In Which I Mend My Family's Clothes

I need to wait for batting to go on sale at Joann's this weekend before I can finish my quilted T-shirt wall hangings (Isn't that always the way?), so this week I've been taking up the huge piles of mending that I've been steadily putting aside for months, waiting for a time when mending didn't actually sound like something that sucked. So instead of telling you that I did sooooo many awesome things today, I get to tell you that I sewed a hook back onto my bra strap, put a zipper into a too-small jumper I made for Sydney last year so that she can wear it throughout the winter-- --although she'd rather wear it like this--
--reinforced all the seams in my Ren Faire dress, threw out two pairs of ripped pants that I looked at again and thought, "What's the point?", made bias tape and hemmed my most favorite pair of jeans ever--
--and printed and cut out with an exacto knife some of the stencils I'm going to paint over weird stains in my family's clothes. So far I've been able to use stash for my repairs--vintage zipper, polka dot fabric gifted from a previous craft fair attendee, etc.--but tomorrow I'm going to get to wend my way over to Hobby Lobby for fusible webbing so I can embroider over holes Syd has been cutting into her T-shirts.

My goal (except with, um, the bra, and I guess the Ren Faire dress, because it's already so awesome) is to leave each of the mended clothes with more personality, make each better looking, than it looked when I originally acquired it. Mending my family's tattered clothes involves more than what the mom of one of Willow's schoolmates must have thought today when, upon hearing what I'd been up to while Will was at school, she exclaimed, pity on her face, "You must be so frugal!" Well, yeah, I do like to save my family's money for take-out pizza and weekend trips to Chicago, but that's not why I ironed the word "STELLA" over the permanent marker stain in Willow's green shirt and then hand-sewed star beads all over it--I did that because sure, it's not as easy as just throwing the shirt out and buying her a new one at Target, but she's not easy, and raising her isn't easy, but I do raise her lovingly, with thoughtfulness and care, as well as mess and fun, and if that love and care and fun (and mess?) can be reflected in external ways, what she wears and plays with and lives in, then so much the better for the world to look at my happy, bright, energetic kiddos in their hand-embellished T-shirts and think, "Somebody loves those little girls."

Hmmm... but what does the world think when it sees my partner in his hand-stenciled Darth Vader T-shirt?

On-line Project Findings

Searching for online stencils of horses (the pony panties, they are a-comin'!), I managed to come across--amazing how full of detours online research can be!--lots of interesting how-tos and patterns for cool projects. 

Wanna see? 

HomeStudio gave this tutorial (look for the link to the pdf) for making Scrabble tile pendants with the pretty papers on them to the Make and Takes blog. I've been wondering how this was done. 

I haven't yet made the Bitty Booties from HellomynameisHeather (look for the link from Free Patterns), but FINALLY Matt's cousins have some babies amongst them, so--hello, Christmas!

Pony panties, again--I pulled tons of stencils from Spray Paint Stencils for freezer paper stencils--dinosaurs, vegetables, a unicorn that I ruthlessly cut the horn off to transform into a pony for my big kid, Godzilla, and the Death Star. I found some other Star Wars stencils from Grrl to cover a couple of bleach stains on Matt's shirts.

What's on your on-line project list?

Chock Full of Happiness

Yay, Sunday--

Finally getting an entire summer's worth of hair buzzed off, alternately at the hands of husband and two-year-old:Blueberry-oatmeal muffins and a SECOND cup of coffee made for me by Matt and the girls, with only a minimal amount of yelling during and a fair amount of clean-up afterwards:Lots and lots of children's artsy projects at home while Matt played a softball double-header in the mugginess across town. Tempera paint in gallon jugs, we hail you:Prior to the bath...Several hours of crafting, for the first time in a few days. I can tell when I've really needed the crafting time, because instead of watching streaming Netflix on the computer while I work, I just... work. Silently. Breathing...Resulting in no fewer than TWELVE quilt tops, soon to be quilted into wall hangings, destined, hopefully, for future lives with some strange folk: Did you get a chance to breathe calmly this Sunday?

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?

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!

I'm a Wench

So I managed to convince my partner to drop me off at the eastside Goodwill last night while he took the girls to the post office to mail off an etsy package and to ask, again, about half our mail that we're sure went missing while it was being held for us there (Netflix sent me Yoga for Indie Rockers on July 31! And have it I do not!). I don't usually go to Goodwill this late in the week because, since I usually only buy from the 50%-off color of the week, it gets picked over, and for a while I was feeling pretty grumpy and uninspired--I found a red tie-dyed T-shirt but it wasn't particularly awesome, I found the Unofficial Guide to Buffy but I thought I already had something similar at home, I found an awesome purple velour blanket but it wasn't on sale, etc.--but then, THEN, you will not believe what I found. A FREAKIN' REN FAIRE DRESS!!! A Ren Faire Dress!!! Velvet and silk, corset tie in the back, push-up bosomness in the front, long skirt for prancing around the maypole and swinging while acting saucy.

But I'm a curvy girl, you say. Does it fit?
IT LOOKS AWESOME!!! Matt was a sport and took this photo of me at 9:00 last night--I'm not fun to take photos of, on account of I tend to critique people's photography techniques while they're photographing, and then I have to preview all the images and delete the ones I don't like, and then we pretty much have to start all over again, don't we? But I love this shot of my new awesome dress. My two favorite parts of it are how you can see the hole in the side of the dress that I need to mend, and the Goodwill tag sticking up out of the neckline. And, of course, I love how I look in my awesome new dress that I am now going to wear absolutely every single place I go for the rest of my entire life.

Friends, this dress cost me $3.99. Sometimes, life can be so good.

Back in the Saddle

It feels good to be back in the swing of things, still home recently enough that daily life doesn't yet seem like drudgery. After all, I've been able to CRAFT again! I put aside schlogging away at my Ravenclaw house scarf until booth-sitting at my next craft fair, and made some real recycled crafts in the last couple of days. I finally thought of a use for some little panels my mother cross-stitched on recycled denim:

And since it's nearly the end of summer (sigh), I'm running low on my wool sweater collection, so I sewed up a few of these babies out of pretty much my last big pieces of felted wool: Do you recognize this doll as the handknit Ecuadorian sweater I scored at my Goodwill Outlet expedition?

The girls seem to have settled back into the routine here pretty well, too, which is nice, since they were starting to get pretty crazy those last couple of days in California. We went to the library for Say it in Spanish with Miss Nancy, a superstar who can breastfeed baby Mateo while singing and playing her folk guitar, and we checked out the following items:

• Eyewitness: OceanDVD
• Born to AddCD
• Echoes of Nature: Ocean Waves CD (I think it has an actual recording of the waves at Pebble Beach!)
• Reading Rainbow Seashore Surprises computer program
• Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
• Lemons Are Not Red (Ala Notable Book(Awards)) (Neal Porter Books)
• Fish Clip Art CD-Rom
• Colors in Nature: Yellow
• Triceratops Gets Lost book and CD
• A Busy Day for Stegosaurus book and CD
• Velociraptor: Small and Speedy book and CD
• An Alphabet Of Dinosaurs
• Orange by Sarah L. Schuette
• Seashells by Adele Richardson

Can you tell what the girls are interested in this week?

After school I wanted to engage the girls in an art project so I could clean, but nothing I suggested (decorating paper bags to use at my craft fairs, painting on butcher paper, drawing pictures on cardstock for thank-you notes, etc.) struck their fancies, so I ended up printing out dinosaur coloring pages from Geoparent. Filling in coloring pages is a really lousy art activity, but it can be a pretty good activity for other learning objectives--map work, absorbing how different dinosaurs look, associating words with letters, etc.

And then I cleaned, and then we went to the post office to mail an etsy package, and then we went to Goodwill, and then we got pizza, and then we watched our ocean documentary, and now Matt is putting the girls to bed while I gear myself up for putting my textbook order in at the IU Bookstore. I really should get on it, because school starts in, you know, two weeks. But it is a loathesome activity, and now I think I will put it off until tomorrow.

What activities do you find loathesome?

...Jiggety Jig

Ah, the joy of being home! We couldn't find the housekey when we arrived home last night around 10:00 pm, but I managed to break in the back door all by myself (hmmm...mental note to FIX said back door this week), and there was only one weird smell in the whole house, from a bag of garbage Matt had put on top of the stove to take out before we left. Ew.

Our collective favorite activity upon homecoming is to collect all the gathered mail, and although neither my order from Dharma Trading Co. nor my swap package for the Christmas in July Stashbuster swap has arrived, my entire order from Dick Blick has made its happy way to our house--and I do mean happy.

We're a family pretty well dedicated to creativity and lifelong learning, so art supplies are dead important to us. Now that we have some serious storage in the basement (as soon as we, um, build the shelves), I chose to invest in some serious art supplies--class packs of markers, crayons, and tempera paint, as well as a few novelties, such as sun printing paper and blank puzzles, and, of course, a gallon jug of Mod Podge for me.

Class packs are actually pretty sweet. The markers and the crayons each contain numerous sets of 16 colors--with two kiddos, I bring out a set for each of them, labelled by kiddo, store the rest, and replenish when necessary. The paint set has a gallon jug for each color, with a lockable pump and a billion little paper cups:
Obviously, though, the box they came in is the funnest toy:Willow had this idea of drawing the entire map of the United States, so I dutifully pulled up a map online for her to copy:Her California looked pretty good actually, perhaps since we've been studying it so much lately; as for the rest of the fifty states--well, she is only four.

In other education news, Montessori starts tomorrow for Will. Our other home projects this week will likely include more map study, identifying some rocks and shells collected in California, helping me create things for a super-big craft fair I'm doing in September, and a trip to the library to check out every color book they have for Syd--I think it's weird that she doesn't have her colors down yet, but Matt thinks I tend to work with both of the girls mostly at Willow's level, and thus I haven't been doing enough color labelling for Sydney. We'll see...