Which Photo Will Win?

For some reason, I really enjoy the photo contest that our local newspaper runs every year. They always have some theme, and tons of people enter, and it's never totally clear by what exact criteria the photos are being judged, but everybody gets to be in the online photo gallery!

I missed out on entering for the past few years, but the last time I entered, in 2006, the theme was Christmas (or Winter? Or Winter Holidays? Surely not Christmas...). Anyway, here is my photo that was given an honorable mention and published, in the NEWSPAPER, on CHRISTMAS DAY:It kills me that I used to get to snuggle with kiddos that young.

The theme for this year's photo contest is Down to Earth, soliciting photos that depict "some aspect of the natural or built environment in the state." They have to have been taken in 2009, duh, and in Indiana, duh, and it's a little vague exactly what sort of photo manipulation is allowed, but to be on the safe side I kept it pretty vanilla. I also added my own personal criteria that I wanted either one or both of the children to be in the photo, but that the photo shouldn't focus so much on the child, but on her environment or, better yet, her interaction with her environment.

Here are the seven that I've narrowed myself down to, in chronological order with the year, from Monroe Beach in February to Anderson Orchard last month:Beyond that, however, I'm having trouble deciding. Which do you like best?

My Cold-Process Soap Has Cured

Check it out!After letting it cure for six weeks, then using a bar in the shower every day for a few days, I feel it's safe now to pronounce my cold-processed soap a success. There are a few things I'll change next time--I probably should have pared all of my bars before I cured them, because I'm not in love with their lumpy tops compared to their knife-straight sides and bottoms, and, it might be my nasty cold talking, but I'm also not in love with the way that the lavender-spearmint essential oils cured. It smells almost too sweet, now. On the whole, however, I'm definitely making soap again, and soon.

I did end up liking the soap I molded in my silicon heart molds----but not liking the soap molded in my silicon Lego mold. I think that spells the death knell for the Lego molds, therefore, because I didn't like it with crayons or glycerin soap or even muffins, either, and after a good scrubbing you'll likely see the big and the small Lego molds up for a few bucks in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

For this batch of soap I used a kit and recipe bought from The Kitchen Girls. Although I'm grateful that I had the kit the first time, to sort of baby me through, I won't be using that recipe again or buying another kit. Instead, here is a selection of the library soapmaking tomes currently residing in my house:

• Soapmaker's Companion: A Comprehensive Guide with Recipes, Techniques & Know-How (Natural Body Series - The Natural Way to Enhance Your Life)
  
• Essentially Soap: The Elegant Art of Handmade Soap Making, Scenting, Coloring & Shaping
  
• Handcrafted Soap
  
• Designer Soapmaking
  
• The Everything Soapmaking Book: Recipes and Techniques for Creating Colorful and Fragrant Soaps (Everything: Sports and Hobbies)
  

Out of these, I think that I'm going to use a basic cold-process soap recipe from The Soapmaker's Companion--perhaps the Soap Essentials recipe, or the hemp soap recipe, or the sunflower oil soap recipe--but make it without essential oils or dried herbs.

The independent hardware stores (but not the big-box ones) have the lye that I need, and I'm hoping that I can get most of the oils, the olive and coconut and whatever, either from a sort-of nearby restaurant supply warehouse that might have super-low-grade olive oil and such, or from Sam's Club. Whatever I can't get locally, Scott at Barefoot Kids said he could order online for me, and Barefoot Kids already has all the dried herbs I'd want to use in their brick-and-mortar.

After my basic cold-processed soap has cured, however, I think that I'm going to try hand-milling that soap in small batches (this is also called rebatching) to make the scented, herb-infused specialty bars that I want. There's a great Homestead Blessings DVD tutorial for this, if you can get past the denim skirts and gender role stereotyping and blessings of the Lord stuff, which I pretty well can if I'm in the right mood. Rebatching will keep the essential oils from altering their scent like they did with my cold-process experiment, and I like the idea of being able to make a single bar at a time of whatever random stuff I take it into my head to make soap out of.

Since rebatching also avoids the possibility of lye exposure (unless you messed up your soap in the first place), I'm thinking that's how I'll be able to include the girls in my soapmaking.

Although they do make a mean melt-and-pour glycerin bar already.

Talk to the Hand Turkeys

I still have papers to grade and children to give an after-school snack to and two more classes tonight to teach, not to mention meals to prep and a house to clean and other miscellaneous nonsense to look after, but my biggest accomplishment today so far has been Christmas shopping at the Wonderlab. I always buy from them during this week every year, when they double the member discount in their gift shop. And thus I am now the proud owner of two large bouncy balls full of glitter and snowglobe stuff (for little stockings), two small bouncy balls full of glitter and snowglobe stuff (for a future holiday--Easter, perhaps?), a farm magnet playset and a horse show magnet playset (for little stockings), a dinosaur magnet playset and an ocean magnet playset (for the next plane trip, whenever that may be), and a magnet playset of tangram mosaic tiles (to be set exactly between little stockings for sharing, because it was expensive).

Combined with the summer sale at Learning Treasures, which provided my secret stash of miniature chalkboards, dot painters, and blank books; the local comic book shop, where I bought a few Owly comic books; a friend's Usborne book party, where I bought a couple of sticker books; the Chronicle book summer sale, at which I bought a couple of very nice puzzles; and Daiso, where I bought some Japanese magnets and other tchotchkes, the little-girl present closet is full. I pull from that closet for holidays, long trips, and anytime a little girl has to go to the emergency room. We're still on the look-out for a full-size electric piano keyboard (suitable for piano lessons) for both girls and a Willow-sized bicycle for Willow, but those big-ticket items will have to wait until fate thrusts them, second-hand and reasonably-priced, into our path.

To add to the festivity of the secret shopping day (after spending the morning at the Wonderlab with the girls, I dropped them off at school and then went back to the Wonderlab to shop, mwa-ha-ha!), I encouraged the girls to make hand turkeys this morning while I drank coffee and read the newspaper.

Willow's turkey

Sydney's turkey

I scanned these, cropped them to 4"x5", and I'm going to print them and use them to make Thanksgiving cards for the girls to send to some friends and family this weekend. I keep a sort of list, so wherever they get bored and are finished scrawling "HAPPY THANKSGIVING" and their name at will be where they pick up with handmade Christmas cards, and wherever they get bored at with Christmas cards will be where we pick up with Valentines, and if you don't make it by Valentine's Day, you basically have to wait until next winter for a handmade card.

In other news, check out my awesome little cousin. He's a tuba playa in a marching band, an art form that I don't exactly get. It's a hold-out from the Civil War, I think, when formation fighting was incredibly important, and has simply been translated, through the centuries, into formation musical instrument-playing:
The flag corps and the liturgical dancers I can't integrate at all into my theory.

And Then We File Them Away Neatly

I have no context for the following picture, except to note that this is my typical view when blogging or editing photos or writing lesson plans, or otherwise attempting to work on my computer: Picture the computer keyboard directly under the cat (whose name is Ballantine), madly pinging away with irrelevant commands, or perhaps picture the cat lying directly on top of one hand trying to type on the keyboard. If it's morning, change the location to the living room library table and insert an opened newspaper in its usual place directly under the cat, with the most interesting article on the page being the piece of the paper most obscured. This is how the cat ensures that I still love her, even though I have two human children, as well.

In other news, the girls and I have been goofing around a bit lately with our newest novelty--file folder games. We first saw the link to the free file folder games web site on Chasing Cheerios, but we've since become fans in our own right, downloading and printing out and making far more elaborate (vintage wallpaper and plastic laminate are required for nearly every paper craft that occurs in this house, apparently) quite a few of the games, including an alphabetical order game that uses pumpkins for Sydney and an animal alphabet set for Willow to spell with. There are plenty of math games on the site, as well, which I'm excited about because that's the subject that I feel like I'm the least likely to offer casual daily enrichment for the girls in.

Making and playing with the file folder games has served to get the girls interested in their assortment of paper and laminated paper games and playsets again, everything from simple laminated alphabet letters or animal silhouettes to play with, to a large variety of matching games--
--to the various puzzles or other activities that we've downloaded and then personalized together:

I've come up with a neat idea for a child-made matching game that I'm going to try out with the girls this week. If it works, I'm hoping we can use it for Christmas gifts for little cousins, and I'll post a tutorial and perhaps a template for the benefit of all the other little cousins out there in the world.

But the best thing that this new interest has led us to is a vastly better organizational system for these paper-based activities. Previously, I'd been storing each activity or set in a Ziploc bag on a shelf in the girls' room, where it soon gets lost and/or forgotten about. However, these file folder games naturally beg for a hanging file box to store them, and it was then an easy task to round up all these other playthings and assign them to file folders in the bin, as well. And THEN I moved each of the girls' random activity pages (nearly all of them from the free Dover samples that I get each week) from clear plastic bins to folders in the file box, so that now they take up less room!

I've read about some homeschooling families, unschoolers usually, who never have their kids do "worksheets." I even read one book by an unschooling mom, I forget which (tell me, anybody, if you recognize it from the story I'm about to tell), in which anytime one of her children asked to go to public school she'd give them some worksheets to sit down and do quietly, and they'd soon realize from this that homeschooling was way better.

I'm sorry, but I think that's messed up. Mind you, we're not homeschoolers, much less unschoolers, but we LOVE worksheets over here. I love crosswords and puzzles and brain teasers, and my kids love worksheets and activity pages and copy pages and sheets of math problems and whatever else they can do. I mean, I don't enjoy sitting and filling out my taxes or medical forms in triplicate or anything, but seriously, who doesn't love a challenging worksheet?

They're good for your brains, my friends. They keep you from getting Alzheimer's.

Super Etsy

Sometimes good product shots require more than one photo shoot, I've mentioned. So after school on Friday, I drove the girls over to the ginormous playground at Lower Cascades Park, and put the superhero capes that I wanted to sell on them before saying, "Go play."


It was perfect weather, in a perfect playground, and we happened to stumble upon a group of some mom aquaintances meeting there (including the blogger behind Blog Schmog, if you're familiar with that one), so the girls even had a few playmates that they knew to frolic with.

I snuck in probably the barest minimum of what you could even generously call "product" shots, but I figure the most important things for potential customers to see, anyway, are how much freakin' fun it is to play with superpowers:

For a while when the girls were babies I had this thing for collecting fleece baby blankets--they were just so simple and so practical, and you could pick them up for a song at thrift stores--and I accumulated quite a few, none of which I would part with no matter how many times Matt would suggest that the babies were no longer babies anymore.

I'm glad I'm a packrat, because fleece baby blankets are PERFECT for superhero capes. Seriously, perfect. Although only the blue with polka dots fleece superhero cape and the patchwoork with elephant applique superhero cape are up right now in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, I do have several other cool blankies in the line-up, but the absolutely most coolest thing that I'm trying out in my shop is a listing for a custom superhero cape from a kid's own outgrown fleece blankie. I'm hoping that other people might think, like I do, that transforming a kid's old baby blanket into a superhero cape for them to treasure all over again is a fun idea.

I'm also trying out offering a free monogram on each cape (using my good old upholstery swatchbook, of course), although I'll have to remove that aspect from my listings if I get as busy before Christmas as I'd like to be.

I have a couple of other things that I want to kick into gear for my pumpkinbear etsy shop in the next few days--an ad spot on Craftster, some more listings, a coupon for my shop available to Craft Knife followers--but for now I'm going to bake a strawberry half-cake and grill some halves of veggie dogs and Amy's burgers.

Because, as a certain baby will tell you, she is, after all, three-and-a-half years old.

I Glued More Things to My House

Searching for something novel the little girls could make for a friend's birthday party today, I dragged down my first-generation Crayola Crayon Maker from a high, high shelf and showed them how to use it. I never really found the crayon maker that fun or satisfying to use (hence its years-long residence on the high, high shelf)--I think it's fiddly, painfully slow, and prone to error.

The girls, however? Fascinated:
And in all honesty, other than having to seal the crayon mold with duct tape each time to keep the liquid crayons from leaking through the leaky crevices, the crayon maker does still work as advertised, and Will and Syd could work it independently from start to finish--isn't that the main benefit to the light bulb line of craft toys?

And yes, I put it back on a much lower shelf today, to facilitate easier child access.

In other news, I've been gluing things to my house again:
I scored a huge swatchbook of vintage wallpaper at the Upcycle Exchange during Strange Folk, and after discovering (by means of trashing my Cricut cutting mat) that it's all waaaaaaay too brittle to craft with, I decided to decoupage it to the built-in bookshelves in one living room wall.

I know it looks kind of crazy--

--but for me, really, it's rather sedate. First of all, the bookshelves are small, so it's a controlled explosion. Second, all the wallpaper swatches come from the same book, so their colors and patterns are largely complementary. Third, since the living room walls and trim are blue, I just used the wallpaper swatches in the blue color scheme. And fourth, the two shelves done up with florals are moderated by two shelves done up in non-florals.

See? I'm practically falling asleep, it's so sedate.

P.S. In case you, too, want to ruin your house's resale value (as if that hasn't already been taken care of for you), here's my tutorial for vintage wallpaper decoupage over at Crafting a Green World.

More Than One Photo Shoot is Usually Necessary

In preparation for a big update in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, I've spent the past couple of days taking tons and tons of photos of my stuff, glorying in still being able to take sunny outdoor shots, however chilly, before the long winter of grey indoor shots comes into play (my big winter plan is to build an indoor photo studio, btw).

Etsy photo shoots are a lot of work, especially with two little helpers--a half dozen photos here, before pushing the girls on the swings and then heading home for lunch, a half dozen photos there, in a sunny spot on the back deck just before the baby melts down, a half dozen photos on a pretty brick wall that we pass while walking to campus one afternoon. I generally have to utilize careful cropping, or a generous amount of retakes.

For instance, in this photo of a blue and polka-dotted superhero cape that I'm going to hopefully put up in the shop tomorrow (and offer a free upholstery fabric monogram with it, for as long as I have time to make them and mail them before Christmas, so tell your friends!), I meant for you to see Will running around and enjoying the cape and acting all super in it:I did not, of course, mean for you to see that she's running around and acting all super in Rose Hill Cemetery, where we found ourselves YET AGAIN late this afternoon after gymnastics:
I swear, I cannot stay away from that place. I wonder how the caretakers feel about people camping there?

Duct Tape Removes Warts

Y'all, don't think bad about me, but I used to have a wart. It's gone now, but it was totally gross. Just ask Matt--I was all the time showing it to him and saying things like, "This is so gross, look at it!"

It was a plantar's wart, I think, and smack on the bottom of my foot, which tells me that I need to start wearing sandals when I go to the public swimming pool, and it was crazy-painful to walk on, so much so that I was actually popping ibuprofin every morning just to take the edge off.

I tried that over-the-counter wart removal stuff, which just peeled away a bunch of skin which then callused and became even more painful to walk on, and I tried the doctor's office, where a physician's assistant froze it but told me that freezing didn't always work and told me to use duct tape.

And so let me tell you--duct tape is the business. You put the duct tape on to cover your wart, and then every now and then you rip it off and put on a new piece. You can leave the tape off for a while every now and then to let your skin rest, and the whole process does take a while. But it absolutely works.

Nothing happened for a couple of days after I started putting the duct tape over the wart on my foot, but then, on like day three, all these other tiny little warts suddenly started erupting all around the original wart--my theory is that this was other places where the virus was embedded in my skin, and the duct tape was just bringing them all to the surface at once, instead of one-by-one over time for the rest of my freakin' life.

Some people say that the wart will turn black and then fall off with the duct tape, but this isn't what happened with me. All the little warts, and the larger plantar's wart, turned to dead, callused skin, and then, every time I peeled off the duct tape, I would also take off some of this skin. Sometimes the tape would peel off a huge, thick chunk of skin, basically showing how deeply the wart had been embedded--seriously, it was crazy-deep, you should ask Matt--and then leave this huge crater in the bottom of my foot. It was disgusting. And also awesome.

The duct tape didn't hurt, although I've actually been trying this process on Willow, now, for a plantar's wart that she also has on the bottom of her foot, and she doesn't like it when the tape peels off part of the wart, although I think that it may just be the unpleasant sensation of peeling skin that she's reacting to, not actually pain. And it's working on her just the same, although I'm taking my time with the process and letting her foot have plenty of time away from the duct tape, as well.

And when we've used up all our duct tape on all our weird and disgusting skin ailments? I kind of want to make us some commemmorative duct tape roll bangles.

Walking on warts makes feet sore, so we both liked warm footbaths with tons of apple cider vinegar and a generous amount of tea tree oil and epsom salts, as well. But what doesn't a nice, warm footbath cure?

In other news, the girls and I have been spending an oddly large amount of time at cemeteries lately:

I've gotten really into photographing old headstones, because I'm weird and weird people have weird hobbies, apparently. I love looking at the entire landscape of an older cemetery, however--I mean, doesn't that photo above remind you of a sort of post-modern Stonehenge, with the huge chunks of limestone all skewed and plunked down into the green grass?

Once after visiting Stonehenge, I planned this elaborate hiking trip to visit all the mysterious standing stones all around the countryside in Great Britain. And then I grew up and got less weird, but I think I'm cycling back around to more weird again, so perhaps that trip will make it back on my to-do list someday soon.

Super Kids

One of my biggest pet peeves is parents who throw a birthday party for their child and say, "No presents, please."

Dude, it's not your grandpa's sixtieth birthday party--let your four-year-old get the prezzies!

Perhaps I'll feel differently when my kids are older and there's a birthday party every week (although there nearly has been for the past couple of months), but frankly, I have ALWAYS loved to get gifts for kids. When my baby cousin was born I was all of nineteen, and I vividly remember having the best time picking her out a little outfit with watermelons on it at Gymboree. I remember how awesome I felt when I scored another little cousin's most coveted Rescue Hero toy for Christmas, hidden behind some less popular toys on a shelf at Wal-mart. Another time I bought him a stuffed hedgehog that could really roll up into a ball, and I bought the baby cousin teeny-tiny little panties with hearts on them at Baby Gap to convince her to give toilet learning a go, and once my partner and I went in together on a cool little batting machine that had my cousin throwing a tantrum by 11:00 on Christmas morning because he couldn't hit the freakin' ball.

I've coalesced my present-buying strategy a bit over the years, into one in which I no longer actually buy presents, and I get an even bigger kick out of it. Last Christmas, with my partner's help, I made that former baby cousin a set of bookmarks with quotes from the Twilight books on them, and I made that former little cousin a redneck T-shirt quilt--John Deere logos, and Gone Fishin' illustrations, and a lot of camouflage. This year the baby cousin has requested a T-shirt quilt made from her own T-shirts, and the little cousin's present is still a secret, but can you say Tuba Playa?

Anyway, I don't attempt nearly that level of meaning when I make presents for the kids' little friends on their birthdays, but a five-year-old is a five-year-old, and they all like pretty much the same stuff. I've made buntings for kids, and crayon rolls, and play dough, but for my big kid's bestest little friend's birthday this weekend, a friend who has been a bestie for enough holidays that I do believe I've already given her a bunting and a crayon roll AND some homemade play dough, a new awesomeness was in order:

I'm super-excited, because I have been wanting to make the kids superhero capes for EVER. It took a while to figure out a pattern that pleased me (it's all about putting the proper angles on the trapezoid), and it took even longer to figure out the kind of closure that I wanted, but I think I nailed it. The capes are a little on the narrow side, the better to keep out of kids' ways, because the lamest thing around is to be flying around all super and to get caught in your stupid voluminous cape. But the closure? The closure?

Let me tell you about the closure.

I thought about ties, and these work pretty well because you can do them loosely, but I don't know a single kid who can tie her own shoelace, much less her own cape under her chin. Snaps are a sure-fire way to get a kid to hang herself from a tree limb or a chimney post or something, and Velcro? I dislike sewing Velcro, although I will under duress.

Instead I, and this is brilliant, used super-stretchy narrow elastic, stretchy enough that a kid can actually pull the cape on over her head, and stretchy enough that if she did snag herself on a fence, there'd be plenty of give to get herself untangled. Hello, Montessori independence!

So yes, one for my kid, and one for my other kid, and one for a little friend whose party is next weekend, and one for the little bestie, which looks like this:

It's monogrammed with her initial on it in upholstery remnant fabric (washed on the sanitary cycle first and hot-dried, because there will be no running dye on my watch), and on top of it are resting the kids' presents to her. A few months ago, feeling like I was sort of bogarting the whole birthday present business by taking it upon myself to make the present for each of their friends myself, I made up a rule for them:

When attending a friend's birthday party, my child must do one of the following:

1. Buy the friend a present with her own money (the only money around is earned by doing chores, mwa-ha-ha!).
2. Make the friend a present with things found around the house.
3. Give the friend something of her own.

And that's why my big kid bought her friend, with money earned sorting laundry, a set of Halloween yo-yos and a Christmas candy, and the little kid gave her the yellow ball with sparkles in it that is almost her favorite toy.

A super birthday, then, for a super friend. And I am absolutely going to stock my etsy shop this week with some capes made from fleece blankies, with the option of a free upholstery remnant monogram, and perhaps I could have done that today, but I didn't. The super kids had some super stunts to do over at the park, you see, so we were far too busy for money-making.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

I am not enjoying teaching right now, or grading papers, or dealing with the idiot student who thought it would be a good idea to steal some other idiot student's paper and pass it off as his own and now I have to fill out paperwork and meet with the Director of Composition and THEN meet with this student to give him his big fat F in my class before I can give papers back to any of my other students, and if you think those students are happy to have their grades delayed then, boy, you don't know students these days.

When do you think I'll get a nationally-mandated minimum wage for being a committed stay-at-home parent who engages my children and exposes them to enrichment opportunities and cooks them nourishing meals and constantly strives to do better by them? Cause I'd really like to stop moonlighting with these college students--they'd rather be moonlighting somewhere else as well, anyway.

In other news, my own happy kids are rockin' their own school, as usual. One of the sweeter traditions, in a classroom full of sweet rituals and traditions (don't take my word for it--the Montessori birthday ritual is gorgeous everywhere), is to have each child draw a self-portrait twice a year, just before the fall and spring parent/teacher conferences. The work table has a mirror set up in front of it, and blank paper and colored pencils, and the older children (and even the youngest ones, by the spring self-portrait), add a sort of handwriting sampler at the bottom. It's a fascinating look at how a child sees herself, and fascinating how that perception evolves over the months and the years.

I posted Willow's self-portrait at four years and ten months, and so here is her self-portrait at five years and nearly four months: Such an evolution in that kid!

Now, it's possible that Sydney didn't quite understand the purpose of the self-portrait work, since this is her first time, but frankly, I think she understood it quite well, and thus I think that her self-portrait is a pretty clear reflection of who my kid is inside:Yep, that's my kid. Her sister is introspective, socially cautious, and very concerned with understanding the social script of any situation. Sydney, however, is an extrovert who craves attention, and is extremely socially clever, particularly in regards to manipulating situations to achieve an optimum outcome. At the parent/teacher conferences Matt discovered, through shrewd questioning, that the two sub-teachers in the girls' classroom have apparently been unwittingly letting Sydney basically do nothing in the classroom except wander around and hang out. One teacher tells Sydney to hang up her coat. Sydney looks at her blankly, so the teacher demonstrates the activity, in the process hanging up her coat for her. This happens every single day. The other teacher demonstrates a new work to Sydney, and then asks if she'd like to try it. She says no. This happens every single time.

"She's very observant," noted one teacher.

"Observant, my butt. A Montessori classroom is not a cocktail party. It's an experiential education lab, and it's very expensive. Get the kid playing with something."

They promised they would.

Finding My Photography a Home

Well, it's not even really photography. I mean, some of it is--I have a whole set of the alphabet created from photographs of cemetery headstones that I'm working on this week--but most of my printwork consists of handwork pieces scanned at super-high resolution and cropped and color-corrected in my usual photography workflow.

What do you call that? Mixed media? Still life? No idea.

Anyway, with my vintage buttons alphabet I've had several download options available on my pumpkinbear etsy shop for a while now, but for a while now I've also been looking for some good print-on-demand options. My printer has good color and tone, and I'm reasonably happy about using it to print stuff for myself, and especially using it hard to print on freezer paper and fabric and whatever (knowing that if I do eventually break it from making it print on something weird, I'll get to buy myself a new one, yay), but I'm not confident enough in the durability or stability of its work to print so much as a greeting card for a friend with it, much less an art print or something to sell. At two different craft fairs this year, the same woman wanted to buy some prints I'd made for the girls and just had on display, and I was all, "Um...no."

I also don't particularly desire, anyway, to make or buy prints of my work and then sell them--my overall goals in life as well as crafting are to sell stuff and get rid of stuff, not buy stuff and then keep it on hand hoping to sell it later on.

So, yeah. Print-on-demand.

I decided (finally) to try out ImageKind, because I lurve their main company, CafePress--it's another overall goal of mine to someday woo my overworked graphic designer husband into putting some of his cooler free-time sketches on CafePress, but strangely enough, he balks at being stretched too thin.

After much futzing and fiddling, I got a profile (I'm Pumpkinbear there, of course), and a gallery of my vintage button alphabet:

I mostly imagine it being used for its high-quality printing process on greeting cards and notecards and postcards, but I have to admit that it is pretty fun to play around with all the high-priced matting and framing possibilities, and then get a preview of the fanciness that can be had for just a couple hundred dollars:

High-falutin', huh? And I'm quite happy to have this checked off of my to-do list, because now that I have a place to put them, I get to start on some other pieces that I've been wanting to start on...

Don't you love how completion of a to-do list leads to another to-do list?

Babies in Diapers, Babies on Film

Babies in diapers sitting:
Babies in diapers fleeing:Babies in diapers with Velcro:

Babies in diapers with snaps:

Babies in diapers getting bribed with whatever I have around to bribe them with:

I did a little photo shoot over at Barefoot Kids this weekend for a cloth diapering tutorial that I'm writing up. It made me realize that just as I didn't take enough photos of my baby girls breastfeeding, I didn't take nearly enough photos of them in their comfy cloth diapers. I still have a few of their diapers for my teaching stash, but not any of my own handmade wool recovers (what did I do with those? Who was so awesome that I gave them my own wool recovers, and yet so un-awesome that I don't even remember anymore?), and I have absolutely zero breastfeeding mementos, although to be honest, I NEVER, NEVER WANT TO SEE MY OLD NURSING BRAS AGAIN!!! I didn't even try to pass them on, or take off the bands or the elastic or the snaps to re-use. I JUST THREW THEM IN THE TRASH!!!

To be fair, I was nursing one to two people continuously from 2004-2009, so those bras and I were done with each other by the time Sydney weaned herself.

And also? You should totally see my new bras. Underwires and everything.

Two Girls, Two Elaborate Skeletons

This comes directly on the heels of Halloween, but it isn't really a "Halloween" activity, except that, you know, it involves skeletons and I got the idea from somebody else who was doing it as a Halloween activity. So okay, it's probably a Halloween activity, but we did it more in terms of human biology than Halloween.

So there you go.

Anyway...I was inspired by the skeleton puzzle over at Chasing Cheerios enough to dig out (after Halloween, of course) a really cool pdf of another put-together skeleton that I had downloaded and saved almost two years ago. Do you do that? See cool stuff on the internet and save it, even if you don't know when/if you'll ever do anything with it? I have an external hard drive, with something like a terrabyte of space on it, pretty much just for that and my itunes and my digital photography compulsion.

So two years ago I found this really cool skeleton pdf online, meant to be put together with brads as a Halloween decoration but pretty detailed as to its bones and stuff, and I saved it to my hard drive. And yesterday, I printed out two copies of that skeleton and gave it to the girls to color. The girls get really perfectionist and self-judgmental when it come to cutting, for some reason, so they made me cut all the pieces out. Which I did. I'll have to think about whether or not I should go cold turkey on the cutting assists in the future.

And today I got out some of my cheap stash scrapbook paper (I just remembered that I should have used my huge sample book of super-brittle wallpaper that I got from the Upcycle Exchange and that almost ruined my Cricut, it was so brittle. Shoot) and let the girls pick out pretty papers, then gave them glue sticks to glue the skeleton parts to the back of the pretty paper. While I cut that out (again), I gave them each a page on which I'd printed all five pages of that same skeleton all teeny-tiny on one page. They colored the teeny-tiny skeleton parts and I cut them out (ugh).

The girls arranged the big skeleton pieces, colored and backed with pretty scrapbook paper, sandwiched in the pockets of laminate, and we laminated them. Then, while I cut out those laminated pieces (definitely going cold turkey on the cutting assists), the girls glued their teeny-tiny skeleton to a new piece of cardstock, which we also laminated. Sydney made a lovely abstract arrangement of bones, but Willow made, as I encouraged her to, a teeny-tiny skeleton put together correctly to use as a key in putting together the large skeletons.

I had wondered if the whole fun of this activity would be in the creation, but the girls actually then spent quite a bit of time on the floor together putting together their skeletons. I had also assumed that each child would put together one skeleton, but I was pleased to walk by later and see that they were both working together on both skeletons:

And making them hold hands, no less, and go for a walk together.

Such friends that sisters can be sometimes.

Another Halloween for the Record Books

The clown costume was FINALLY finished:I could write books about that yarn wig, let me tell you. And the logistics of actually SEWING, on the sewing machine, with two little girls whose heads are about to explode, they're so excited. Made my head just about explode, too, if you know what I mean. But I digress.

The pumpkins were finally finished, too:

Although Matt had to take over that one after 1) I decided it would be a good idea to try to carve using my Dremel but without the Dremel pumpkin carving kit and turned the livingroom into a pumpkin slaughterhouse and 2) it was discovered, a little too late, that Willow's pumpkin was starting to go bad on the inside and, you may remember, I've had a little thing about smells and just grossness in general after being hyperemetic during both my pregnancies. Matt is now, officially, the yearly Pumpkin Parent.

Makeup was applied judiciously:
And then, with great glee, not so judiciously. Made Will a bit more of a horror film clown than I'd been expecting, but it worked.

It was a perfect night for trick-or-treating:
Our stickers were not exactly the hot item of the neighborhood (One kid, seeing Matt about to drop a handful in his bag, actually pulled his bag away and quickly said, "Uh, no thanks"), but we didn't get egged, either, so there you go.

Of course, all our neighbors are more awesome than we are, so OUR kids got plenty of candy.

Even some candy to share:
When they're too old to share candy, I figure they're old enough to start making their own costumes, don't you think?

With my kids, hopefully it'll never come to that.