Heart Handmade: Some WIPs

Are you as stoked to ride the bus as my babies are? No? Well, then it probably wasn't as hell of a morning for you as it was for my babies, cause it was a hell of a morning for the babies this morning. Of course, we ride the bus something like every other day, so it's often a hell of a morning for them. Kids, you know?

And last night, my first night teaching for the semester, Matt made this for dinner:

It's going to be a hell of a semester, I can tell.

When I haven't been pre-screening Gone with the Wind or answering stupid questions ("Do we really need to buy ALL of the required textbooks for this class?"), I've been happily crafting away to a Valentine theme. After having monopolized our big living room table for nearly a week (carpet picnic, anyone?), I've finally finished the papercrafting portion of my Valentine's Classroom Card Exhange swap over at Craftster. Here are a couple of little peekies:

Next comes the beadwork and the adding of Christmas clearance tinsel, and after that comes the making of envelopes from old magazine pages. And then I send them. And then, in return, I get 23 lovingly crafted handmade Valentines from all my swap buddies--squeal!

One of the fun things I've been anticipating about this project is trying out some beadwork with some of the absolutely terrific vintage beads I scored at a garage sale last summer. I bought most of them intending to sell them on etsy, but really they need a more positive identification of provenance and material, so while I'm waiting for the library to buy me , I'm setting aside a few that I'd like to try crafting with myself, primarily ones with less traditional bead shapes that I can dangle as pendants from my soldering work, like these hearts:Resin? Lucite? Beats me. They rock, though, right?

This afternoon while the girls carefully picked out every single dried blueberry from the peanut butter and dried blueberry sandwiches I'd made them (you see why I need a creative outlet?) I finished cutting out the pieces for the two denim quilts with heart appliques that I'm planning--I was doing this a couple of weeks ago, but had to set it aside when I ran out of denim, and last week at the Recycling Center I actually had a pair of denim overalls in my hands, when some guy, I swear to god, walked up to me, took them out of my hands, walked back to his truck, threw them in the back, then got in himself and drove away. I called Matt right there on the sidewalk, totally incoherent with fury, and like a man he's all, "What are you talking about? Why do you want overalls?" Barf.

Anyway, here are some of the heart appliques we're decorating for our lap quilt for the living room:

And seriously, that's not even all of the heart-y goodness! The scrappy heart pinbacks that I put up in my etsy shop made some people happy (and therefore me, as well), so I've been making more. These use some old songbook pages, and I take unmitigated pleasure in putting a definitive sequence of notes on each pin:

I've been so addicted that I inadvertently passed on my addiction to my girls, and they have spent so long painstakingly choosing the exact one-inch circle punched from scrapbook paper and the exact tiny heart punched from a different scrapbook paper for each of a thousand pins each and then "helping" me make their buttons--

--that I've been spending much of that time patiently assisting them and also kind of screaming inside my head.

But it is through these kinds of sacrifices that a future generation of crafty divas is trained.

P.S. Check out my post about how much I heart Craftster over at Crafting a Green World.

But I Have a Disability

If I can't be bothered to learn my students' names this semester, would it be wrong to tell them that I have a disability that manifests as an inability to connect a person's name to their face?

That would be really wrong, wouldn't it?

I might do it anyway.

In Love, and Also Maybe Not

Have I mentioned that I have, of late, become totally obsessed with Old Crow Medicine Show? They may very well eventually join the upper echelons of My Favorite Musicians: Neutral Milk Hotel, Kimya Dawson, Rufus Wainwright, Bright Eyes, and the Pixies. Here's the very well-made and surprising video of my favorite of their songs, "Wagon Wheel."

Incredible.

In other news, I've spent most of my hours today prepping for a new semester--a daily schedule to write, the first week's lesson plans to update, a class Web site to post, videos to reserve, 50 copies of a 9-page syllabus to print and collate and staple, etc. Barf.

My Matt and I have also been goofing around, however, with the toy he bought me for Christmas: a Tamron AF75-300mm F/4-5.6 LD lens with a macro of 1:3.9. It's super-cool--

--but Matt was a little snowed by the marketing because really it's a telephoto lens with the capability of focusing on a subject at a little better than one-quarter life-size, which is one definition of macro, but not a true macro lens. A macro lens is what I've been wanting, and I like the way this one focuses, but the telephoto aspect of this lens means that even to get the macro focus I have to be at least 3.5 feet away from what I'm shooting, and it's a little weird, if not nigh on impossible, to get across the room from the thing I want to photograph. Shots from above are likely out, unless I put my stuff on the floor and then stand on the table?

I have a really poor sense of balance.

Scrappy Saturday

I woke up this morning in the middle of a little-girl sandwich (Matt had long ago escaped to the girls' bed, after they'd escaped to ours). Each little girl snuggled and snuggled up to me, and if I tried to roll from my stomach to my back, the space I left as I rolled would be filled by little girls before I could re-occupy it.

And then I woke up. And then Matt and Will went to their Lowe's Build-and-Grow workshop (do you go to these? They're awesome) while Syd got to watch The Land Before Time as a bribe for being left behind. And then I went to work out (If you ever want to see a bunch of ladies lose their shit, throw them all into Curves with another lady who doesn't change stations every 30 seconds when the intercom says, "Change stations now"). And then we got groceries. And then I ate sushi. And then Matt made me a big desk (out of a door, of course). And then the girls fought over a library book (The book had a giraffe in it--obviously, punches were thrown). And then I finished Ringworld. And then I worked on my syllabus because spring semester classes start on Monday (barf).

And then I made these:

Bear with me, because I'm kind of ridiculously excited about them. They're little, and cute, and made with scraps of paper that I was going to recycle, so that's, like, bonus points, and it's the first time I thought to layer the papers that I put in my button machine, although now I'm all, "Of course!"

And so I made, um... a lot. Some are for my girls, some are to give to Will's classmates on Valentine's Day, some are to save for go-to presents for birthdays and such, and some scrappy little heart pinbacks are up in the pumpkinbear etsy shop.

I'm super excited about the ones I'm going to make tomorrow out of old songbook sheets.

And check out the dinosaur sweater Willow is sporting in her etsy photo shoot--Salvation Army. Twenty-five cents.

If IHad a Wish

Friends, I am about to humiliate myself solely for your amusement.

The back story: When I was very little, I liked to write--well, I still like to write, obviously, but you know what I mean. I wrote stories and poems and product ideas and the rules for games in a succession of random notebooks.

Nearly all of it is utterly atrocious.

Imagine an overweight, unsocialized, extremely precocious, verbally abused, really well-behaved four-eyed girl with an infinite amount of free time on her hands because she was enrolled in no after-school activities (my mother still talks about the ONE Girl Scouts meeting we went to--she was forced to socialize with other mothers (gasp!) while I was forced to clean up after snack time and play a series of intricate games whose rules I was not taught. We did not return) except for Weight Watchers when I was in the sixth grade. My sixth grade teacher also went there, and sometimes I'd see her at weigh-ins.

Now imagine what that child would write:
["If I had a wish," thought Jason as he stared out of the view-screen in his bedroom, "I would be captain of a starship just like Daddy. I would be brave and strong and lead my crew into battles with the enemy. I'd travel the universe and be rich and famous."

Jason Robert Daniels was a small pale 12-year-old with long, softly curling blonde hair and big green eyes. His father, Michael Daniels, was a tall, rough-looking man who captained the U.S.S Empire. He was perfect for an exploratory vessel such as the Empire. The Empire was also one of the first ships to allow the families of crewmembers to live on board. This was hard on both Jason and Michael, since Jason had lived with an ancient-looking aunt for the last 10 years and until last week, had seen his father a total of 14 times. But now that was all to change. Jason and his dad were together, and hopes could run wild.

"Jace," said Michael as he interrupted his son's daydreams, "If you want a tour of the war deck you had better come now." ]

It goes on from there with a LOOOOOOT of description, some father-figure idealizing (Did I mention that I don't actually happen to know my own father? Hmmm...), etc., until...

[Suddenly, the lighting of the rooms turned red and sirens wailed loudly. Jason, now cowering unnoticed in his corner, watched the proceedings too panicked to move. The crew ran hurriedly but orderly to their stations.]

And you don't even want to know where it goes from there. One hint: there is a very wordy, quite melodramatic funeral scene about four pages later.

If you're good to me, maybe sometime I'll show you the story I wrote in which the main character (who is totally me), is a professional racing-diver and finds some caves underneath her house which turns out to be a handy clubhouse for her dozens of super-smart pets.

Nana, 107 Years Later

My Nana was born in 1902 and died in 1999. For those of you who never tasted her apple fritters, too bad for you. I've been writing a series of posts on Crafting a Green World about finding my Nana's quilts stuffed away in a back closet in my Papa's house over Christmas; admiring, airing, fluffing, carefully re-folding them and putting them back nicely in that same closet (likely to be aired, fluffed, and carefully refolded every time I visit); and spending some time exploring the online quilt collections held by museums worldwide.

One of Nana's quilts, however, had apparently been put aside as a wedding present for me and long-lost (I've been married...um...I never can remember off of the top of my head on account of my wedding was a nightmare and I've repressed the majority of my memories of it). The huge fuss I made over Nana's quilts jogged my mother's memory, however, and one quilt that had been stuffed away unseen for probably 30 years now lives in the light on my daughters' bed.I taught myself to quilt a long time before I learned that it's a passion I shared with my great-grandmother. I just hope that ten years after I've died an old, old lady, all the quilts that I've ever made will still be danced upon by little girls in dress-up clothes:

On the Photo-Mosaic Bandwagon

I have to admit, I loooove all the crafty retrospective photo mosaics that I've seen on so many blogs this week. Grouping all the stuff you've made all year all together in one big collage speaks loudly to the power of the handmade and the human touch, I think, especially with the CPSIA looming over our shoulders and my concerned letters to my representatives about it going completely unanswered (Hello, Senator Lugar, can you hear me?).

In that spirit, here's a grouping of my handmade of 2008. Some of this I've sold, some I've given away, some was for me, some was for my girls (ONE thing was for my Matt), some was practical, some was fanciful, and friends, this wasn't even the half of it:
It was a happy year.

Holiday Fast-Forward

You'd think I'd be mellowing in the post-Christmas crash--a New Year begun, one babe back in school, my own semester yet to begin...I have magazines to read, a new Waldorf doll-making book from the library (finally!) to think about, and a DanceDanceRevolution resolution to conquer.

But no, my friends, I have not been "mellowing." I do not mellow. Instead, I have been doing this--

Yes, you with that look of horror upon your face, that is what you think it is--I HAVE been prepping for Valentine's Day.

I have an idea for a denim quilt with denim heart applique that I've been working on for my etsy shop, and a plan for another one but with all the heart appliques decorated by our family (ideally each topped with a red or pink vintage button, although I do not actually own any vintage buttons), and I'm doing some cardmaking for my Craftster swap, and the result of all this is...

Y'all, I ran out of stash. I am about two pairs of blue jeans shy of cutting out all the pieces for my second quilt, and I flat-out ran out of vintage songbook or poetry book pages dealing with the concept of love. So obviously I ran by the Recycling Center today, because their free Sidewalk Exchange is continually rife with ripped blue jeans and crazy old books (I found porn there once! Porn!). But the Recycling Center? Closed! With a big sign out front saying they're closed on Mondays now!

Stupid New Year.

When I found myself standing in the study earlier tonight eyeing my 1936 Kittredge Shakespeare, I was all, "Whoah, lady! Calm on down. You can find some real-live trash tomorrow."

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!

Soup-Chili Hybrid, and Other Adventures

Sundays have the potential to be so awesome, in a productive sort of way (You think productive=awesome, too, right? Um...right?).

Today, I cut out about a million denim hearts and squares for a couple of quilts I have planned. A certain little kiddo hung out with me and practiced her measuring:

(The trick, fellow four-year-olds, is to get the edge of your ruler flush with the edge of what you want to measure. Notice the impeccable form above).

I went to the library and got both a Voltron AND a Thundercats DVD set, but I did not get the book the library ordered and put on hold for me about how to make Waldorf dolls, on account of the librarian was being very weird ("But [my name] has to be present to pick up her hold item." "Um, I'm Julie." "Do you have an ID?" "I have my library card." "Well..."). I'm not kidding you, she looked exactly like the ballot judge who gave me the loopy voting machine intro on Election Day.

I put some nifty little Valentine gifties up on my etsy shop:

I added some New Years' Resolutions to my list (gardening, and seed sprouting).

I got my partners for Craftster's Valentine's Classroom Card swap.

I made this weird but delicious chili-soup thing: You put in the veggie chili mix stuff, but then you put in all your leftover and freezer veggies and fill the pot the rest of the way up with veggie broth, and you get your partner to make up a batch of Bob's Red Mill gluten-free cornbread. Then you mix it all up in a little Pyrex bowl just for you:

I played DanceDance Revolution. A lot.

I ate some more cornbread with ginger jam.

And the big kid is here now to remind me that it's Family Art time.

Ooh, and I think my coccyx has finally healed!

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!

Resolutions, Both Crafty and Not

Sure, sure, I'm happy to be home, but I forgot a little bit that home is chronically filthy, and that cabin was so, so spick-and-span. I'd also perhaps rather spend a few more evenings gazing at this--

--instead of what I'm currently gazing at, which is, in essence, you guys I suppose, so take that as you will--hee!

I wrote up my New Year's Resolutions on the car ride home in my newest and most bestest friend ever (although I took a hefty break around St. Louis to fiddle with and curse Matt's new GPS thingie--you'd think it would know that one whole damn highway has been closed for three months and help us navigate AROUND it to get to Whole Foods, but no, it's all "Take that one highway! No, seriously, take that one particular highway!" Grrr). Here is where I stand:

1. Be healthier (Subpoint #1 Exercise every day. Subpoint #2 Limit junk food). As far as Subpoint #1, I actually did start yesterday this one-month membership at Curves that I won in a silent auction, um...last February? Curves? Is awesome! As far as Subpoint #2, my partner (who's not necessarily still at his beginning-of-our-relationship fighting weight, either) keeps buying orange rolls and frozen pizzas--I don't think he got the memo.
2. Work on book proposals, magazine submissions, and self-published project how-tos. Yep, wouldn't it be nice if I could write AND craft, all at the same time? I enjoyed writing my piece for Craft magazine so super-much that it got the little hamster in my head running overtime on its little hamster-wheel of ideas.
3. Keep a clean house (Subpoint #1 Everything organized. Subpoint #2 Everything neat. Subpoint #3 Everything clean). Yeah, y'all who know me, or at least who have seen certain self-revelatory photos of my study, are laughing your asses off right now, I know, but it's a dream of mine! And just today Matt and I went through all kinds of marital discord trying to agree on fabric storage and an additional table in my study (update: we did NOT agree), and I bought the girls each their own miniature whisk broom, dustpan, and spray bottle for vinegar water. Maybe some work will finally get done around here.
4. Keep working on craft fairs, etsy, and blogging. Cause maybe some day the whole "for fun AND profit" thing will apply to them.
5. Do something good for Matt every week. On account of I heard somewhere that you're not actually supposed to take your husband for granted all the time..........whatever.
6. Decorate the house really cool. I totally want to be one of those people whose house looks really creative and awesome, with surprising yet beautiful paint colors and whimsical little touches and stuff. And while we were at the Re-store today, Matt would not let me buy the aisle of theater seats OR the bank of apartment mailboxes--you see what I'm trying to work with here?
7. Teach the girls every day. I like to make more work for myself, so even though Will attends a half-day preschool, I still feel the need to make their homelife enriching and creative and attentive to all their mental and physical needs--I'm a part-time homeschooler.
8. Get really, really good at DanceDanceRevolution. Cause that counts as exercise, right?

P.S. Check out my two posts about my Mama's old quilts and how to care for them over at Crafting a Green World.

I Highly Recommend Devil's Den to You

As a little reward for staying happy, productive, and composed through the Christmas holidays, our little gang of girls+Matt spent December 30-31 at Devil's Den State Park. It's only an hour from Ft. Smith, high up in the Ozark Mountains. There are all the usual hike-y, scenic, mountain spring-y, forest in winter sights, but the big draws for me are two-fold: (1) an extensive cave system, ranging from cakewalk to not fully mapped; and (2) a cozy, tiny cabin with a big stone fireplace.

Did we love it?

We loved it.

And now we are home, and the pleasure of that is immense, as well.

Sketch Books for Everyone, and Everyone for a Sketch Book

I think my personal favorite little giftie that I slipped into everyone's stocking on Christmas Eve is one of these nifty little Moleskine sketchbooks. Add to that about a million colored pencils, and everyone in the family has been quite inspired:The girls draw pictures and stick on stickers, and ask me to do "color work" with them (I have to write the name of each color (usually in that color) in list format, then draw a box next to each name so that the girl can color the box in its appropriate color--for some reason the kids freakin' love this, and as I've suspected for some time that Will's going to be a whole language reader, it's cool by me.

Our two sketch book rules: (1) You may not tear pages out of the sketch book; (2) You must fill in every page of your sketch book before I will give you another. Yes, I am in charge of sketch book supply and demand.

Matt's the only one who actually "sketches" in his sketch book, of course--you've seen other evidence of his great artistic merit. I, however, am the only one who creates pretty much no artwork of any kind in my sketch book. As far as I'm concerned, my sketch book is instead the Great and All-Powerful Book of Lists:I adore it. Ample and bountiful pages for lists of every kind and dimension, bound in a book small enough to keep in my back pocket, permanent enough for me to keep and refer to and not lose, communal enough that I can write in it while the girls work in theirs, special enough that I can take the care to fancy it up.

And yes, I get stickers, too.

Vintage-y Mama and Papa Goodness

My Mama died a few years ago, and she was very unwell for a very long time before that, so the last time she redecorated her house was, um...a very, VERY long time ago. That means that basically everything in Papa's house now is crazy-awesome in that big orange mushroom, brass, seashell, and wood paneling kind of way.

Interesting fact: On a trip to Graceland a few years ago, Matt and I were stunned to discover that Elvis' kitchen? Looks exactly like Mama's! Y'all, they have the exact same countertops!

Here is some of my favorite stuff:
Big ceramic cat. One time when I was in college, I was saying something to Mama, and she didn't hear my right, and thought that I was saying that I wanted to take this big ceramic cat away with me, and she FREAKED. OUT.

Mama's bell collection. There are two more knick-knack shelves just like this one to the left and right in this hallway, which is so narrow that Matt, who lumbers around like some kind of bear-man, is always just about to crash into them and knock them all, shattered, to the ground every time he goes to the bathroom.

Chairbacks of the dining room chairs. The dining room sits in what used to be Aunt Pam's bedroom, until they knocked the wall out. I don't know what Pam did then.

Photo of my cousin Amy as a child. Cousin Amy was quite a bit wealthier than me, and her parents always generously brought Mama bags and bags of her outgrown clothes for me every time they visited. Amy was older, however I was much fatter, and being forced to try on dozens of her adorable, barely-worn, stylish, too-skinny clothes every few months is among my more miserable memories.

Mama's snowglobe collection. She collected snowglobes late in her life, so that when we were still dating Matt gave Mama that snowglobe of San Francisco there in the foreground.

The 70s-era orange and yellow mushrooms have been right there, in the kitchen, over the wood paneling, for as long as I can remember. They face across the breakfast nook a giant wooden fork and spoon, and a little wooden crate with a plastic hen and a couple of plastic eggs in it.

The Serenity Prayer, cross stitched perhaps by my mother? Its sentiment is well-taken, I hope, in a life in which I, myself, can't control nearly as much as I'd like to or feel called to.

See? Awesome house. And I haven't even told you the best part, that I've spent practically the last 24 hours taking a bunch of Mama's old records, the OLD old kind that's like resin on wood or something, not vinyl, and downloading them to my computer through my brand-new UBS turntable (good story there--more on it later). Papa sees me surrounded by all these record albums and he's all, "Do I go into YOUR house and dig through all YOUR closets?" And I'm all, "I wish you would, if you'd find a bunch of really great and valuable records that I was storing like shit so that they're getting all warped and not only did I find a box and correctly store them upright for you, but I also ripped them all and put them on CDs for you so you can experience their memories anytime."

Of course, Papa is pretty deaf, so I don't think he necessarily heard any of that.

An Ode to Floam, Whatever it's Made of

Fun as Christmas is, it does involve, for us, a ten-hour car trip (twice), a week-long stay in a relative's house (on an air mattress), lots of unfamiliar food (i.e. sugar), and constant exposure to people we don't often see (grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins). The four-year-old is just this year old enough to thrive on this (except for the car ride), but the two-year-old has spent an unsurprisingly large amount of time coping by crashing out at unusual times...
...and in unusual circumstances:
I'm finally learning a couple of parenting tactics, however, and so as you might have noticed in my last post, every single present in the girls' stockings was something To Do. I can make my babies quilts and clothes and lovies any day, but what they need when they're away from home in a house with no kid infrastructure of its own and no same-age kiddos around is wholesome, creative, engaging activities.

Hence the Floam. I don't know what this stuff is made of, and my sense is that it's likely an ecological nightmare, but wow, it's fun. It's made of these little pellet things held together by something sticky but that doesn't make your hands sticky, and you can squish it and pull it and tear it-- --and mold it and squeeze it--

--and when you're done with the highly cathartic sensory experience, you can make a snowman----or a heart for your suspicious-looking lover:

And perhaps because our generous loved ones also gifted my babies with lots of colored pencils and stickers and books and puzzles and musical instruments, and the coveted BALANCE BIKES, or perhaps because the babies are older now and a little more sure of themselves in an unfamiliar surrounding, but there has been a *little* less fussing and fighting and TV-watching and candy-eating this holiday, and a LOT more happy coloring and listening to books and working puzzles and playing games with Grandma Beck.

If this keeps up, I might someday renege on my vow never again to step on a plane with them.

Christmas Stockings on Parade

The best thing about sewing felted wool stockings for my babies is seeing them fulfill their happy purpose in life:

(the matching bracelets sewn by my Christmas in July swap angel)

(travel-sized blank sketch books for everybody)

(stickers and coloring and Floam)

(see the crocheted dolphin, also made by my swap angel)

And then we ate breakfast and played Rock Band and opened presents and ate Christmas dinner and played with blocks and ate more of Uncle Art's devilled eggs and put together dinosaur puzzles and ate blueberry pie and put together the girls' train set and ate pumpkin pie and sketched in our sketch pads until Sydney fell asleep face-first on the dining room table.

P.S. My adorable Cousin Katie, currently eating party mix and playing on her new Linux laptop, says hi.