Beady Photos on Etsy

My favorite part of selling on etsy is taking the photos of my stuff. Just to be braggy, here are the photos from the first set of beads I unstrung, cleaned, and am helping into a bigger, better life:

Such bright, happy beads from such an ugly necklace. Wish them well, these beads, that they find the urban chic or boho or contemporary casual jewelry item they've just been dreaming of belonging to.

Garage Sale Beads

On Saturday, as soon as Kid #2 wakes up (whining for nursie, if she's younger, or just stumbling around groggily, if she's older) and joins Kid #1 (already nursing, if she's younger, or still stumbling around groggily, if she's older), I go in and beat my partner around the head with pillows until he, too, wakes up and makes me some &^(*@)(# coffee, already. Then, of course, we hit the road with all the other sleep-deprived parents and their bright-eyed little children for a morning of farmer's market, garage sales, and the YMCA.

This Saturday we walked nice and early over to a garage sale just around the corner from our house. Dishes, Christmas stuff, stuffed animals--yawn. And yet...over by the peony bush, all those organizers and plastic containers and toolboxes and baskets all over the table and on the grass around it--I wonder what's in those? VINTAGE JEWELRY, that's what! But how much are they selling it for, you ask? ONE DOLLAR EACH?!!? "Each" including the huge Ziploc bags full of jewelry, as well as individual necklaces and rings and bracelets.

Commence tunnel vision. I systematically worked my way through every single organizer and plastic container and toolbox and basket. Oh, the awesomeness. Gawdy 70s brooches and beaded necklaces in crayon colors. Chunky 80s plastic geometric beaded jewelry. Native-style dyed-wood beaded chokers and stones set in wrapped wire. Neo-Victorian-style ornate metal bracelets. At some point, Matt wandered over and asked if I was almost done. Without looking up, I told him to give me all his money and take the girls for a bike ride. I'm sure he stiffed me, though, because there was a long pause before he handed me all of twenty bucks. How did he know that there was at least eighty bucks worth of jewelry covetousness in my heart?

In the end, I presented the little old lady who said that she used to collect jewelry but then stuck it all in storage for 20 years with exactly twenty items (a couple of them being the previously-mentioned Ziploc bags crammed with stuff) and handed her exactly twenty dollars. The joy, the joy, the joy in my heart cannot be expressed. Seriously, look what I scored:

Out of the 50+ pieces of jewelry I ended up with, 23 are super-tacky-enough and strung with such beautiful beads that I can de-string them and repurpose the beads in my own work and sell them as recycled supplies in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop. Look at the awesome wooden beads on this very ugly necklace:

There are also a ton of these 70s-era necklaces with their 70s-color chunky beads. I think these look like Jelly Beans:

These wire-wrapped stone necklaces will be especially cool, I think, unstrung and used a little less, um...exuberantly?

And then there were at least twenty or thirty other pieces that I handed over to the kids for craft projects and dress-up. We already used our newest favorite tool, the hot glue gun, to bling up the shelves over my work desk with some strung-bead swag, and here's what the kids have been doing at least twice a day every day since the garage sale:

Little Xsa-Xsas, aren't they? I like how even the kitty has been bedecked.

And amazingly, even with me being kind of about the butchest girl on the planet, I actually found three pieces of jewelry to make my own heart go pitter-pat--a brass chain to wear around my neck, a string of 70s orange beads, and this:

  

For one dollar! That there is the stuff that legends are made of.

The sweetest finds, though, were a couple of pieces of genuine jewelry for the kids. Just look:

The little one has the chunky, shiny, marbled beads, and the big one--can you see what I found for the big one? Yep, a delicate silver necklace, just her size, and the pendant is a W. Its whole life, that pendant has just waited for this moment, because it's finally where it was meant to be--nice when you can make destiny happen for only one dollar.

Finally, a Photo Shoot

Finally, a free morning with no rain, perfect for walking over to the park with a bushel basket of stuff for a photo shoot. Our property is so shady that a good product photo shoot basically requires going to the park, and while I can do a few items and still supervise the girls, if Matt can come, too, then I can do forty items while he supervises the girls. Of course, we're young parents, so we can't actually go to the park with the girls without getting a little "friendly" advice about steps we could maybe take to parent just a little better. Mind you, I'm all about the "it takes a village" idea, but that's only if the other people in the village share my particular parenting values. And I have one particular parenting value that pretty much no other parent shares, it seems: on the playground, I do not say to my girls, "be careful," or "that's dangerous," nor do I prohibit them from doing any activity on the playground that they apparently feel themselves capable of trying. If, in my heart, I'm pretty sure that they will fall and collarbones will be broken, I'll casually spot them, and I've talked them through many a challenging feat, but I will not physically assist them. I want the girls to be brave and self-reliant, and to challenge themselves, and to develop a knowledge of their own bodies and the capabilities and possibilities of those bodies without my overhead dominance. Who am I to tell them what their bodies are incapable of doing? And they usually surprise me and don't fall, and when they do, they usually climb right back up in the tree. The girls have thus tended to learn some playground abilities, such as climbing up and down a ladder or navigating the open distance from a ladder to a platform, way before a lot of other kids their age, probably with more bruises, but who remembers bruises?

So when Sydney is climbing a ladder and a mother, ignoring me standing right there, runs up and snatches her off that ladder, as happened a couple of weeks ago, or when she's again climbing a ladder (she's big on ladders lately) and a woman comes up to Matt standing right there and tells him, "That's dangerous. She could fall," as happened this morning at the park, it pisses us off. Matt, of course, who is unreasonably calm when faced with unreasonable people, simply replied, "She's fine." The woman argued, "I saw her fall just a few minutes ago!", and Matt said again, "And she was fine." Who can argue with such implacability?

Here's Sydney on that same controversial ladder:

Awesome kid.

Anyway, now that I'm down off my soapbox, here are some highlights of today's photo shoot, most of which I'll probably be writing about in more detail later in the week:

Stash-busting:

Some fabulous finds:

Yes, I did make even more soldered glass pendants out of reclaimed images, but Girls Love Astronomy, too:

My newest etsy listing:

And, spinning...

Dizzy? Dizzy!Did you make yourself dizzy today?

Record Album Cover Box Tutorial, Here We Come!

So even though my Bargain Hunter swap partner really wanted some nice storage containers, those were pretty much the only things I wasn't able to score for her at the various thrift stores and yard sales and dumpster-diving locations I visited during our swap. I found billions of knitting needles and yarn and books to alter and cool Spanish T-shirts, but no storage containers. 

So the day before I sent, hanging out at home alone with the girls, I made some record album cover boxes out of records I got at the free day at the Monroe County History Center garage sale. The kids could entertain themselves for an hour, I figured. Thus follows the course of that hour:

RECORD ALBUM COVER BOX TUTORIAL (INCLUDING WHAT YOUR CHILDREN WILL BE DOING/WRECKING/FIGHTING ABOUT WHILE YOU MAKE THE BOX)

1. Gather your materials. You'll need some record album covers, scissors, a good long ruler (bonus if you've got a ruled cutting mat), a pencil, and a hot glue gun with glue. While you do this, your children will be putting together a giant velociraptor puzzle:

2. Separate your record album cover into two pieces, front and back. Sometimes you'll need scissors, and sometimes the cover will be so old that it will easily separate by hand. When you're done, it will look like this:

 

You'll need to sacrifice a cover to your children so that they can do this, too, because tearing things up is fun. NOTE: The cover you sacrifice will NOT be usable after the children finish with it.

3. Starting with the cover you want to be the top, decide how tall you want your box to be. It will be a square box, and the taller you make it, the narrower the box width will be. 1" tall is wide and flat, 3" tall is tall and narrow, but 2" is a good height for a generic box. Using your ruler and your gridded cutting mat, if you have one--

--mark a line 2" from the edge of the cover all the way across on all four sides of your cover:

 

Press hard with your pencil, because you'll later be folding along these lines, and the pencil indentation will make it easy to fold. While you're doing this, the children will have moved on to clay.

4. Do the same with the side that you want to be the bottom of your box, only now you need to measure 2 1/16" from the edge of the cover on each side. This will make the bottom of your box slightly taller and narrower, and since the top of your box will be slightly wider, it will fit over the bottom snugly but not too tightly. When you're done your two covers will look about like this--

--and your two children will be done with clay:

 

5. Notice that in each corner, your lines have crossed to make a square. On each side, cut the right-hand line up to where it meets the perpendicular line--

--and then fold all the ruled lines you made, making sure they bend easily at a 90-degree angle:

 

While you're doing this, your children will be emptying out the dress-up bin, looking for their tutus that they actually left in the car after the last dance class.

6. So you can see how, when you snipped the right-hand line up to where it met the perpendicular line on each side of your cover, you made square tabs, each 2" square. Take two adjacent edges of your cover and fold them up to a 90-degree angle along those lines you drew. On the side of that tab that has the cover art on it, you're going to spread hot glue, and then tuck it inside the box and press it onto the inside of the adjacent edge:

 

This forms one corner of your box. Press firmly until the glue cools down, and then repeat for your other sides. It should now look like this:

And your dancing daughter looks like this:

  Repeat for the other half of the box until it's finished and looks like this:

 

And then quickly, while your daughters are blitzed out on Jumpstart Kindergarten--

--repeat three more times until you have this:

Whew! What an hour!

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?

Magic Wands--Piggyback Tutorial Included

A while ago, on a Saturday without much else going on, our entire family started making these wands from a tutorial on DadCanDo. We rescued the used typing paper, rolled it into the tapered tube, and glued the last third of the paper as we were rolling to hold it nice and tight, like so:

From left to right you can see my wand, Sydney's (done with my help), Willow's (done independently), and Matt's (also done independently). Pretty awesome so far, right? But then, due to a lack of both the acrylic paint and the hot glue that the instructions called for next (I don't know what it is about dads, but DadCanDo loves itself some hot glue), we put the project aside.

Time passed, however, and at some point I bought a bunch of acrylic paint so that the girls could try their hand at professional art just like Marla in My Kid Could Paint That (my ultimate evaluation of their professional potential as preschoolers...um, no), and then I bought some hot glue so I could make record album cover boxes (tute for that to come), and then yesterday, in a fit of weariness at my stuffed stegosaurus sweat shoppe (must deliver by Friday. Must deliver by Friday. Must...), these unfinished wands caught my eye and I thought, "Hmm..."

And so without re-consulting the instructions (which may have turned out to be a mistake), the girls and I jumped right in. You do it, too. Starting with the recycled paper all rolled up and glued into a nice, tapered-tube wand shape, gather your tools:

You'll need your wands, hot glue, a hot glue gun, and some cereal for stuffing your face.

Now, you need to plug up the ends of your wand with the hot glue, at the same time filling the ends up with glue enough to provide a nice weight in your hand at the hand-end (If it's light like paper, it won't feel like a wand), and a nice-feeling counterweight at the tip. Sure, go ahead and let your three-year-old do her own hot-gluing; everyone loves tools:

With the girls' thicker tubes, I actually found it pretty difficult to get their handle ends filled up with the glue correctly. Eventually, I squeezed a bunch of glue in, stuck a piece of parchment paper over it, and stood the wand up on its handle end and balanced it there, so that the hot glue could all run down against the parchment paper. When the glue re-solidified, I peeled the parchment paper off.

After this, you're supposed to use the hot glue to run a kind of spirally decoration down and around your wand. I'm not totally sold on this part, but it involves the hot glue gun, which is a tool, so we did it anyway. Here's what mine ended up looking like:

Now you're supposed to seal the paper, perhaps with a spray sealer or maybe some Modge Podge, but I forgot about this part, so we didn't. Instead, we moved right on to the next fun part, which is the painting:

I played mine straight with a brown wand and yellow accents----but my girls generally tend to be way more awesome than me. Willow did hers in pink and purple----and Sydney did her hands in purple----and then got some as a natural consequence on the wand.

On the whole, I think my wand turned out only okay, especially compared to the terrific photos on the DadCanDo gallery. All those wands, made by eight-year-olds, look completely realistic, whereas mine still looks like rolled up paper painted real cool. The sealer might be more important than I realized, or it might just be all in the details of painting--painting isn't so much my thing. Anyway, though, the wands work quite well enough to serve their purposes of being waved like mad while running around the house--

--and of being squiggled back and forth enticingly to serve the delight of kitties--What did you do today that was magical?