Sunday Update

I think I post often about the entity that is Sunday in our house. Saturdays, now--Saturdays are fine. We cooked, the girls and I invented a board game (more on that later), we hung out at the Wonderlab, did a little shopping (little-girl mittens at the west-side Goodwill), had dinner, and enjoyed Family Movie Night (Mary Poppins--Matt does an AWESOME Dick Van Dyke doing a cockney accent). But Sunday? Here we go...

The Nutcracker

As part of my attempt to make Willow into Someone to Go to the Theater with (This is the same kind of emotion, I think, that some moms feel when they talk about how they wanted to have a little girl in order to have Someone to Go Shopping with), I practically put a second mortgage on the house in order to buy the two of us AWESOME seats at the IU Ballet Theater's The Nutcracker in December. Because nothing is fun unless you study for it, not only have I checked out several versions of the ballet in book and DVD form from the library, including one ON ICE, and some Tchaikovsky CDs, but today while I soldered (see below), Matt took the girls to a public library program on The Nutcracker. The girls were thrilled by the dancing----although not quite as much by the craft activity: A crown, I think?

Soldered Glass Ornaments

Soldering doesn't really fit with my work ethic, since I can't manipulate molten metal with two little kids underfoot, but I obsessed about learning it at one point when I had lost my mind studying for my qualifying exams, and I still find it a lovely craft. Here are some ornaments I soldered while the rest of the family was at the library:
I've now used up the last of my pre-cut glass stash, though, and I find cutting glass with a hand tool VERY tricky. I believe I'm in the market for a second-hand glass grinder.

Officially a Big Girl

I had to be a bit insistent with Matt about this, but once we switched to a panties-only during waking hours policy, Syd seems to have finished her own personal switch to a toilet-only during waking hours policy.

In our house, toilet-learning is the first time that a kid warrants her own big gift, just for her. Will got a tricycle; I think Syd would like a whole lot more something like this

from Ostheimer Wooden Toys, but it costs Four. Hundred. DOLLARS!!! I'll be looking this week for something similar that I won't, you know, have to trade Sydney for.

For Hanging by the Chimney with Care

I think it's a total rip that stockings are for kids, so in our house we also do stockings for everyone, and so Matt helped me design a pattern (he drew, I nitpicked) for some stockings to sew out of felted wool. Here are three blocked and drying:

You can't tell in the photo, but the grey ones are really beautiful--they're from a cable-knit sweater, lightly felted, with the tops the finished bottom of the sweater. One will be Syd's and one I'll put in my etsy shop; the striped one is Matt's.

The Battle over the Table

The living room table, so recently moved (by me, with the back injury) to the lovely spot with the natural light by the window, was briefly shoved into a corner (by me, with the back injury) because Matt was being a dick about it, but my ability to throw a really big hissy fit (it's the redneck in me) with little to no warning fortunately trumped Matt's shove-everything-against-the-wall design ethic, and the table was moved back (by me, with the back injury) into the sweet spot a couple of hours later.

Parts of the House are Clean

Parts of the House are Still Very, Very Filthy

Can you even find the baby--excuse me, big girl--in the photo?

Panties are Prepared

I drew a pattern for the perfect pair of T-shirt panties today, only, T-shirt material isn't as stretchy as regular panty material, and you may not realize this when you put your panties on every day, but your panties stretch a LOT to accomodate your body, and all this is a preface to the fact that I need to tell you that the panties I make for myself out of T-shirts are ENORMOUS. Seriously, they're huge. Looking at them, they make you kinda feel like crying, but ooh, they are comfy.

So I cut out a ton for myself, and they are ENORMOUS, and Willow wanted some, too, and she wanted them to be "matches" with Momma, so Matt used his graphic design skills to cut down my pattern to fit her. The style is a little more adult than I'd choose for her--a little hipster, slightly cheeky--but seriously, something about the idea of wearing matching panties with my four-year-old...I could not resist. Here's the stack of Will's all cut out:

So yeah, our Sundays tend to be ridiculous. I'm exhausted, but you know what? Matt cleaned out the refrigerator today, and we totally have an unopened bottle of cheap champagne back in there.

I'm gonna go get it.

Little Felt Things

Sydney circles:Photography experiments:Sort-of sewing:Help with felting:Drying in a row:

Where We Go to Wonder

First, my continuing project: I'm still working out some test shots for my Craft magazine piece. The colors still look a little washed out to me and the image isn't sharply focused (my eyesight sucks, so I rely a lot on autofocus, but autofocus? Eh.), but I figured out that the overall tone would look better if I didn't pose my artifacts on, you know, a BRIGHT GREEN background. You learn something new every day...

And today, the girls and I spent quite a bit of time learning at the Wonderlab.

The Wonderlab is our third-favorite public area in all of Bloomington. I've been taking Will there, daily, weekly, monthly, since she was just over a year old--Syd's been going there since she was a newborn. My favorite thing about the Wonderlab is that since they were old enough to put their hands on anything, each of the girls has been able to interact with every single exhibit there in some meaningful way. Mind you, the kids aren't necessarily grasping the finer points of how hot air makes the balloon rise, but they grasp the cause-and-effect of push the red button, watch the digital thermometer numbers rise, and up goes the balloon. It's that kind of learning that's especially valuable, I think--as the girls visit these same exhibits over and over throughout the years, old lessons are internalized and new discoveries are made.

Here were the favorites today: Our other favorite thing about the Wonderlab is their membership in the ASTC Passport Program. Every time we go on a trip, I always pull up the complete list of Passport Program participating museums, and we ALWAYS find some cool place to get free admission into--St. Louis Science Center, Chicago Field Museum, San Francisco Exploratorium, etc. On our California trip, Matt and I took the girls to the Exploratorium for the day two times, and the first time we basically recompensed our entire year's membership at the Wonderlab. It rules.

But in case you think I didn't do anything crafty today, you're wrong! Here's a little peek at a project I'm trying to work up out of some of my felted wool:
Can you figure it out?

Let There Be Light

I've been in desperate search of light lately--well, mostly I've been in desperate search of over-the-counter and breastfeeding-safe pain relievers, but I've also been in search of light.

Our house is in a great neighborhood and is in good condition and is a good walk to most places we like to go, but it has basically no natural light. The windows are teeny-tiny little things stuck on odd walls in all the numerous teeny-tiny little rooms, and none of them face south. But I have this absolutely terrific assignment to write and photograph a craft project tutorial for Craft magazine (Make's little cousin), and I am desperate for good light in which to photograph.

So I'm limping around the house this afternoon, and all of a sudden I'm all, "Hey! That one window, now that the leaves are off the silver maple, actually gets pretty good light. If only there was a table next to it." I have numerous traumatic injuries, y'all, and yet many heaves and ho's and curses and whimpers later......there's a table next to the one window in the house that lets in terrific natural light. Never mind that it's shoved up against our old dorm couch on one side and the wall on the other, and that the entire bare wall that the table used to be shoved up against is all gross now from being next to the table. Just...never mind.

And the table? Looks like this: I barely even deserve to have furniture.

So I had myself a happy little time trying to figure out some ways to photograph my piece.

Straight above?Looking down at an angle?Definitely not straight on:My digital color enhancements are also pretty off because I have terrible eyesight, even with glasses. I may have to whip out my 500-page camera manual for this project.

But all afternoon I have been obsessed with photographing the light at this window. For our afternoon snack I set the girls up with some cut-up bananas, a couple of handfuls of dark chocolate chips melted in our new crockpot, and a little bowl of crushed pistashios--dip, roll, munch--and I insisted that we do all this at the table by the window, even though the crockpot cord wouldn't really reach and nobody could therefore sit comfortably:
But ah, the light.

Wow, though, I really need to wash the window now.

p.S. Check out my tutorial for aromatic herb ornaments over at Crafting a Green World.

For My Mother, Who Wants to Know What I Want for Christmas

jewelry (from SuchPrettyColors)

a book about making jewelry

warm hat (from 16BIT)

soap (from FlameWorks)

sturdy briefcase recycled from an old tire (from Used Rubber USA)

embroidery patterns (from Sublime Stitching)

Jar of stuff for the making of other stuff (from The Naughty Secretary Club)

P.S. Check out my tree hugger booklist over at Eco Child's Play.

If You Think I Look Bad, You Should See the Bananas

Choosing to carry several bunches of bananas in my arms rather than hold onto the railing this morning, I fell down half a flight of stairs into my basement. Wow, that hurt. After moaning and writhing for a while on the cool concrete floor, I rallied long enough to make it back up the stairs, through the hallway, and into the girls' bed, where I called Matt on the cell and panted something like, "Killed myself. Come home."

It really didn't take him that long to get back here.

We ascertained that nothing is broken except possibly for my coccyx (which could be), but I am currently occupying what is commonly known as "a world of hurt." It involves lots of ibuprofin, lots of moaning, as little movement as possible, and quite a bit of parenting using mindless forms of entertainment.

Hello, coloring pages. Hello, Netflix.

I have found myself completely unable to sacrifice my Netflix subscription solely because of their "Watch Instant" feature. It's brilliant--click a couple of clicks, and you're streaming a movie, or a documentary, or an obscure TV show from the 1980s. This morning, when I was more in the whimpering and writhing in pain stage, the girls watched a lot of episodes of Caillou, but this afternoon we all watched SEVERAL episodes of PBS's Nature--one on The San Diego Zoo, one on Dogs, and bizarrely, I was so out of it that I can't even think of the third. Anyway, Watch Instant rules.

And even though I think that in general, coloring pages are not only NOT art, but also detrimental to the natural development of children's art, they're so handy in a pinch that I do keep myself well-stocked for emergencies. I have a lot of these coloring pages from Sprout, for instance--nothing with a character, but a lot of number pages and letter-sound illustrations and sea creatures and dinosaurs, etc., so later this afternoon when I was sick of nature documentaries but not feeling capable of actually thinking through an interaction with my children, I whipped them on out. And fortunately, I think I so far utilize them rarely enough that my girls still have their own agendas with them. Syd mostly "writes":
(she's asking me to spell "Dadda" for her, and every letter I say gets another little circle), and although Will does like to color the pictures, she's really into cutting these days:
Cutting is kind of a hard skill for a lefty to master, but she's plugging away.

I also got to cancel my classes tonight (woo!), and so lay in bed for another few hours watching Netflix movies while Matt cooked dinner (um, pizza and French fries?), goofed around with the girls, bathed them, and read them to sleep.

Will the coccyx be better tomorrow? We'll see.

The Soapmaker's Newest Companion

So Matt's in the nursery right now doing this-- --with two bathed, sleepy little girlies, but I get to goof around because I literally just finished this:

Uh-huh, two loaves of made-from-scratch multi-grain bread AND some oven-roasted tomatoes. The oven-roasted tomatoes are my specialty, except that I kind of burn them usually, but the bread is quite the accomplishment. Y'all, my bread has been RISING lately. RISING!!!

It was only yesterday that I took this awesome workshop on soap-making from The Kitchen Girls over at Barefoot Herbs Barefoot Kids, and I am already all about the soap-making. I'm all, "I must make soap. I can't BELIEVE I don't already make my own soap." As if it's a character flaw or something, which it kind of is.

The best thing about the workshop was that The Kitchen Girls had these little soap-making kits for sale, with all the stuff you need for a nice big batch--all your oils, already mixed, your little container of lye, some essential oil in its own little container, a spatula, some rubber gloves, and some safety goggles. I bought another buck's worth of dried spearmint from Barefoot Herbs, requested
from the library, and I am in business.

Except, of course, that I need a crock pot and an immersion blender. Well, that's what Goodwill is for, right?

And at Goodwill this afternoon, that's where I committed a crime against morality.

It wasn't the crock pot--I found a little one that I can maybe use for small batches of soap, the idea of which I like better than the making of one big batch, anyway--and it wasn't the immersion blender, which I'm still searching for. It was the woman with a big armful of T-shirts, so big that when she wanted to flip through another rack of clothes, she had to lay her big stack of T-shirts on a trolley behind her. I come walking past, minding my own business, and then, on the very top of her stack of T-shirts, I see it.

An Angel T-shirt. With the whole cast. Have I mentioned that I'm a big fangeek?

I thought for a second, I started to walk away, and then, quick as lightening, I SNATCHED this woman's T-shirt from the top of her pile and kept walking. And then, my friends, I bought that shirt.

Am I sorry?

Do I look sorry?

Caps, Caps, and Caps

For days now, I have had this kind of crazy headache that also makes me feel like I am sort of observing everything, but not really connecting with it, like I'm just sort of visiting inside my skin--pending psychotic break? Brain tumor? I dunno, but I can sure tell you that I haven't been the life of the last couple of parties I've been to.

That being said, this weekend, excruciating headache and psychotic break and all, I've still been to a couple of parties, and a soap-making workshop where I met an awesome blog friend and bought some lye, and I've read a hundred picturebooks to little girls and fed them soup and oatmeal and macaroni & cheese, and graded homework, and made caps. And more caps. A lot of caps, really. Is that another symptom of a pending psychotic break?

I started making caps inspired by SouleMama's Mama to Mama site, which is collecting newborn caps for safe birthing kits to give to moms in Haiti, and remembering both a simple little cap pattern I made up when Syd was small, and a stash of jersey tubes given to me by a friend I met at a craft fair, I sewed up these ones for Haiti while Syd napped and Willow wrote up a list of friends to invite to a party (Planning theoretical parties is a hobby of hers), often consulting me on spelling tips ("Does Owyn's name start with a blue letter or a purple one?" Hmmm): They were so easy that I figured I'd use up the rest of my stash of jersey tubes--yay, stash-busting!--so I sewed up some more blank ones for future baby gifts:I can always embroider them in about a minute for a nice, quick gift.

With the scraps I sewed Syd up some doll caps and I experimented by making a cap for myself (Note: This style is NOT attractive on the average adult head). I had much better luck with the black jersey knit: I figured Haitian moms or my mom-friends might not appreciate the stylish chique of a black baby cap as much as I do, so I instead freezer paper-stencilled some dinos on the black ones I made to put up a little later in my etsy shop: Here they are just chilling out on the towel bar in the bathroom while the fabric paint dries, but nonetheless, I'm kind of stoked by their awesomeness.

Of course, though, the whole point of any crafty excursion is to Make. Stuff. For. My. Girls. So yeah, they got caps. Caps to wear inside while rockin' the Goodwill Outlet Store marble maze with Dadda.

Caps with freezer paper stencils of every little girl's favorite things: ponies and dinosaurs.Little girls in pony caps and little girls in dino caps: do they totally slay you, or what?

P.S. Check out my post about the Caps for Cap-Haitien project over at Crafting a Green World.

Animal, Vegetable, Two Kids? Unpredictable

I think I've mentioned before (many times) that neither Matt nor I are either able or willing cooks, that I have caused numerous kitchen fires, that Matt has never caused a kitchen fire mostly because he confines himself to boiling tortellini and grilling things on his wee little George Foreman, that things that I make generally turn out weird and even though I know exactly why this happens (in a madcap manner, I make healthier and apparently unworkable substitutions, and I treat all amounts and times as approximate), I can't seem to stop myself from keeping on doing it...

Y'all, this book is gonna change my life

Barbara Kingsolver is awesome, and if you haven't read her before, read The Bean Trees: A Novel and The Poisonwood Bible, too, but first read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Sure, the premise is cool--she and her family eat locally for a year, growing a huge garden, befriending local farmers, raising chickens and turkeys for eggs and meat, learning to make cheese, etc.--but it is all integrated within a larger discussion of the ethics of food production, food transportation, food pricing, in just a clear-headed, evocative, plain-spoken manner.

If anything can inspire me to cook at all, much less locally, this book can.

Of course, I obviously ran right out to Bloomingfood's with the girls to buy some wholesome, locally grown produce, and of course the prices nearly knocked the food ethic right out of me. I mean yeah, we try to eat healthfully and organically, but we're also totally dirt poor--we buy organic milk just for the girls because I don't want them to go through puberty at age seven, and I was thanking god that the College Mall Kroger's put in a big, swanky natural foods section so that I could buy bulk nutritional yeast and rolled oats without having to save up. The smack end of the growing season, and Bloomingfood's, was possibly not the best place for a dirt-poor family of four to begin their locavore adventure: I ended up with two locally grown tomatoes, four apples, some milk, and some cheese.

And, um, a sprouting jar? Don't even ask, cause I. Don't. Know.

Anyway, at least when we got home it was a fine afternoon for a change, so I got a chance to rake what used to be here----over the tops of my brand-new lasagna garden beds (although the prospect of the leaf vacuuming team driving by and sucking up all my lasagna beds, which are near the road, is DESTROYING me!), and the girls got to goof around outside a little:
Then, in honor of Barbara Kingsolver, I did not turn to the girls and say, "Peanut butter or cheese? Name two fruits or vegetables," which is how, um, I usually feed them. Instead, we made a whole wheat pizza crust from scratch and, praise be (or perhaps it was the salt and soda I snuck in), the mess actually rose this time, and we all got our own quadrant of deliciousness to decorate: Yummy looking, right? Things like that don't usually come out of our kitchen. Syd did up her lower left quadrant in mozzarella, grape tomatoes, brussels sprouts, and one artichoke; Will did hers in brussels sprouts, one tomato, and one artichoke, Matt had all tomato, and I had pepperjack (local, thank you very much) and artichoke.

And oranges are for making faces with: P.S. I've got tutorials for these here and here, but I also have some new handmade blank books and a set of bigger Christmas-colored crayons up on my etsy shop.

Upcycle Your Crayons!: How to Make New Crayons from Old Crayons

When I was researching melted crayon tutorials for my last post on upcycling crayons, I realized, "Hey! Everybody else does it wrong!" By that I mean that everybody else does it, um, differently than me, but since you can trust that I know the absolute best way to do pretty much anything, here's how to melt crayons better:

1. Gather up all of your kids' old broken crayons. Look under the couch, among the sheets on the bed, in all the toyboxes, and in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator. Ignore all the other disgusting things you find in your search--it's important to stay focused here.

I'm an art snob, so my kids only use Crayola brand crayons--Prang are good, too, but Crayola is more readily available. You should know, though, that if you mix crayon brands, your crayons won't melt as neatly--the brands all have slightly different melting temperatures, and if they have a lower melting temperature than I'm accounting for they'll get so hot that the pigment will separate from the wax, and if they have a hotter melting temperature, they won't melt at all in this oven. They'll look fine and be perfectly serviceable for your own kiddos, but might not be the peak of perfection if you're making them as gifts.

2. Peel all the paper and cat hair off of your crayons, break them into small pieces, and sort them into your molds.
While obviously you should encourage your kids to organize their crayon bits however the heck they want, if you want to make yourself a couple of very attractive crayons, consider limiting your color palette to two or three choices per crayon, and strictly limit the amount of darker colors that you put in each mold--the darker crayons will show up really well, and can be quite overwhelming.

As for molds, the muffin tin is the standard choice, but it can be very difficult to pop the crayon out when it's finished, and the same goes for bakeable candy molds. My personal favorite choice is a flexible silicone baking mold--it's much better for easing your crayon out when you're done, and it comes in lots of fancy shapes. For a silicone mold with small shapes like the heart mold in the back of the above photo, two crayons are ample; for one with medium shapes like the mold in the forefront, five or more crayons will work.

3. Put your mold into the oven, turn it to around 200 degrees, and wait at least an hour. You can melt your crayons quicker with a higher temperature, but this will also tend to separate the pigment from the wax, so you'll have a muddy brown bottom and a translucent top on every crayon.

Check on your crayons every now and then, and when all the pieces are liquid, turn off the oven and let the crayons set until they're solid again. If you need to, you can remove your mold, but this will tend to mix up your colors--if you leave the mold until they're set, they'll look much more nicely striated.

4. When your crayons are at least solid, even if only barely so, you can remove the mold to a countertop to finish cooling completely. Don't unmold the crayons prematurely, even if you want to, or you'll moosh them a little.

5. When your crayons are completely cooled, flex the edges of each mold away from the crayon, push gently on the bottom of each mold until you feel the crayon release from the bottom, and then gently ease out your crayon. You only need to be particularly careful about this part if your mold includes any fiddly bits--sticky-outies or such.

6. Do a lot of coloring.

P.S. Interested in more upcycled craft projects? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!