them and lost herself in bead reveries while pouring them through her hands like water, but you can clearly see the turtle's eyes, the color and placement of which she directed, and the legs and tail and shell and all. Such the artist.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, foster kitten antics, road trips, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Felted Wool Cupcakes--I'm Obsessed!

Today was Willow's first day of summer vacation back here at home, and so we spent the morning riding the bus to the library for storytime and a craft, playing in the playroom, picking out books, getting lectured by a really mean librarian at the Circulation Desk because Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World: 75 Dairy-Free Recipes for Cupcakes that Rule and are overdue (seriously, you should have to pay the fine OR listen to a lecture, not both), eating a picnic lunch outside by the bear statues, and riding the bus home, and then the afternoon playing outside, stringing beads for necklaces, reading a thousand books, playing Dinosaur Bingo, walking to the playground, walking home in the rain, playing outside in the rain, reading more books, cooking macaroni and cheese for dinner, eating dinner, taking a bath, and watching a Trout Fishing in America DVD. As Willow is laying on the study floor drawing a picture and I am cajoling her into getting ready for bed, she says, "I wish summer vacation was over. It's boring." Sigh.

So while Matt was bathing the girls, I stitched together yet another felted wool cupcake. I am obsessed! I don't know how many felted cupcakes the girls really need to have in their pretend food collection, but I do know that I've got at least another half dozen laid out on the study table to cut out and stitch up. But come on, they're sooooooo cute:

I thought they needed a little something, so I tried adding bows...I dunno. Tips if you're going to make these, though:

• Cut the cupcake wrapper at an angle so that the bottom comes out narrower than the top, since real cupcake wrappers look like that, not straight cylinders.
• If you're making these for kids, skip the part in the instructions that asks you to glue the bottom of the cupcake wrapper on. It's not noticeable, and obviously much sturdier, if you hand-stitch it.
• If you're making these for kids, also forget the part where you stick pretty straight pins into the frosting as decoration--seriously, no. I'm thinking about stitching beads on for the same effect.
  

And, of course, here's the action shot, in which you can see my lovingly crafted felted wool cupcakes at play:

"Look, Momma! Cupcake smashes the other cupcakes, and then they fall over, and then the cupcake shots them. Shot! Shot! Shot!" Sigh.

Me! On the Web!

One of the things I did a few weeks ago that is pretty cool is enter into a consignment agreement with Handmade Collective, a new web shop. I think their site design is quite lovely, and my goal is to get more and better-quality publicity for my work than I've so far been able to manage myself. Etsy is a terrific way to sell online, and it's still my primary outlet, but it's easy to get lost in the huge masses of beautiful products at Etsy unless someone has conducted a pretty specific search or they're willing to do a lot of browsing. So Handmade Collective is kindly hosting one of my denim quilts, and I hope it sells.

Although I still haven't managed to find enough peace and sun to photograph and post my latest Etsy creations, the tie-dyed bibs I've been making a ton of and the tie-dyed quilt I'm pretty happy with since I learned how to use a bias tape maker for it, I did manage to find the sun and peace to at least photograph and upload/revise some listings for the felted wool pins I made last month and the essential oil soaps I posted a while ago with some then grumpy photos. I think these photos are much nicer:

Cupcakes, Dinosaurs, Pink Chucks, and Arkansas

Since it's craft fair season, obviously I've been spending almost all my time this week working not on record bowls, T-shirt quilts, and melted crayon hearts, but on cupcakes, dinosaurs, pink Chucks, and Arkansas.

The girls and I have been way into , which I swear is, along with my other great favorite, , the only cookbook I have ever cooked from in which what I cook actually comes out even remotely similar to the photo in the book, and even remotely delicious (I'm a disastrous cook, with a near-manic tendency to make ill-advised substitutions and a certainty that all measurements are only approximate). So far we've made the chocolate mint cupcakes twice and Matt has made, of all things, the margarita cupcakes with them once. Margarita cupcakes? Awesome.

I've also been, during Sydney's precious afternoon naptimes, watching Dexter - The First Season on Netflix and making the girls a bunch of the felted wool cupcakes I found in . They stopped looking like cupcakes to me once I got deep into making them, the same as when you say a word over and over again it loses all meaning, but out of the three I've made so far, there's one that even I'll admit is just darn cute.

And then there are the dinosaurs--I promised the girls a dinosaur quilt this summer, and I am darn well going to deliver a dinosaur quilt, so for a couple of days I put the iron and the dishtowel in semi-permanent residence on the livingroom table (I got so used to intoning, every time I heard little feet thud by, "Don't touch the iron. The iron is hot," that I started even warning Matt as he went by. This is similar to, when I'm laying out a quilt on the livingroom floor, my intonations of "Don't step on the quilt. Walk around the quilt") and knocked out these sweet babies: I'm not a hundred percent happy with the frame conceit, and I doubt that I'll do another one just that way, but hey, it's dinosaurs. The more, the merrier.

The vegan cupcakes are ostensibly a rehearsal for the girls' big summer birthday bash next month, and one of the things I've been trying to do all month, only it keeps raining two out of three days, is take a photo of the girls in their matching candy pink Converse Chuck Taylors to put on the invitation. Finally, a break in the weather, and I managed to find matching socks for everyone, and I only once had to fiercely threaten Willow with not going to dance class if she didn't sit down for this picture for five minutes (I know, I know, but usually I am the kind of mother you don't want to call Social Services about), and I got this photo:

It's so cute it kind of makes me feel sick to my stomach a little. Of course, I cropped off the part where they're sitting with dirty faces cramming their mouths with Quorn nuggets and pineapple.

In upcoming news, today is Willow's last day of school for the summer--I blew her mind yesterday by informing her that when she comes back to school in August, she'll be a MIDDLE-GROUPER! (As opposed to the Youngest Group and the Kindergartners, the other kiddos in her class for those of you not in tune with Montessori lingo). So after school, and after dance class, and after stopping by a party for my friend Tim, who has just successfully defended his dissertation (I sigh, because I can no longer attain the academic single-mindedness it takes to get a PhD), we're all trekking down to Arkansas for the long Memorial Day weekend. Papa and my mother have been talking about taking the girls to McDonald's for their collective birthdays, and hopefully the city pool will be open, and I'm eager to look through my Mama's collection of old recipe books from the various elementary schools and churches she was involved in throughout her life, a collection that is both beloved to me and awesome in its ingredients and preparation methods (7up cake! Jello molds! Oleo!). Willow and Sydney are begging to take their new favorite toy, which Matt bought for them at Goodwill for five dollars on Sunday. That favorite toy is this:
Whew! What did you do this week?

Bargain Hunting Begins!

After the successful conclusion of my part in the Craft for My Kids swap, it took me about five seconds to sign up for the Bargain Hunters swap. Basically, I have a budget of ten dollars, with which I am to find as much awesome stuff that my partner will love as humanly possible, and with which I am also to make her a good-sized craft. After a slight misunderstanding in which I thought for a couple of days that she ONLY wanted decorative wooden boxes, we are now on the same page and I realize that she is going to be fun, fun, fun to shop for.

I have to say, I am going to be GOOD at this swap. In case you're local, here are the places to hunt bargains in my town:

1. Post-season at Target and Jo-Ann's, when holiday stuff gets marked down to 75% off (in late January, Target will mark Christmas stuff down to 90% off, but you have to be watching for it, because it gets picked over fast). These are good places to buy twinkle lights to make your house look awesome, shaped molds for soap or crayons, goth stuff or costume stuff or face painting stuff, etc.

2. Goodwill at two locations, the College Mall one being more of the college student Goodwill, and the much bigger west-side Goodwill being the townie store. Frankly, I find Goodwill a little pricey--a T-shirt there is two dollars. Two dollars! However, each week a different colored tag is 50% off, and the tag color changes on Sunday, so if you go Sunday or Monday, you get the best pick at the half-off goods. These are good stores for board games for jewelry or altered books; sheets, pillowcases, and blankets with which to sew; china for mosaics or jewelry; and themed T-shirts for a quilt.

3. Salvation Army--this store is dirt-cheap, with one tag color being half-off each week and one tag color being 25 cents, and another clearance rack up front at 25 cents. I recently got a ton of wool sweaters there for 25 cents, including one with dinosaurs(!) intarsia knitted in. Their selection of adult T-shirts and adult jeans sucks, however, and they only take cash or check. This is a good store for wool sweaters for felting, record albums for record bowls and album cover boxes, weird children's picturebooks for framing or altered books, and I bought Willow an awesome pair of rollerblades there for two dollars once.

4. Dumpster behind the Salvation Army, which is my all-time favorite place to dumpster-dive, on account of the Salvation Army closes at 6:00 pm on Saturdays and doesn't open until 9:00 am on Mondays. All weekend people come by the loading dock and either dump stuff off or pick through stuff. We usually go by on Sunday afternoons after my partner's softball games, and if it's a rainy day and we don't go, I feel sad. The pro about this place is that it's totally free; the con is that it's technically illegal. This place is good for children's clothes and toys, books, clothes with unusual patterns for sewing, work shirts for my partner, and just really odd stuff. Yesterday we found a six-foot artificial tree, which we took, a huge blonde wig in a Kroger bag upon which someone had written, "NEVER BEEN WORN," which we did not take, several puzzles--still sealed--of dogs or cats or elephants, some of which we took (the girls and I have been working/crawling over and rolling in and throwing around the dog puzzle off and on all day), two wool sweaters, which we took, one orange work shirt for Matt, which we took but it's a little too short so we're taking it back next week, and several still-packaged little hearts that are supposed to grow 600% when you immerse them in water, one of which we took and which is now sitting in a glass of water on the bathroom sink right now.

5. Our Recycling Center (which is the most terrific Recycling Center in the nation, as it recycles plastics #1-#6, including bags, offers donation drop-offs for a billion different items from shoes to bottle caps, and encourages you to drop off materials that they can donate to children's art programs) has a sidewalk exchange, where you can drop off stuff you no longer want but is still good (no electronics!) and which you can visit once a week and take up to four items per person. The girls and I bring a bag of stuff here about every week, and take in turn a bag of stuff. This place is good for records, magazines, Nintendo stuff, jeans for denim quilts, and children's stuff. I usually leave Sydney in the car here, since the exchange is right in front of the parking spaces, and Willow's special job is to choose a toy for Sydney and a toy for herself.

Where do you bargain hunt where you live?

Bib It

I might possibly have a bit of a caffeine problem--Matt slept in for freakin' ever this morning, and even though he doesn't drink coffee himself, he's the only one who knows how to operate the French press and he has some sort of mysterious, elaborate ritual every morning to make coffee for me (I hear the sink, then the teakettle whistling, then silence, then the refrigerator, then the microwave--it's crazy). So with Matt asleep, the girls and I had breakfast, and read a million books, and did some laundry, and gardened out in the backyard, and I was just getting madder and madder at Matt. How dare he sleep for half the morning? We had literally just had this exact fight about how he acts like he lives in a hotel, and here he is acting like he lives in a hotel! And so it's something like 10:30 am, and I still can't find the really gross smell in the backyard that's coming from...somewhere, and Sydney upends an entire peat pot of seedlings, so I grab her up, bust into the house and into the bedroom, shriek "GET UUUUUUUPPPP!" and burst into tears. So I'm sitting on the kids' bed, totally having a nervous breakdown, but then Matt fixes my coffee, and as I drink it, I inexplicably start to feel better. By the time I finish my coffee, everything is completely all right again. That's a caffeine problem, not a partner problem, isn't it?

I am, at the moment, utterly obsessed with tie-dyed bibs. They're really quick and easy to make, because I made two in literally five-minute spurts throughout the day (I cut out two while Matt read board books to the girls, later I ironed on the interfacing while he searched all over the house for two matching shoes for each of them, later I sewed one up while Willow played a computer game from the library, I sewed up another one both before and after this...

...later I topstitched one and added snaps while Matt gave the girls a bath, and so on). They're also really satisfying, because I think they look just terrific. They look as if they'd been sewn, and then tie-dyed, and it's just a really unusual yet fun look for a little kid, and non-cutesy--I am so anti-cutesy. Anyway, here's a tutorial:

1. Create a pattern. If you're just making them as gifts or for yourself, there are numerous free patterns on the internet, but if you're even contemplating the possibility of accepting compensation for them, even in the future, it's worth the time to create your own pattern. I looked through several patterns for bibs before I made my own, and they're all really similar, as you might imagine, but I made mine to be very simple, since the tie-dye itself has plenty of impact, and wth a longer and wider base and a longer neck strap than most patterns I'd seen, and after having some early trouble with snaps, I reinforce the whole neck area with interfacing.

2. Cut the bib pieces, front and back, out of an old tie-dyed shirt. I've gotten to where I get a ton of use out of each tie-dyed shirt I come across: I end up with two large quilt panels, one bib, and either an entire set of coaster pieces or several small quilt blocks.

3. If you're going to fasten the bib with snaps, you should definitely reinforce the neck with fusible interfacing--otherwise, the snaps often won't set properly, and can pull out of the material if a lot of force is used. If you're going to fasten with Velcro, you don't really need to add interfacing, but I like the structure it adds to the neck area. Alternately, you could cover the entire bib with interfacing, or even a layer of batting or plastic. Your two bib pieces should be sitting front-to-front, and if you're using interfacing, iron it to the outside of one of your pieces, so that it will be inside when you turn it after you sew: 4. Sewing T-shirt material can be a little tricky. You want to use a small ball point or stretch needle, and you'll usually have to loosen your thread tension and lengthen your stitches, as well. If your material gathers, your tension is too tight. A medium zig-zag stitch will always work, but the stitch edges will show through, then, at the roundy parts of the bib after you turn it. I don't think that looks bad, but it's something to think about. If you're worried that a long, loose stitch won't be strong enough, though, know that we'll also be top-stitching around the whole bib again later:

5. Don't forget to leave a hole, and then turn your sewn bib right-side out. You can iron it at this point, or just smooth and shape it by hand, but then top-stitch again around the entire bib. This flattens it, strengthens those earlier loose stitches, and I think looks very nice as a border. The top-stitching also neatly closes the hole you left for turning the bib. 6. Here's where you choose your fastener. I dislike hand-sewing Velcro, but frankly, snaps are usually overkill--I mean, it's a bib, people, not your pants. I like a sturdy fastener as much as the next person, but having a fastener much stronger than your material will wear on the material a lot when you open and close the fastener. That being said, I still mostly use snaps--the snap fastener is a tool, and I'm a sucker for tools:
And that's it!

Craft for My Kids Conclusion

The Craft for My Kids Swap is OVER, at least on the giving end. Being as my partner just, you know, gave birth and all, I reckon I can wait patiently to receive my goodies. Here's the swap gallery in which my partner very generously compliments my crafts, and here are my photos of what I made:
My partner's nursery is decorated in blue and sage, so this denim quilt has a sage wool felt backing and binding and is tied with an embroidery thread that sort of, but doesn't quite, match the backing:



I made this baby powder by sieving cornstarch over and over with lavender essential oil. It smells so excellently awesome that I wish I had an excuse to, um, powder myself...I used some different essential oils in these vegetable glycerin soaps. Lavender is calming and soothing on the skin, peppermint is energizing and helps upset tummies, and lemon-eucalyptus clears up stuffy noses: I think babywearing is critical to attachment parenting, which I think is critical to raising calm, confident, creative, and self-actualized people. I make a lot of these ring slings, and I teach babywearing locally at Barefoot Herbs+Barefoot Kids, so I felt very comfortable making a ring sling for my partner, but I still wanted to weight-test it, of course. Yeah, I think it will hold a newborn...One of my partner's kiddos loves turtles, so I wanted to make a turtle stuffed animal out of felted wool, but I never ended up totally happy with the pattern. I've got some more ideas, though, so I'm going to keep sussing it out:

I've made so many of these crayons in the past year that, seriously, the girls are running out of crayons. Is it still a recycled craft if you have to buy your kids new stuff so you can craft with their old stuff?This is my most favorite thing ever--I made my partner four of these, in different colors. These are made out of old T-shirts, y'all!I like to make kiddos doll ring slings to match their mommas' slings. Only Sydney uses them to carry actual baby dolls, though. Willow is more partial to hauling dinosaurs...On the whole, this swap was a huge success, and I haven't even received my own package of goodies! I learned some terrific new skills that are already serving me well, which is one of the big reasons why I love these swaps, and I developed some great new ideas for new products for my web shop and craft fairs. The essential oils soaps went over really well at their first fair last weekend, and I'll be bringing out the tie-dyed T-shirt bibs really soon. The felted wool turtle still needs some work, but I think it has potential.

I spent a little time today making black bias tape to frame up a tie-dye quilt I pieced, but most of the day was spent running a child-labor fruit salad sweatshop in my kitchen in preparation for Willow's school birthday party this afternoon. Willow's teacher, who is some kind of preschool evil genius, has a beautiful birthday celebration for her students. At circle time each birthday child gives a proper introduction of their family to the rest of the group--"This is my momma, Julie, and my daddy, Matt, and my baby sister, Synee"--and a large model of the sun is placed in the center of the ellipse on which the children sit. When it's your child's turn, she holds the large model of the earth and walks around the ellipse as many times as the earth has been around the sun since she's been born, while a parent reads a brief biography of the child, prepared earlier with the child's help. Willow was insistent that I mention she'd been to France as a baby, for instance. After every birthday child has had their turn, all the birthday children stand in the center of the ellipse while the teachers and their schoolmates sing the "Tall as a Tree" song to them. Reader, did I weep? Oh, freakin' yeah, I did.

Recycled Scrapbooking

So for some reason I can't get out of my scrapbooking kick, even though I have tie-dyed bibs and felted wool dinosaurs to make, so today, in between baking vegan cupcakes with the girls and offering unsolicited breastfeeding advice to the next-door neighbor and writing "Z was zapped" on Willow's self-assigned "handwriting sheet" and getting snitty about Matt's cousin's utterly ridiculous decision to exclude children from his wedding celebration, I played with some ideas for including recycled/found elements into scrapbook pages.

These came from a poster of a John Williams Waterhouse painting, one of those things that hung in your dorm ten years ago and you really ought to get rid of but you looooove pre-Raphaelite painting so...

I cut a couple of 12"x12" squares to serve as background papers, but one of them, the close-up of the Belle Dame sans Merci and her intended victim, was so striking that I think I actually will reframe it for the bedroom, a warning for my partner, perhaps... I also cut out some title letters for a page of the weekend trips we like to take to St. Louis, and some random shapes, using my daughters' cookie cutters, for photo mattes or whatever.

These are paint samples from Lowe's--I keep repainting in the house, and while I moon over the paint swatches in the store the girls have taken to collecting them. Sydney, who I'm starting to feel may be color-blind, just likes to hunt and gather, but Willow like to collect pairs to play matching games with later. Later than that, I find them all over the house, and they become...

The top title for the Wonderlab is from those coordinating three-colors-to-a-swatch sample cards, and the other titles are from swatches that demonstrate textured colors.

I also have tons of free fabric swatches that I got online from places like distinctivefabric.com (where I often go to visit this shaggy heart fur fabric, which I long to slipcover the chair in the master bedroom with and make some matching big pillows for the bed, if only I wouldn't have to take out a second mortgage to do so) or fabrics-store.com--I've been to just about every fabrics store on the web in my unsuccessful attempt to score a thick bamboo or hemp terrycloth with which to sew towels. French terry? Bleh. Even though stores ask you not to request free samples JUST for crafting purposes, if you got the samples legitimately, I'm pretty sure that THEN you can use them just for crafting purposes. Same with the tons of swatches of recycled rubber flooring that I've collected in my search for a suitable floor for the basement. Of course, many of these swatches I was able to get courtesy of my IU email adress and my stated (personal) research goal of "soliciting products for environmentally sustainable interior design." That's legitimate, um, right?

Other ideas: bottlecaps turned upside down to serve as tiny photo frames, tiny little stuffies sewn and then stuffed with shredded paper, old CDs covered with paint or paper, cassette tape used as ribbon or tied into bows, Altoid tins redecorated as tiny treasure boxes, illustrations from children's books cut out to embellish a theme. What else?

Fair of the Arts Begins

Today was an awesome day. Yesterday, not so much. A rep from A Fair of the Arts, our local monthly craft fair at the farmer's market, called yesterday morning and asked if I'd like to sub in an open vendor spot at the first fair today. Heck yeah, I'd like to. Of course, then I had to make signs and craft a few last-minute items (last-minute like 11:00 last night!) and figure out a display and buy some stuff from Lowe's to manufacture said display and pick up some change and clean out the car and load up the car, etc. I generally like to get most of this stuff done earlier than 12 hours before the craft fair begins, but what can you do.

Good thing, then, that it was an awesome day to vend at a craft fair. It's been a miserable, rainy week, but today was calm and clear, and tomorrow is set to be miserable as well, so everyone scurried out of their houses like a break in the storm to indulge in a little retail therapy before scurrying back in. Once it stopped freezing, it was nice to sit in the sun and people-watch and chit-chat with passers-by. It was also nice to make some hard-earned money.

Here are most of my quilts--denim and khaki, Incredible Hulk, two dinosaur quilts, and the world travelers quilt:

This is the best and most terrific display that Matt designed and we made and I painted in two shades of purple. It faces the outside, so it's got photos and display stuff. You can see the IU quilt and the Superman quilt, which got bought for a little boy's bed, although the dad seemed awfully happy about it, too:Here's the business side of the display. I'm really proud of the signs I made last night--I utilized my newfound scrapbooking skills! My pendants are on the left, including the one that I later bartered for eggs and watercress with a little girl at the farmer's market. The backside of my front-facing quilts are on the right, and the felt flower pins, including the red-buttoned one (it's also the one in the photo) that two women wanted at the same time. I reassured the loser that I have more red buttons for next time:I had to put out an extra sign for these soaps a little later--the weird combination of direct sunlight and extra humidity caused moisture to condense on them, but happily people still seemed to like them anyway. Essential oils are always so tempting:Record bowls rock, as always, even though I was up until 11:00 pm cooking these:
And the buttons--it's a really eclectic mix, I admit, mostly culled from the pages of Entertainment Weekly, so that when someone finds a button they adore, they tend to act as delighted as if they'd just rediscovered a part of their own head:The weather was so, so nice, that after tear-down and the celebratory very large meal (being from the South, the buffet is the traditional food of my people), we had the whole rest of the day to slave outside in the yard and do this: Awesome day.

Messy Monkey

I'm starting a new web shop in my pumpkinbear shop at etsy. The girls and I love to make art supplies and I then like to make natural cleaning supplies to clean up after their use of said art supplies--thus, a web shop. Here's what I've got so far:

They're little one-ounce vegetable glycerin soaps with esential oils added in--I nerded out in my product listing, listing each of the essential oils from which a patron can choose, along with its therapeutic benefits and a description of its scent. Stuff like that is important to know, though, because peppermint soap really does make you feel better when you're nauseated, and eucalyptus soap really does clear out your congestion when you have a cold. The photos are all a little grumpy because it's been raining here for days and our house basically gets no natural light, so I might replace them when the sun shines again and I can make everything look cute out on the grass.

Stuff in the future Messy Monkey shop: two more sizes of heart soaps with essential oils, soap crayons (still in the r&d phase--I tried out a recipe yesterday that left my hands indelibly stained in purple), scented baby powder, recycled and remelted crayons, and kits for making your own art supplies and art projects with the kiddos. Any requests?