Of Hand-me-downs, Carrots, and Experimental Ukulele

It's funny how a day can get away from you, full of stuff, nothing planned.

The last wee carrot harvest, all of which were later consumed by Sydney, dirt and all:A big bag of hand-me-downs from Will's best girlfriend, all requiring extensive patching and repair in the little model's fabric of choice, pink satin stars:
One of the beautiful things about little kiddos, by the way, is the way they look at things. You'd think that Willow wouldn't want to wear her best friend's cast-off clothing--that she'd be ashamed of wearing hand-me-downs, or be afraid she'd be teased at school. Nope--Willow is THRILLED to dress like her best friend in her best friend's VERY OWN CLOTHES!!!!! Too bad said best friend has a habit of walking around on hands and knees to play "doggie."

We were supposed to get the fall yardwork done today--putting in the lasagna garden beds, moving shrubs, sowing grass seed, etc. But instead we biked over to Lotus in the Park.

Lotus Fest is our own nationally-renowned world music and arts festival, with prestigious international acts performing on multiple stages both weekend nights. Willow and I were able to go together last year--my favorite act is perennially the Tuvan throat singing, but Willow perked right up at 11:00 pm for March Fourth, an urban marching band with goth costuming, fire-breathing, and stilt-walkers who'll swing by during every number to high-five a tiny little girl bopping along up on her mother's shoulders--but we just couldn't afford to all go as a family this year, so I played the martyr and refused Matt's offer that I go alone, and then I sulked.

Thank god, then, for Lotus in the Park, a day-long, family-friendly, FREE event during which many of the visiting artists perform at an outdoor park. By the way, experimental ukulele? AWESOME!!!Of course, the monkey spent most of the time here: Oh, and of course there was art! See? Masks!
We seriously do have to get back on task tomorrow. The lasagna gardens have to be set, and Matt has a softball game, and I have to choose a semiotically rich scene from the atrocious 1976 remake of King Kong for my students to analyze in class on Monday, and the house is seriously pig-filthy, and I'm almost done making Willow some headbands and would be done if I didn't have to also make identical ones for little sister and best girlfriend, and we've picked out the "Halloween tree" and just need a pot of gravel to stick it in and some ornaments to put on it...

It's funny how a day can get away from you..

Yes, I Am...

...a fangeek. I made this applique to cover some holes in my T-shirt left by another applique I put there just for fun only it looked really, really stupid and also? Made my breasts look very odd. So then, after ripping it off, I actually did need an applique on my T-shirt. The material is a much nicer linen than I can afford, because I cut it out of the extra material from a pillowcase that I sewed a pillowcase dress from.

If you need further proof of my fangeekiness, check out Willow covering the Peter, Paul, and Mary hit "Puff the Magic Dragon:"

She totally sings, right, that Puff lives in the Autoverse? You know, home of Optimus Prime and the Decepticons?

Fine. It's just me, then.

P.S. The list continues:

21. Bathtowels and handtowels to replace the ones that get used for wiping fingerpainty hands and scrubbing yogurt off of the floor just as often as they get used for legitimate body drying. I'd love to sew them out of a thick hemp terry--does that exist, I wonder?

22. Socks, socks, socks, socks!!!

All the Places You Have to Go

Willow: "This is all the places you have to go to get to California. You follow the line, and the circles are where the beluga whales live. The house is a bathroom, and the planets are the sun, the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranijus, Neptune. The pointy thing is the sun, and that other thing [the house] is also a rocketship. That [the letters] spell the building that the paper was made in."

Beer Makes You Happier

So say that you are having a seriously lousy morning. You STILL have some Project #1 papers to grade and you want to return them tonight to your students, who are whiny and demanding and will refuse to understand why it might take more than one week to grade 46 papers that (supposedly) took them two weeks each to write. Add this to the fact that you are actually having some discipline issues in your classroom, which is ridiculous since your students are college freshmen, although they seem to be having an unusually difficult time adapting to your classroom, which is not permissive, accepts no deviation from the stated rules of the syllabus, and requires a lot of unsupervised work on their part. Are you the problem? You know you're unhappy teaching this semester, you find it burdensome and tiring, you resent the time spent away from your family--can the little rats tell?

And of course, since this is a morning in which you need the children to play independently so that you can work, and you can't go to the park because it's too windy to grade papers there, and you can't go to the library because the playroom is closed on Wednesday mornings, the children are also being whiny and demanding. Willow is throwing an hour-long fit because she's cold--she is also naked and refuses to get dressed. Sydney is fully dressed, but you've just had to change her clothes entirely after she stuffed cottonballs down the drain and overflowed the sink onto herself, the floor, and down into the basement.

Clearly, life sucks. You need to make some beer bread. Beer bread is delicious. It's easy. It's bread. It's beer. It's yummy happy comfort food that will bring some small pleasure into your spiteful day.

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2. In a bowl, sift three cups of flour--I sometimes do all whole wheat, sometimes all white, usually a combination thereof. If you use at least two-thirds self-rising flour, skip the baking powder and salt; otherwise, throw in a teaspoon of each. 3. Grab a beer. I have an entire case of Budweiser in the basement that I use only for beer bread, but when I'm feeling especially unhappy, I treat myself by using my most favorite of all beers: You need a tad less than 12 ounces of beer, I assert, so go ahead and take a little swig of that bad boy: If you accidentally drink too much, well, there's always another beer in the fridge, right?

4. Pour in the beer and mix it on up: After you've got it just mixed, you can add it whatever: spices, nuts, shredded cheese, dried fruit. My favorites are pistachios or sunflower seeds or shredded pepperjack. Raisins and garlic were both kind of gross.

5. Spray a loaf pan, pour in the dough, and bake it in the oven for 45 minutes.

While you're waiting 45 minutes for your bready goodness, you've still got your demanding little monkeys to pacify, so whip out one of your faithful documentaries,. Kids sit gape-mouthed on the bed, you get to just nearly almost finish grading:
6. Forty-five minutes later, yum! I tend to like mine with some butter or jalepeno jelly or vegenaise--
--but Willow likes me to melt cheese on hers so that she can then stuff it into her mouth like an animal:
And while you're grading the last two papers and then recording the grades, flush with not so much a sense of accomplishment as resigned relief that the misery is over for a little while, your younger monkey, bored with the bird movie, will scribble over some of your students' papers and then the sheets and then fall fast asleep:

Instead of ahh-ing over how adorable your little daughter is, you will think, "Crap. There goes her afternoon nap."

Hello, writing lesson plans with a baby on my lap!

To Do

So now that I'm done with my big craft fair, and luckily have just enough left over to make for a good display at the final local farmer's market craft fair next month, I have vowed to make nothing else to sell until I work through at least some of a very long list of things I need to make for my own babes and big guy:

1. Dinosaur T-shirt quilt for the girls' bed
2. Star Wars T-shirt quilt for Matt
3. Winter pajamas for the girls
4. These booties: My theory is that I can resize the pattern to make winter slippers for the whole family.
5. Huge felt board, with felt cut-outs, for the girls' playroom
6. Curtains for the girls' playroom
7. Dino quilted wall hanging for the bathroom of the girls' playroom
8. At least two birthday presents for at least two special kiddos in my girlies' lives
9. Headbands for Willow
10. Tied tutu for Will's little girlfriend
11. New pattern templates for my growing girls, based on my most favorite book, Short Kutz
12. Halloween costumes
13. Little girlie winter pants out of old sweatshirt and sweater sleeves
14. Lasagna gardens for next year
15. A good scrub for all the grungy house using the recipes from my other most favorite book,
16. Kid-made Halloween decorations
17. Mom-made Halloween decorations!
18. Must try dryer lint modeling material!
19. Rain barrels!
20. Scrapbooking at least some of the backlog--there's a big backlog

And that doesn't even include all the randomness, such as this brown pillowcase sitting on my desk that is begging to be made into a pillowcase dress for Sydney even though she doesn't need another pillowcase dress, and if I make a pillowcase dress for her, I might as well make one out of this black-and-white pillowcase for Willow, but I could then use the leftover material to make matching headbands, and that counts for my list...

In other news...I didn't have a chance to ask Willow to talk about this art that she created this morning, because she worked on these two pictures literally from the moment she got up and grabbed an adult (one of whom only wanted coffee, the other of whom only wanted a shower) to get her "markers and beautiful paper" to the time that I told her, "Listen, get some pants on or we are going to miss the bus to the library!"

Any interpretive thoughts?

Strange Folk Sunday

The second day of a two-day craft fair isn't quite as awesome as the first day--the excitement's worn off, and it's less busy, with more sightseers out for a wholesome Sunday activity than super-excited handmade fangeeks looking for the next big thing. Instead of only having one thousand people looking at the record bowls and asking, "How do you make these?" or joking "I bet they don't play anymore!" or berating you with "That's a fine thing to do to a good record!" you have two thousand people doing the same. It's still a fun experience, but somehow it's WAY more tiring than the first day was.


But while I was trudging through Day Two, Matt and the girls hit the St. Louis Science Center and the St. Louis Zoo (and yes, I was also bummed that I couldn't go, too!). The St. Louis Science Center is always a top spot on account of the giant anamatronic dinosaurs, but guess what the family found at a special exhibit at the St. Louis Zoo?



Dinosaurs!!!

Such a lucky day.

Today it's back to the grind--freshman comp papers to grade, grocery shopping to do, kid to drop off and then pick up again from preschool, meals to cook and trash to pick up. On the plus side, I've got some #6 plastic, and me and the kiddos are going to make ourselves some Shrinky Dinks!

Strange Folk Saturday

It has been a good, good Saturday! If you've never been to an indie craft fair, my friends, I must tell you that I highly recommend it. Just imagine chilling out here in suburban St. Louis with me this weekend, wandering through the enchanted craft forest, visiting over a hundred handmade items vendors and with every one of them you think, "Huh, their stuff is cool!" When you get tired you can take a break over at the alpaca petting zoo or the #6 plastic Shrinky Dink station, and when you get hungry, why, there's both a coffee shop and a booth selling deep-fried Snickers bars. Yum.Here are just a couple of shots of my booth......and a worm.

The girls have been having an awesome time, too. One of the reasons St. Louis was a good choice for a craft fair was that we love spending the weekend there, anyway--zoo, Science Center, The Container Store, Whole Foods--but Matt and the girls didn't even get out of the park today. Not only is Strange Folk in a park with trees to climb and a playground and a picnic blanket with books and toys just behind my booth and lots of grass to run in, but there is also a #6 plastic Shrinky Dink station and a make-your-own necklace table and an alpaca petting zoo, etc. Sydney especially enjoyed the World's Biggest Sandbox: And Willow enjoyed--can you guess?

Matt got this great shot of the two vendors at the mei tai booth, along with their mannequin:

I even got some shopping time while Matt ran the booth with strict orders to smile at people, look pleasant, respond in complete sentences when they spoke to him, and not eat:
Becoming so crafty by habit has unfortunately spoiled my craft fair visiting a little, however, because everything I see, I say something like, "Ooh, a fleece hat with kitty ears! So cool! But I could probably figure out how to make that for myself. Oh, diaper prefolds with quilter's cotton on one side! Um, I could make that, I guess. Vinyl brooches! I should make some of those for myself." But I did find a loophole--supplies! I bought a yard each (so far) of two new awesome cotton fabrics, one of zoo animals and one of the alphabet, and the sock monkey one is kind of calling for me to come back again for it tomorrow. I also bought this beautiful and bright wool roving--

--for making the little felted wool balls from .

All in all, it was a good day for a little money-making, a little shopping, a little spending time with the family...
It was a good day.

Happy Feet

My new boots arrived!

They love me and I love them.

I wonder how profitable I'd need to be at Strange Folk in order to earn a Serger AND this green pair?

Love for Nie

I'm not so much into Jesus-lovin', myself, but I do love this blog by a Jesus-lovin', homebirth-having mama with four kids and, obviously, lots of kid-related adventures. For some reason I am always, for instance, thinking of this post and cracking up, because for some reason I, too, am always being subjected to the weirdest freak-outs by people of authority about my children. One of my mom friends who's a relatively recent transplant here and so far is just not feeling the small town love claims that Bloomington is the nation's home for displaced busy-bodies, but I, personally, get people all judgmental about my neglectful parenting everywhere.

Matt's theory about "neighborliness" in smaller cities and towns is that in a big city, nobody cares how you act because they'll never see you again, and anyway, they've got business of their own to take care of and they don't need to take time away from it to tell you your kid should be wearing a helmet while tricycling. In a smaller city or small town, however, people have a bigger stake in how you behave because they're likely going to see you around A LOT. I can't even tell you how many Bloomington people I've never met but who I know by sight because I see them every week at the library, the farmer's market, Bryan Park, and Joann's. When people see you around a lot, they'd probably prefer if your kid didn't always do annoying shit right in front of them or endanger her life so that they can't enjoy their latte for fear that the kid will fall off the top step and crack her head open and then they'll have to step in and call 911 and worry about minute rollover or whatever. Of course, in a small town those same busy-bodies will also sneak up to your house in the dead of night and leave a big grocery bag of cucumbers and tomatoes on your porch, so there you go.

Anyway...the blogger and her husband, and anyone knows that if you read someone's blog you feel as if you know them so well, were in a terrible plane crash last month and are very seriously injured. Here's the family-run blog about their recovery and the fundraising being done to help them--I'm not so much about the fasting in their honor, or the race, but I was all about the two-day benefit sale on etsy. New items will be added today around 1:00 pm-ish for those kicking it here in the Eastern time zone, but you should also check out the awesome stuff that sold yesterday.

Little Ladies with Style

Even though I work a lot with clothes--sewing them, thrifting them, refashioning them, etc.--we are not a family who puts much emphasis on what we wear. I buy/sew clothes for the girls that are roomy, comfy, NOT trendy (if you don't have little girls, you probably don't know that you can buy low-rise jeans, shirts that proclaim one to be a heartbreaker who's looking for a boyfriend, and bikini-cut panties for your four-year-old), not girly (since the girls were babies, I've often made it a point to dress them in clothes gendered male because I know that people react differently to small children based on how they're outwardly gendered and I'd rather people think my babies are boys and call them sport and tell them how strong they look than think they're girls and call them princess and tell them how pretty they look--you know?), and I'm a sucker for costume stuff and vintage stuff and stuff containing pop culture media references from my own youth.

It's interesting to me, then, to witness my daughters' relationship to clothes. Willow has dressed herself since she was about two and a half, choosing her entire outfit each day--the only conditions I put upon her are that she has to cover her genitalia if she wants to leave the yard and she has to follow the school dress code when dressing for school (Montessori dress code isn't too big of a deal, since it's pretty common sense--play clothes instead of dresses; sneakers instead of cowboy boots or sandals; no pop culture media references; no jewelry; no costumes. Will's teacher only starts to get REALLY crazy when winter comes and she's telling you what kind of zipper she wants on your kid's snowsuit and hanging up an example of the kind of gloves you're NOT supposed to buy--after 40+ years in the game, the lady has her opinions).

I usually choose Sydney's outfit and dress her, because she has yet to have any interest in those activities for herself. Oh, and I'll occasionally make/sew matching articles of clothing for the girls and ask them to, in Willow's words, "be matches" now and then for my own amusement.

So for the past several days, when I've thought of it, I've been taking photos of the girls after they've finally gotten dressed for the day. I get a kick out of seeing what they're wearing and where it came from: This was yesterday, just before school. Sydney is wearing a striped onesie that her Grandma Janie bought her on clearance at Target two summers ago; white leggings with green butterflies that Grandma Janie bought at Old Navy and sent her last month (Willow has a matching one with pink butterflies, but the seams ripped in it the first time she wore it--I have my suspicions about Old Navy's workmanship); a wool vest that I bought at Goodwill; and red and pink shoes that I scored when I ended up transporting garage sale leftovers after a fundraiser (that I would be "going through" said garage sale leftovers before dropping them off at Goodwill was understood. Probably. (ahem)).
Willow is wearing a ratty old pajama top with planets and astronauts on it that I had intended to be a painting shirt when I dumpster-dived it; a pair of embroidered jeans from Goodwill; and a pair of pink and white shoes handed down from one of her little girlfriends--the growing-like-a-weed little girl blew through them in about a week, but they're still about two sizes too big for Willow, not that she cares.


This was not a school day, obviously--I don't know if you can tell, but the girls have removed the frame from my laundry bag in the closet and are using it as their "ballet barre" while they try to imitate the positions in the ballet book there in front of me. Willow is wearing a tutu I made for her while Sydney is wearing a dance skirt that was one of her birthday presents from a little neighbor girl; they're both wearing handmade necklaces, also gifts from the same party.

Oops, I shouldn't have let Willow wear those Powerpuff Girls pajama pants to school! With it she's wearing a grey velvet shirt from Goodwill, and Sydney is wearing conductor overalls sent years ago from Grandma Shoemaker to baby Willow in honor of Grandpa Shoemaker's career on the rails, and a dumptruck sweatshirt from the sidewalk exchange at our Recycling Center.

Here Sydney is wearing a flowered shirt and flower-cuffed capris (long pants last winter) that match but that I got from the Recycling Center on DIFFERENT days (wahoo!), and Willow is wearing a housefly shirt and comfy sweats from Goodwill. They're both wearing their matching candy-pink Converse Chuck Taylors from the mall.

This is Willow's school picture day, God help us. I've obviously just finished scrubbing her face to remove most of the black marker, but she chose a red shirt from Goodwill, a dumpster-dived kitty cat swing shirt (formerly a dress), plaid shorts from Goodwill, and mismatched socks. Sydney is wearing a vintage polyester dress from the Salvation Army thrift store and a blue Fuzzi Bunz.

And here Willow is wearing a ratty and poorly handmade dinosaur T-shirt that I picked up at the Recycling Center solely for the fabric but that is now, of course, Willow's most very favorite shirt that she wears everywhere so people can think I awkwardly and unevenly stitched it together for her and DIDN'T FINISH THE SEAMS! Anyway...Sydney has on a red dress with faux fur trim, also from the Recycling Center, and hiking boots that a friend gave me, assuring me her kid hardly wore them.

So I have no idea what patterns are revealed here, or what it's supposed to say about my children and their relationship to clothes. Does Willow wear whatever comes to hand first, or does she have some obscure reasoning as to color combination, material, or pattern? Does Sydney actually match in regards to what I dress her in, or sort of not? Do they look like all their clothes were originally worn by some other kids?

Or do they look totally awesome?

Branded

It was a day busy with Pumpkinbear branding, but I did get most of it done--along with a little laundry, a little Numb3rs Season 2 DVD set (my newest obsession from the public library, now that I'm apparently stalled in the hold line for Season 2 of The O.C.), several hands of dinosaur flash cards with Willow, who can now pick out the ending "saurus" AND tell you that it's Greek for lizard (happy homeschooling moment!), and a trip to Sam's for that freakin' EZ-Up and some frozen foods that Matt can feed the girls while I'm teaching in the evenings (neither of us are geniuses in the kitchen, it turns out).

The idea is that our whole family will wear Pumpkinbear shirts all weekend, although since I only made one shirt for each person and the craft fair is two days long...well, one can hope, right? Mine isn't quite finished: The logo is freezer paper stencilled on a green raglan tee, originally from the Gap, but new to me when I bought it at Goodwill some time ago. All the fabric paint on all the T-shirts will need to be heat-set with the iron tomorrow night or, since I teach, Tuesday morning. After that, I can iron some tear-away stabilizer to the back of the shirt and sew on the pumpkinbear applique--I freehand stitched it on my sewing machine with green thread on black flannel, and I am quite proud of how it turned out. I've never tried freehand stitching words before, but now I'm going to do it every day pretty much.

Matt's shirt is totally the awesomest, though. I didn't feel like cutting out two insanely complicated Pumpkinbear stencils, so I decided to reverse-stencil his shirt: It looks really cool and butch and I can't wait for him to try it on.

Then the girls came upstairs from where they'd been "helping" Daddy in the basement, and I had to set up some fabric painting for them. I had them painting onto black flannel because I thought I might then be able to do something with it for Halloween decorations, but now I don't know--nothing jumps out at me. I was able to hover a little less this time over my expensive fabric paints by allowing each girl to choose a color, which I then poured a little of into an individual cup. Halfway through, they switched colors, and then when they got bored I used up the rest of the paint in their cup by painting some simple little designs that I can later cut out and applique as patches onto their clothes or to cover stains: I'm not as totally in love with the girls' shirts as I am with mine and Matt's, but since they'll probably get them filthy and ruined a few minutes after they put them on, anyway, that's probably for the best.

I freehand stitched with orange thread another "pumpkinbear" onto a piece of white linen from a pillowcase dress I was making today, and I'm going to applique that over the Old Navy branding on the back of Willow's orange shirt, and Sydney's shirt will have a "pumpkinbear" applique in white thread on grey flannel below her stencil to cover a couple of stains.

I still need to make either a bunting or a banner and to finish up my second table cover, but I'm so sick right now of my own brand name that I'm instead going to sew up a half-dozen or so pillowcase dresses as a little treat--I had planned to be all cool and relaxed this week, but instead I think I'm probably going to push myself frantically to make a bunch more stuff because I so desperately want to earn enough money for that new serger that I want so badly I can taste it.

Mmmmm, serging.

Goodwill Gives Us Reason to Dance

Yay, Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale!!! Both Goodwill locations!!! I've mentioned before how much I heart Goodwill, and I heart Goodwill 50%-off storewide sales just that much more. I hit the west-side Goodwill at the crack of 9:00 am and the College Mall Goodwill right after I was done with that one--fanatic, I know, but I buy almost all of my recycled crafting materials at Goodwill, and almost all our family's clothes and household goods, etc., so the storewide sales are serious stock-up occasions for me.

The kids, of course, always make out like bandits, but it's interesting, always, to see what comes up and who gets what. At the last storewide sale back in June, for instance, I only bought the girls a couple of shirts, but today they totally scored:So Will got a velvet dress, formerly of the Children's Place, a stripey long-sleeved shirt, a dinosaur shirt (cause she needs more of those!), a black turtleneck, a batik shirt done by a local artist that I can't BELIEVE I found at Goodwill (If I ever found one of my quilts I'd sold back at Goodwill, I think I'd be really upset) but was a total score because I can't really afford the shirts new, an old-school Mr. Happy shirt that was probably around when I was Willow's age, a Darth Vader shirt, a dance outfit, and a cutie little green dress with big green buttons.


Sydney never needs as much as Willow, because she has the "benefit" of hand-me-downs, so I generally just buy her something if it's particularly awesome, such as a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer long-sleeved shirt, or embroidered Mary Janes, or an awesome embroidered jacket, or black cowboy boots (that will fit next summer, perhaps?), or a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt.

Is there anything cuter than a bad-ass baby?

In the past I've gotten most of our family's adult, "professional" clothing at Goodwill, but this time we only made off with one pair of nice work pants for Matt and a vintage top for me:

The category of crafting/interior design was a big hit, though, with another bunch of T-shirts for quilts (probably none for Strange Folk), a bunch of wool sweaters that are already cut up and in the basement next to the washing machine waiting to be felted (it would be nice if I had time to work some of these up for Strange Folk--Matt really wants me to sell some of my felted wool stegosauruses, but I don't have any already made up), and a big mirror that I plan to put on the wall in the girls' room as part of a dress-up area for them: We didn't really get a lot of toys for the girls--Willow picked out a toy pony (of course), Syd picked out a wand, and I bought them a set of dinosaur flash cards (of course) and an addition to their Lincoln logs collection:

Our goal is to eventually be able to build an entire Lincoln logs civilization, don'cha know?

The biggest score, however, occured at about two minutes past 9:00 am, when I practically shoved two tween boys into a clothing rack so that I could get my hands on something that I have been waiting YEARS to find: A DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION MAT!!!

While I later hit the College Mall Goodwill, Matt and the girls hit the mall to buy a used copy of Dance Dance Revolution (which we'll return later this week for, ideally, a better copy and/or a better price?), and all evening we took turns busting the kind of moves that only our family can bust:

Hopefully, this Sunday will be unlike last Sunday in that our power will stay ON, and hopefully we'll take enough breaks from Dance Dance Revolution to buy an EZ-Up and freezer paper stencil our Pumpkinbear T-shirts. And find a King Kong DVD for my class this week. And get the car fixed, on account of our turn signals don't work. And get my bike fixed. And...mmm, take a nap, perhaps?