ATC Swapped

My first grown-up ATC swap (can you believe that Will did an ATC swap before I did?) was pretty much super-fun, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Here's my X card, entitled "Mac's X-Ray":
This didn't photograph well, but it's an x-ray image of a brain tumor that my Mac (different from my Matt--rumor has it that Papa, who is hard of hearing and before my marriage saw me with my best friend as much as he saw me with my boyfriend, combined with the fact that Mac, my best man, wore a tux that was carelessly identical to Matt's, never was quite sure exactly which guy I was marrying until the actual marriage. Gawd, how I love all three of those dumb guys) battled a few years ago, printed onto transparency film and stitched to Bristol board. The words were printed individually onto adhesive paper and adhered to the front of the transparency (I'm afraid they're going to fall off, though--next time, I should figure out how to attach them from the other side of the transparency?)

Here's the X ATC of one of my swap partners. It's entitled "X-Ray":
It's three ATCs that accordion together using those metal rings, which is awesome cool. The images are x-rays printed onto matte paper and then glued onto the ATC paper.

Here's another X, by a different swap partner. It's entitled "Xenograft:"

The top and bottom of the figure are individually cut out and glued together--the proportions are perfect, which amazes me. The background is stamped with lots of letter x, and the postage stamps carry the letter, too.

Here's the V card from a swap partner--it's entitled "V=Villain":

There are a ton of collage elements to notice here--photos, typing, black-and-white copy images, inked parts, parts shaded in with colored pencil, etc.

Here's my W card, entitled "My Little Willow Tree:"

It's cotton quilting fabric quilted to Bristol board, then embroidered using the free-hand tool on my sewing machine with a willow tree.

And here's my V card, entitled "Aunt Vicki":

Again, the photo is lousy, because it's really hard to photograph a transparency. This is a photo of my Aunt Vicki printed onto a vintage book page (The Christmas Carol, I believe), lined up exactly with an identical photo printed on an overhead transparency--they're all quilted to Bristol board with a double row of stitching. The words are again printed individually on sticker paper and adhered to the top, and I'm betting they fall off before the year is out.

I think it takes a year to do all the swaps to equal an entire alphabet--how cool would that be?

Oh, no--I am now also obsessed with alphabets.

What To Do With Four Pounds of Buttons

Did I ever mention that just a few days after winning my super-awesome vintage button auction on ebay, that I won another 2 pounds of vintage buttons with a low-ball minimum bid? I don't know why one auction went so high and the other so low, but there you go...

Four pounds of buttons.

And they become: A button alphabet! I'm so totally stoked by them that it makes me kind of giddy--a perfect de-stresser from a stressful week.

It took me a while to figure out a method, and it's still some convoluted pattern of designing the alphabet in Photoshop, printing it, cutting it out, slicing it down the middle, tracing it onto the paper bag, then gluing each button on, then SEWING it on, because what's the point of a button if you're not going to sew it?

I'd like to eventually make two entire alphabets of these--one to sell individually, and one to sell as a set--and I still haven't figured out what to mount them on or how (fabric? Quilted? Felt? Mat board? Cardboard?), but hopefully by Luna Fest I'll have a first-generation in stock.

Oh, and one for my baby, because for some reason she's going to be three years old next month:
If anyone knows what committee I should contact to protest this whole "time flying" business, I'd appreciate their email address.

We Have Easter Eggs, But He Has a Secret

You might remember how much I've decided that I love the Maine Wood Company (it's now Casey's Wood Products, but I'm SURE it used to be the Maine Wood Company)--I bought all the girls' simple dollhouse dolls there (although I can't BELIEVE that I didn't buy these Star Wars peggies off of etsy), and some dinosaur cut-outs for future kid crafting.

Well, somehow Willow learned about Easter--the egg hunts, the bunnies, the candy, etc. You know, all the important stuff. I figured we could just pagan it up to be a nice Spring celebration (although I sort of already did that with St. Patrick's Day, finding it too odd to be explaining to a four-year-old why we celebrate a holiday about Ireland). The beauty of making it a Spring celebration (just like in pre-Christian times), is that you get to keep all that important stuff!

And that is why I (over)ordered a LOT of wooden eggs from Casey's Wood Products this week. Now, some I want to felt over with my nice rainbow wool roving, and some I want to leave natural, obviously, but the other thousand or so?

The girls and I have been creating our own wooden Easter Eggs. And it RAWKS!

The first thing we discovered is that Sharpies work GREAT on these wooden eggs----you get great color saturation (and now, I do not know why I let the baby use Sharpies while wearing that dress), way less mess, and the marker tip allows you to get a ton of detail: Later I'll show you Matt's Mexican wrestler Easter egg--I am totally going to make him color all the girls' dollhouse dolls now.

Of course, though, it wouldn't really be our house if we weren't sloppily wielding some dangerously messy art supply, now would it? And so OF COURSE we got out the acrylic paints, too: In order to lessen the general level of mud-making (most of the wooden eggs are really quite inexpensive, but of course the girls gravitate toward the goose eggs, which are $2.25 each! Don't worry, though, because I'm going to steal the ugly ones and felt over them later), I limited the acrylic paints to two tones within the same color--red and pink, for instance, or blue and navy. The girls didn't seem to mind, and actually had fun observing the different gradations of pink their advertent and inadvertent mixing came up with:
Next on the Easter (uh, Spring) trail, I have to go over to Joann's tomorrow to buy elastic on sale, and I'm really really REALLY hoping to find this chocolate Easter bunny kit there. I loooove the idea of chocolate Easter bunnies, and hell, I'll eat one, but the chocolate always tastes cheap to me (unless it's also filled with peanut butter, obviously), so I'd be stoked to be able to make myself a yummy bunny with some nice dark chocolate.

Okay, in other news, last night I was doing some stuff on the Internet--I've been totally stressed lately, because some people on this etsy team I'm in are really taking this whole "political is personal" worldview, and basically acting the kind of crazy that you're supposed to just back slowly away from, NOT engage--and Matt walks into the room, sipping a cup of juice from a straw, and says, utterly out of the blue," Would it make you feel better if I told you that I have a secret blog?"

Did you get that, friends? Feel free to do the double-take with me. My husband has a secret blog.
If your husband told you that he has a secret blog, what's the first thing you would think of? Here are my top three: My Blog About the Cats I've Killed. My Blog About All the Little Boys Who Live in Our Neighborhood. My Blog About Funny Things I Do to My Wife While She's Sleeping.

But no, my husband's secret blog is way better. It's super-geeky, but super-awesome. It is--get this--a blog that he writes from the perspective of a super-villain wannabe (kind of like Dr. Horrible, but Matt TOTALLY denies the connection). It actually marries the crappest parts of our lives in a really cool way, since the super-villain wannabe is an academic, but is also tortured by student assistants and mired in bureaucracy.

Seriously, Matt doesn't want me to give you the link (his Google Analytics reads: 2. Me and him. And I thought my blog was underappreciated), but you will be so happy if you check out Super-Villainy. Only Matt says that you have to, HAVE TO start from the beginning, way back in September (can you believe that my husband has had a secret blog since SEPTEMBER???), and read the posts in order.

Oh, and he hasn't posted since January, but he says that's all part of the overall plot and his post tomorrow will explain everything. My guy, such an artist.

P.S. Want to follow along with all the rest of the messes we make? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Come to the Moon

The moon, like Spanish: la luna? Old English: mona. Greek: mene. Latin: mens, mensis (literally, "month"). Welsh: mis. Like, you know, Luna Festival?

I'm so absurdly over-educated that I can't tell if my jokes are actually funny.

Anyway...come to Luna Festival!

Come to buy or come to sell--there are actually still a couple of tables open, and I can forward you the pdf application if you're feeling a little crafty. Otherwise, definitely come to buy.

I really like Luna Festival because it's like a craft fair pre-game--I signed up for five(?) sessions at A Fair of the Arts, and one of my New Year's Resolutions (oh, man, I just re-read those and noticed the "limit junk" one--whatev) was to get into some more national-level craft fairs this year, so Luna Fest is like my small, relaxed beginning to the season. I can try out some new stuff I've been working on all winter, test my pricing, have that extra time to work on signage--all that good money-making good stuff.

I also like to mix up my theme a little: last year I sold at Luna under Girls Love Dinosaurs, and this year I'm thinking of combining some kind of craft kit/rainbow thing. The girls have me unhealthily (unholily?) obsessed with rainbows, of all things----all those pretty colors! Lined up in a neat row! How organized! Fussy yet unfussy!

It's tiresome even for me to hear myself talk, sometimes.

What the Heck is an Armscye? A Tutorial

I have been futzing over armscyes lately.

Not really for my book proposal, since I'm def going with the T-shirt apron instead of a smock, but I'm also (since I did all that work for the smock pattern before I decided to ditch it for the proposal) working on some pattern zines probably to sell in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, but I'll likely have a few copies at each of my craft shows, as well.

Anyway, you might remember that I have yet to sew a single thing utilizing even the simplest of patterns. I have a couple of Built by Wendy patterns, but I haven't even opened the wrapper yet. I'm a really big fan of reading instructions or tutorials, or even just looking at finished projects, and then just sort of figuring things out for myself.

And I've figured out that when you're making a pattern or sewing anything you're inventing, the straight lines are no prob. Especially sewing for kids--they're such straight little noodles that it's basically just your kid's measurement plus a seam allowance. Curves, now...

That's another story.

An armscye is basically your clothing's armpit, and a LOT of items of clothing become ridiculously simple to figure out how to sew if you can just get that one curve:

Easiest way? Copy it from a shirt or dress you already like and that fits well. If you lay the clothing out really flat, you can actually place a piece of typing paper over the armpit area and use a pencil to draw the curve, feeling where the seam sticks out a little. You'll probably need to draw a couple of different armscyes, say one from a T-shirt, one from a fitted top, and one from a dress, because we like our armpits to fit differently depending on the item.

Easier way? Use a pattern drafting template, like Short Kutzor, if you really know what you're doing, a patternmaker software program.

Harder way? Get a piece of wire or bendable ruler that will hold its curve and bend it around your armpit, then trace that curve.

Then make something goofy for your kid:

In other news, this is unrelated to anything and is also pretty offensive, BTW, but I cannot get over the awesomeness that is Why the Frak Do You Have a Kid? It's really bad, like snapshots of groups of smiling pregnant fourteen-year-olds in prom dresses and goth guys holding babies while playing video games, etc.--you know how much I love parenting train wrecks (Hello, Toddlers and Tiaras!). Check out the entry for April 3--I started screaming out loud and basically could not stop for a Really. Long. Time.

It got to the point in which I was drinking a glass of ice water, and I'd have to consciously take a drink, swallow, and then put the glass to the side before I pulled up a new photo.

I'm such a cliche.

Buttons, Buttons, I've Got the Buttons!

So my Matt spent practically the entire day slaving over the computer--he formatted my laptop, reinstalled Windows, reinstalled all my software programs, futzed over drivers that wouldn't install correctly, futzed some more--rendering my computer and himself virtually useless in all other regards all day, during a month in which I have online grades to record, book proposals to write, blogs to post in, an etsy shop to update, research to do, and finally, FINALLY everything is reinstalled and I'm back in the game.

And if the internet is acting wonky again (which was the ORIGINAL PROBLEM, remember?), well, for now I'm inclined just to overlook it and be grateful for what I have.

In other, CRAFTY news for a change, I've been reading and re-reading , and whining to everyone I see all about how in all the other crafty blogs I read, everyone in those blogs is just swimming in vintage buttons, and I have like five buttons, total, that I ripped off of an old Gap shirt (from Goodwill, of course, not The Gap, not that you care) of Matt's before transitioning it into a dishrag.

I couldn't stand it anymore. In a shocking move and a nail-bitingly tense auction, I bought over two pounds of buttons on ebay: This auction actually went a little higher than most of the vintage button auctions tend to do, because of two reasons:

1) The seller, who clearly had no idea of the awesomeness of what she was selling, just sort of mentioned in passing that most of these used to be her grandmother's buttons (DING! DING! DING! DING!)

2) In the sort-of blurry photo of a bunch of the buttons spilled out of the Ziploc bag onto a table, you could see studded all over the pile beauties like these: And now they're mine, ALL MINE!!!

Come on, even if you're not one of my crafty friends, you gotta love a shot like this one:P.S. Check out my shout-outs on Craftzine and Recycled Crafts! Remember, only make plant markers out of vinyl miniblinds that were made after 1996, or you and your loved ones will all die of lead poisoning.

Goodbye?

Directly after posting this, my Matt will be reformatting my computer. He got the internet to work again after reinstalling the driver, changing the wi-fi to a different channel (he thinks), and reinstalling the software. After an entire day of sitting on his butt in front of my computer reading magazines while reinstalling all my software, we discovered that my photo editing software no longer recognizes my camera software, and my graphic design software won't correctly install at all. So Matt downloaded all the Windows updates (which he reinstalled Windows to get rid of yesterday, suspecting that might be why my internet wasn't working), futzed some more, and has decided that reformatting the computer is really the best idea.

Did any of you ever watch Home Improvement on cable? They should totally remake that show with a geek husband instead of a carpenter.

In other news (since I can't download to my computer or upload to you any photos of what I've been up to), I wish you would check out, if you're crafty-minded, the editorial I wrote for Crafting a Green World this morning about how one of the etsy teams I'm a member of, Team Craftivism, recently had itself declared by the leadership a left-wing political group. I'm a big nerd so I'm mostly concerned that the team name no longer accurately represents the team, but the debate over my post there has gotten, um, quite heated, and I'd love to hear your opinion of the whole business.

Reminds me of the wool versus acrylic incident that I started a few months ago.

I am possibly an "inciter."

Two Very Different Schools of Thought

So Matt says that he fixed my computer, but since he also said that three days ago after turning it off and back on again, and then again after rebooting the wi-fi router, and then again after running an anti-virus program, and then again after reinstalling Windows (causing me to have to reinstall all my programs), and then again after rebooting Windows to a previous installation, I'm trying to blog really, really quickly.

Which is ridiculous, since I have a LOT to say.

There was an interesting juxtaposition of activities this week--on the one hand, the spring Parents' Evening at Will's Montessori preschool, and on the other hand, a forum for parents of prospective kindergarteners at our local public elementary school.

I'll do Montessori first, because I think there are going to be some friends who are going to be unhappy with what I say about the public school, so I'll let you get your happy vibes on before that.

So you probably know by now that Montessori classrooms do not welcome parents in on a drop-in basis--the classroom is the child's space, with important work for the child to do, and parents basically just get in the way of all the happy little elf-work. But one night a semester, Will's school has a shortened session to which parents are invited.

This is the animal stamping work. You use the animal stamps to stamp the appropriate number of times under each number--this is one of the first works that the three-year-olds are taught, which is why there are boxes to show you how many goes where. Children are always welcome, however, to do any work that they've been taught whenever they want, and repetition of easier works is something that kids find comforting, and that gives them a sense of how far they've progressed, and helps them internalize certain concepts, sort of like muscle memory for the mind. Will still does this animal stamping work about once a week.
This is a work in which you scoop different objects out of the fishbowl, sort them into separate porcelain bowls, then dump them back in the bowl and sponge up the water. It's a sorting work and a motor skills work to practice the spoon grip.
One of the things that I've found really interesting this year is that in the fall semester Parents' Night, Willow was almost entirely interested in the works that practiced pretty abstract and sometimes complicated mental skills--arithmetic, literacy, a lot of handwriting practice, some geography, calendars, stuff like that. But lately she's been almost entirely interested in the motor skills works--dipping, gripping, squeezing stuff. I've actually noticed this at home, too, in that she's far less interested in thing like mazes and math worksheets and dinosaur identification and the art that she usually loves, and she's been happiest just running around and jumping and digging and messing stuff up and helping me do housework. It's a different stage of development that she's in at the moment, I guess, and I'm very pleased that her school also supports this type of development and allows her to practice satisfying works that challenge her motor skills as well as her academic skills.

In this work you use the tool to move the little balls from the bowl to the platter and then back again. It's terrific for the scissors grip, which lefties often find a lot more challenging to learn, only I've just noticed that my own little lefty is using her right hand here. Sigh.

One of my other many favorite things about the classroom environment is that there are no pictures of kittens hanging from tree limbs or motivational posters (have you seen the site where you can make your own de-motivational posters? Rawk), but there are, instead, hanging quilts on the walls and African drums and these really lovely Japanese prints:This one is a partner work. One child wears the blindfold, and the other child hands her two swatches of cloth--velvet, burlap, cotton, etc. The blindfolded child says if they're the same or different. I think that older children might do an ordering work with this, as well--Montessori young child work is very big on teaching them to order gradations of things, like sounds from highest pitch to lowest, textures from roughest to smoothest, colors from darkest tone to lightest tone. I don't remember the exact philosophy, but it's something about heightened sensory development and deep concentration, or something: This is another sorting work, and I think might be another three-year-old work, as well. It also involves categorization, since you put the insects together, and the plants together, and animals together. Everything you need for a particular work is all together on a little child-sized tray, remember, and you can get it off the shelf and put it back as you like. There are purposefully not enough tables in the room for every single child to do a table work, however, and purposefully not enough floor space for every child to do a floor work, either, because living in a community involves recognizing that the rights of other people are as important as yours and that prior involvement takes precedence. The new thing in the middle group is that you get your first work plan. It helps give the child a well-rounded experience by asking them to, at first, complete a small number of activities in various curriculum categories chosen by themselves and by the teacher. It lets a teacher unobtrusively set a child extra time with a skill with which they might be struggling, and lets children learn goal-setting and the feeling of accomplishment. Older children get increasingly more detailed work plans and are increasingly more in charge of creating and fulfilling them, until in just a couple of years a child's work plan becomes not just a goal chart, but a daily, often hourly, sometimes more frequently-updated record of exactly what that child is doing and what they are learning and have learned at any given time--this, by the way, is a far more complete and accurate record than standardized testing, although our Montessori still participates in some standardized testing, mostly so that the children are comfortable with it after they've left the program.Practical life is also big fun. The girls both have their own brooms and dustpans and spray bottles at home, but sweeping the classroom is still awesome, apparently. Although after Will swept some dirt into the dustpan, she forgot a step and just hung the dustpan up without emptying it, spilling all the dirt right back onto the floor. Oh, well--it's one way to ensure that 30 kids all have some dust to sweep up.You can pet the class gerbils whenever you want and feed them, too, if you see that they need it, but you must ask a teacher to supervise you.For the spring Parents' Night, the children do Speaker's Rug, which is something they do weekly. A small square of carpet is passed around the circle, and when it comes to you, you may stand on the carpet and say something, or you may pass it. Will is the only kid who ALWAYS passes, because she's very uncomfortable with situations in which she isn't sure exactly what the social script is, but she sits respectfully and listens to the other children speak, and she sees that all the other kids do, too, and Speaker's Rug happens every single week like clockwork so it's something that's inevitably going to become familiar and comfortable enough that one day she WILL feel the confidence to get up and speak to her schoolmates.

I love Willow's school. And I hope that will help you see why, exactly, I hated hated HATED the forum at our local elementary school. Mind you, it's supposed to be a good school, and I've thought about that forum, and I'm thinking that (hoping that) perhaps it was just the presentation that went really wrong. Perhaps the teachers and principal COULD have said some things that I would have really liked.

Only they didn't.

What they did do...they went on and on and on about the bus schedule, randomly, in my opinion, since I'm only a PROSPECTIVE parent, and I don't yet give a flip about the bus except to know that there is one and they haven't lost a kid yet. They briefly went over the daily schedule, but it was like "We walk the circle at 8:45, then at 9:00 we have open choice, then we meet in the circle, then we go to an activity, then recess, then lunch, then nap, then reading, then science, then home." Okay...

My friend Noel asked if the kindergarteners ever interacted with the older children (hoping that they DID, you know), and all the kindergarten teachers fell all over each other reassuring all the parents that they watched their kids so closely and they only had recess and lunch with older children but there were assigned seats at lunch and five teachers at recess, etc. etc.

I asked what the teaching philosophy was regarding media exposure, particularly computer and videos, and how did that translate into classroom practice, and one (older) teacher apologized before she said that she didn't approve of five-year-olds using the computer, and then when I assured her that I perfectly agreed, some other teacher jumped in to say that every teacher's classroom was different and that SHE taught her children to properly utilize the computer right from the beginning.

One teacher made a joke that a five-year-old's attention span is about five minutes long.

Another teacher made a joke that when a parent complained to her about all-day kindergarten, she said to that parent, "Well, you can see your kid at night."

You see what I'm getting at here? A lot of this stuff is just normal for teachers to think--hell, the things I think about my students quite often is not printable in a family blog--but very little of this is what, as a prospective parent, I needed to here about the program. I needed to hear what their teaching philosophies are, what their views are on student learning styles and ranges of development, how they handle discipline and teach the kids to handle conflict, how the children are encouraged to socialize and form a community, etc.

Except that then they cut off the presentation portion so that people could fill out forms. I did manage to commandeer one last teacher to ask one last question (No, there's no foreign language curriculum, but sometimes they have a club), but then I admit that I ditched before the school tour. I used to go there a lot for a preschool playgroup, so I've seen the place.

But seriously, it could have just been a bad presentation for a good school. For instance, one of the teachers talked about how at first, the kindergarteners would spend most of their time learning that they had to wait their turn and let 20 kids go ahead of them and that they had to sit quietly and not touch each other. I was telling Matt that this pissed me off, that I did NOT think it necessary that a five-year-old have to learn these particular lessons, but Matt was all, "Of course you do. They do that same stuff at Montessori, only they tell you that it teaches community-building and respect for all people and manners. It just sounds like junk here because they're doing that stuff just to keep order, but it's still the same stuff."

And there was also this really long speech in which this one teacher talked on and on and ON about how we were all going to be so mad at her for the first couple of weeks because she would not let "her kids" leave her from the front of the school at the end of the day until they'd given her a high five and she'd made eye contact with us, because they were "her kids" and she needed to say goodbye to them and we'd just have to wait. I actually replayed this speech in my head for her, something like, "I take my role in loco parentis very seriously. My students must learn that they cannot leave my side without my permission, even to go to another trusted adult. I teach them that they must high-five me before they go to you because this keeps them from running off without supervision and because it gives me time to see you and know that they are going to an appropriate caregiver." See? That sounds way better. And if you could refer to her as your "student" and not your "kid," I'd like that, too, thanks.

I wasn't disappointed in the school, though, really, because I clearly remember the time I've spent in public schools as a student and as a teacher, and so it was never my intent to enroll my girls--when we can no longer afford Montessori, I will joyfully transition the girls to homeschooling--but I was happy that Matt, who's more ambivalent about homeschooling and who has pleasant memories of public school, got to go to this meeting. It's not quite what he remembers, I think, and he knows that we can do better without it.

I'm lying, though, because really I am disappointed. Most people can't afford the money for a fancy-pants private school or the time for full-on homeschooling, and I don't like to think about how it would have felt to have gone to that meeting and come away thinking as negatively about it as I do now, but know that my kids were going to go there, anyway.

FRAK!!!

My computer is messed up. Another word for this is "suck," which rhymes with the word that I say when I can't get onto the internet for more than a minute at a time for the past three days.

And also? Matt almost died last night and I saved his life with the Heimlich Maneuver.

Frakking grapes.

Photos and a real post tomorrow? And internet and ebay and foobiverse and Gosselins without Pity and Crafting a Green World and answering students' emails and PMs on Craftster?

We'll see...

Digitally Crafty

In keeping with my personal theme of family-wide collaboration (and my personal goal of our girlies someday having two independently-employed stay-at-home parents), I've been thinking for quite a long while of ways to incorporate my Matt into some of my crafty work. I learned right away, at about 8 pm on the eve of my very first big craft show, that Matt, although full of big promises--"Sure, I'll help out!"--is completely mentally/emotionally unsuited for actual crafting, or preparing displays, or even helping to set up or boothsit at actual craft fairs, although I make him do those last two things anyway because he has muscles and a girl's gotta browse (and pee).

And while a ton of other ideas that I have (I always have a ton of ideas of varying degrees of impracticality), such as tutorial zines or patterns, could incorporate Matt, those aren't really creative uses for him, more just utilizing his graphic designer expertise in Adobe Illustrator CS4.

There are ways to do craft digitally, though. Not only are there some graphic designers who do handcraft, like the lastest EtsyBlogger featured blogger--

--but handcraft is one area that really appreciates good design, and I've noticed, especially lately, a lot of digital design being sold in the supply market. Shabby Princess, for example, sells (and gives away), these really elaborate digital scrapbooking kits with papers and fonts and realistic-looking embellishments and journal tags and stuff, all digital, and there are a lot of shops on etsy that have been selling digital collage sheets for printing and incorporating into physical craft work.

And that explains why Matt's working right now on a comic book-themed digital scrapbooking kit for my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

On account of we're still big dorks.

In other news, awesome Matt went out to run some errands on Friday night and came home with chocolate and . You might remember that I'm a big fan of the first books (though I'd rather just forget that the last book even happened; as far as I'm concerned, she wrote The Host instead, not along with), and I was really eager to see the movie, despite the mixed reviews.

My opinion? A mixed review.

Some of the negatives, mind you, are hard to remedy and are just really part of the product--for instance, I think it's a very rare child who can act, and therefore I accept the fact that unless a film is extremely carefully written and directed or unless an extremely gifted child actor is chosen, the young actor will just not be that great. And that's something you just have to accept. So it really didn't bother me that the kid who played Edward Cullen, or the kids who played all their friends, had pretty spotty performances. Seriously, Daniel Radcliffe can't do EVERY acting role available to young men, now can he?

I did think that the role for Bella was written in such a way that the actress could and did perform it well. Bella's supposed to be a loner at first, cautious at first, a little wary of showing emotion at first--this mostly requires that the actress look solemn and non-reactive, and she nailed it.

The various reveals of the various plot points were also a little spotty, as if the writer and director couldn't decide if they wanted you to have read the book first and therefore know what's going to happen or not. Again, part of the film-from-book product.

Okay, but the point is that I thought the movie was both terrible AND awesome. The cinematography was terrific--evocative of the mood of the film, and that and just everything else about the film was just so modern-day gothic that it was really, really gluttonously fun. So maybe you didn't have to take the GRE Literature and thus didn't read The Monk or the The Mysteries of Udolpho or any of that stuff, but as a former literary scholar I just ate it up! The music fit, the forest scenes REALLY fit, and hell, even the melodramatic acting really fit in with the overall theme.

And that's why every time Matt was groaning in disgust during this whole film, I was going "SQUEAAAL!"

Because I'm smarter than him.

My Pumpkinbear Etsy Shop is Presentable Again!

What with, you know, parenting and teaching freshman comp and cooking food and starting seeds and sewing presents for little-kid birthday parties and cleaning and writing my book proposal and making patterns for my book proposal and creating some Artist Trading Cards for my Craftster ATC WXY swap and blah blah blah, my pumpkinbear etsy shop was growing sadly neglected, and it was starting to make me feel antsy.

So off and on this weekend, in between the sewing and seed starting and stuff, I found some time to update. It didn't help that the weather turned (AGAIN!) and so all my photos are weirdly lit, but perfect lighting or not, they're up, and that's better than perfect lighting.

The fun thing is that I managed to update with a lot of really different stuff, some of which I've been sitting on for too long due to just doing other stuff. So I've got some vintage crafting stuff, like this crazy-awesome lap loom, with all its parts AND an instruction book, that I happened upon fortuitously one day:

Matt made his first digital collage sheet for me, just a simple one-inch set of the international breastfeeding symbol images that we use to make pinbacks, so that other crafty people with button machines can make their own fundraisers for their own natural birthing advocacy organizations: I sold off all my other comic book pinbacks and doily pinbacks, so I FINALLY relisted a set of each: I have to make some more of the black doily pinbacks before I can relist those, but I'm still on this random rainbow kick, and so I'm also absurdly stoked by my rainbow doily pinbacks.

And finally, now that I've gotten my T-shirt smock pattern all worked out to my satisfaction I'm thinking of changing it into a T-shirt apron for my book proposal (more gender neutral, don't you think maybe?), which pattern I'd also need to work out (pushing the proposal mailing back just a few more days, squidge squidge), but anyway, now that it's all worked out and happy I can enjoy sewing up some crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt dresses out of my crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt stash:

Captain America--such a nice guy. Too bad about Bucky.

P.S. Check out my expose on a big company that ripped off an indie crafter over at Crafting a Green World.

Because Everyone Needs a Dinosaur Dress

I've been working out this new pattern idea for making dresses/tops out T-shirts, sort of like the pillowcase dresses I make. Of course, figuring out a new pattern requires making up that pattern several times, and hence:

Velociraptor Dress

I think I'm actually liking this idea a lot more than the pillowcase dresses, because, duh, it's way more fangeek. It's tricky with the bias straps, though, because they ought to be all mitchy-matchy, but I hate to buy new fabric.

Fortunately, Mr. Velociraptor also has some pale green accents to complement the pale green fabric I used here:I'm making this pattern to include in my book proposal, but I'll also likely have a few of these dresses up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop this weekend after I'm satisfied with the way it's working, because it's a good way to use up my stash of awesome T-shirts.

Don't worry, though--I made the girl put on pants before I sent her to school:

Good Game Morning

With the rainy weather, the children didn't take to being booted outside first thing in the morning the way we'd been doing it earlier this week, so it was yet another indoor morning for us.


Prescription? Games, games, games.


I'm not at all into games--board games, card games, sports, about the only thing I will do is sit down for a good session of D&D if you've got a rockin' DungeonMaster--so the benefit when I do chill out with the girls and play a bunch of games with them is that, not only am I bored to tears inside my head, but I also get to feel like a REALLY good mother, you know, sacrificing my mental capacity and emotional well-being for my girls.


The girls are especially fond of Uncle Wiggily, a Goodwill score of a few months ago. Admittedly, it's a terrific game for their age range--you can use it to reinforce counting, number identification, basic arithmetic, as well as the usual turn-taking and sportsmanship and stuff:
When Sydney gets bored and wanders off to pretend that the toy dinosaurs are having conversations with each other, I liven the game up a little (and make it go a LOT faster) by playing Abacus Uncle Wiggily.

Do you guys have an abacus? They rock. Will can do all kind of crazy math using an abacus, and that's just the basic stuff that I know to teach her--if you really know, you can do all kinds of CRAZY stuff with an abacus.

Anyway, in Abacus Uncle Wiggily, you pull TWO cards (maybe even three, if you're brave) and add them together using the abacus: You get to hop forward your answer, of course. But if you're wrong...well, let's just say the consequences are dire.

After Uncle Wiggily, we played this ocean life card game that I bought the girls for Christmas. I don't know how you actually play, but sometimes we play a game using the front sides of the cards as flashcards--

And sometimes we use the trivia questions on the back. Okay, there is a game I do like: I LIKE trivia.

So a kid picks a card and brings it to me, and there are various permutations of which one or how many of the trivia questions on the back that I ask. If she answers the question(s) correctly, she adds the card to her collection. If she answers incorrectly, I add the card to my collection.

Because I was such a good mom, I gave myself permission to serve frozen pizza for lunch. With frozen spinach on top, though, so it's almost like a healthy lunch.

Sort of.

Meet My New Micron Pen Roll

Isn't it fabulous?Sydney put the colors in order for me, so you know they're in perfect logical order and aesthetically pleasing, to boot:Again, like my marker roll, this one is loosely based on the colored pencil roll in . I have a couple hundred other things I'm going to try out from that book, too. And now, a fancy shot:In other news--you guys, I cannot get the City Museum out of my head! How often do you start the day taking the girls to yet another hands-on museum and end up doing the funnest thing you've ever done in your entire life? Oh, and I was so sore yesterday that I could barely move.

So Matt and I were doing some research on the City Museum and the story behind it is also really interesting. Bob Cassilly is the artist/"serial entrepreneur" who's behind it, who also, probably not coincidentally, created our other favorite thing in St. Louis, Turtle Park. Anyway, he and his former wife bought the old St. Louis Shoe Factory for 69 cents a square foot and created the City Museum in it. Matt tells me that originally, it was a non-profit, and the wife was president of the board. Later, however, Cassilly insisted on buying the building back from the board to make it a for-profit enterprise, and his wife was forced out of the business and they divorced and all kinds of scandal.

You know, though, this might be a little Green Party of me, but I think the idea of a for-profit museum, as long as it doesn't go all McDonald's/Disney World, is fine. Cassilly is clearly, after seeing the City Museum, a creative genius, and not only might a board of directors stifle some of his artistic decisions ("You want to stick an old plane where?!!! And let people climb on it?!!!"), but the museum seems to have an ethical system that's both eco-friendly and local, it's not crazy expensive to visit (although it is sort of non-crazy expensive), and hell, brilliant artists deserve to make good money.

Check out this great article on Terrain about the City Museum--Through the Dragon's Mouth. I found it really insightful, both in the philosophies behind the museum that the author uncovered and in her observations about how adults and children interact there. I wonder if I'm so drawn to the place because it's perhaps the first public place I've visited that seems to share my own guiding beliefs.
Oh my gawd, y'all--the City Museum is my church!