Not a Renegade This Year

I'm so bummed!

is this weekend, and I am not there! I am here, and I am seriously, seriously bummed. Nevermind the fact that we were just out of town last weekend, and that I have my own biggie craft fair--

--in TWO weeks, for which I am furiously crafting, and that it has apparently been hurricaning down rain in Chicago all day. I don't care! I'm mourning my Renegade!

We all went to Renegade last year the weekend after I failed my PhD qualifying exams (it felt political from the start, since the administration had been weirdly unwilling to give me any maternity accommodations and I had been unwilling to take my exams while tending to a newborn. They did eventually give me a few extra months, but then my committee was just never available to meet to help me prep, and never mentored me the way that all my grad student colleagues said that they were being mentored, and then all of their exam questions seemed to come completely out of left field and I was apparently super unprepared. After I failed, I emailed the chair of my committee and said that I was thinking about not trying again, and she just never emailed me back!), and so Renegade's obvious awesomeness is paired in my mind, I think, with relief that at least the months-long constant cramming was over, and the whole fun and relaxing weekend served as a balm for my very wounded ego. I bought Syd this hat and ordered a matching one for Will----and Syd, who really hadn't been able to walk for more than a couple of months (hence the bare feet even in the slight chill--bare feet=better balance, don'cha know?), followed her big sister along like a true devotee--

--and not just for the snow cone that a big sister will graciously share:

  

I also have lots and lots of photos of this lady--

--which tells me that my kiddo's obsession with dinosaurs goes back further than I'd thought.

I would have loved to have gone back this weekend. And, um, this might come as news to you, but I tend to repress unpleasant emotions, so the fact that I was shot through with misery this morning and burst into tears and could not tell you why may have had something to do with the anniversary. Or it may not--who knows?

I did notice, however, that some of the same vendors I visited last year are there again. I'm quite the handmade soap nut, so I bought some Biggs and Featherbelle soap , and I admired the industrial-strength record album coasters that artreco made.

But there were so many other things that I wanted to buy this year! How will I get this spoon ring now? And the British flashcard toddler apparel? And the faux fur cat-eared hat? Okay, that one I'm just going to have to buy anyway, shipping be damned! And yeah, I'm not even going to kid myself that I could ever afford this, but this bookshelf would look so great in the playroom.

Speaking of the playroom...finally tired of hearing me bitch and moan about the rickety shelves he installed (seriously, this morning they were canted at a 30-degree angle, and they just had fingerpaint and board games on them!), Matt took me to the Habitat for Humanity Restore and did not tell me I was nuts when I called him over to where I was and said, "Wouldn't these doors make PERFECT shelves for the playroom?" Okay, he did swear a lot in the ensuing hours, but tomorrow I'll show you the coolest thing ever to be constructed in our house. Not the coolest thing ever conceived, if you get me, but the coolest thing, by far, ever constructed.

Matt did not, however, permit me to buy the church pew. God, it would have ruled!

Paper and Wood and Felt

The kids spent the entire morning together playing, coloring horse pictures, and guzzling yogurt, leaving me with no other excuse than to spend all morning doing some really nasty, disgusting cleaning. I excavated out a few layers of dishes in the sink, organized the basement playroom, did a million loads of laundry, vacuumed, repaired the vacuum cleaner, cleaned out the refrigerator, found the missing library CD, picked up clutter, etc., while the kids just carried on taking turns and sharing and entertaining themselves, cruelly not rescuing me from such misery. Unfortunately, unless you had a "before" photo to compare the house to, it's still so messy that you wouldn't actually be able to tell I'd done anything at all. But I feel all gross and depressed now, so I guess that's something accomplished!

I'm not one to collect a ton of stash--honestly!--but when a craft store does offer a big sale on an item that I know I use a lot, I do like to stock up. Thus, Joann's 40%-off sale on felt-by-the-yard has had me going there TWICE to buy basically a yard in every color. It's not wool felt, but made entirely from recycled plastic bottles, which I think is absolutely terrific. Sure, wool felt is natural, and it does shape a little better, especially with a steam iron, but I'm opposed to factory farming, and organic wool felt is WAY out of my price range. Anyway...felt made from recycled plastic bottles? Awesome!

I've written before about making felt food with the kids, and next week we're going to make our felt board for the big playroom with lots of felt cut-outs for it. I mostly want to make geometrics and math symbols for them, but I've got enough white felt that the kids can draw on it with markers and cut out their own felt pieces, and I'm thinking about experimenting with my Bubble Jet Set to try to run some felt through the printer--I could print scanned characters from their favorite picture books, perhaps...

Another project the kids and I have been into this week is making animals from these old library FormWild CD-Roms. It's a set of 5 CD-Roms with pdf images of animals--you (not the kiddos--this is one of those projects you do out of their sight because it's way too fiddly and exacting) print them onto cardstock, fold and glue them according to the instructions, and you have three-dimensional stand-up full-color realistic-looking animals to play with! The best part is that there is about any animal that your kids would be interested in, from insects to dinosaurs. We're systematically checking the disks out of the library, and so far we've made every single fish stand-up, two of the horse, and the dinosaurs are in the works. I like to use them to tie into whatever subjects the kids are interested in exploring at a certain time, so I haven't shown them the insects, farm animals, or endangered species yet, and we haven't yet checked out the birds or mammals--but we will! The super-coolest thing, though, is that since the images are pdfs, they expand to scale. The web site says you can print these babies up to eight feet wide and they'll still look good and be constructable. It's been years since I've been to Kinko's, but it's got me thinking--how cool would a set of eight-foot dinosaurs made out of foamcore board be? So cool.

Another so-cool thing? This Web shop, Casey's Wood Products--I've seen it mentioned on more than one blog, and yes, it is so, so cool. The whole site just consists of little wood thingies to buy--die-cuts in a million shapes, pegs and spindles and spools and blocks, game pieces, beads, buttons, wooden fruits. Seriously! Unfortunately, the die-cuts are just made from "plywood" (whatever that REALLY is) and most of the turnings just say "wood"--I would have preferred a definitively eco-conscious material--but the options are really awesome. I could possibly splurge on some of these dinosaur die-cuts for the kids for Christmas--they'd love to color and play with them. But how awesome would these game pieces be for making up your own board game? And bowling pins? And these are turnings you can paint as little people!

Finally, here are a couple of Christmas gift ideas that I'm sussing out for the little kid:

• a learning bike like the one I want for her sister


• a non-plastic dollhouse


• enough colored pencils to last two kids for an entire happy childhood


• cool alphabet tiles that also have braille

Or, you know, 90% of the stuff in my Pinboards or my etsy favorites are stuff I really want for my kiddos. It's weird--I don't even remember what kind of stupid junk I wanted before I had kids. Plastic 1980s-era action figures, probably.

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!

A Fight with Fluttershy, or, How to Sneak Interest-Led Preschool Reading, Writing, and Art into Your Small Child's Media Obsession

Somehow, Will has become obsessed with My Little Pony, without any actual exposure to the cartoon.

Well...I do have a couple of old-school My Little Pony figures from my own childhood that the kids play with, but we all refer to these as "baby horses." I dunno--do the ponies whisper into their brains, "We are really called My Little Pony. Ask your mommy to let you watch our cartoon"? At school, the kids spend half the day running around on the playground--do they intersperse soccer and animal doctor and who can slide down the slide the fastest with "Hey, did you catch yesterday's My Little Pony? Awesome!" Was she somehow exposed to My Little Pony radiation at the video rental place that has affected her on a cellular level?

Whatever the societal ills that have led us to this juncture, Will woke up this morning wanting to draw "a My Little Pony with wings." Okay... I sit her down with paper and markers, she draws for about a second, then scribbles in fury all over her page and freaks out in frustration because her picture doesn't look like the picture in her head. I'm not exactly happy with this, because her unhappiness with her own product makes me wonder if she's been too exposed lately to adult versions of drawing, or adult models of how to create a particular art product.

So I sit down with Will and attempt to talk her through what she wants to create--"Okay, start with a head--good. Now draw a body attached to the head." That lasts for maybe two seconds, with hysterical tears to follow. We're moving, now, progressively down my levels of preferences for how I'd like her to do her art.

First preference: the child creates her own art.

Second preference: an adult talks the child through the creation of the art she wants, while keeping the art materials, and thus the control, entirely in the child's hands.

Third preference: the adult provides the child with a model to copy to create the particular image she desires. So we go together to the Internet and do a Google image search for "My Little Pony," printing off a colorful picture of a candy-bright, chunky-hoofed horse-like critter for Willow to copy. This actually gets her through the creation of one entire picture, when then, unfortunately, is scribbled over and torn up and thrown on the floor in a screaming fury that then requires the said four-year-old to sit in my lap, weeping, for nearly ten minutes. Clearly, we're down to the last resort here.

Fourth preference: I print off some coloring pages from the Internet. My derision for coloring books is manifold--there is little scope for imagination in working with someone else's version of a scene, it models "how to do" a piece of art that my kids tend to want to imitate instead of doing their own far more creative visions, its filling-in-the-blanks doesn't reinforce the kind of manual arts skills I think they should be practicing, etc. However, on the plus side, it finally gives Will an acceptable (to her) My Little Pony picture to immerse herself in, and it's an acceptable way, at least, for her to follow her interest in My Little Pony. 

Speaking of high horses:I'm a tricky mama, however, and now my morning is centered around not cooking or cleaning (yay!), but channeling this interest into an activity equally satisfying for Will, but more in tune with my desire that she do something creative and educational. While the kids colored on these ridiculous cartoon Pony pages, I printed off a few horse coloring pages from the Internet and interspersed them in with the others. Here's Syd's horse:

  

I love the red devil eyes and the fiery red hooves Syd graced her horse with.

Then, while the kids were working on a couple of horse coloring pages, I sewed together a couple of blank books (I have got to remember to put aside a sewing machine needle or two just for sewing paper--I can't believe that I was so immersed in my own little mission that I sewed the books together with the nearly new ballpoint needle that was already in the machine). 

I sat down next to Will at the table and, when she was finished with her horse picture, I said, sweet and innocent as candy, "Here's a special blank book I just made for you. Do you want to tell me a horse story for it?" And Will proceeded to dictate a twenty-minute-long narrative about a unicorn named Chicka-dee-dee who gets a pet bird, meets a herd of unicorns, battles two dinosaurs, falls into the ocean, and disappears herself onto an airplane. Then she illustrated it:

 

Here's the dictation Syd gave me for her own book, and her illustration:

 

Does the phrase "Daddy's little girl" have any significance here?

So, yeah, I'm a manipulative parent who will use my so-far greater intelligence as mere deviousness in order to trick my child away from a pleasure she embraces and toward what I want. Well, if you can't manipulate your children, then who can you legally manipulate?

Curious Little Monkey

My third class session isn't even until tonight, and already I've had the following cliched emails from students:

• the long, meandering story about how he missed class because he couldn't find it even though he "wandered around" Ballantine Hall for 25 minutes looking for it--oh, and there was no capitalization of his sentences--???


• the concise email consisting of four bullet-point questions asking about finicky little details in the five-point homework assignment due tonight


• the stupid question that asks about the exact same thing that I said three times in class on Monday--no, there's no forum open for tonight's homework assignment, because you're turning it in during class!

Normally, I'm actually pretty fond of my classes--teaching isn't necessarily my life's dream, but it has purpose, and I consider teaching some of my fellow humans effective written communication skills to be something of a mission of service. This semester, though, I've just started off really twitchy from the beginning. I dread having to get myself and the girls ready for the parent trade-off, I really miss my family during the three evening hours three times a week that I'm gone, and the late-night bike ride home leaves me still exhausted the next morning. I've also been feeling twitchy about Will's preschool lately, too--Bloomington Montessori is such a terrific school, and Willow absolutely adores it, but it's crazy-expensive, and I'm not sure how well a school institution, even a cool one like Montessori, fits with my parenting values. So, yeah, it is completely impossible this year for me to renege on my teaching contract and pull my girlie out of school, but my reactions at the start of this new school year are something to think about...

Know who else likes thinking about stuff? Curious George!

This is the first quilt I've posted on etsy in a while, since I've instead been making a few for the house, but eventually, of course, I ran into my perennial problem when I find that I really like making something--um, how many T-shirt quilted wall hangings do we need?

With these little guys, though, and unlike with the bigger quilts, I loooove quilting. Can you tell?

I don't normally do a lot of quilting to my full-size T-shirt quilts because they're already so busy that I think more pattern is distracting, but with these single-image quilts it's much easier to quilt a really creative, elaborate design that only enhances the primary image. Yay.

Oh, and yes, the Star Wars quilt is off of my etsy shop--it's happily wending its way over to its new home right now. And no, I don't know when I'll make another. I can only make a full-size quilt after I collect several T-shirts, and that depends on Goodwill and the dumpster diving.

Christmas in July is FINALLY Over

Well, at least it was a happy ending to possibly the longest Craftster swap in history, on account of I got ditched by my regular swap partner AFTER sending her all the stuff I spent weeks making her (don't worry--she has a myspace page and regularly updates it, so, as the swap organizer said, whatever happened to her, she's at the least alive and with internet access), and my swap organizer hooked me up with not one, but TWO swap angels. You can witness the awesomeness of my first angel package to arrive here, but yesterday even more awesomeness arrived.

I had asked for either stocking stuffers for the girls or non-religious holiday decorations, so when the big padded envelope arrived in our mailbox and the girls began to squeal for it ("It's MY present!" "No, MY!"), I lost my head a little and made the mistake of telling the girls that they could NOT look at Momma's special package because it might be Christmas presents. For Christ's sake, you'd think I'd have learned something about parenting in the past four years. Seriously, it was a rookie move, but in my defense, this will be the first year that we're "really," as in not in a half-assed way, celebrating the holiday.

Obviously, then, after I'd actually opened the package while holding it over their heads and peeping inside, when I announced, "Yay, ornaments! You CAN have these now!", Willow immediately snatched everything she could reach and looked like this--

--and Sydney, of course, retaliated by snatching some sweeties of her own: So you can sort of see in my daughters' avaricious grasps the so-cute crocheted ornaments that JennyBear made for us. I don't know if she knows any kiddos, but she somehow knew dead-on that anthropomorphism=awesome. The ornaments have faces!!!I love the birdie the best. I vaguely remember this pattern--perhaps in ?--and it makes me want to make a thousand more for our tree, but I don't think I can come close to imitating this cool embroidery. Have you ever noticed that I'm full of a lot of embroidery talk--Sublime Stitching patterns I want to buy, how-to books I've already bought, clothing I'm going to embellish--but I haven't yet ever stitched a single stitch of embroidery? I am an embroidery poser! I'm the closest I've ever come, though, having recently used my Hobby Lobby birthday gift card to purchase some tear-away interfacing for embroidering on T-shirts.

Anyway... I spent half an hour trying to get some good shots of all this goodness to post in the Craftster swap gallery; meanwhile, the conflict escalated:

(I love how Will is sneaking the bird out of Sydney's hand while she's looking at something else)"No!!! Bird mine!!!"And Willow's main offense is to pretend to be a dinosaur--"Raawr!!!"--and Sydney's main defense is a good offense, and she lunges forward and bites Willow on the chest. Photo shoot ended, double time-out.

How to Sew a Super Quick Felted Wool Diaper Cover

We made books again this morning, among other things. The big kid dictated and illustrated this awesome little story about a butterfly that goes fishing, then finds a hole to live in, until he's scared out of his hole by the Thump! Thump! Thump! of a huge herd of diplodocus stampeding by. The little kid did not dictate any stories, but she DID cause a lot of mess and chaos, which in itself is a pretty well-illustrated story of parenting little kids.

There is always so much drudgery around the house the day after a vacation--clothes to wash, unpleasant smells to investigate, the cat to clean up after, breakfast and lunch to fix without the benefits of fresh food--that it makes me kind of twitchy after a while. So I felt like making something. Of course, the kids were twitchy, too, all fighty and pestery, so I ended up making a super quick ten-minute diaper cover out of an old sweater, because that's all the self-care I had time for. Wanna see how?

Super Quick Felted Wool Diaper Cover: A Tutorial

This tutorial will make a pull-on diaper cover, to be worn over a fitted diaper or a pre-fold that has been fitted with a Snappi.

1. For the quickest diaper cover, you should already have on hand a felted wool sweater or two. You can felt a wool sweater by running it through the washer and the drier a few times until it reaches the right consistency--it doesn't have to be too thick or stiff or anything, but you should be able to stretch it a bit without being able to see through the weave. There is a lot of room for error here, though, so don't get too stressed. Feel free to just throw the whole sweater in the machine to felt it, but if you get really into making things from felted wool, you'll eventually want to start cutting it up at the seams to help it felt more evenly and without wrinkles.

2. Measure your baby around the waist and around her fat little thighs.

The little kid is 18 inches around the waist, and 13 inches around a fat little thigh. You won't need to add in a seam allowance, but you might want to add in a little extra for growth.

3. Measure out an equilateral triangle (three equal sides) on your sweater, with one side (this will be the diaper's waist) made up of the finished hem of your sweater.

4. Cut out the triangle, and lay it out like this:

The finished edge that will be the waist is at the top now, and you fold the bottom angle of the triangle up to touch the top side, and fold the two angles on the left and right in to meet that top angle.

You should have a little square now. The top is the diaper's waist, and the two bottom corners are going to be the leg holes. Halve your baby's fat little thigh measurement (I have 6.5, rounded down to 6 because I'm lazy), and measure up that many inches from each corner and mark it. You're going to be sewing DOWN to this mark on each side.

Later, you might want to experiment here to really custom-fit your kiddo. For instance, if you have a very fat-thighed baby, the rise of your diaper will be lower than it would be on a skinny-thighed baby, but don't worry--the equilateral triangle will work.

5. Sew down from where the angles meet to the leg-hole marks you made. I use a strong thread and a zig-zag stitch to keep the diaper nice and stretchy.

6. For the best water-repellancy, you'll want to lanolinize your felted wool diapers--I use a lanolin-replenishing soap, and it's really not hard.

7. Try the diaper cover on your little ball of blurry motion, and admire:

Well, maybe I'll try again while she's sleeping.

There are a lot of modifications you can make to this simple pattern to make it more attractive and give it even better absorbency:

• Add regular elastic or FOE to the waist and/or leg holes
• Sew on the ribbed cuffs from the sweater sleeves to the leg holes
• Sew on cuffs from a different sweater for a cute color combination
• Make a pair of baby pants out of a felted wool sweater for a winter longie diaper cover
• Applique felted wool embellishments

You can also use this same technique to make a pull-on diaper cover out of fleece, which is nice and light but will be affected by compression wicking (so don't strap your kid into the car seat with it on) or even a thick cotton terry, which technically isn't water-tight but is nice for messy activities or beach play because you can wash it in as hot of water as you want. Or just let your kid run around naked. Whatever.

P.S. Want to also DIY those cloth diaper inserts? Here's my tutorial!

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!

Playroom in Progress

With the advent of the Matt-built rickety shelves and the 40%-off sale on felt-by-the-yard at Joann's this week, the playroom is back in progress. Some inspiration from flickr: 1. house inside house, 2. Dude, I don't think were in Tatooine anymore, 3. Playroom - to your right, 4. playroom, 5. Playroom (image2), 6. orange kids tv room, 7. Playroom with secret door, 8. Playroom, 9. Playroom Bunting, 10. Playroom, 11. Workspace5, 12. Playroom - to your left, 13. Playroom Wall 1, 14. Playroom Bookshelf, 15. children's playroom, 16. nu craft shelf, 17. New craft studio - WIP, 18. craft room 9.07, 19. indie vintage craft room, 20. Flea Market, Thrifted, Recycled...

Now all we have to do is un-rickety the shelves, finish the flooring, make and put up a big felt board, fix the hole I accidentally knocked into the drywall, install a big hinged fold-up-against-the-wall art table, figure out if I want to put up a reading loft or a cargo net for climbing or a tire swing, buy a futon for a guest bed, hang up artwork, and make curtains and a windowseat. See, piece of cake.

I Heart Tim Horton's

So here I am in Belleville, Michigan, sucking down my second Tim Horton's iced cappuccino of the day and utilizing their premium public wi-fi. Tim Horton's beats Starbucks cold, I tell you. But why, you may ask, am I sitting here six hours to the north of the last place I blogged, i.e. my hometown?

• Tim Horton's


• Matt's paternal grandmother, aunt, cousin, and baby cousins (including a six-week-old--squeal!)


• the Found store in Ann Arbor


• IKEA


• Sydney's NICU reunion

And it's been a festive weekend so far. The girls got cherry-tongue at the Ann Arbor farmer's market while Matt and I gorged on an entire loaf each of olive bread and white chedder/jalepeno bread: While we were walking through the covered farmer's market, I spied an awning across the way that read "SuchPrettyColors." Hmm, I thought to myself, that name sounds familiar, and I dragged the family away from the twelve different kinds of tomatoes they were mooning over and went to investigate. When we'd pushed our way through, what did I see but the self-same breastfeeding pendant necklaces that I bought two of on etsy (this one and this one) last year? And there are like four more of them in my wists! The lovely proprietor, Ann Sheppard, comes over, and I immediately screech into her face, "I know you online!" Ann quilts and makes jewelry, among other things, and she has this web site and this etsy shop. I bought yet another breastfeeding pendant, and almost bought this Utamaro one, but seriously, I have to let some other people participate in breastfeeding activism, too. Right? Cause she also does the Sunday artisan's market, so I could go back...

Small world, huh?

The theme for Sydney's NICU reunion at St. Joseph Mercy Health System in Ann Arbor was "Under the Sea." Just like prom, right? There were games and fun stuff for the kiddos--
--although of course we spent the most time at the buffet and the craft table. Totally on-topic for my currently ocean-crazed girlies:
By the way, I have never seen so many multiples in one place in my life. Sydney got to wear a special nametag--
--and Matt remained true to his promise to smack me on the head whenever I got weepy.

It's kind of ridiculous how lucky we are:

Tomorrow--home! I've got lesson plans to prep and two etsy orders to ship and a craft fair to get ready for and Willow's tuition to pay and the yard to lasagna garden and DVDs to return to the library and...

Got Her Red Dress On

Do your kids ever do something so awesome that you just have to take, like, a thousand photos of them in about eight minutes? Every day, I know. Well, if you're not one of these children's grandparents, brace yourselves, because the girls, they played with a grasshopper this morning:


Notice that Sydney's wearing the red elephant dress that I mended for her. I wore this dress when I was her age, and it's a treasure, kept for me with just a couple of other little outfits and a ton of plastic 1980's-era toys to hand down to my own wee girlies. After Syd sliced off most of the lace around the sleeves and some of the sleeves themselves (she's a more confident scissors-user than Willow is, perhaps because Will is left-handed, and every now and then while doing something around the house I'll discover something new that Syd has snuck off and scissor-handed), I hand-stitched these little seed beeds all around both sleeves. It was a crazy amount of work, and next time I will most certainly embellish a hem with bias tape instead, and my work didn't even turn out terrible even----but of course you can't tell when Syd's wearing it. I don't know, though, maybe if she stood still long enough...

Some other Strange Folk

So I've been cyber-stalking some of the other vendors who will be at the Strange Folk Festival with me, the better to plan where to spend all my profits. Here are my favorite fellow recycle and especially eco-conscious artists:

• ARTicles by Teresa: She recycles random stuff, sometimes industrial, into these cool embellishments for journals and scrapbooks--it's a sweet idea. My favorite is this paper fastener made from parts from a watch face.
• Comforts by Ruthann: I am a sucker for hand-crafted soaps, and also unrelatedly obsessed with peppermint and eucalyptus essential oils. Yeah, this soapmaker makes handcrafted soaps with natural ingrediants, including PEPPERMINT and EUCALYPTUS essential oils. Matt insists on only using Irish Spring to counteract my soap indulgences.
• Ettu Handmade Wearables: This concept is so cool--I'm pretty deft at recycling cast-off clothes for my own tykes, turning pants legs into jumpers, sweaters into dresses, and sleeves into pants, but Ettu has a beautiful line of T-shirts from cast-off clothing, matching colors in a creative way and often incorporating my most favorite sleeve type, the raglan. This shirt is reversible with a Christmas theme on one side and a Hannakuh theme on the other--brilliant.
• Gnomeclothes makes reusable cotton napkins, sandwich bags, and lunch sacks. If we can afford to keep sending Will to Montessori when she starts first grade, which is unlikely, we'll probably send her lunch with her most days. How comforting to know she won't have to carry it in a Bratz lunchbox.
• HandBEHG makes cool bags out of wool and recycled wool. She also works with roving to make felted wool balls, a project that I have been dying to do with the girls. Good thing there will be some Strange Folk vendors selling plant-dyed wool roving--goodbye, profits!
• House of ni Lochlainn: I really like this collection of suncatchers and jewelry made from deconstructed chandeliers and vintage jewelry. I have a huge collection of vintage jewelry I scored at a garage sale that I've been meaning to post on etsy, but I just can't seem to make myself say goodbye to it.
• Little Bird Bows: Oh, my freakin' God! A Strange Folk vendor who sews cloth diapers! Breathe calmly and repeat--"I have plenty of cloth diapers. I can sew my own cloth diapers. Also, I have plenty of cloth diapers." Goodbye, profits.
• Revamped Fashion: Clothes for curvy girls made from recycled/repurposed materials? Okay, now I don't have any profits left. Does it count as wearing a skirt if you wear it over pants? Because I don't wear skirts, but I WANT this.
• Did I mention that yesterday, while attempting to cook potatoes and corn on the stove while Matt's ribs (not literally, unfortunately) baked in the oven, I turned on the wrong burner and caught our last remaining oven mitt on fire? I picked it up and held it, looking at it stupidly, until the flames began to lick up to my wrist, then dropped it on the floor, dropped another dish towel on top of it, and when that promptly caught on fire as well I thought about pouring water on the whole thing, thought better of it, and instead opened the oven door and threw flaming dishtowel and oven mitt in with the ribs. Also, I might add--I have no business being in the kitchen. Anyway...how nice that Squaresville makes these cool oven mitts out of recycled denim.
• Trash-to-Treasure Creative Recycling: I am all about heavy metal in my jewelry. Recycled soda cans? Awesome!

You're totally going to Strange Folk, right? Who's your favorite vendor?...Aw, you guys! Besides me!

Scooby Dooby Do, Where Are You?

I'm a real big 80s fangeek. Yesterday the girls found my container of dice from my Dungeons & Dragons days--it's up on the sci-fi bookshelf on account of I like to look at it--and so we all sat around for an hour and played dice: I'm really good at inventing games for preschoolers--in this game, we take turns choosing which die we want to roll, then we roll it, then Willow writes down what number we rolled. Probabilities, number recognition, fine motor skills, turn-taking--see, we're homeschooling! Needless to say, this is Willow's most favorite game, although she might have a change of heart when I show her the Horse Farm computer program I got her from the library today.

In other news of 80s nostalgia, witness my newest mini T-shirt quilt: When I was a kid, I loved Scooby Doo so much. It went off the air eventually, of course, and didn't jump back into syndication for probably ten more years. I was grown up-ish, by then, but I sat right back down to watch this glory of my youth, and thus had the shock of my life: why, the animation was terrible! And that Shaggy--he sounded just like the guy who did New Year's Rockin' Eve! (shudder!) It still is practically the highlight of my teaching career, however, that a few years ago, when the site RatemyProf was really popular, some anonymous student commented that I was "like Velma from Scooby Doo, only funnier." It utterly took the sting out of another student's opinion that "She needs to stop wearing those red boots!"

Anyway...I've become very fond of using a layer of fleece as batting instead of that weirdo polyester junk or the expensive and flat cotton batting, and I looooove how it makes my quilts all warm and thick and squooshy soft, so Iwent a little quilting crazy:

Eh. If you can't go quilting crazy, then how, I ask, can you go crazy?