A Mother's Day Miracle

If you happen to know anything about my Willow, my talented, incredible, painfully shy Willow, a child who refused to participate in her school's kindergarten ritual of Reader's Chair, a child who weekly declines to participate with her classmates in their class ritual of Speaker's Rug, a child who didn't even want to stand in front of the class on her birthday to be sung to, then you will likely be as amazed as I am at what I am about to tell you.

Willow played in her first guitar recital today.

I am amazed. Awe-struck. Astonished.

Much of the credit goes to Willow's sweet guitar teacher. On the way to her latest lesson, Willow said to me, "I decided that I don't want to do the recital." I said, "Oh, that's fine, sweetie. Just tell Maja that when we get there." We walk in the door to Maja's house, Maja greets Willow and then asks, "Are you excited about your guitar recital?" Willow pauses for a couple of seconds, then quietly answers, "Yes."

Much of the credit also goes to the IU Pre-College Program in Guitar, which I cannot recommend highly enough. If you've ever been the victim of a preschool teacher who treats a class concert with all the solemnity and pomp of a major Broadway opening, leaving a path of weeping children with stress ulcers in her wake (and I have been the victim of this, OFTEN), then you, too, would appreciate the calmness and matter-of-factness in which the director of this guitar program ran the recital: small, well-lit concert hall; children who sit with their parents until their turn and then return to their parents immediately afterward; ample applause both before and after; no microphones; and duets with their teachers for all the youngest players. The only telling point that this small concert was actually taking place in a venue of great importance was the niceness of the outside scenery--

--which was perfect for some pre-concert romping:

Ample pre-concert romping is absolutely essential:

Before the concert began, I gave Willow my camera to keep her entertained. This is how she saw her own first guitar recital:

Guitar Music (Willow performed "Little Bunny," as translated from Serbian

and transcribed by her Serbian guitar teacher)

Guitar (held by Daddy)

When Willow's name was called she marched right up to her smiling teacher on stage, played her (terribly dischordant, out of tune, and off-beat, but who cares?) song in duet with her, and marched right back to us again.

It was a miracle.

Fortunately, I am well versed in miracles:

I've made a couple of my own, you know.

Go On! Let the Baby Spray Paint!

What harm can it do? It's not like she going to sneak out after you put her to bed with her lullabies and stuffed lovies and go out to tag the city.

And if she does do that...well, at least she'll have mastered proper spray paint technique. I HATE it when I walk by some graffiti and I see those big splotches with drips coming down, like the tagger accidentally got the spray paint too close to the wall. Amateurs, seriously.

To teach your baby to spray paint, you will need:

• BIG paper. Seriously, spray paint is not a miniature art. We use those big pads of Strathmore drawing paper, but rolls of newsprint would also work awesomely.
• spray paint. 
• a vertical surface, not an easel. An easel just isn't big or vertical enough. Find a clothesline or a fence to clip your paper to, or attach it to the backs of a couple of chairs that you've got outside. You are outside, aren't you? Because you also need to be outside.

1. Show your child where to stand to maintain the proper distance from the paper. This is really important, because it's instinctive, it seems, to want to creep in closer and closer as you work, but that's not how spray painting is properly done. Spray paint a line on the grass for the kid to stay on, perhaps.

2. Depending on how strong your child is, the proper form that you show them for holding the spray paint will vary. Spray paint actually takes a bit of strength to use. Willow, who is five, can easily spray paint by holding the can in both her fists, fingers toward her paper, and depressing the nozzle with both her thumbs together.

3. Set your kid free!

For us, spray painting is a nice large muscle activity, one of those things that it's fun to do when you want to do some art but you're tired of the kid being a couch-lump in the house all day. Because the spray paint doesn't cake up on the paper, the artwork itself also remains a nice background medium for additional artwork. Will turned the particular piece of art that she created on this day into a sign for the craft fair, and it worked very well.

Next I think I'll have her spray paint her name real fancy across the side of the garage.

Four

One

Two

Three

FOUR!!!

Happy Birthday, wonderful, wonderful Sydney. May your year be filled with as many pink doughnuts and toy ponies as any child could wish for.

Spray Paint and Felt Cake: Craft Fair WIPs

Don't even ask me about my foot. I'm clearly going to have to go back to Promptcare tomorrow and have it amputated or something. Did I mention that the girls were playing with my sewing stuff yesterday and made a mess and therefore I stepped on a hand-sewing needle with my bare foot? Blunt end first? And I had to pull it out with my own two hands, although I thought for a minute that I was going to have to get some pliers?

SAME FOOT!!!!

So no, we're not talking about that foot anymore.

In other news, I've been hobbling around getting my butt in gear for the start of craft fair season on Saturday. The beginning of the season is always so panicky--so many signs to make! Change to aquire! Where's the duct tape? The last-minute panic hasn't yet set in, so today was mostly spent making felt cake--

--in large numbers:

Pimping the EZ-UP:

And no, we're also not talking about the sudden rainstorm that's occuring right now on said EZ-Up before the paint can cure. Just swear a few times inside your head for me.

And, of course, if I'M going to spray paint, then so must the child:

The other child was napping, after having screamed the entire walk home from Chocolate Moose about her skinned side. The second that we got home and I put a Band-aid on the skinned side, it was miraculously all better and she stopped screaming. I did not smack her.

And when Matt got home from work and saw that I was NOT lying down with my foot elevated, but instead SPRAY-PAINTING THE EZ-UP and LETTING THE CHILD SPRAY-PAINT and LETTING THE OTHER CHILD NAP IN THE LATE AFTERNOON SO THAT SHE WON'T GO TO SLEEP TONIGHT he didn't smack me, either. In fact, he brought home pizza (such act is entitled "Cooking Dinner on the Nights When Julie Doesn't Cook") AND helped me finish spray-painting AND took a photo of me looking all happy and relaxed:

Wait until he sees how many craft fair signs I need him to design for me tomorrow...

Good Foot vs. Bad Foot, and the Dinosaurs

My feet are making me very unhappy of late:

See that foot on the left? The one that's bigger than the foot on the right now? The one that's all swollen and hurts to walk on and has that huge, red, gross infection on top?

Yeah, I may have to get rid of that foot. It's been a big disappointment recently.

These are better:

I've been up and about more than I should, but even last night, after that darned disappointing foot forced me into bed with Grey Gardens for company, I could still cut out these felt dinos with my foot up. They're for my craft fair season that starts this Saturday, ideally to be joined by many more things to be sewn and done and otherwise manufactured, ideally to be done on two feet that are well and whole and permit me to stand and walk for as long as I want to.

As far as not meeting that ideal...we won't even discuss that.

P.S. Check out my latest posts over at Crafting a Green World--a round-up of DIY business cards (got to get mine done this week...) and a tutorial for repairing a puzzle by making a handmade puzzle piece.

A Rainy Rainbow Day

Turns out that on a stormy day, an indoor rainbow is just as good as an outdoor rainbow.

Rainbow fruit and veggie kabobs:

Also to eat: rainbow goldfish crackers, leftover rainbow M&Ms, and a rainbow of juices (well, except for the blues--turns out there are no blue juices, so for blue we had Hawaiian Punch, and it was a BIG hit!).

Rainbow reading nook:

Also to do: making rainbow edible bracelets out of Froot Loops and stretchy elastic thread, coloring on a mural wall of butcher paper duct-taped up in the living room, running around in the yard and getting muddy and spraying the hose between rain showers, and all of the  toys in the house. Toys are good.

The masterpiece:

And after:

Thrilling, this cake.

The rainbow party kids:

They were excellent party hosts, polite and generous and grateful and friendly. Well, at the exact end point of the party, when my partner was spraying children's feet mud-free with the garden hose, the older kid did throw mud right in his face, but like we always say, if you're not carried screaming hysterically from a party, then you clearly didn't have any fun.

Oh, and she apologized later.

In other news, one of the nice things about throwing a children's party is the plethora of sensible parents who also attend. As I limped barefoot across the front yard, one mom friend asked me why I was limping. I explained to her that I'd managed to puncture the top of my foot with a stick over at the community garden on Wednesday, and it was still red, sore, and swollen. Immediately, I seemed to be surrounded by a swarm of lecturing mothers, under whose close investigation I do come to wonder, myself, at my situation. I mean, I can't put on my shoe! That's probably not good, now that one comes to think about it.

Therefore, as soon as the party finished, I got on the phone with my insurance's nurse help line (she also lectured me), then bullied on the shoes, got in the car, and after only a brief stop at Vintage Phoenix for Free Comic Book Day, I found myself at the walk-in clinic, with a tetanus shot, an antibiotics prescription, and an order to stay in bed with my foot elevated today.

A day in bed?!? It's like Mother's Day came early this year.

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!

Rainbow Party Project #6: Rainbow Cakes Aplenty

Rainbow cake has basically been a week-long project. But yes, I am pleased to tell you that tonight, the night before Rainbow Party Day, the dream has been achieved.

Tonight, on top of the stove, rests a seven-layer cake waiting to be frosted and decorated with M&Ms on the morrow. Its layers, from top to bottom: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

Y'all, the rainbow cake is REAL!

But no, you can't see it yet. That would spoil the birthday party surprise!

A LOT of thought went into Rainbow Cake. I toyed with the idea of a straight-on rainbow cake, and was VERY inspired by the rainbow birthday cake over at ChocolateSuze, and her awesome rainbow Mario mushroon cake. But I really, really wanted a rainbow layer cake, and I just almost made the 20-layer rainbow cake, also at ChocolateSuze (I am still ABSOLUTELY going to make that one, just another time...).

Most of the 20-layer cakes that people post online are done with crepes, or otherwise very thin layers. So then I planned to just slice each layer in half horizontally, saving one half of each for a later date, but a very smart mom-friend of mine suggested that instead, I pour a small amount of batter into a regular 8" round pan and just watch it carefully to see when it was done. Done and DONE!

And that's how the rainbow cake was built: plain box of cake mix (on Manager's Special for 86 cents!), one cup of batter taken out and colored and spread into the bottom of an 8" round cake pan, cooked for 15 minutes. Perfect.

The girls, of course, were pillars of strength and sources of unending aid, and they also talked me into making an entire batch--24 cupcakes!--of rainbow cupcakes earlier this week just for them to eat. I'm still not sure what that was all about, but it certainly has not spoiled their taste for rainbow cake any, so it's all good.

And how nice to be able to rest my arm for a few of the 450 strokes called for in the recipe:

She learned to do silly voices while stirring from me.

The food coloring that we used is CRAP for your body--seriously, it's made entirely from high fructose corn syrup and those D&C dyes that make kids super-wild--but it's amazingly vivid, and we love it. And how many times have I told the children NOT to put it into straight into their mouths?

Many times. I have asked them not to do this many times.

We did do old-school rainbow for the cupcakes--yes, it's crazy, I baked a seven-layer rainbow cake and then two dozen rainbow cupcakes (well, I ate three, so 21 rainbow cupcakes), because I INVITE TOO MANY PEOPLE TO PARTIES. I need to feel loved, or something. Sydney helped with the cupcakes, in the most excrutiating manner imaginable:

Seriously, multiply that by seven colors and 24 cupcakes. My soul died an hour before we were done, but the child was filled with bliss, what can you do?

I love the randomness of the color when the cakes are ready to bake:

If we don't have our fill of rainbow edibles by the time this party is over tomorrow, it will NOT be for lack of trying on my part.

One of Many Uses for an Overhead Projector

It's old-school, I know. The overhead projector, as a tool of classroom technology, is so old-school that Matt actually scored this one for free from campus, and I heard a nasty rumor that our local public school district, which is going broke and therefore firing librarians and teachers and cutting world languages and music and nature education, etc., dumped off all its overhead projectors during the city's recent day for free electronic waste disposal.

However, we of this house are THRILLED to have an overhead projector. It is crucial to my future plans to write neatly on the walls in Sharpie (stay tuned), and the kids thoroughly enjoy themselves with transparencies, markers, and huge newsprint pages taped to the wall for muralizing. See thusly:

I use my scanner and inkjet transparency film for my part of the enterprise, and the kids use their awesomeness in telling me what they want me to make for them. So far, in addition to the horse skeleton, we have a map of the spread of horses throughout the world, a United States outline, an outline of the 13 original colonies (I love you, Megamaps!!!), and later tonight I promised to make a transparency of the Greek alphabet.

I know, no rainbow project today! But don't worry--the big kid's rainbow party shorts are waiting for me to add a waistband and bias in purple flannel, and in the stove are rainbow cake layers orange and yellow, while the red layer finishes cooling on the counter before being laid in the freezer. And also?

I found the Hawaiian dude's cover of "Somewhere over the Rainbow." This party is going to be AWESOME!

Rainbow Party Project #4: The Rainbow Party Dress

You might think that a party wouldn't necessarily call for a brand-new, handmade, thematically appropriate dress.

You'd be wrong. Seriously, you're talking to the woman who made the children matching outfits for Music Day, and they didn't even perform!

It just so happens that I happened to have in my stash (and I have it because the children begged for it who knows how long ago when we were at Joann's, and it was cheap and also on sale) three yards of sickeningly pink, sickeningly rainbow and hearts flannel fabric. I don't sew with flannel so much anymore, so I have been busy turning all my novelty flannel prints into colored pencil rolls, but pink? And rainbows? It was meant to be.

Here's what it was meant to be:

It was meant to be hers.

The dress is sewn from a vintage children's pattern, the same one that I used to sew Willow's crochet dress--both those dresses are a size 3, incidentally, but you can tell that the crochet material has WAAAAY more stretch. This one is a perfect fit for my almost-four-year-old, in length and width, and it has a terrific fit to it, too, I think, which you don't always find in children's clothing:

The entire dress is trimmed in purple flannel bias--

--and the closures are done in mismatched (but matching) buttons, the buttonholes of which it took TWO sewing machines, and a lot of swears, to sew:

I'd say that the baby looks like an angel in her sweet new dress, but I don't know...

She's the kind of kid who can look awfully naughty just sitting on the couch, you know what I mean?

P.S. Check out my tutorial for back-to-front blanket binding over at Crafting a Green World. Ooh, and in my post about Waldorf dolls, the public is amusingly already up in arms that I so much as mentioned Waldorf's foundation in anthroposophy. It is what it is, people.

Rainbow Project #3: Rainbow Party Playlist

Rainy weekend! Instead of a lot of gardening, I did a lot of sewing:

Notice that the dinosaur quilt has finally reached the binding stage--what has it been...a month now? And after MUCH swearing, I broke out my newer sewing machine (thanks, Grandma Bangle!) to sew some buttonholes, acknowledging that the presser foot plate on my older, and constantly used, sewing machine is too thrashed to do a zigzag stitch without fraying up the thread. I totally got Matt up in there to see if he could rig some sort of repair, but after HE swore a few swores, I have made peace in my head with the fact that I will just use two sewing machines from now on. Nothing wrong with that.

Instead of a lot of goofing around outside and going to the park to goof around and maybe taking the two-wheeler pedal bike out for a spin, Willow did a lot of computer games and painting and puzzles:

I really, really, REALLY love this puzzle, scored from the Montessori Garage Sale, entitled "Industries of Europe." I have a serious weakness for geography puzzles in which the pieces are shaped by geographic boundaries. That, and it cracks me up to watch Willow trying to fit France all sorts of places--Soviet Union, Egypt, Iceland...hmmn.

The biggest weekend project, however, has been to create the most crucial component of Sydney's upcoming rainbow party---The Rainbow Party Playlist. I love a good party playlist, ask anyone. Seriously, anyone.

The playlist's theme is, of course, the rainbow, and all the songs are about rainbows, or at least prominently feature a rainbow metaphor. I have some jiggering to do--there are a LOT of sappy rainbow songs out there, which is bringing down the middle of my playlist, and I still have to score the original Judy Garland "Somewhere over the Rainbow" and an unmixed version of that Hawaiian dude's cover of the same, but here it is in essence:

1. "The Colors of the Rainbow in English" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

2. "Rainbow" by Colbie Caillat, from Breakthrough

3. "Rainbow Colors" by The Wiggles, from Racing to the Rainbow. Have you ever read the Wikipedia entry on the Wiggles? Fascinating.

4. "She's a Rainbow" by The Rolling Stones. I'm gambling that the young partygoers, who will range in age from infancy to six years or so, aren't going to get the metaphor in this one, so it's cool.

5. "Arco Iris" by Sol Y Canto, from El Doble De Amigos

6. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Spanish" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

7. "True Colors," from...ahem...Glee, the Music, Volume 2 (thanks, Kimberly!!!)

8. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Dutch" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

9. "Rainbow" by Paul Lippert, from Rainbow in the Sky

10. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Japanese" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

11. "Look to the Rainbow" from Finian's Rainbow

12. "The Colors of the Rainbow in French" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

13. "Rainbow Connection" covered by Willie Nelson

14. "That Terrific Rainbow" from Pal Joey

15. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Italian" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

16. "Roy G. Biv" by They Might be Giants from Here Come Science

17. "The Colors of the Rainbow in German" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

18. "Eat Like a Rainbow" by Jay Mankita from Putumayo Kids

19. "Rainbow Connection" covered by Jason Mraz from For the Kids Too

20. "The Colors of the Rainbow in Farsi" from Color Wheel Cartwheel

21. "Rainbow Connection" by Kermit the Frog

Later this week, I suppose, I'll deal with the less important details of the upcoming party--plates, silverware, napkins, mowing the lawn--you know, the minor details.

P.S. Check out my review of Making Waldorf Dolls over at Crafting a Green World. As soon as local, happy sheeps get sheared, I'm making myself--I mean, the girls, ahem--a hard-core, true-to-life Waldorf doll.

Rainbow Party Project #2: Rainbow Party Invitations, and a Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Tutorial

The rainbow party projects are going to start showing up fast and furious, with one week to go--and pouring rain coming down, which Matt says means that it DEFINITELY won't rain NEXT Saturday. Okay, sweetie...

So while the rain poured down, the kiddos and I sat down at the big wooden table in the living room and painted ourselves a summer's full of rainbows. Last night, I even dreamed about rainbows, we painted so many rainbows. I cut one huuuuuge piece of Strathmore watercolor paper into 14 4"x5" postcards, although I don't think we'll actually end up having to mail any invitations this year. Still, postcard size is a good size for an invitation.

Wet-on-wet watercolor is just a different way to watercolor, and I don't even necessarily think that the results are that better--just a little different. With wet-on-wet watercolor, the watercolor paper is also wet, and so the paint spreads more, and saturates the paper more easily, and you get that spread, saturated look that always screams "Waldorf!" to me--wet-on-wet watercolor is one of the trademarks of Steiner education.

There are different methods to achieve wet-on-wet, but when we do wet-on-wet watercolor, I give the kids a thick pad of newspaper to work on, which will absorb all the excess water produced during the activity, and then I soak the watercolor paper in a big bowl of water for several minutes, until it's completely saturated:

If you're doing this with larger pieces of watercolor paper, you'll likely need a tub, or the sink, to soak the paper in, and I can't even imagine that you'd want to do this at all with the largest pieces of paper--unless you got several people to crouch around the same piece of paper and all paint at once, a really large piece of paper would dry out before you were done with it. You can also see why you need professional artist's paper for this. It takes a nice paper to still be usable after you drown it.

After the paper is totally saturated, lift it out of the water and, depending on how big the piece is, either just shake the excess water off, like I did with these postcards, or blot the excess water off with a clean towel. The paper will still be wet, of course, but you don't want big drops of water on the surface, because that will dilute the paint.

Then, you paint...

And since these are invitations, I glued the actual invitation that Matt designed onto the back of each one, and there you have it:

A rainbow invitation to a rainbow party.

I can't wait for you to see the ridiculous dress that I'm sewing for the birthday kid to wear.

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Last Thing That I Ever Buy from Chronicle Books

You know that feeling that you get, that powerless feeling when a company tricks you out of your hard-earned money and then treats you unfairly and acts like a jerk in the process? You totally know that feeling, right?

I hate that feeling. I should never have bought from Chronicle Books the second time.

The first time that they screwed me out of my money, I thought it was a fluke. I made a big book purchase from Chronicle as a birthday present to myself, using a coupon code for 30% off my purchase plus free shipping. But the Chronicle web site did this thing, where it showed me the coupon code discount and the free shipping to process my order, but when it emailed me my receipt, it showed me that it actually charged me the FULL price plus shipping!?!

Oh, man, and have you had to deal with any big company's customer service lately? Matt sent those emails that you're supposed to send to the Chronicle Books customer service email address, and NEVER got a response. What's up with that, by the way? Shouldn't you at least get back a form or something? And then he battled the phone tree, over and over again, and NEVER got to an actual human. NEVER. It's like they didn't have any actual human employees working that summer. And we didn't want to just return the stuff and have to battle to not pay return shipping. We NEVER got our money back. Never! And it was a ridiculous amount--something like seventy dollars. Who gets screwed out of seventy dollars by a book company?

So yes, I should never, EVER have gone near Chronicle Books again, never should have ordered from them again, never even should have looked at their site again. And yet I really want an 18-month planner that starts in July, and Moleskine makes one, and Chronicle has such a good selection of Moleskine, and, oh, look! a coupon code for 30% off my total purchase and free shipping!

You guessed it. The shopping cart showed me my discount and free shipping and processed my order with that total, but guess what my emailed receipt looked like?

This time Matt was finally able to get ahold of an actual human, eventually--I think he might have sold his soul at a crossroads in the middle of the night to do it, but he did it. And I won't even tell you how awful it was to have to talk to customer service--how my story seemed to be doubted, how last summer's order was deemed to old to correct, how my request to just cancel the order for that one little planner if the amount that I was charged couldn't be corrected was denied because it was going to ship later today, how I betrayed my own dignity by shouting at the customer service person--but I will tell you that eventually, finally, somehow Chronicle managed to refund the extra charges on that one little planner purchase.

The sick thing, though, is how one incident can make you angry all over again about the incident before. So yay, I got back this money that they were never supposed to charge me in the first place, but I'm still furious, and I still feel victimized. And it's gross how powerless you can feel in the face of personal injustice--they should never have overcharged me last summer, and yet I'm never going to get that money back, and there's nothing that I can do about it.

Fool me twice, shame on me, indeed.

UPDATE: I received an automated email from Chronicle today with the order number for last summer's large purchase in the subject line. The text of the email read, "per Joseph, credit for 174.68." $174.68 was the total of that order. Is Joseph my savior, a deus ex machina who has swooped in with an extremely generous compensation for my troubles? If so, I am now infused with happiness and gratitude and other good feelings evocative of one's power in the world, and thank you, Joseph! Or, since my credit card company hasn't actually noted any credit to my account yet, is it just more administrative weirdness? Time will tell, and I'll keep you updated.