I Lost the Babies, But in Other Ways I Am Organized

Willow and Sydney had a playdate this morning because I wanted to get some work done. Specifically, I wanted to grade papers all morning, not read books and play board games about dinosaurs and see if the laminator will laminate leaves and playfight with sticks in the front yard and maybe watch a segment of Mythbusters--these are my favorite things to do of a morning, true, but grading papers? Must be done.

So we invited an adorable little schoolmate over to play with the girls, and there was much running up and down stairs and in and out of the house, etc.--your typical playdate. At one point in the morning, however, Sydney came in and asked for a snack, and so I thought I'd find Willow and the little friend and see if they wanted a toasted cheese quesadilla, too (the little friend claimed, however, that she isn't allowed to eat snacks at other people's houses, but that's a later story). I didn't see the girls upstairs, so I ran down to the basement playroom. No girls. I figured I must have missed them somewhere upstairs, so I ran back up and looked in all the rooms, calling their names. No girls. Now I figured I must have missed them downstairs after all, so I ran back downstairs, and looked in the bathroom off of the playroom and the closet under the stairs, calling their names.

No girls.

So now I think that they must be hiding, so I run back upstairs and look really well in all the nooks and crannies in all the rooms, calling their names sternly and announcing trouble to come if hiding places are not revealed.

No girls.

And now I start to panic. I think of all the places in which a mischievous hiding little girl or two could come to grief--did one girl lock another in a Rubbermaid bin made empty due to our recent organization, and then panic, herself, and hide? Could they have climbed into the broken dryer and then passed out? Emptied the chest freezer of food, hidden that food, climbed inside the freezer, and shut the door on themselves? Drunk a full bottle of hydrogen peroxide and crawled underneath the kitchen sink to die? I run back downstairs, like an IDIOT, and check the dryer, and the freezer, and the nook where the furnace lives, and the space around the chimney.

NO GIRLS.

And now I think, I HAVE WASTED TOO MUCH TIME. Whatever has happened, I have wasted lots of precious minutes running back and forth, while these children are in danger or dead. So I run back upstairs, heading straight to the cell phone so that I can call 1) 911 2) Matt 3) the little schoolmate's mother.

And as I pass the hall closet, which I have looked in at least four times in the past few minutes, I hear "gigglegigglegiggle." And from beneath the winter coats and behind the stroller and sturdy boots crawl Willow and her little friend, just giggling as hard as they can giggle.

And that's how I had my first heart attack.

In other news, the expansive organizational project of the girls' bedroom and our study/studio, the two messiest rooms in the house on account of they are constantly inhabited by three of the four messiest people in our family, is finished. I didn't finish grading papers this weekend, but I did finish putting all my favorite things, and all of the girls' favorite things, into clear plastic bins with sturdy lids. And then I labeled those bins. And, um, color-coded them. Because if you're going to do something, you might as well overdo it.

Here's part of the closet in the study:
You can see the bag in which I keep my teaching materials for my cloth diapering classes; the bin containing acrylic, oil, and tempera paints; the bin containing bulk colored pencils, the big jug of Mod Podge; the smaller box of plaster of Paris; four rolls of contact paper; the bin containing the one-inch pinback button machine and all its parts; the bin with all our hole punches; and the edges of small bins that contain seashells and artist trading cards. Oh, and at the very top, my brand-new and best-beloved Cricut, which I'll rhapsodize about some other time soon.

Here's another view of that same closet, if you can believe it:

You can see the big bin of bulk crayons, with our various pads of artist's papers stacked on top of it; bins of popsicle sticks, wooden cut-outs, and river rocks; the box of activated charcoal that, combined with the river rocks, goes into our terrariums; a bigger bin with all our paintbrushes; a small bin of pom-poms (and perhaps googly eyes); and bins of scrapbook embellishments and blank puzzles.

You probably can't see the labels on these bins, but every bin is labelled. And every bin has, below the label, one of three things on it--YES, NO, or WITH PERMISSION, and is underlined with either a green, red, or yellow marker. One of the main things I wanted to accomplish, as well as actually having a place to put all my crap, is to help the girls understand what materials they have access to. I take their roles as collaborators in our shared art and as artists in their own right very seriously, and I wanted to reassure them of what supplies they're permitted to use unsupervised, what they must be supervised to use, and what is off-limits. Basically, only the vintage beads, the jewelry findings, the soldering supplies, and the scrapbook embellishments are forbidden. The most important distinction in my mind is the WITH PERMISSION from the YES, or, for Sydney, the yellow underline from the green underline.

Bigger shelves elsewhere in the study hold bigger stuff:

Here are bins of blank papers, vintage papers, purchased scrapbook papers, scratched/warped vinyl record albums for crafting, and bulk markers. On top of one of the bins is a huge book of wallpaper samples--this is lots of fun for flipping through.

Even my desk received its fair share of attention, desperately needed, with a couple of nice, big paper bins labelled--

Although I'm not sure why I marked them NO--you'd think I'd welcome the help of anyone who wanted to do my paperwork drudgery for me...

Good News, Bad News, and Pumpkins

The good news is that I only have 19 more hero myth papers to grade. Okay, that's actually the bad news, but I'll think about it tomorrow when the usual insanity of attempting to grade papers with the girls sets in.

The real good news is yay, autumn! Here's the fall spread at the local farmer's market this weekend:

The girls each picked out their own baby pumpkin for 50 cents:
We also always let the girls buy a honeystick at 25 cents each from the Hunter's Honey Farm stand:

We didn't buy any of these yet, but we did buy some butternut squash and ugly peppers:

And apples, which I thought I might use for applesauce but which have since been mostly consumed:

I hope somebody saved one for me to have at breakfast, at least.

For the Living Room Wall

Although it's not much fun trying to organize stuff, sorting through trash and finding an actual liveable place for everything and buying ever more of those freaking clear plastic bins, I do have to say that the girls and I are finding a lot of fun in rediscovering the stuff we've had for ages and just forgot about because it was shoved in the closet on top of something else that was behind some other thing. That's not why I got the stuff in the first place, just to forget about it and never use it, and it probably goes a long way to explain why we have such a ridiculous amount of stuff in the first place.

Because as soon as the girls saw the small stack of stretched canvasses that I bought on big sale a few months ago and then put in the closet meaning to give them to the girls to paint someday soon and then forgot about, they were both all, "I want to paint!"

And seeing, now, a segment of stuff that perhaps wouldn't have to go back into the closet after all, as well as an opportunity to collect all the little bottles of acrylic, oil, and tempera paints that happen to be stuffed here and there in the closet, I said, "You betcha!"
We collect our empty egg cartons primarily to keep paint colors separate when we're working, but I thought the girls would like some experience in blending, so this time I gave them a plate. I have to admit that it resulted in some finished works that are a little on the monochromatic side, primarily of the "mud" tone of colors--
--but who cares, it was fun. And priceless to enjoy the look of deep concentration on my little mud-making girls' faces:

I had sort of planned these canvasses to be hung on our own living room wall (and I had sort of planned that Matt and I would paint a couple ourselves, but the girls were on a roll), but the youthful declaration was that they would be Christmas presents. Chasing Cheerios does these cute handprint canvas paintings that I had been contemplating making as presents, but original artwork, signed by the artist, always makes the nicest gift, don't you think?

So there you go--organizing, entertaining, educating, AND we got a couple of Christmas presents done, to boot.

Working and Progressing: Comic Book Bookmarks

My days are still quite occupied with putting things into clear plastic bins here (and teaching my students about racism in King Kong, sorting through the kids' clothes to see what needs winterizing, reading Melissa Gilbert's GREAT memoir, and shuttling the kids to various playgrounds and playgroups all over the world, it seems), and it really has become quite the revelation: SIX plastic bins of Legos? The bin I bought for toy dinosaurs STILL isn't big enough? I am getting sort of fond of watching the nice rows of stacked bins appear on shelves where previously were, you know, some pretty baskets and vintage tins with a huge mound of random stuff piled on top--it's starting to look like the Mythbusters workroom, and you know how much we love the Mythbusters over here.

The study/studio is coming together a little more slowly--I'm thinking of organizing the clear plastic bins into a system something like Montessori, or like the homeschool workbox method, for both me and the kids. Like the blank cardboard puzzles that the kids like to decorate go into one box along with a couple of packages of the markers they use to decorate them, and my solder and flux and copper tape and glass bits all go (sorted) into the same box since I use them together. And then you can take one box out, do your project, and put that box back away again--what a wonder that would make of my life.

Anyway, I did take a brief break yesterday after taking the kids to the local hands-on science museum and school and home again and before heading off to my own class with the DVD of the 1933 edition of King Kong in hand to make something that has been dwelling on my mind since the Strange Folk Festival craft fair:

At one of the handmade books vendors at Strange Folk, they were giving away a free record album cover bookmark with every purchase--a piece of album cover cut into a bookmark shape, punched at the top with a ribbon through it. Super cool, and I immediately wanted to try it out with comic books. Above is my first attempt, out of an old Dungeons and Dragons comic--I like the size and shape of the bookmark, and the sturdiness of the laminate, and the look of the cording at the top, but my partner wants to see a version that's thicker, and I want to try some options that will let me tie a vintage bead or two onto the cording.

Tutorial will appear when I've got it down--stay tuned.

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!

I Go Over to the Dark Side

Goodbye, quirky vintage containers and lovely baskets made of natural materials. I wanted to be one of those cool crafters whose entire space is crafty, all personalized and unique and yet organized. Not so much SouleMama's craft room, exactly, because she's way too mellow for me these days, but definitely YummyGoods' craft space.

Only, those vintage containers don't really hold all my stuff, which I then pile on top of other stuff. And I'm really short, so I can't see what's in the containers above my head, which is pretty much three-quarters of the space in my house. And those lovely baskets of natural materials get dragged around by the girls, which is fine, but then also spilled and toppled and tumbled, and, you know, just all messed up.

So I've given it a good long haul, and I'm still going to utilize the awesome quirky vintage mason jars and chipped Fiesta ware and all the other random stuff that I've been trying to put stuff in, but 90% of the girls' toys and our craft supplies?
Clear plastic storage bins, baby. I've gone over to the dark side, and it's made of non-degradable petroleum by-products.

But you can stack these petroleum by-products. And see what's in them. And because you have to buy them new, you can buy them to fit whatever you want to put in them (this alone is novel and good). And they have lids. Sturdy, snapped-closed lids, enabling a three-year-old to carry, not a handful of crayons that are going to be left both here and there and everywhere even after officially designated "clean-up time," but the entire stash of crayons, upside-down if need be:

And they look like candy in there, which more appropriately models the role that crayons play for us here in this house.

Stay tuned for more clear plastic storage bin godawfulness as it occurs.

Our Second Year at Strange Folk

Oh, how I heart St. Louis! It's so funny, because when I was a kid I HATED St. Louis. It was the place we'd get up before dawn to drive six hours to every now and then, straight to an old lady apartment (belonging to my Great-aunt Della), sit there for a reeeeeeaaaalllllllllyyyyyy long time (if I was lucky, she'd bring out her Norman Rockweller coffee table book for me to look at--barf), and then drive six hours back home again. That SAME day.

I couldn't believe it when I grew up and realized that there's stuff TO DO in St. Louis. Awesome stuff. Stuff like sliding down the free-fall slide at the City Museum:
And witnessing there the extent to which a little sister will go to not be bested by a big sister:
Stuff like discovering what my husband thinks is the very best way to deal with the fact that the eggs he's attempting to cook in the hotel kitchenette have just set off our room's smoke alarm: That's a PILLOW he's waving, friends. Not a blanket or a towel, but a pillow. Note that he has not even called down to the front desk yet to say, "Hey, I know the smoke alarm is blaring and maybe people are evacuating, but it's just me, I'm just cooking some eggs." And notice how, even though the smoke alarm is screaming in their faces, the girls are so focused on this thing they've just discovered called the Disney Channel that it doesn't even faze them.

Oh, right, and stuff like the Strange Folk Festival. Which, thank you for asking, was AWESOME! Last year at Strange Folk was good, but this year was awesome. The record bowls are nearly gone, the pinbacks I had to keep replenishing as fast as I could make them-- --and the bathroom breaks were as few and far between as I could make them, and accomplished at a dead run. It was THAT kind of craft fair. The good kind.

I also think that Strange Folk has the best atmosphere of any craft fair I've been to, big or small, conventional or indie. It's in a huge park, with plenty of green, empty space for children to play in, a huge playground, and some activities (sandbox, handmade hula hoops, milk jug igloo) imported in by Strange Folk just for the kids. That makes it a much more restful place for someone with kids to shop or sell--Will and Sydney played in the grass and under the trees, and walked together to the sandbox, and befriended random kids like they wouldn't be able to do at a fair on a city street or in a convention center.

And the music is good, and the trees are shady, and the people are just plain nice. One customer gave me the last two cookies that he'd bought from the gourmet cookie vendor across the way. Another customer said, "Your stuff rocks!" and then high-fived me! And you know how I feel about high-fives.

Willow made her entrepreneurial debut at Strange Folk. She wrapped hunks of grass in duct tape and sold them for 25 cents each (she actually sold four), and my shy girl was officially in charge of giving each customer, after the transaction, a business card, saying "Here's a business card for you." It was terrific for honing her awareness of social cues, because she had to figure out just the right time to hand over the card so as not to interrupt the sale but not to let the customer walk away, either, and she had to interact with each person, and she got tons of positive reinforcement, because you know that all adults do really like to be addressed nicely by a little child. Take that, socialization!

But for the customers with children, Willow prepared a special treat. She made Artist Trading Cards, wrote her name on the back, and let me write my web info, as well, and then gave one to each customer's child:
Animals was the theme, can't you tell?

Whew! Three days in St. Louis makes for three long days, but if it takes some long, long days of hard work and play to make sisters be this nice to each other on purpose--

Count me in.

Busy/Exhausted/Sore/Damp/HAPPY!!!

Too tired to type. Just know, Strange Folk Festival RULEZ!!!

Willow Blogs: Wild Cats

I love kittens because they are playful and they play and they fight all around the house. We got them at the Humane Society because we love them. We're keeping them until they're old enough to go back and get a new family.

This is Gracie. She is my favorite kitten because she's nice and grey and she's playful with her little ears.
Gracie is the oldest kitten because I think she ate a lot more canned cat food and we are going to make treats for our kittens.

This one is Jesse. She is black and white. She is a very runsie kitty because every time she runs away when I go toward her, even if I'm not going to get her.

This is Hillary. She is also a very runsie kitty and she is very nice and scratchy. She is very squirmy.

This is Whitsie because she has lots of whites on her even though she's black. Her skin is white; I don't know why.

This one's Blacksie. She's a nice kitty and she's very black. She likes to play all the time. She is a very nice kitty and always very mischievous, but all the kitties are mischievous. They climb on the table.

This is the day that they finally get to find a new family. They'll be good kitties for their new families and these are their names: Gracie, Blacksie, Whitsie, Jesse, and Hillary.

I love them.

Stash Upholstery Leaves for Its New Home

Sending stash out of my life makes me happy. It makes me happy not so much to just get rid of stuff, but to know that this stuff, that I collected, scavenged, was given, bought for a crazy-cheap price no telling how long ago, turned out to be useful after all, and off it goes to its new home.

Hence my happy goodbye to my early-in-the-week project, 24 crayon rolls that I sold wholesale through my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop (way less money for each crayon roll, but way more money total than I'd usually earn at one time--does that make sense?) to a tourist shop up north:

The inside of each crayon roll is made from stash fabric that I was given by a women who saw me at a craft fair and thought of me when she cleaned out her own sewing space; the thread is stash, a combination of large spools bought at 50%-off at Joann's and smaller spools in prettier colors that I inherited from my partner's grandmother; the stash elastic is also a combination of some bought on sale, some inherited, and some picked up for free at a local garage sale; the crayons are stash, bought for anywhere from 20 cents to 24 cents for a 24-pack at various back-to-school sales this summer; and, finally, the upholstery fabric for the crayon roll fronts is stash, of course, leftover from the several large books of upholstery samples that I bought from a local thrift shop.

How much do I love those upholstery fabrics?

So much.

My favorite thing about my stash is the myriad of uses that present themselves solely through its existence in my life. That fabric from a craft fair friend did sit for a while on my shelf until I needed a nice, sturdy, plain fabric to back the wild patterns of the upholstery, but the crayons have made themselves a luxury in our home, accompanying gifts, being taken on car trips, being opened any time it would just be a nice treat to have a new box of crayons. And that upholstery fabric? It's been art rolls, birthday crowns, monogram wall hangings, scrapbook embellishments, bookmarks, and I don't even know what all else.

My newest idea, now that I've been scanning everything lately, was to scan some of those upholstery patterns as I was sewing up the crayon rolls:

Isn't that kind of cool? I'm thinking I could use it for digital scrapbooking, which I'm not that into (right now...) or other kinds of digital design work.

So now it seems that I have an electronic stash, as well.

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!

And I Am Martyred by the Color Pink

Certain family members of the in-law persuasion have long made veiled accusations that I will not permit my girls to wear pink. This, I declare, is flatly untrue. Yes, it was completely true when they were infants--I actively put my girl babies in clothing gendered as male, but I'll tell you all about why I did that some other time. And yes, it's true that when I shop for clothing for my girls, I generally don't buy them pink stuff--when my kids don't care what they wear, I buy them clothes that I like. Who doesn't do that?

However, I firmly believe that I have always been extremely accomodating when they do show a preference. Why else does Willow have at least 12 dinosaur shirts? And pants with dinosaurs on them? And dinosaur jammies? And a dinosaur dress? And don't even get me started about the ponies and the rainbows, because I really don't feel like discussing it right now.

And therefore, since Willow has lately been complaining that she has no "pretty" pants (and since my suggestions that, since she doesn't like the pants I've bought her previously, she should really get a job so that she can buy her own pants hasn't led to her actually getting a job, alas), yesterday at the Goodwill 50%-Off Storewide Sale I invited her to come over to the children's clothing section so that we could pick out some pretty pants together.

It's hard, obviously, for a five-year-old to find clothes at Goodwill--they're sorted by color, which does help one zero in on the "pretty" pants, but only a Momma can accurately evaluate fit and condition and quality and appropriateness. Fortunately, it turns out that I'm actually quite good at ascertaining the kind of pants that my daughter will find "pretty".


If the pants are jeans, they should be fancy jeans:Otherwise, light blue is pretty:
Light green is also pretty:Purple, too, is pretty:So, yes, Willow and Sydney both came home with scads of pretty pants, and a few other pretty necessities----and even a couple of other awesome items:The future farm girls have a system for who gets to wear THAT shirt on any given day, let me tell you.

Other than that, some work shirts and work pants were bought for the man, some record albums and vintage sheets and T-shirts were bought for crafting, and the babies got more books, of course. But did I find any awesome clothes for myself, you ask?

Well, you can fail the PhD student concentrating on medieval studies through a feminist lens out of her qualifying exams, but you can't erase the ridiculous amounts of useless information about the medieval time period and its literatures out of her head: And also? When I was a little kid, I never, never, NEVER had cool clothes. And in junior high, one of the MAJOR things that I wanted (along with stone-washed jeans and T-shirts in two different colors so that you could roll the sleeves up and see the color of the shirt underneath and leggings and the dexterity to tie an oversized T-shirt into a knot at one bottom hem, etc.) was THE FOLLOWING KIND OF HOODIE THAT ALL THE COOL KIDS WORE:

Childhood dreams really can come true, can't they?

Especially when they're simple:

Leafy: A Leaf Rubbing Tutorial

Friday really was a leafy sort of day. I needed to sign my teaching contract, so it was a walk to campus to visit the English Department (where the secretaries ALWAYS have ample candy to offer to little girls) and the IU greenhouse:
Hallelujah, nobody touched the spiky plants this time:
The girls and I had a lovely picnic lunch on campus, which is quite wooded and broken up here and there by small, winding creeks (although, as a first-semester graduate student living alone on campus, hoofing it to every class, I did rather wish that they'd just demolished all the lovely foresty bits and stuck the buildings all together in one easily-walkable city block). The girls passed the time by throwing large chunks of limestone and shale into said creeks, while I read my Entertainment Weekly in the company of a small discarded cicada exoskeleton:But after the girls got out of school--and thus after I'd had for myself a nice break to eat my own lunch, shower, straighten the living room, do a little laundry, and plod away happily on the crayon roll wholesale order from my pumpkinbear etsy shop while watching some Netflix--we had renewed energy for new projects.

And thus we found ourselves back in nature, collecting leaves from all the neighborhood trees, and taking them home for leaf rubbings (finally!).

You will need:

• lots of leaves (flat ones, of course, and nice and supple)
• several sheets of thin paper (typing/copy paper works fine, and Strathmore sketch pads work REALLY well)
• crayons with a wide drawing surface (we broke open a brand-new Crayola 24-pack for this project (20 cents at the Wal-mart back-to-school sale!!!, but there are lots of other kinds of crayons that would work as well, or even better, frankly, for little hands)
• for a very small kid, Scotch tape or its equivalent can be a big help

1. Peel the wrappers off of your crayons--for some kids, this is the best part:2. You need a really flat drawing surface that has no discernable texture of its own--a concrete sidewalk or wooden picnic table won't really work, for instance, but a deck table or inside table or inside floor will work just fine:

3. Lay out your leaf nice and flat (to hold it really steady, you can double up a piece of Scotch tape, sticky side out, and stick it to the surface underneath it--this is especially helpful for small kiddos, who are the most fussy about wanting a nice result yet have the least dexterity to make it happen), and put a clean sheet of thin paper on top of it.

4. Holding the paper down very flat and keeping your leaf perfectly still, rub over and all around it with the flat side of your crayon:Or, if you're littler, just draw yourself a picture. It's equally fun:5. You'll be left with the impression of your leaf on the paper, showing all the great veins and other textures of the leaf, and looking really great and pretty:6. WARNING: Leaf rubbing may make you very, very sleepy. Go lie down with a kitten:In other news, we almost took a hot air balloon ride this morning, but it was too windy. Such is life, alas...

WIP Wednesday

Winter-themed pajama pants for Willow and Sydney

I had to move back to doing school stuff, and then craft fair stuff, and then etsy stuff, before I could sew these pants up or modify, since the patterns in Weekend Sewing seem to run small for adults and large for kids, the pajama pants pattern for myself and cut out some mitchy-matchies for me and the girls, but I'm glad that I was stalled, because that crotch seam, which the pattern leaves unfinished, did, as I had suspected it might, split in both Matt's and Willow's pajama pants. And so now I have those to repair, as well, as fellow WIPs. I can't decide if I should just reinforce the crotch seams on the pajama pants yet to be sewn, as I will with my repairs, or if I should switch to a stronger method--a french seam, perhaps, or is that a little much for some pajama pant crotches?

Twenty-Four Upholstery Sample Crayon Rolls for Wholesale

It makes such a difference to have a block of time to myself during the day, every day, knowing that the kids are happy and engaged at school. It's okay, too, knowing that next school year that block of time will likely go away, again, unless a windfall of private school tuition money somehow makes its way into the Montessori account books under our name. I'm just savoring my time to work alone during the day this year, sometimes running errands without two little helpers, sometimes grading papers and writing lesson plans, and sometimes, as I am this week, making up a large order of crayon rolls from my pumpkinbear etsy shop while watching Glee on Hulu and Swingtown on Netflix--insert happy sigh here.

Many Craft Books To Read and Be Inspired By

I'm especially looking forward to making a little time for and --both of these are looking to be crucial for my Christmas present crafting. I'm Pumpkinbear on Goodreads as well, so you should totally be my Goodreads friend, BTW!

Playing with Spoonflower

I don't know if I would ever get up the nerve to actually order something from Spoonflower--my free Spoonflower swatches were pretty great, but Spoonflower itself is mighty pricey--but I'm still interested in playing with it, and my dream is that someday Spoonflower will look something like Cafepress, in which you could purchase yardage of ANYBODY'S pattern, and they'd receive a nice commission for it. I'm also looking forward to getting the girls to draw some things to use as Spoonflower patterns.

Oh, and I also want to make a vintage buttons and upholstery sample set of numbers, introduce painting with acrylics on canvas to the girls, set up interviews with awesome IU alumni to write up for the IU Alumni Magazine (Jamie Hyneman and Greg Der Anian, call me!), bind some terrycloth with quilting cotton to finish the towel sets I started making for Matt and the girls a LONG time ago, sew two more mattress pad covers, revise my book proposal to send to a new set of agents, make a bunch of photo frames out of cardboard and hang up all my photos in the living room, put a new floor in the kitchen...