End of the Season

And almost before it began, it seems, the entire season of craft fairs at the farmer's market is over:

Until next year...

Halloween Tree

We haven't, traditionally, been a very festive family--when you're talking about a family who has spent the past two Thanksgiving weekends at a sci-fi convention, of all places, "festive" hardly seems to apply, especially in the face of other, so much more descriptive adjectives, like "geeky" (but hey--Tasha Yarr told Willow she was cute, and Matt and I each found ourselves working out in the same tiny hotel gym all alone with Darth Maul. Is that geeky? Don't answer).

But we can change, I swear it. And in the spirit of such change, I'd like to introduce you to...
...the Halloween tree.

Yes, of course it's dead--it's Halloween! Halloween is a little more of an autumnal celebration in our family, however, with less of the witchy-ghosty-skeletony business and more of the browns and reds and leaves and pumpkins stuff. So yeah, we stuck a big dead branch from our silver maple in a pot, filled the pot with gravel from the driveway, put it on the table, and started decorating.

See? Festive!

I made these ornaments from vintage linen pillowcase fabric that I soaked in Bubble Jet Set, then ironed to freezer paper, then ran through my printer, then stitched and stuffed. They're from autumns past but still remembered:
These are some spiderwebby thingies I made one afternoon in the summer while the girls were stringing beads. They're made from bent wire and beads from the girls' ridiculous bead stash: And here's what we did today, when I wasn't screaming at the girls (combination of my bad reaction to an extra-feisty visit from Aunt Flo along with the girls' completely expected reaction to a candy corn art project gone terribly, terribly awry):
#6 plastic + a full set of Sharpies = Of course, decorating may well be the best part:
Here's to a month full of making fun stuff to hang from the Halloween tree!

Cuter Than Me

I'm ashamed of myself.

Many, many months ago, I bought three yards of brand-new shaggy red-and-white hearted faux fur fabric. I could not resist it, it was so delicious, and on huge sale, and I did have a plan for it, I swear. I'm supposed to be turning it into some nice big fluffy happy comfy pillows for the master bedroom. And so I measured out the amount of fabric I needed for two nice big fluffy happy comfy pillows, and made a little extra into a little dino for my etsy shop--

--and then put the last yard up for sale in the shop just to destash it (I'm not great at figuring out the etsy/Paypal fees, although they are minimal, so I made maybe a buck in profit--nice business practice, right?).

But look what this fabric magically turned into, less than a month after it was purchased--the cutest little teddy bear in the world! So cute, and so quick--I feel guilty that such adorable fabric is just sitting in my study when it has all that potential to be turned into awesome stuff. I have to get off my butt and make those pillows now!

I just wriggle to think of the cuteness that will result after my Strawberry Shortcake crochet patterns book wends its way to its happy new home this week.

TO DO:

23. Shaggy Red and White Hearted Faux Fur Pillows for the Master Bedroom

The Red Cross Gives Me Stuff

Yes, it is my office hours, and so yes, I should be grading stuff, but I just had a ten-minute consultation with a student about her Project #2, and that calls for a half-hour blogging break, right?

In half an hour, I can tell you that today, I baked Bob's Red Mill Gluten-Free Brownies with my squabbling girlies. I hosted a playdate for one of Will's little girlfriends, during which they dragged out every toy owned by either of my children, all of which had been put back in their appropriate spots by me the night before in preparation for said playdate. I sewed ornaments for our Halloween tree while watching season 4 of Numb3rs. At 4:30 pm, I took a shower. I spent half an hour looking for two tutus and one pair of ballet flats. I read some of , which is so far even better than the Twilight series (we're politely pretending that the final book of that series didn't happen, aren't we? Good). But before all that, way at the crack of 9:00 am, the girls and I took their child-sized real metal shopping cart and a big cardboard box over to FREE DAY AT THE RED CROSS BOOK SALE!!!!!
I wrote in a previous comment that I was torn between taking my girls to the children's section or the crafts book table first, knowing that while visiting one, the other would be thoroughly picked over. You know the solution to this problem? Nice old lady volunteer. She took the girls to the children's section and helped them choose books while I gave the crafts table a quick once-over, then ravaged the nature tables for plant and animal books with good illustrations for collaging. The nice old lady system wasn't perfect, as she limited them to picturebooks and her selection was a little religion-heavy (eek!), but I snuck back later and got all the cool stuff, too.

Look at the awesome morbid Santa illustration--he's all grey and dead-looking, and are those badminton birdies falling all around him? I found some other books with Christmas-y scenes, as well--we have about five ornaments in our house, and I'd like to make a ton for our tree and as gifts, maybe with an image decoupaged to each side of a die-cut or cardboard cut-out and then mod podged.

I also found a ton more records for future record bowls--ten or so old-school Disney movie soundtracks and a dozen or so Christmas albums, some old atlases for the girls to cut up when they're decorating the big maps they like me to print out for them, a couple of cheezy craft books that might have some cool projects in them and also might not, lots of vintage children's books, LOTS of books for the cutting and coloring bin (If you and your kiddos don't have a bin of outdated old books to use in art projects, you are totally missing out on some serious awesomeness), and some random kid's book with this most fabulous illustration:

I don't really knit myself, and so I don't know what to do with this fabulous illustration, but it is totally fabulous, right? I'll think of something.

Back in the Etsy Saddle Again

I had fully intended, along with my vow to make nothing for commercial purposes until I'd hooked my own family and home up with some much-needed handmades, to not update my etsy shop, either, until life was feeling more in order.

Nice for those who can afford it, I suppose, but if I really do want to pull through with my dream of being an at-home, self-employed, unschooling mama with a thriving etsy shop and a book deal for one of those crafting/lifestyle/parenting books that are so popular these days (I've got at least two buyers out there, right?), then I probably should at least keep my etsy shop stocked with the stuff that I've already made.

And so, a small supply update for an awesome, awesome book that I found at the Red Cross book sale on Saturday. A how-to manual for crocheting 14" Strawberry Shortcake dolls? Are you kidding me? I haven't yet really found my way with the knitting arts, yet, but man, do I totally need some little Strawberry Shortcake buddies: I also found Walt Disney characters needlepoint book: Embroideries and needlework instruction, good for begging my mother to cross-stitch me, I mean the girls, that scene of Bambi with his mother. Has anybody ever read the real Bambi: A Life in the Woods? It kills me. And the other day at the public library the girls picked out , basically an illustrated reprint of Bambi's birth scene from the novel. I swear, I get a little teary every time I read it out loud.

In other news, my big Syd is queen of the monkey bars:

She also uses the toilet when at home, the little rock star.

Headbands are a Check!

So the house is still pig-filthy, the girls are watching a movie (a Nova documentary on ants, on account of we're weird), I have not graded my two late Project #1 papers nor found a movie clip to show my students tomorrow NOR scheduled their upcoming(!) library day, and Matt and I have no idea what we're going to have for dinner after the kids are asleep, but never fear, my babies have headbands!I meant to just make Will some, since, you know, she's the only one who needs them, but obviously I ended up making matching everything for Sydney, and even a couple of matching ones for one of Will's best little girlfriends. I sewed a denim one for each girl out of old blue jeans and embroidered it, an alphabet-print one out of the fabric I scored at Strange Folk, and a red wool felt one out of what was formerly a dumpster-dived trenchcoat, but the most awesomest of all?

Kerchiefs!These have 3/4" elastic instead of ties, and if I'd known how well they hold my daughter's floppy hair out of her snotty face so that she doesn't constantly have to run her filthy hands through it, I'd have made the girls five of these and no headbands, because they are brilliant.

All that sewing, and we still had time for Matt's softball game (this is the tail end--the girls and I generally go fabric shopping at the westside Joann's after dropping Matt off at the field. Today's score? Shiny tulle at 40% off)----and a visit to both Menard's and Lowe's so that we could set just a couple of our lasagna beds: Yeah, if it looks like the girls helped, they totally didn't.

Of Hand-me-downs, Carrots, and Experimental Ukulele

It's funny how a day can get away from you, full of stuff, nothing planned.

The last wee carrot harvest, all of which were later consumed by Sydney, dirt and all:A big bag of hand-me-downs from Will's best girlfriend, all requiring extensive patching and repair in the little model's fabric of choice, pink satin stars:
One of the beautiful things about little kiddos, by the way, is the way they look at things. You'd think that Willow wouldn't want to wear her best friend's cast-off clothing--that she'd be ashamed of wearing hand-me-downs, or be afraid she'd be teased at school. Nope--Willow is THRILLED to dress like her best friend in her best friend's VERY OWN CLOTHES!!!!! Too bad said best friend has a habit of walking around on hands and knees to play "doggie."

We were supposed to get the fall yardwork done today--putting in the lasagna garden beds, moving shrubs, sowing grass seed, etc. But instead we biked over to Lotus in the Park.

Lotus Fest is our own nationally-renowned world music and arts festival, with prestigious international acts performing on multiple stages both weekend nights. Willow and I were able to go together last year--my favorite act is perennially the Tuvan throat singing, but Willow perked right up at 11:00 pm for March Fourth, an urban marching band with goth costuming, fire-breathing, and stilt-walkers who'll swing by during every number to high-five a tiny little girl bopping along up on her mother's shoulders--but we just couldn't afford to all go as a family this year, so I played the martyr and refused Matt's offer that I go alone, and then I sulked.

Thank god, then, for Lotus in the Park, a day-long, family-friendly, FREE event during which many of the visiting artists perform at an outdoor park. By the way, experimental ukulele? AWESOME!!!Of course, the monkey spent most of the time here: Oh, and of course there was art! See? Masks!
We seriously do have to get back on task tomorrow. The lasagna gardens have to be set, and Matt has a softball game, and I have to choose a semiotically rich scene from the atrocious 1976 remake of King Kong for my students to analyze in class on Monday, and the house is seriously pig-filthy, and I'm almost done making Willow some headbands and would be done if I didn't have to also make identical ones for little sister and best girlfriend, and we've picked out the "Halloween tree" and just need a pot of gravel to stick it in and some ornaments to put on it...

It's funny how a day can get away from you..

Yes, I Am...

...a fangeek. I made this applique to cover some holes in my T-shirt left by another applique I put there just for fun only it looked really, really stupid and also? Made my breasts look very odd. So then, after ripping it off, I actually did need an applique on my T-shirt. The material is a much nicer linen than I can afford, because I cut it out of the extra material from a pillowcase that I sewed a pillowcase dress from.

If you need further proof of my fangeekiness, check out Willow covering the Peter, Paul, and Mary hit "Puff the Magic Dragon:"

She totally sings, right, that Puff lives in the Autoverse? You know, home of Optimus Prime and the Decepticons?

Fine. It's just me, then.

P.S. The list continues:

21. Bathtowels and handtowels to replace the ones that get used for wiping fingerpainty hands and scrubbing yogurt off of the floor just as often as they get used for legitimate body drying. I'd love to sew them out of a thick hemp terry--does that exist, I wonder?

22. Socks, socks, socks, socks!!!

All the Places You Have to Go

Willow: "This is all the places you have to go to get to California. You follow the line, and the circles are where the beluga whales live. The house is a bathroom, and the planets are the sun, the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranijus, Neptune. The pointy thing is the sun, and that other thing [the house] is also a rocketship. That [the letters] spell the building that the paper was made in."

Beer Makes You Happier

So say that you are having a seriously lousy morning. You STILL have some Project #1 papers to grade and you want to return them tonight to your students, who are whiny and demanding and will refuse to understand why it might take more than one week to grade 46 papers that (supposedly) took them two weeks each to write. Add this to the fact that you are actually having some discipline issues in your classroom, which is ridiculous since your students are college freshmen, although they seem to be having an unusually difficult time adapting to your classroom, which is not permissive, accepts no deviation from the stated rules of the syllabus, and requires a lot of unsupervised work on their part. Are you the problem? You know you're unhappy teaching this semester, you find it burdensome and tiring, you resent the time spent away from your family--can the little rats tell?

And of course, since this is a morning in which you need the children to play independently so that you can work, and you can't go to the park because it's too windy to grade papers there, and you can't go to the library because the playroom is closed on Wednesday mornings, the children are also being whiny and demanding. Willow is throwing an hour-long fit because she's cold--she is also naked and refuses to get dressed. Sydney is fully dressed, but you've just had to change her clothes entirely after she stuffed cottonballs down the drain and overflowed the sink onto herself, the floor, and down into the basement.

Clearly, life sucks. You need to make some beer bread. Beer bread is delicious. It's easy. It's bread. It's beer. It's yummy happy comfort food that will bring some small pleasure into your spiteful day.

1. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

2. In a bowl, sift three cups of flour--I sometimes do all whole wheat, sometimes all white, usually a combination thereof. If you use at least two-thirds self-rising flour, skip the baking powder and salt; otherwise, throw in a teaspoon of each. 3. Grab a beer. I have an entire case of Budweiser in the basement that I use only for beer bread, but when I'm feeling especially unhappy, I treat myself by using my most favorite of all beers: You need a tad less than 12 ounces of beer, I assert, so go ahead and take a little swig of that bad boy: If you accidentally drink too much, well, there's always another beer in the fridge, right?

4. Pour in the beer and mix it on up: After you've got it just mixed, you can add it whatever: spices, nuts, shredded cheese, dried fruit. My favorites are pistachios or sunflower seeds or shredded pepperjack. Raisins and garlic were both kind of gross.

5. Spray a loaf pan, pour in the dough, and bake it in the oven for 45 minutes.

While you're waiting 45 minutes for your bready goodness, you've still got your demanding little monkeys to pacify, so whip out one of your faithful documentaries,. Kids sit gape-mouthed on the bed, you get to just nearly almost finish grading:
6. Forty-five minutes later, yum! I tend to like mine with some butter or jalepeno jelly or vegenaise--
--but Willow likes me to melt cheese on hers so that she can then stuff it into her mouth like an animal:
And while you're grading the last two papers and then recording the grades, flush with not so much a sense of accomplishment as resigned relief that the misery is over for a little while, your younger monkey, bored with the bird movie, will scribble over some of your students' papers and then the sheets and then fall fast asleep:

Instead of ahh-ing over how adorable your little daughter is, you will think, "Crap. There goes her afternoon nap."

Hello, writing lesson plans with a baby on my lap!

To Do

So now that I'm done with my big craft fair, and luckily have just enough left over to make for a good display at the final local farmer's market craft fair next month, I have vowed to make nothing else to sell until I work through at least some of a very long list of things I need to make for my own babes and big guy:

1. Dinosaur T-shirt quilt for the girls' bed
2. Star Wars T-shirt quilt for Matt
3. Winter pajamas for the girls
4. These booties: My theory is that I can resize the pattern to make winter slippers for the whole family.
5. Huge felt board, with felt cut-outs, for the girls' playroom
6. Curtains for the girls' playroom
7. Dino quilted wall hanging for the bathroom of the girls' playroom
8. At least two birthday presents for at least two special kiddos in my girlies' lives
9. Headbands for Willow
10. Tied tutu for Will's little girlfriend
11. New pattern templates for my growing girls, based on my most favorite book, Short Kutz
12. Halloween costumes
13. Little girlie winter pants out of old sweatshirt and sweater sleeves
14. Lasagna gardens for next year
15. A good scrub for all the grungy house using the recipes from my other most favorite book,
16. Kid-made Halloween decorations
17. Mom-made Halloween decorations!
18. Must try dryer lint modeling material!
19. Rain barrels!
20. Scrapbooking at least some of the backlog--there's a big backlog

And that doesn't even include all the randomness, such as this brown pillowcase sitting on my desk that is begging to be made into a pillowcase dress for Sydney even though she doesn't need another pillowcase dress, and if I make a pillowcase dress for her, I might as well make one out of this black-and-white pillowcase for Willow, but I could then use the leftover material to make matching headbands, and that counts for my list...

In other news...I didn't have a chance to ask Willow to talk about this art that she created this morning, because she worked on these two pictures literally from the moment she got up and grabbed an adult (one of whom only wanted coffee, the other of whom only wanted a shower) to get her "markers and beautiful paper" to the time that I told her, "Listen, get some pants on or we are going to miss the bus to the library!"

Any interpretive thoughts?

Strange Folk Sunday

The second day of a two-day craft fair isn't quite as awesome as the first day--the excitement's worn off, and it's less busy, with more sightseers out for a wholesome Sunday activity than super-excited handmade fangeeks looking for the next big thing. Instead of only having one thousand people looking at the record bowls and asking, "How do you make these?" or joking "I bet they don't play anymore!" or berating you with "That's a fine thing to do to a good record!" you have two thousand people doing the same. It's still a fun experience, but somehow it's WAY more tiring than the first day was.


But while I was trudging through Day Two, Matt and the girls hit the St. Louis Science Center and the St. Louis Zoo (and yes, I was also bummed that I couldn't go, too!). The St. Louis Science Center is always a top spot on account of the giant anamatronic dinosaurs, but guess what the family found at a special exhibit at the St. Louis Zoo?



Dinosaurs!!!

Such a lucky day.

Today it's back to the grind--freshman comp papers to grade, grocery shopping to do, kid to drop off and then pick up again from preschool, meals to cook and trash to pick up. On the plus side, I've got some #6 plastic, and me and the kiddos are going to make ourselves some Shrinky Dinks!