Perspectives

From above:
From below:From above:From below:
Those kids remind me to change my perspective MANY times daily.

Luna? Not So Much.

Ominously, the first craft fair of the season was quite...eh.

Mind you, all the stuff was there. Quilts:
Pinback buttons: Gift Tags: And some new stuff that I've been making with these terrific upholstery remnants that I scored a few weeks ago:

There was even my own personal troll-girl who crouched under the table and played with stuff for five hours:

Customers, though? Not so much. And customers wishing to purchase things? Um, there were even fewer of those, at least for me--the hallway where we set up is kind of narrow, so vendors could have been making a killing just three tables down and I wouldn't have known. There wasn't so much being killed right near me.

The experience was educational, however. All of my sales were very small--I didn't sell any item that cost over $5--so that tells me that I'll likely need to bone up on a LOT of really small items for my craft fairs this summer. Of course, it's actually harder to make a good profit if you're selling really small items, because you obviously have to sell 60 $1 buttons to make the same amount of money as you can from one $60 T-shirt quilt, but whatever a girl's gotta do, I guess.

People seemed to like the belly dancers. Perhaps I could belly dance just inside my booth? Draw in the customers? Earn some extra singles?

Day in the Sun

It was the best sunny, warm, breezy, cloudless day yet! I know I was pretty stressed at times in the past few months (what odd freshman comp classes I've had this year...), but it must have been a harder winter than I thought, because I never remember being this ridiculously stoked for Spring!

But finally, finally, the lilac is in bloom right outside our front door:
And although I did spend much of the day at a cloth diapering class and the Montessori Garage Sale (I bought a lathe! A LATHE!!! For $15!!! I can't even let myself think about it until my semester's officially over, but I'm so excited), much more of the day was spent outside, at the park, in the sunny, cloudless, warm, breezy air.

I finished my last photo shoot for my book proposal:
One awesome kid permitted me to join her high, high up in her favorite climbing tree:
While the other kid stayed on the ground, enjoying some watercolors al fresco:
And now the babies are asleep, although the sun is barely down (thank you, day full of fresh air and tree climbing), and my Matt is at a Flight of the Conchords concert (I can't stand them, so thank you as well, small children in need of a mother's care), leaving me to happily blog away and craft a few last-minute things for tomorrow:

If only it wasn't Little 500 weekend, causing the emanations from my open windows to sound more like a zombie invasion (sirens, wordless screams, drumbeats, squealing tires) and less like a peaceful warm spring night...

Eh. As long as Matt makes it home tonight without getting a "walking drunk" violation, which my students tell me totally exists, but if you have $265 in cash you can pay your fine right then and avoid being sent to jail (what these kids are doing here without their mothers, I'll never know), it'll all be good.

P.S. Check out my post about crafting with wood over at Crafting a Green World.

In Between Teaching, Writing, and Parenting...

I sewed:
So refreshing.

I tend to have a lot of irons in the fire, with a lot of plans for far more irons, so it's easy for me to let myself get really panicky about all that I have to do, and all that I haven't yet done, if I'm not careful:

• LOTS of homework papers that I *should* grade and alphabetize to pass back to my students on Wednesday. It will give me less to do when I'm trying to grade and record final papers, and my students will appreciate knowing their grades up to the final--of course, it will also give them more scope for pestering me with whining...
• LOTS of things that I *should* craft for Luna Fest on Sunday--one set of button alphabets to finish and another that I could sell as a set; several sets of crayon rolls, marker rolls, and colored pencil rolls, allowing me to sell them individually or as gift sets; melted crayons; doily pinbacks, etc.
• A couple of last tutorials, some photos, and a LOT of proofreading and design work on my book proposal, and then having it copied and bound and sending it--I really, really wanted to send it this week. Sigh.
• How great would it be to write a couple of pattern zines to have ready at Luna Fest, and also for my pumpkinbear etsy shop? Wouldn't you totally want a hip, indie zine that would tell you how to make a superhero T-shirt dress?
• If I don't post regularly on Crafting a Green World and Eco Child's Play, then I don't earn my craft supplies budget for the next month. No craft supplies=suckage.
• The Montessori Parents' Library, for whom I am the Parents' Library librarian, could use a Wish List, written self check-out instructions, signage, and CD copies of all the expert lectures that are on--ugh--cassette tapes.
• Speaking of...when did I last update my pumpkinbear etsy shop?

On the plus side, the kiddos are happy and engaged (barring some minor drama with Music Day--how did I manage to convince Will's teachers that I am some kind of rabid stage mom, when the truth is that I don't give a flying flip whether or not she performs the bumblebee song in front of her classmates and parents?), with a mama who helps them put together the velociraptor puzzle and reads the dinosaur encyclopedia to them for one solid hour and makes gluten-free brownies with them in the morning.

Come to think of it, did I eat anything today other than a butt-load of gluten-free brownies? Maybe that explains it...

P.S. Check out my list of eco-crafting tutorials for Earth Day over at Crafting a Green World.

I Can't Be Your Partner in Crime

The girls and I spent the day up in Indianapolis on Friday. We hit all my favorites--the Goodwill Outlet Store (I'm saving the INCREDIBLE puppet theater I scored for another post), the opening season of the butterfly exhibit at the Indianapolis Zoo--

--and the Indianapolis Art Museum:
As I was shooting this photo of Willow in the contemporary gallery, and Sydney was happily stomping on the floor just behind me, with another photographer shooting another exhibit in a little niche just behind her, all of a sudden this huge guard starts running towards me, screaming at me to stop right now!

I'm all, "What? The baby can't stomp on the floor?"

And he's all, "You CANNOT take photos in this gallery!"

Without thinking, the first thing I do is whip around, point with my entire arm straight at that other guy taking some pictures in the nook, and shout, "But HE'S taking photos!"

The guard turned around and started shouting at the other guy, so I grabbed both the girls' hands and said, "We gotta go." Then we hightailed it.

Two minutes later, safely down the elevator, I stopped to think about it and I thought, "Really, Julie? You seriously sold out a stranger over a 'no photo' policy?" I can't believe that my instinctual reaction was to throw the blame and then flee. I mean, what kind of person does that?

I actually saw the guy a few minutes later and of course I apologized. He, of course, said it was no big deal, because, you know, it's just a "no photo" policy, not a criminal act, which makes it just even more ridiculous that I sold out a stranger and then ran.

Painting on the grass in the museum gardens was much more relaxing:
Although now I wonder--I hope there wasn't a rule about not being on the grass...

Our New Bible

I am totally wiped after spending the day working on the marketing section of my book proposal (I have one more project tutorial to photograph, but the rain! The rain! It thwarts me!), but Matt was at the library with the girls this afternoon (See? THIRD time this week!)--this was after he had to rush over to Montessori because I, hunched over my computer tapping away about speaker engagements and family-friendly workshops, suddenly had the heart-rending revelation that Willow! We missed her parent/teacher conference! It was half an hour ago!...

...anyway, AFTER the parent/teacher conference (don't worry friends, we have a strategy for Music Day, and the teachers are considering changing the entire format of Speaker's Rug just to slyly trick Willow, who is the only child in the history of the program to have gone two years without speaking once, because she is my baby and she is stubborn, into feeling comfortable enough to speak. It's like Baby Toastmasters in that class), Matt took the girls to the library so I could miserably tap away some more (Writers don't actually like to write, you know. Writers only like to have written), and as he was scanning a shelf of new non-fiction titles, Will pulled a random book off of a nearby shelf and said, "Daddy, I really want you to check this out."

"Oh, yeah?" said Matt, and turned around to see:
Smart kid. They probably have a whole chapter in there about how you aren't supposed to ditch your kid's parent/teacher conferences.

You Can Keep What You Can Carry

This can be my new mantra, since the girls and I went to a program at our public library in which the girls each received, and then got to DECORATE, their very own book bag.

I'm telling you, we go to the library a lot, and the library book problem here at home is getting pretty desperate. Not only do I have my entire bookshelf just for library books that I only return when I absolutely have to, and then when I do return them I just use another card to request them, but the girls have TWO entire bookshelves just for the library books that they, too, have a hard time returning. Even Matt has a little library book problem, although try and get him to admit it.

Seriously, we went to the library twice this week, and both times we came home with a huge stack of books for the girls. Does everyone do that? Are we the kind of family who thinks everything that we do is normal just because we do it, but then the girls are going to grow up and learn that their childhoods were seriously? Messed. UP.

Anyway, the library program was awesome, and not just because our favorite librarian, my dear friend Mrs. Christina, was in charge (she and I were talking about this, like, truck porn you can get for little kids who are into cars and trucks and heavy machinery--it's hour-long videos with just these shots of trucks, you know, and zooming in on the headlights and the wheel wells and watching them spin their tires in the mud, real fetish stuff, but you're not supposed to call kid obsessions fetishes, please remember that).

No, the program was awesome because of all the fabric paint! Tubes and tubes of it, in color after color, the kind you brush with brushes and the kind you squeeze from the tubes directly onto the fabric and TWO kinds of fabric markers! We get there and get our totes, and all the other kids are kind of hanging back like they don't know what to do or they're scared to draw on their tote bag, but my kids are all, "Hell, YEAH!" and in they dive:
I'm not kidding, y'all. It may be hard to notice in this photo, but I'd like to point out that in it, Syd is painting with a brush--in each hand:
We were the first ones there and the last ones to leave. Christina actually had to give Will an old shirt of her own kid's because I couldn't take Will to school looking the way she ended up, in her thrifted Gap velour dress, no less (I'm sure the program notes read "dress to mess," but I forgot to read the program notes).

The cost of mess, though--look at those bags!

How many books do you think will fit in each one? Ten? Fifteen?

Forty?

P.S. Check out my cloth diapering class tomorrow from 2:00-4:00 at Barefoot Herbs + Barefoot Kids--new location!

My Avatar is Also a Fangeek

You might remember that directly after Sydney's toilet-training celebration (the new panties, the present, the Baking of a Treat), I bought a butt-load of these little wooden peg people from Casey's Wood Products.

I had always intended to paint them (there are some examples of exquisitely-painted little peg people on etsy, if you're curious), but they are really small, and whenever the girls and I paint...let's just say that we work well with a LARGE canvas. A large big-ole-mess-of-acrylic-paint-everywhere kind of canvas.

However, decorating our wooden Easter eggs with Sharpies went so exceedingly well that yesterday we dragged all the Sharpies (fine and larger points) back out, kidnapped a handful of peggies from the dollhouse, and went to town.

As I'd expected, the kiddos were more interested in experiencing the process of coloring the interesting curves and wooden texture than in drawing "dolls", per se, but after much careful work in which my reach just nearly exceeded my grasp, I did succeed in creating my own little peggie avatar:

I decided to go minimalistic, to disguise the reality that I have no idea how to make proportional arms, or a nose, or even a mouth. Or even eyes, really, so it's a good thing that I wear glasses, because I can totally do those.

But not the earpiece parts. That seemed hard.

We'll do this project several more times, I imagine, so it's my hope that Willow, at least, will eventually want to make her own peggie avatar. If not, though, I plan to recruit my Matt to finish out the family.

Cause don't YOU want to watch your private family dynamics played out by preschoolers in the setting of a dollhouse?

Controlled Chaos (Except for the Controlled Part)

This is what the work table in my studio looks like right about now:I count three different types of craft projects in the making there. I'm hoping to finish up one complete set of button alphabets tomorrow, which I'll likely sell by the letter. I'd like to do another complete alphabet to sell as a set, but it might be nice if at my first couple of craft fairs this season I had something to sell OTHER than two sets of button alphabets, ya know?

Ooh, and a third set just for the babies, but since we have nowhere to put that one it gets to be low priority for now.

I am so stoked for craft fair season.

And garage sale season.

It would be nice to see the sun again, too...

P.S. Check out my post about appraising your vintage stuff before you craft with it over at Crafting a Green World.

Egged

Easter really isn't so much one of my favorite holidays. I'm not religious, so that whole part's lost on me, it's not one of those holidays in which you're supposed to be sitting around on your butt all day if you're not busy cooking a big meal, so it's not really that restful or relaxing, and it takes place on a day that's already a weekend, so basically it just means that some extra stores I might want to go to are closed now.

But I did buy five dozen regular eggs and maybe five dozen more wooden eggs for making all awesome and colorful, so there is that:
We were busy dyeing some of these particular eggs on Friday night. Matt got home from work, looked at them, and is all, "What do you use to dye these?" I'm all, "Um, food coloring?" He's all, "You don't have to use a special kit? You can just use food coloring?" I'm all, "Well, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's why they put the directions on the food coloring BOX, dear." You see what my life is like, right?

And we didn't even blow out any to decorate--that's five dozen hard-boiled eggs that I'm talking about here. I thought about blowing out some for a terrific fine motor skills activity for the girls, since you have to be so gentle, but I figured that the girls are both too young for it to be at all a successful activity. But then I saw that Chasing Cheerios had her two-year-old painting blown eggs, so there you go. I could be eating scrambled eggs for a week, but no, it's egg salad and devilled eggs and diced egg on salads for me.

Oh, and there's candy, but I tell you, if Matt looks at me nibbling my chocolate and peanut butter rabbit and squeals, "It's a REESEter bunny!" one more time, he is NOT getting lucky tonight.

Of course, there's also the egg hunt. And that's pretty freakin' fun, if you ask me, and I didn't even have my own basket. Five dozen eggs, plus the wooden ones, makes for a sweet hunt for two kids. See? Syd's snapping up the results of our "red" session:
And two happy little girls--

--who have no idea that their diet for the coming week is going to consist primarily of hard-boiled eggs.

Belch.

P.S. Check out my post on how to craft with Easter trash over at Crafting a Green World.

P.P.S. It's so, so wrong that I keep visiting this site, but this particular picture from Why the Frak Do You Have a Kid had me laughing so hard that I could not breathe. It'll take about seven seconds to see what the big deal is, though, so give yourself time.

I swear, though, the girl in that picture looks kind of familiar. Sarah Edwards, that's not you, is it? You're a social worker!

The Golden Rule of Flash Photography

Today the baby learned Rule #1 of self-portraiture:
You can't shoot towards the mirror if you're also shooting flash.

It's still awesome, though, right? My kids are compiling quite the photography portfolio.

And my camera? Well, regular upgrades are something to look forward to, I suppose. While the girls try for that extra-close-up of the area behind the toilet bowl, I'll just hum quietly to myself and pretend like this one's in my future:

On the other hand, I do like for my family to eat, so maybe I'll go rescue my camera.

ATC Swapped

My first grown-up ATC swap (can you believe that Will did an ATC swap before I did?) was pretty much super-fun, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Here's my X card, entitled "Mac's X-Ray":
This didn't photograph well, but it's an x-ray image of a brain tumor that my Mac (different from my Matt--rumor has it that Papa, who is hard of hearing and before my marriage saw me with my best friend as much as he saw me with my boyfriend, combined with the fact that Mac, my best man, wore a tux that was carelessly identical to Matt's, never was quite sure exactly which guy I was marrying until the actual marriage. Gawd, how I love all three of those dumb guys) battled a few years ago, printed onto transparency film and stitched to Bristol board. The words were printed individually onto adhesive paper and adhered to the front of the transparency (I'm afraid they're going to fall off, though--next time, I should figure out how to attach them from the other side of the transparency?)

Here's the X ATC of one of my swap partners. It's entitled "X-Ray":
It's three ATCs that accordion together using those metal rings, which is awesome cool. The images are x-rays printed onto matte paper and then glued onto the ATC paper.

Here's another X, by a different swap partner. It's entitled "Xenograft:"

The top and bottom of the figure are individually cut out and glued together--the proportions are perfect, which amazes me. The background is stamped with lots of letter x, and the postage stamps carry the letter, too.

Here's the V card from a swap partner--it's entitled "V=Villain":

There are a ton of collage elements to notice here--photos, typing, black-and-white copy images, inked parts, parts shaded in with colored pencil, etc.

Here's my W card, entitled "My Little Willow Tree:"

It's cotton quilting fabric quilted to Bristol board, then embroidered using the free-hand tool on my sewing machine with a willow tree.

And here's my V card, entitled "Aunt Vicki":

Again, the photo is lousy, because it's really hard to photograph a transparency. This is a photo of my Aunt Vicki printed onto a vintage book page (The Christmas Carol, I believe), lined up exactly with an identical photo printed on an overhead transparency--they're all quilted to Bristol board with a double row of stitching. The words are again printed individually on sticker paper and adhered to the top, and I'm betting they fall off before the year is out.

I think it takes a year to do all the swaps to equal an entire alphabet--how cool would that be?

Oh, no--I am now also obsessed with alphabets.

What To Do With Four Pounds of Buttons

Did I ever mention that just a few days after winning my super-awesome vintage button auction on ebay, that I won another 2 pounds of vintage buttons with a low-ball minimum bid? I don't know why one auction went so high and the other so low, but there you go...

Four pounds of buttons.

And they become: A button alphabet! I'm so totally stoked by them that it makes me kind of giddy--a perfect de-stresser from a stressful week.

It took me a while to figure out a method, and it's still some convoluted pattern of designing the alphabet in Photoshop, printing it, cutting it out, slicing it down the middle, tracing it onto the paper bag, then gluing each button on, then SEWING it on, because what's the point of a button if you're not going to sew it?

I'd like to eventually make two entire alphabets of these--one to sell individually, and one to sell as a set--and I still haven't figured out what to mount them on or how (fabric? Quilted? Felt? Mat board? Cardboard?), but hopefully by Luna Fest I'll have a first-generation in stock.

Oh, and one for my baby, because for some reason she's going to be three years old next month:
If anyone knows what committee I should contact to protest this whole "time flying" business, I'd appreciate their email address.

We Have Easter Eggs, But He Has a Secret

You might remember how much I've decided that I love the Maine Wood Company (it's now Casey's Wood Products, but I'm SURE it used to be the Maine Wood Company)--I bought all the girls' simple dollhouse dolls there (although I can't BELIEVE that I didn't buy these Star Wars peggies off of etsy), and some dinosaur cut-outs for future kid crafting.

Well, somehow Willow learned about Easter--the egg hunts, the bunnies, the candy, etc. You know, all the important stuff. I figured we could just pagan it up to be a nice Spring celebration (although I sort of already did that with St. Patrick's Day, finding it too odd to be explaining to a four-year-old why we celebrate a holiday about Ireland). The beauty of making it a Spring celebration (just like in pre-Christian times), is that you get to keep all that important stuff!

And that is why I (over)ordered a LOT of wooden eggs from Casey's Wood Products this week. Now, some I want to felt over with my nice rainbow wool roving, and some I want to leave natural, obviously, but the other thousand or so?

The girls and I have been creating our own wooden Easter Eggs. And it RAWKS!

The first thing we discovered is that Sharpies work GREAT on these wooden eggs----you get great color saturation (and now, I do not know why I let the baby use Sharpies while wearing that dress), way less mess, and the marker tip allows you to get a ton of detail: Later I'll show you Matt's Mexican wrestler Easter egg--I am totally going to make him color all the girls' dollhouse dolls now.

Of course, though, it wouldn't really be our house if we weren't sloppily wielding some dangerously messy art supply, now would it? And so OF COURSE we got out the acrylic paints, too: In order to lessen the general level of mud-making (most of the wooden eggs are really quite inexpensive, but of course the girls gravitate toward the goose eggs, which are $2.25 each! Don't worry, though, because I'm going to steal the ugly ones and felt over them later), I limited the acrylic paints to two tones within the same color--red and pink, for instance, or blue and navy. The girls didn't seem to mind, and actually had fun observing the different gradations of pink their advertent and inadvertent mixing came up with:
Next on the Easter (uh, Spring) trail, I have to go over to Joann's tomorrow to buy elastic on sale, and I'm really really REALLY hoping to find this chocolate Easter bunny kit there. I loooove the idea of chocolate Easter bunnies, and hell, I'll eat one, but the chocolate always tastes cheap to me (unless it's also filled with peanut butter, obviously), so I'd be stoked to be able to make myself a yummy bunny with some nice dark chocolate.

Okay, in other news, last night I was doing some stuff on the Internet--I've been totally stressed lately, because some people on this etsy team I'm in are really taking this whole "political is personal" worldview, and basically acting the kind of crazy that you're supposed to just back slowly away from, NOT engage--and Matt walks into the room, sipping a cup of juice from a straw, and says, utterly out of the blue," Would it make you feel better if I told you that I have a secret blog?"

Did you get that, friends? Feel free to do the double-take with me. My husband has a secret blog.
If your husband told you that he has a secret blog, what's the first thing you would think of? Here are my top three: My Blog About the Cats I've Killed. My Blog About All the Little Boys Who Live in Our Neighborhood. My Blog About Funny Things I Do to My Wife While She's Sleeping.

But no, my husband's secret blog is way better. It's super-geeky, but super-awesome. It is--get this--a blog that he writes from the perspective of a super-villain wannabe (kind of like Dr. Horrible, but Matt TOTALLY denies the connection). It actually marries the crappest parts of our lives in a really cool way, since the super-villain wannabe is an academic, but is also tortured by student assistants and mired in bureaucracy.

Seriously, Matt doesn't want me to give you the link (his Google Analytics reads: 2. Me and him. And I thought my blog was underappreciated), but you will be so happy if you check out Super-Villainy. Only Matt says that you have to, HAVE TO start from the beginning, way back in September (can you believe that my husband has had a secret blog since SEPTEMBER???), and read the posts in order.

Oh, and he hasn't posted since January, but he says that's all part of the overall plot and his post tomorrow will explain everything. My guy, such an artist.

P.S. Want to follow along with all the rest of the messes we make? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Come to the Moon

The moon, like Spanish: la luna? Old English: mona. Greek: mene. Latin: mens, mensis (literally, "month"). Welsh: mis. Like, you know, Luna Festival?

I'm so absurdly over-educated that I can't tell if my jokes are actually funny.

Anyway...come to Luna Festival!

Come to buy or come to sell--there are actually still a couple of tables open, and I can forward you the pdf application if you're feeling a little crafty. Otherwise, definitely come to buy.

I really like Luna Festival because it's like a craft fair pre-game--I signed up for five(?) sessions at A Fair of the Arts, and one of my New Year's Resolutions (oh, man, I just re-read those and noticed the "limit junk" one--whatev) was to get into some more national-level craft fairs this year, so Luna Fest is like my small, relaxed beginning to the season. I can try out some new stuff I've been working on all winter, test my pricing, have that extra time to work on signage--all that good money-making good stuff.

I also like to mix up my theme a little: last year I sold at Luna under Girls Love Dinosaurs, and this year I'm thinking of combining some kind of craft kit/rainbow thing. The girls have me unhealthily (unholily?) obsessed with rainbows, of all things----all those pretty colors! Lined up in a neat row! How organized! Fussy yet unfussy!

It's tiresome even for me to hear myself talk, sometimes.

What the Heck is an Armscye? A Tutorial

I have been futzing over armscyes lately.

Not really for my book proposal, since I'm def going with the T-shirt apron instead of a smock, but I'm also (since I did all that work for the smock pattern before I decided to ditch it for the proposal) working on some pattern zines probably to sell in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, but I'll likely have a few copies at each of my craft shows, as well.

Anyway, you might remember that I have yet to sew a single thing utilizing even the simplest of patterns. I have a couple of Built by Wendy patterns, but I haven't even opened the wrapper yet. I'm a really big fan of reading instructions or tutorials, or even just looking at finished projects, and then just sort of figuring things out for myself.

And I've figured out that when you're making a pattern or sewing anything you're inventing, the straight lines are no prob. Especially sewing for kids--they're such straight little noodles that it's basically just your kid's measurement plus a seam allowance. Curves, now...

That's another story.

An armscye is basically your clothing's armpit, and a LOT of items of clothing become ridiculously simple to figure out how to sew if you can just get that one curve:

Easiest way? Copy it from a shirt or dress you already like and that fits well. If you lay the clothing out really flat, you can actually place a piece of typing paper over the armpit area and use a pencil to draw the curve, feeling where the seam sticks out a little. You'll probably need to draw a couple of different armscyes, say one from a T-shirt, one from a fitted top, and one from a dress, because we like our armpits to fit differently depending on the item.

Easier way? Use a pattern drafting template, like Short Kutzor, if you really know what you're doing, a patternmaker software program.

Harder way? Get a piece of wire or bendable ruler that will hold its curve and bend it around your armpit, then trace that curve.

Then make something goofy for your kid:

In other news, this is unrelated to anything and is also pretty offensive, BTW, but I cannot get over the awesomeness that is Why the Frak Do You Have a Kid? It's really bad, like snapshots of groups of smiling pregnant fourteen-year-olds in prom dresses and goth guys holding babies while playing video games, etc.--you know how much I love parenting train wrecks (Hello, Toddlers and Tiaras!). Check out the entry for April 3--I started screaming out loud and basically could not stop for a Really. Long. Time.

It got to the point in which I was drinking a glass of ice water, and I'd have to consciously take a drink, swallow, and then put the glass to the side before I pulled up a new photo.

I'm such a cliche.

Buttons, Buttons, I've Got the Buttons!

So my Matt spent practically the entire day slaving over the computer--he formatted my laptop, reinstalled Windows, reinstalled all my software programs, futzed over drivers that wouldn't install correctly, futzed some more--rendering my computer and himself virtually useless in all other regards all day, during a month in which I have online grades to record, book proposals to write, blogs to post in, an etsy shop to update, research to do, and finally, FINALLY everything is reinstalled and I'm back in the game.

And if the internet is acting wonky again (which was the ORIGINAL PROBLEM, remember?), well, for now I'm inclined just to overlook it and be grateful for what I have.

In other, CRAFTY news for a change, I've been reading and re-reading , and whining to everyone I see all about how in all the other crafty blogs I read, everyone in those blogs is just swimming in vintage buttons, and I have like five buttons, total, that I ripped off of an old Gap shirt (from Goodwill, of course, not The Gap, not that you care) of Matt's before transitioning it into a dishrag.

I couldn't stand it anymore. In a shocking move and a nail-bitingly tense auction, I bought over two pounds of buttons on ebay: This auction actually went a little higher than most of the vintage button auctions tend to do, because of two reasons:

1) The seller, who clearly had no idea of the awesomeness of what she was selling, just sort of mentioned in passing that most of these used to be her grandmother's buttons (DING! DING! DING! DING!)

2) In the sort-of blurry photo of a bunch of the buttons spilled out of the Ziploc bag onto a table, you could see studded all over the pile beauties like these: And now they're mine, ALL MINE!!!

Come on, even if you're not one of my crafty friends, you gotta love a shot like this one:P.S. Check out my shout-outs on Craftzine and Recycled Crafts! Remember, only make plant markers out of vinyl miniblinds that were made after 1996, or you and your loved ones will all die of lead poisoning.

Goodbye?

Directly after posting this, my Matt will be reformatting my computer. He got the internet to work again after reinstalling the driver, changing the wi-fi to a different channel (he thinks), and reinstalling the software. After an entire day of sitting on his butt in front of my computer reading magazines while reinstalling all my software, we discovered that my photo editing software no longer recognizes my camera software, and my graphic design software won't correctly install at all. So Matt downloaded all the Windows updates (which he reinstalled Windows to get rid of yesterday, suspecting that might be why my internet wasn't working), futzed some more, and has decided that reformatting the computer is really the best idea.

Did any of you ever watch Home Improvement on cable? They should totally remake that show with a geek husband instead of a carpenter.

In other news (since I can't download to my computer or upload to you any photos of what I've been up to), I wish you would check out, if you're crafty-minded, the editorial I wrote for Crafting a Green World this morning about how one of the etsy teams I'm a member of, Team Craftivism, recently had itself declared by the leadership a left-wing political group. I'm a big nerd so I'm mostly concerned that the team name no longer accurately represents the team, but the debate over my post there has gotten, um, quite heated, and I'd love to hear your opinion of the whole business.

Reminds me of the wool versus acrylic incident that I started a few months ago.

I am possibly an "inciter."