Freebies from the Public Library, or, Your Romance Needs Fulfilled

If you can get up at 7 am and get your coffee drunk so that you're ready to face the world, and if you can bully the girls into getting dressed in a reasonable amount of time (not always a sure thing, as evidenced by this morning, when Willow's failure to dress herself in an hour sent her into hysterics when I told her that we were going to miss Storytime at the library), and if you can feed them a breakfast that doesn't contain ANYTHING messy that would mean they'd have to change clothes again before going out, and if they can find their shoes, and if you can find the car keys, then you could go to the free day at the public library's book sale and you, too, could bring home all of this:
The bag on the left is all romance novels--50 of them from which my 46 students can choose later this semester, for their final paper that will be a comparison of a gender ideology within their romance novel to a subversion of that ideology in another cultural artifact:
The bag on the right is my stuff--outdated craft books that sometimes have some really interesting projects or methods, cookbooks, travel guides to use in scrapbooking vacations we've been on, and educational materials that might be good to use with the girls:And the girls' shopping cart--that's all their stuff, carefully filled to the maximum allowed capacity. At the book sale there was this other kid, maybe four years old? Now, I don't necessarily offer my own children appropriate supervision, but my kids fortunately don't go get all up in strangers' business when we're out and about, either. So as I'm trying to pick out 50 romance novels, squatting in the middle of an aisle and the girls are "helping" me and I'm trying to read back covers so I can pick out ones that will be useful for my students, this kid comes up and keeps trying to throw books into my paper bag and I'm all, "No, thank you," and he's all trying to move my arm so he can get the book into the bag and I'm all "NO, thank you!" but trying to be nice because he's not my own kid, so I can't yell at him, and where the heck is his parent?

So then he walks over to the girls and starts fighting with them over domination of the cart, and I'm all "It's their special shopping cart, sweetie, but you can have a turn pushing it if you want," and then he shoves Sydney, who shrieks, and starts grabbing their books out of their cart, and I'm all, "NO, sweetie, those are their books!", and then I'm all done, so I tell the girls we are leaving posthaste and the kid STANDS on the girls' cart so they can't push it and I'm carrying two full bags of books and trying to tell this random kid to get OFF and he's ignoring me and I'm wondering if I can maybe just kick him, just a little, but then his parent finally sees him and threatens to whup his ass so we're free to leave, the girls with their ample treasures intact:
If that kid tries it again at the free day of the Red Cross book sale I WILL kick him, because the Red Cross free day is hard-core.

There's Only One Way to Skin a Tomato: a Tutorial

At least I think that there's only one way. Maybe only one good way, and a lot of lousy ways (tiny little paring knife? Fingernails? Sandpaper?)

Note to my friend Betsy, who is made nauseated at the sight/smell/taste of raw tomatoes in anything but their pristine, whole, unviolated form--don't read this post.

You will need:

• loads of tomatoes (I skinned a good twenty pounds of tomatoes from the farmer's market yesterday)
• a big pot of boiling water
• a nice big colander that fits well within the big pot (you can work around this, but a nesting colander is by far the easiest way)
• a big bowl of cold water (ice water is the best, but I can't stand to waste the ice, so I just use cold water)
• paring knife and cutting board
• second bowl for tomato cores and skins for the compost pile

1. Rinse your tomatoes off, then cut out the little woody core at the top and any funky/mushy/brown spots.

If you do this, you don't need to score the skins, as well, because the hot water will slip in through the cut you've already made.

2. Fill your big pot about halfway with water and set it to boil, and fill your nesting colander about three-fourths full of the cored tomatoes. The boiling water will come up over the top of the tomatoes once the colander is fit down into the pot. 3. Fit your nesting colander full of cored tomatoes down into the pot of boiling water, making sure that the water rises to cover the tops of the tomatoes, and set your oven timer for one minute.If you don't have a colander that will fit into your pot, just dump the tomatoes right into the boiling water, and fish them back out with a slotted spoon. You risk stewing some of them a little this way, however, since some of the tomatoes will stay in that boiling water for longer than others. Another method is just to dump the whole pot, boiling water and tomatoes all, into a colander resting in the sink after a minute, but that's a waste of water and energy if you need to scald more than one batch of tomatoes.

4. The scalded tomatoes should look like their skins are about to fall off (don't look, Betsy!)----and you should be able to slip the skins right off with your fingers. If the skin of a tomato doesn't come off easily, pop it back into the cold water to soak for a couple more minutes while you do the other tomatoes.

And when you're done, you're left with these fine beauties:
Now it's time to make tomato sauce.

Read About Me on the Galactic Interweb

Tonight the news is all about:
I can be difficult to interview, because I never stop talking, and because what I do talk about can be kind of odd and obscure and pedantic (Wanna talk etymologies, anybody? Or medievalisms? How about hair bands?), but every now and then some brave soul becomes interested in parsing the train wreck that is my life and, behold, I am interviewed. On that note, check out the article Eco Craftivism is Serious Business over at Naturally Savvy, in which I am featured and I say lots of things, some of them even comprehensible.

In other news, although both the print and digital editions of Make cost money, one of the editors of Make kindly gave me a free link to my memory game article in Make 19, and told me I was allowed to share the link AND post it here on my blog! Awesome, right? So now you can find my article at the bookstore OR the library OR online! Pass it on, because everybody needs to know to make random stuff out of other random stuff.

How to Have a Happy Harvest

It requires at least one (but preferably five) sleepy kittens--
--some very busy little girls-- --and a finished total of 16 pints of diced tomatoes with basil:On the whole, now that my very first experience in canning is over, I'd say that the process is way easier than I'd thought it would be--if I can do it the first time with no major mishaps, then it's DEFINITELY easier than I thought it would be--but it did require a major fight with my spouse (who agreed before we started that he would not try to tell me how to do anything while we were canning, on account of I have read and watched probably a dozen tutorials on canning and he has read/watched none, and who did not last half an hour before breaking that promise and being asked to go spend some time reading comics at the bookstore), an unplanned trip to Wal-mart on a weekend night to grab more wide-mouth mason jars, and waaaaaaaay more hours than I thought it would. I mean way more, like midnight more.

I've been researching canning and getting advice from real-live people who know how to preserve their own food (thanks, Cake!) for months, now, but this tutorial on canning diced tomatoes and this canning tutorial video were especially super-helpful, and both short enough to look over several times on the day itself. I also was able to follow the instructions that came with my brand-new pressure canner for how to can tomatoes, and thus I was pretty much all set.

I had sort of hoped that the girls would be uninterested in the canning, and would prefer to entertain themselves independently all day while I worked--this was naive. And thus I am now also the expert on how to let a three-year-old and a five-year-old "help" one preserve food. The trick? Have them hand you stuff. They handed me tomatoes from the cold-water bath so that I could peel them, and then they put each skinned tomato into a bowl (and then, sometimes, from that bowl into another bowl...). Or give them scissors and a bowl and let them go mangle your basil plants. And then they can wash the basil, and the tomatoes. And then they can use the scissors to cut the basil. They can stir the pot in which the diced tomatoes with basil needs to boil for five minutes. They can hold the ruler and measure the half-inch headspace in each mason jar as you pour in the hot tomatoes. They can wipe up the ridiculous amount of tomato juice that you spilled. They can carry all the tomato peels out to the compost bin, and help you fill the dishwasher. See? Helpful! And it probably only adds an extra hour or two to the total time you'll spend canning!

So that's one winter's worth of vegetarian chili taken care of:

Now, anybody have a good recipe for a nice, versatile tomato sauce? Cause I bet the farmer's market will have canning tomatoes again this Saturday...

Because in the South, You Do Your Christmas Shopping Early

I received a very nice email from my mother yesterday, reminding me that after two solid months of reminders, I still have not told her what Willow and Matt want for Christmas (my presents and Sydney's presents she's already purchased, the desires of daughters and toddlers likely more transparent than those of ever-changing five-year-olds and sons-in-law).

Do all mothers do this, or just Southern ones? To me, having to declare my Christmas wishes in late summer has its firm place on the seasonal calendar of my childhood with the other mainstays of spring cleaning, a week in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, in the summer, purchasing my Halloween costume from Wal-mart, and eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. I'm not the early bird that my mother is, or my Mama was (I don't remember anything about how my Nana shopped, although Mama surely acquired the habit honestly), but since I make most of the presents that I give to friends and family, right now there's a batch of spearmint and rosemary cold-process soap curing in the basement that, if it turns out well, will be Christmas presents for some, and this weekend's tomato sauce that I make and can will, if it turns out well, be Christmas presents for some others, so I'm no day-before-Christmas do-er, either.


So here, mother, and everyone else in the world, are some things that my husband and my daughter would like for Christmas:

The girls and I have been playing around with our small second-hand set of soft pastels enough to know that my Matt, a wonderful artist and a man who never buys himself ANYTHING nice, would probably really like himself an excellent set of soft pastels of his own:
Willow, too, of course, loves her art, and is as creative and natural an artist as any child could be. I consider it one of the most important responsibilities of my parenting to provide her with as wide a variety of enriching experience as possible, and to give her as many artistic tools and media as I can. How awesome would it be to have a few sets of these blank nesting dolls realistically painted by my Matt, a few sets "abstractly" painted by myself, and a few sets for the girls to paint, not to mention a few sets to keep naked?

Matt is currently in the habit of toting his to-do items back and forth to work in the dumpster-dived cut glass bowl in which I put those items--mail addressed to him, forms and bills, packages to mail, etc. I really would like the nice bowl to actually stay on the shelf on which it lives, dear. Wouldn't you prefer to tote your stuff in something a little more butch--a robot messenger bag, perhaps?

Willow's great love of dinosaurs is legendary by now, but one simply can't wear a dinosaur T-shirt every single day of one's life (this is my claim, not the child's). On the days on which one chooses to instead wear a Star Wars shirt, or a housefly shirt, or a camouflage or tie-dyed shirt, how nice to also be able to still sport a subtle, sophisticated shout-out to the awesomeness that is the dinosaur:

Matt's a good sport when people tease him about his beard, because he's such a nice guy, but frankly, his whiskers are just plain hot:

Will's dream is to have a playground installed in the basement, and I have to say that it doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Matt and I dream about installing in the girls' basement playroom a reading loft, a slide, and something great to climb on: As a digital designer, Matt does most of his work with a keyboard and a mouse, but he's also an excellent freehand artist, and undergoes elaborate permutations twice a week to transform our comic strip, which he draws by hand, into a digital document to send to the newspaper. He has wanted a really good computer stylus and tablet for several years now:
I don't know what it is so appealing about lots of tiny little things. I'd say that it's just a kid obsession, but well...you've seen for yourself my relationship with buttons. As math manipulatives at home or just for playing with--dinosaurs! Or ocean creatures! Or vehicles! Or fruit!
Star Wars plus delicious treats, two things of which Matt highly approves:

Both of the girls, but Will especially, have been really into acrylics lately. I've been making them use the cheap-o craft acrylics that are the best that I can afford, but for works like painting onto canvas or tole painting, how nice to have a set of really super acrylics:

The reason that I can always tell you in a heartbeat what I or anybody else wants is through my etsy Favorites or my wists. I like to keep track of crafty stuff I find online that appeals to me somewhat as a wish list, but also quite largely as inspiration--it's like my own little digital sketchbook, or scrapbook, of stuff to modify or emulate or think about or inspire. My etsy pumpkinbear favorites have all my favorite stuff from other etsy sellers, and my pumpkinbear wists have all my favorites of everything else.

What's the link to your etsy favorites and your wists?

Pajama Pants for Everyone (Except Me!)

Well, to be fair, I guess the cats didn't get new pajama pants, either...

But everyone else did. I'd been saving out this yellow striped vintage sheet, scavenged from the Goodwill Outlet Store, to make pajama pants with for a while, but it was only late last week that I even got the chance to start (something along the lines of teaching/parenting/writing/crafting for pay/watching a lot of Netflix holding me back). First, you know, I had to clean the living room, my only large pattern-cutting space, and then scrub the filthy floor, and then cobble together the pattern out of lots of taped-together pieces of used typing paper, because I used up my last large piece of tracing paper making my wrap skirt pattern and haven't replaced it yet--are you tired yet? This is kind of making me tired, but I actually did enjoy it, you know--I'm a putterer, perhaps.

Anyway, just before I was going to start cutting, I went to check on Matt putting the girls to bed and mentioned that I was going to make myself and the girls some matching pajama pants.

"I want matching pajama pants," Matt said.

There was enough material in the vintage sheet for two children's pants and one adult's pants, not two, but today is Matt's birthday, so matching pajama pants it is:
The girls' patterns were a little too big even at a size small, so I probably should have used my pattern for their pants, but if you're going to have jammies that match with Dadda, I suppose you might as well have them with room to grow, in anticipation of all the Dadda plus kitten plus Lyle Lyle Crocodile book breaks yet to come:Don't worry about me, though--I have a vintage blue flowered sheet back in my fabric stash that I think might be big enough for some momma/daughter mitchy-matchies, too.

Farmer's Market in Focus

Not a craft fair Saturday, but just a regular Saturday at the farmer's market:

Cake taught me that you have to look UNDER the tables for the canning tomatoes:

As for canning? That's tomorrow's brand-new adventure.

Where Small Things Will Soon Be Sorted

Along with chauffering babies to school and gymnastics, straightening up a living room that immediately got trashed again, hanging up what seemed like five gazillion loads of laundry on the line, buying $40 worth of gasoline for the minivan, making patterns for jammie pants for me and my babies because I want mitchy-matchies with the monkeys, but I also plan to make them the Story Time Pajamas from Oliver + S this weekend), and cooking a dinner that once again nobody ate but me (and yet, if I DON'T make dinner, that's apparently a problem as well), the girls and I spent most of the morning out in the front yard painting on egg cartons:
I'm not quite ready to deal yet with shopping from within an ethic that only buys from egg farmers who only buy from hatcheries who don't deal cruelly with male chicks--have to find the time to do the research on that one--but we do buy cage-free and organic, and local when we can, and the benefit of that is that the eggs always come in these AWESOME recycled-cardboard cartons. I save every single one, and the girls and I went to town on maybe a dozen this morning. I actually brought them out to paint myself while the girls painted on big paper, but the girls were compelled, COMPELLED, to paint cartons, as well, and I'm not sure why, but they had themselves a ball.

We have a LOT of paint, good thing:
In the end, I only managed to rescue two egg cartons for my own painting, but through my own paint mixing and the girls' far more creative paint mixing, I ended up with a fine bevy of colors for them:
Chasing Cheerios uses these for collecting nature colors, but I find so much appeal in the smallness of the containers within the carton that I'm trying to think of something inherently small for the girls to collect and sort into the appropriately-colored container.
Buttons, perhaps?

Spoonflower Swatched Me!

Happy Free Swatch Day, indeed! You can check out my Spoonflower pumpkinbear profile (be friends with me, in case I ever design something for real real!) for these designs that can tile and expand, but here are the scans of my designs on my swatches! Mind you, they look like scans, which on my scanner means lousy, but here they are in my hands, and that's what's important:

Here's a photograph of the rocks at Pebble Beach that's done on organic cotton:
I didn't intend this to tile in any way, which is good because it won't do so neatly, and I can't think of any way within my current Photoshop design skills to rig it, although my Matt could, I'm sure. So for photos, since I don't have a wide-format camera, the biggest I'd probably do is a fat quarter, which for a detailed photograph of what is basically a texture, like this one is, would actually probably be pretty cool.

And here's a scan of buttons, also done on organic cotton:In retrospect I should have done a swatch of something super-saturated with color, because the tone on both my designs is pretty muted, but the color transfer is accurate (I used LAB color, which Spoonflower suggests). Something like this would actually work as a larger print, but there would have to be white space between the buttons so that I could tile them, and I'm thinking that I'd definitely want to use a better background--perhaps a vintage print, or some scans of old book pages?

Anyway, I'm exhausted but done teaching for the week, and now I get to sew.

And watch Mythbusters with the girls, while kittens sleep on us:
The best thing about being a working girl is that I get a real, live weekend again!

I've Got the Whole World in Her Hands

So if you're feeling kind of stressed about the start of the school year, about lesson plans and class prep and grading and just the pure logistics of the kids' school and your school and office hours and playdates (Example A is Tuesday office hours: the kids and I start at the public library for story time, then I drive them and their packed lunches to my partner's office, where he meets me in the parking lot and we switch cars, and he feeds the kids their lunch and takes them to school while I drive over to my office hours with my work stuff, and find a parking spot and walk to my office, then leave promptly at the end of my office hours to walk back to my car and drive back to my partner's office to get the car with the car seats to drive to the kids' school to pick them up--stressful, right? And we haven't even talked about the evening hand-off twice a week so I can teach!), and you haven't crafted anything lately, which you REALLY like to do, because you've been too busy writing your syllabus, and the house is a wreck because you've been too busy to clean, AND the yard needs to be mown very badly...

...then I suggest that you take your kid's suggestion that you spend the entire morning with her drawing a pretend map of a world. You are to use your biiiiiiiig Strathmore sketch pad (leaf rubbings are still on the docket for sometime) and crayons, and there will be lots of ocean and many fanciful continents--

--and also bridges between the continents and sea plants for the people to eat and outer space and volcanoes that erupt into outer space.

The big kid and I filled one entire sheet of paper with our map, collaborating together, and we were going to do the other side of the paper together, as well (the world has to have an other side, of course), but she got impatient while I was out hanging up the laundry and just did the back side herself. It was amazing, of course.

The little kid did not want to draw, but she did want to sit near us at the table and play with ponies, so there you go:I have a few more interminable teaching tasks to do tomorrow--a lesson planned around the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces that we'll be reading, an assignment sheet for my students' first analytical paper of the semester, a bonus reading to scan and upload, as well as some miscellaneous plans, in-class writing assignments, and hand-outs to revise for this semester--and then that's Week 2 done and all I have to do is teach it, and I WILL NOT plan anything for Week 3 (which is mostly peer review days and instructor consultation days, anyway) until I have made the kids some nice autumn pajamas, and bonus points for some matching jammie pants for myself.

But if that stresses me out too much, there are always kittens to watch. This one is attacking a shoe!

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!

Leafy

Yep, we are blessed with a bounty of kitties. We don't have to do all the work to spin our own spinner when it's our turn at Hi-Ho Cherrio, what with the kittens around--
--and our fat, lazy Ballantine keeps us from having to read all the bad news in the newspaper:
Unfortunately, she also likes to lay on the comics, the drive-in movie times, and the garage sale listings, but that's the price you pay, I guess.

In other news, Willow woke barfing at 3:00 this morning. She felt better, fortunately, after just three or so hours of being VERY ill, but I still kept her in bed all day (thank GAWD for Netflix's Watch Instant--Willow had her first exposures today to Meercat Manor, Blue's Clues, Kipper, AND the Wiggles), and she's been sound asleep, I'm hoping for the night, since about 5:00 pm, poor kid.

Syd, of course, absolutely basked in being the only kid on call today. The constantly-running television soon paled in comparison to a set of parents able to completely focus on her (although probably asking her if her tummy hurt or if she felt like throwing up a little too often to be quite normal). She hung out at the drop-off laundromat with Matt (this is the first time we've tried it, and I'm a little squeamish about it now after Matt described in detail the burn-out employee who will likely be the one to wash all of my panties), and helped him clean the kitchen, and there was a lot of wrestling worked in there somewhere, and this afternoon she and I went to the park all by ourselves, and I pushed her in the swing for as long as she wanted.

We brought Sydney's bucket to collect leaves, because I've been wanting to do leaf rubbings with the girls for a while now. Not necessarily to learn all the parts of the leaves or anything just yet, but mostly to admire the shape and the form and to see the detail, all that good stuff.

Unfortunately, it's been too long since I've brought out our huuuuuuge Strathmore sketch pad--it's too big for the girls to get out independently, and I guess I just don't think about it very often--and Sydney was way more interested in just drawing than in doing any particular project. Don't you find that kids have to spend a lot of time, I mean a LOT of time, exploring any specific material or medium before they're ready to manipulate it in any kind of actual "project"? My kids are that way, at least.

So Syd and I spent a lot of time drawing with crayons on our huge sketch pad, and then, just because I'd been looking forward to it for a few days, I made some leaf rubbings myself:
I forgot how freakin' fun they are, but they are FUN! And very satisfying, especially to someone who can't really draw a lick. My goal now is to offer the girls the sketch pad a LOT in the next couple of weeks so that we can try leaf rubbings again real soon. I was thinking, though--wouldn't something like this make a cool Spoonflower print?

Black and Pastel

There were wildflower walks to go on:
(along with a wildflower encyclopedia, of course, so that I can knowledgeably mis-identify each flower); some wandering jew to propagate:(it's pricey and a bit unnecessary, but I occasionally buy these propagation gel container kits because it just makes it that much easier to do this project with two wriggling and impatient girls), and, of course, five kittens to adore:
but in the past couple of days the girls and I have also had time to develop a newfound love for pastel crayons. I've offered pastels to the girls a couple of times before, when they were younger, but I think that they were too young to appreciate the sometimes subtle difference between the pastel crayons and regular crayons, and the pastels were also a bit delicate for my boisterous artists.

However, we aquired another used set from Grandma Bangle (as opposed to our first used set, which was an old one of Matt's), and this time the girls were very stoked, especially at the color saturation, I think.

The girls also really like to use their pastels with black cardstock:

Not construction paper, and not textured cardstock, but plain flat cardstock or Strathmore black drawing paper with pastels is a pretty sweet combination.

P.S. I did some research, and what we have is apparently soft pastels, not hard pastels. I'm totally putting this set of 60 pastels on my wish list for after our used set of 10 has finished being worn down to itty little nubs.

The LOLCats Live at Our House

We clearly all needed more chaos in our lives, so enter the litter of foster-kittens. Five kittens, to be exact, although an exact count at any one time is extremely unlikely. Two look like this:
Two look like this:
And only one looks like this:She's also the bruiser of the bunch, outweighing the others at a whopping one pound. We'll probably have these babies for a month, until they're old enough and weigh enough to be able to be adopted, and then we'll bring them back.

Lots of people are actually pretty horrified when I tell them about our regular influx of foster-kittens. They're all, "Oh, won't the girls be broken-hearted when the kittens go back?" No, it's totally a reasonable question, and I don't know, perhaps my kids have hearts of ice or they're just exceptionally oblivious, but Matt and I have never even so much as implied, through word or association, that there would even be the slightest of possibilities that we could actually keep these kittens. They are our visitors and our guests, and guests ALWAYS go home eventually. So I don't know, maybe a more clued-in kid would figure out what's really going on, but it works for my kids.

Here's my list of reasons for why everyone with kids should absolutely foster:

1. Kittens are cute, fun, and entertaining. They make kids happy.
2. Caring for kittens and handling them appropriately are useful skills to learn--they teach kids that having a creature under your care requires a lot of work and a lot of self-restraint.
3. The kittens will need to go back in two weeks to a month, which is about as long as it takes for the novelty to wear off, anyway.
4. Kittens need to be put in foster families at first, because they're very susceptible to stress, illness, and the development of bad habits at the Humane Society.
5. Fostering kittens makes them more adoptable, because they will be litter-trained and very well socialized, especially towards children, and are far less likely to develop bad habits.
6. When it's time to return the kittens, saying goodbye to creatures that the children loves teaches them that we can't always keep what we love, that love carries on even after loss, and that pleasant memories comfort us and eventually become what is important.
7. Expending love and care on creatures that the children know they will eventually give to someone else teaches them the skill of service, that we should also work for the benefit of others, even if we won't ever meet them.

And, finally, 8. Sleeping with a kitten is an experience everyone should have:

At least a few million times before you're six years old, especially.