Decoupage So Easy, Even a Three-Year-Old Can Do It

Getting into a Montessori classroom is no easy feat. The Montessori classroom is the child's well-ordered, busy workspace, not the parent's, and while parents are free to observe their child's class at any time through a large two-way mirror, they are not welcome inside the classroom without an invitation.

Therefore, when I casually let it drop that I have spent not one, not two, but THREE entire afternoons in the girls' class, all the other Montessori parents look at me with shock and admiration and they say, "How? How did you manage that?"

It's all about the skillz, my friends. In my case, my skillz at gluing stuff to other stuff, as I spent an EXTREMELY busy three afternoons teaching 30 children, ages three to six, the fine art of decoupage.

The result? Awesomeness: In several previous class sessions, the children had the opportunity to do a pattern-making work using the metal insets. They drew on tracing paper with colored pencils, and could decorate their pattern however they liked. Later, one of the teachers cut around each pattern and set them aside for me.

Montessori lessons are basically taught one-on-one or one-on-thirty, so that children tend to either do things as a class, such as Spanish or music or community meetings, or with the sole attention of the teacher or a classmate. We set up my decoupage station as a work that children could choose one time, so that I stayed with the decoupage and when a child wanted to choose that work, she would go put on her smock and get in line. This was a little tiring for me, since I basically repeated the same three actions with 30 children in a row, but I still think it was the best way to give them the optimum process-oriented experience and still come away with a beautiful product to be auctioned off in a school fundraiser later this month.

Here Willow demonstrates the basic preschool decoupage technique:
On a table, I laid out every single decorated pattern that we had to work with. When it was a child's turn, I asked her to choose any pattern that she wanted. When she had one, I then asked her to choose any spot on the entire box to put her pattern, as long as it did not cover up another child's name (more on that later). Overlapping another pattern was fine:
When the child had a spot chosen, I handed her a sponge brush and let her dip it into a dish filled with Mod Podge. Then, I instructed her to paint the spot where she wanted to put her pattern all over with glue. After that, she laid down her pattern and I helped her smooth it out (not making a big deal about creases or bubbles--these are preschoolers here, and it was important to me that the project, while nice, authentically look like it had been created by preschoolers), and then I had her dip her brush back into the Mod Podge and paint over her pattern again. Decoupage is nice because you don't have to be neat or precise with the glue--as long as I kept drips and bubbles at bay, each overlapping layer of Mod Podge served only to strengthen the whole. In between kids during the three days, I painted the entire surface of the box several times with Mod Podge again, for a nice, durable surface.

Although I reserved the top of the box entirely for the decorated patterns, each child had also written her name on tracing paper, and a teacher had cut all of them out, so after each child had decoupaged her chosen pattern, I helped her find her name among all the other names, and then instructed her to find a spot on the sides of the box, not overlapping another child's name, to decoupage her own signature:You can see Sydney's signature just to the right of the big pattern in the middle there below:
And there's Willow's near the top on one side:This turned out to be a really excellent project to do with a large group of small children. Decoupage is simple enough, and forgiving enough, to really be done by a small child without being over-directed by an adult, and yet the result is quite sturdy and really pleasing.

AND it'll get you inside that Montessori Dutch door.

Craftster Read to Me Mommy Swap Goodness

I do a lot of swaps on Craftster, but the Read to Me Mommy swap may have just topped the 2008 Christmas in July Stashbuster swap (in which I had not one, but TWO swap angels step in for my flaky partner!) as my favorite swap to date.

The Read to Me Mommy swap was already set up to put me into nerdy heaven, what with the pleasure I took in sending off a copy of the girls' favorite pop-up encyclopedia, , and in making a variety of felt dinosaurs and a travel felt board (AND in finding an excuse to buy ), and in stencilling a parasaurolophus onto a child's T-shirt. But it turned out to be even better to receive my own swap package from my partner:

OCEAN-THEMED!!!

She sent an autographed copy of Seashells by the Seashore, a counting and shell identification book:
She sent shells, and stuff to decorate them with, if we ever get tired of just looking at them and playing with them as-is:She made a sewn matching game with hand-drawn illustrations:She made a beach bag out of beautiful fabric:And she made the most amazing, most elaborate, themed roll-up felt playset that I've ever seen:

If you like crafting for kiddos, especially crafting educational or extension activities, you should totally check out the Read to Me Mommy swap gallery, which is inspirational. There's a Harold and the Purple Crayon package that I possibly must recreate in every way.

The next Craftster swap that I'm currently signed up for is...wait for it...a DINOSAURS swap. My swap partner would like matchy stuff for herself and her sister, so it will be like crafting for my girls in the future! I bet they'll STILL like stuffed dinosaurs and stencilled shirts!

Snow Paint

It turns out that snow just doesn't come in enough garish colors to suit us, so......we painted it.

You will need:

• spray bottles (I bought small spray bottles brand-new from The Container Store the last time we went through St. Louis, just to have on hand for art projects like this)
• tap water
• liquid food coloring (not the professional-quality food coloring that you use for, you know, food, but the cheap-o McCormick stuff, which is really good for crafts)

Fill the spray bottles each about 4/5 full of tap water, then add at least 10 drops of food coloring to each bottle. Darker, more vivid colors will show up better in the snow than lighter colors or pastels will. I don't recommend that you use yellow at all, unless you want to sneak over in the night and do a neighbor's yard.

Before I give the spray bottles to the girls to use, I usually prime them by spraying them into the sink and I adjust the spray to a sort of concentrated mist.

And then, you spray!Since it continued to snow all day, most of our designs were eventually covered up, but it did turn us, for a while, once again into the yard that people stop and stare at (nude Jackson Pollack painting and front yard street-adjacent vegetable gardens also encourage that sort of behavior, we've found):There was ample snow stomping-- --and other assorted snow frolicking--

--yesterday, but although the public schools are having a Snow Day today, it is business as usual at Montessori. I'll be spending a third afternoon there working with the preschoolers and kindergartners on a decoupage project, but there are pinto beans in the crockpot, so my plan is to take the littles to the public library for a couple of hours after school.

Perhaps I can get some writing done there?

An Indoor Water Valentine

Lots of other blogs have really sweet, love-affirming Valentine's Day posts.

We traditionally prefer to spend our Valentine's Day weekend getting our redneck on at Caribbean Cove indoor water park.

In my opinion, indoor water parks are just one of those things that are automatically classified as redneck. Normal people in swimsuits, misbehaving children, questionably safe activities, hot dogs, arcade with prizes, inner tubes--these things, while quite normal in isolation, when put in combination are very redneck, and in a large, public, indoor swimming hole, are very, VERY redneck.

I'm quite at home here, as you might imagine.

As are we all. There is, traditionally, frolicking----and shopping at the nearby Goodwill Outlet Store (ask Sydney sometime about her brand-new-to-her two-foot-tall realistic-looking plastic pony), and miniature golfing, and a family screening of Dinotopia (we have gotten WAY into Dinotopia), and picnic lunches----because we can't afford Caribbean Cove and anything other than peanut butter all at the same time, and, of course, bucket-dumping:Since last year I posted a photo of Matt getting water dumped on him, I told him that I wanted to post a photo of him doing the same thing this year, so he dutifully went and stood under the bucket. But every time the bucket dumped, I'd yell out, "I didn't get it that time, Matty! Can you do it just one more time?" I managed to get him to stand under that bucket and get dumped on FOUR times before he caught on.

Five has been a big year for Willow so far--losing her first tooth, learning to read, learning to ride a bicycle, becoming a kindergartner--and this weekend was no exception to the string of heart-breakingly big firsts, because THIS year, unlike all the other years we've come to Caribbean Cove previously, Willow is over 42" tall, and thus she can ride the water slides:Trust me, she's in that photo, riding in the front of the inner tube that's also holding her father, but the splash is so big that you can't even see her.

It's not necessarily your typical hearts-and-flowers-and-Cupid Valentine weekend, but if you ask Happy Girl #1----and Happy Girl #2--
--they'll assure you that it's the perfect Valentine weekend for us.

Prehistoric Valentine

A parasaurolophus in pink is one little girl's perfect Valentine:It's made from a freezer paper stencil cut with my Cricut from , and painted with Jacquard Neopaque fabric paint in pink. The positive image of the parasaurolophus is painted onto a shirt sent to my Craftster swap partner's little kiddo, along with his name done in stencil--Dinosaur Tracks has a really excellent stencil font.

Willow adores her pink parasaurolophus, and has already put in a request that I stencil her a shirt that has a stegosaurus being attacked by the meat-eater of my choice. This will take place later in my life, as today ALREADY I've finished up and mailed my swap package (just under the deadline), finished up and sent in my A Fair of the Arts application (just under the deadline), and unflooded the kitchen and the basement with the shop vac--we did not spend enough money on our dishwasher. Still to do: bullying the girls into finishing the addressing of their Valentines, shopping for weekend groceries, and packing for Caribbean Cove! This year I will NOT be taking 46 awful papers to grade, which will be a relief. I WILL be taking a romance novel, a bottle of cheap champagne, my Lensbaby, and lots of DVDs.

Much relaxin' will be done.

We Don't Wash Wool on Hot

Dear Matt,

First of all, thanks for doing the laundry. What with Willow barfing and all, laundry definitely needed to be done, and I'm glad that you stepped up. Did you have trouble finding the washing machine? I know it's been a while since you've used it, so I hope it's still in the place that you remembered.

I did want to mention again, however--remember when I showed you all the girls' nice, soft wool leggings that I spent one weekend sewing up for them? I sewed them from sweater sleeves, and sewed matching skirts, and they were super cute? Remember when I held them up and said, "Look at these leggings. They are made of wool. You cannot wash them on hot, and you cannot put them in the dryer. Look, here's another pair of leggings. It is also made of wool. Do not put this in the dryer, and do not wash it on hot," and you said, "Stop talking to me like I'm not smart!" and I said, "Of course you're very smart, but you also felted my nice, soft wool socks, and I do not want you to felt this pair of leggings that you are now looking at," and you said, "Okay, okay! Stop treating me like a child! I hear you about the leggings!"

Do you remember that? I'm just asking because--
--you felted the leggings. They are very small now. They are no longer Willow-sized. They're not even Sydney-sized. In fact, they might now fit Sugar and Nutmeg, the guinea pigs in the girls' classroom, and that's fun, because I was meaning to spend all weekend sewing those guinea pigs something nice anyway.

Anyway, thanks for doing the rest of the laundry, and Sydney didn't even notice that the skirt on her princess dress is a little pink now, what with being washed with red and orange and purple wool leggings. On hot.

Love,
Julie

P.S. You also put the down comforter in the dryer. There are feathers everywhere.

Sick of Snow Days

Books

Magic School Bus and Dinotopia and Biscuit and Boynton and Gilbert, among MANY others

An elaborate lunch

pasta with last night's pizza sauce and shredded Swiss cheese with sliced oranges on the side

Cassette tapes on the stereo

LOTS of snow

LOTS of sledding
one major temper tantrum involving how much it sucks to bike in the snow (I told her so)
Writing
lots done on tablet paper, not so much done on the book proposal

Hallelujah
an early bedtime

The odd snow day is a nice novelty, but there's also something appealing about one's normal schedule, don't you think? I'll be happy when a normal non-snow schedule reappears, just any time it wants to now.

Valentines Made by Artists

The girls are less interested in prepping for Valentine's Day than they are in it just BEING Valentine's Day already, but nevertheless, even children have obligations, and Valentine's Day likely incurs the greatest obligations for the under-12 set than any other holiday.

Y'all, we have GOT to make some Valentines.

The girls' school does permit store-bought Valentines, although not Valentines with media characters, so I'm not sure how you're supposed to work that one, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend a penny on this Hallmark holiday when we are perfectly capable of constructing our own Valentines with stuff we already own, and stuff that is, thus, free.

Therefore the daily sweatshop. Which is also really not that bad because the children are also not asked to bring a Valentine for everyone in their class, but just their special friends. To keep even that lesser amount from getting monotonous, I set out a different Valentine activity every day, so that there's a little more impetus to keep crafting, and no, they are NOT allowed to make every single Valentine be for their mutual friend Ella.

The day before yesterday, the girls made one tray of melted crayon hearts, which is three hearts for each of them to give out. Yesterday was far more productive, with the creation of Artist Trading Card Valentines being fun enough for the girls to make about a dozen total:Willow did most of hers with colored pencil, but Sydney got really into coloring her ATC, then gluing beads onto it:
I found that fun, too:

I got into the habit last year of giving out Artist Trading Cards instead of business cards at craft fairs (I always prefer performing a labor-intensive task over spending any kind of money whatsoever), so if there are any Valentines left unsent, I will be happy to have them join the Pumpkin+Bear ATC stash.

For today's Valentines, I'm thinking of setting out this huge stash of plastic "stained glass" suncatchers and paint that my mother bought for the girls the last time we visited. The girls can have the fun of painting them, and then they can leave my house and be someone else's chore to hang up and display and surreptitiously get rid of when the kids aren't looking.

The 36 Hours of a Snowman's Life

It took an unreasonable amount of effort to make this snowman:
The children will claim that I didn't help at all, but the fact is that I rolled that entire head all by myself. And then I went inside, because I'm not really a snow person.

Although I do like to sled.

My Aunt Pam makes snow ice cream both times that it snows in Arkansas each winter, but even though I ate bowls-full myself as a child, I no longer find it sanitary. Isn't snow just basically air pollution on ice, or is that too paranoid?

Fun as it was to make the snowman, after school today Willow asked if she could kick the snowman down and stomp it up.

I said that she should.

And apparently that was pretty fun, too.

Tutorial: Sew a Long Skirt for a Little Girl

Because they're sock monkeys.

And because the little girl likes to wear skirts.

I had thought that I was going to save most of this jersey cotton sock monkeys sheet, which probably cost $1.50 max at Goodwill Outlet, for matching pajamas for the littles. But that's a lot of sewing, and I have a lot of other stuff going on, as well, and the littles already have plenty of jammies, and I keep cutting into the sheet to make more baby bags for Barefoot Kids. But it's sock monkeys! I have to make SOMETHING for the girls out of it!

Hell, the little girl likes skirts. Might as well make a skirt:
To make a skirt of your own for a little person that you happen to know, you'll need a goodly bit of jersey cotton. I'm actually pretty stoked that I figured this project out, because several years ago I bought a few jersey cotton sheet sets, just red and grey and blue and whatever, but we don't tend to use the flat sheets in our house, so...yay, future skirts!

Anyway, measure the little person from waistband to anklebone, and add 1.25 inches, and measure her around her waist (make her suck it in, because for some reason my littles always measure wider than they wear), and multiply by 3, then add your seam allowance--1/4", unless you're going to do a french seam or something crazy like that, but you're welcome to.

Take the time to iron your jersey cotton nice and neat, because jersey cotton can stretch and warp something fierce, although a little careful ironing will true it back.

Starting at the bottom hem of the sheet, which will be the bottom hem of the dress--
--measure the length and cut, then measure the width across and cut.

Hem the side of the skirt, so that you're left with a really, REALLY wide tube.

For the waistband of the skirt, I was inspired by the blog post by Lil Blue Boo about HER T-shirt skirt, so that I folded my waistband down 1.25", too, and top-stitched the top edge to make a casing for the elastic, too. Her tute for that is very clear and has more photos--the only big difference is that I don't use interfacing or starch, and so zig-zag or overcast all my stitches when I sew knits. Anyway, her idea makes for a really neat waistband:As always, the outie is optional.

Depending on how snug you want the skirt's waist to be, you can measure your elastic for anywhere from your child's waist measurement (it'll be snug, since you'll be using some of that length to sew the elastic to itself) to your child's waist measurement + 1/2" seam allowance (that sounds like it would be a comfier fit, but remember that your child has no hips--go for snug).

Hook a safety pin to one end of the elastic, thread it through the waist casing, sew it to itself, and sew the casing shut.

Do you have two girls, too? Then go make another one!

Or just go ahead and have that third glass of sangria. The girls are asleep, after all, and there's a Toddlers and Tiaras marathon on TLC.

Back to the Library

I can't believe we survived the whole three months.

Our bright, expansive, handsome children's department in the public library was closed for THREE ENTIRE MONTHS. Can you believe that? Renovations were apparently necessary  but at times, I seriously wondered if I could last that long. I am addicted to requesting, online, large numbers of library materials as I think of them--say, for instance, the little kid has been talking about death a lot, or we're invited to take a trip to Boston this summer--and having them sent to the drive-up, where I can pick them up at my leisure. For the entirety of the renovation, the majority of the children's collection was unavailable. That means NO copies of Lifetimes, my absolute favorite book about death. No Revolutionary War on Wednesday, the book in which tiny Jack and Annie take their Magic Treehouse to war! I nearly expired.

And the beautiful, large playroom! Don't even get me started about how much I missed the playroom. Or the train table. Or the window seats by the board books. Or spending the entire afternoon sitting in comfy chairs working on stuff while the kids browsed or read or played.

I REALLY missed that last one. The happiness of writing for hours, with the kids, without feeling like I'm neglecting them! And we've also gotten out of the house!

My time of trial is over, however, for as of Monday, the children's room is officially open again. Things are spiffier, there is new carpet, the children's DVDs are in a SHOCKINGLY prominent location, but otherwise, things are back to normal. Story time was followed by activity time, world without end amen, and funnily enough, the activity was the exact food coloring, table salt, and ice experiment that's been on trend on the interwebs lately, so I didn't even have to drag out our crap to do it. Of course, we are very little, so we just watched the salt melt through magnifying glasses:

It was like going back home after a long absence, where even though things may be different, you can manage to settle right back in just fine:

The big kid learned to read while the children's room was closed, so I think this homecoming is going to be extra-sweet for her.

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!

A Set of Dinosaurs with Which to Travel

The baby is fully healed. Her 104-degree fever for much of last night earned her the day that she's having today, which she is spending in bed, watching children's shows on Netflix Watch Instant and being offered tasty delicacies by her mother--blueberry-pomegranate juice, vegan carob brownies from , fresh oranges, frozen pizza. I figure her body needs a day of rest, which it has to if my little hummingbird is content to just lie there and watch TV all day, and, frankly, I could use a day of extra productivity knowing that both girls are justifiably glued to the boob tube.

And that's how I FINALLY got that living room table nice and scrubbed (we've been kneading bread on it, is why) and made vegan carob brownies and wrote the entire About the Author section of my book proposal and finished the large craft for the Read to Me Mommy swap that I'm participating in on Craftster:

It's a travel felt board, made to accompany , a madly awesome book that would normally be far too expensive for me to purchase for a swap, but the girls were given a copy by an extremely generous mom friend, and then a second copy for Christmas by another loved one, so there you go! In my house, regifting is valid and encouraged.

Only Willow, likely, could tell you the names of all the dinosaurs that I included, but the ones in the photo above are, I believe, an apatasaurus, a supersaurus (which is either a baby or very far away!), and a dimetrodon, while an ichthyosaur swims in the sea and a pterosaur conquers the air. And yes, I cheated--using my last paycheck from Crafting a Green World for a while (more beauracracy changes, ick), I ebayed a most coveted copy of . It was a steal, and a bunch of bidders tried to snipe me in the last minute, but I stood triumphant!

The girls are thrilled, especially Willow, who drew an allosaur in honor of the occasion:Notice that she is in the camp of paleontologists who believe that predatory dinosaurs were highly colored.

For the felt dinosaurs, I cut cardboard templates with the Cricut, then hand-cut the felt. For the travel felt board, I hot-glued felt to the front and back of a Scrabble board. That one was a little tricky, so I'll likely post a tutorial for it when I make a second one for the girls. I made them their own dinosaur felt set, and I made a third set for putting into my pumpkinbear etsy shop as soon as I can squeeze in the time.

And now, while the girls watch what seems like an infinity of Caillou, I plan to do a couple of loads of laundry, write the book's table of contents for my book proposal, figure out what dinner I can make with all the pots and pans dirty (loaded baked potatoes?), blog for free at CAGW, change the bed that Sydney has been eating crackers in all day, read the girls another chapter from Bambi and hope that they'll still go to sleep even if they haven't gotten any exercise all day, get a little exercise myself, and maybe, just maybe, sew up a sock monkey baby bag.

Oh, and I didn't get much sleep last night, so there's always that.

WIP Wednesday: The Eucalyptus, Vapo-Rub, and Honey Edition

So the actual culling down of this week's WIPs was seriously marred by a certain little sickie, who spent a small part of the day snuggled up in her sleeping bag on the couch with tons of stuffies, listening to Winnie the Pooh on CD--
--and a vastly greater majority of the day and evening snuggled up in a blanket on my lap, glassy-eyed and flushed, dripping popsicles and juice all down my front. I'm a sucker for this kid when she's a sickie, on account of she's the one who's spent her life trying harder to break my heart than the other little bruiser has, but still...when I look with longing across the room and fantasize about getting up to clean off the table and give it a good scrubbing? Momma could use a break.

If I had managed to get anything done today (which I didn't), here is what I would have chosen from:

Current Works-in-Progress

1. book proposal revision: heavily edit, redo one tutorial using a different fabric, redesign, solicit proofreaders, possibly solicit expert contributions
2. Craftster Read to Me Mommy swap: finish travel felt board scene (with monogrammed carrying bag?), think up and create one more small craft to go with it
3. sock monkey baby bag: sew it up and send it off to Barefoot Kids
4. Montessori Parents' Library: prep for my meeting tomorrow (at 7:45 in the freakin' morning!), make signage
5. school Valentines: crayon hearts this year?
6. thank-you note to Aunt Peggy: dear god, she sent the girls a generous present for Christmas, and what have I sent her in return? Bupkiss!
7. Valentine's gifties to little cousins (on account of I ran out of time to send them Christmas gifties): stuffed cousin dolls and something else...hmm, hmm, hmmm...
8. Valentine's giftie to aunt and uncle (same reason): red wine jelly?
9. Valentine's giftie to Matt's brother (crap, this is getting bad): decorated picture frames a la little girls
10. Fair of the Arts application: three pics and some rhetoric

Perhaps the baby will feel well enough tomorrow to lie in bed and watch Land Before Time all day.

Little Painted Dollhouses

There are certain items out there in the world so awesome that probably any crafty parent, happening upon them, would say, "A-ha! I know just what to do with THAT!"

Such it is with a certain mass-marketed unfinished-wood CD holder shaped like a house. It cries out for, it LONGS, to be painted and decorated and turned into a child's little dollhouse. And oh, it has been. Witness the following bloggers, to name just a few:

• Chasing Cheerios
• Angry Chicken
• The Snail's Trail

There's even been some blog-sniping about who had the idea first, which is always fun (not).

However, I win, because everybody else paid around five bucks for their CD holder houses, and I found mine on clearance at Michael's for $2.49 each. So nyah.

Sometimes when I buy some art materials or a kit for the kids I'll just hold onto it for a while--perhaps they're really into some other thing at the moment so I know they can't concentrate on it, or they've gotten some other presents recently so I know they won't appreciate it, or I just feel like the timing's not right. We have several colors of polymer clay, for instance, that the kids even picked out, that I've just haven't offered them yet, and a couple of wood kits from our local history center's museum store, and even some Christmas presents (gasp!). 

These houses, however...as soon as we got home I got out our hard-core set of artist's acrylics--

--and excitedly to work they did go! The big kid left and came back to painting all evening, but the little kid sat in her chair for over two hours straight and painted:

She didn't even leave to go to the bathroom. Even I left to go to the bathroom. But her hard work really did pay off. What with the large spectrum of color in the acrylic set, and the kid's strategy of leaving one area to dry and then coming back to paint it in a different color (she basically painted the entire dollhouse three times), her entire dollhouse has a lot of depth and an interesting variety of color--it's pretty amazing, and we haven't even whipped out the book of wallpaper samples yet.

I watered down the acrylics a bit so they would flow better, and put each color in the compartment of a plastic tray that had once held miniature quiches (Matt has a weakness for you, you little egg-and-cheese confections!). And while the kids painted away, I worked on my book proposal revision.

I'm glad that we all had that really happy, creative time, since I've been off my game the past couple of days, tearing my way through a recent Steven King novel instead of writing or crafting or parenting or cleaning so much (I finished it tonight, thank god, and life can now continue as normal).

But with two dollhouses like this to play with, the kids have somehow managed to keep themselves entertained while their mama has been indulging in the Victorian sin of novel-reading.

For me, I swear, a good book is like a bad addiction.

Our Version of Alone Time

At least for the near future, this is what it looks like from nine to eleven o'clock most nights, our girls soundly tucked away, the living room table cleared of dinner and evening family activities:
I work on my book proposal revision, and Matt works on his homework.

And believe me, it is work. I need to change the entire perspective through which I'd planned to write my book, keeping my authorial voice undamaged while revising according to the constructive criticism that I received ("Talk less about Willow and Sydney" ?!?). Matt, used to years of art done almost entirely on the computer, is having to get used now to the intensive hand-work of his drawing class, and not just the drawing itself, but the tedious and tiresome process of prepping his work surface according to the various requirements of the professor ("Mark your grid with tape cut to 1/8" width" ?!?).

We're working in the mines, my friends, but for a bigger purpose: one of us wants an MFA degree, and the other one of us wants a book deal.

Neither of these, apparently, simply fall out of the sky into one's laps. So be it.

Tutorial: A Volcano in, I Mean on, Your Pants

I'm really clumsy, and I think I also may be getting old. Before I had kiddos, when Matt and I played adult co-rec softball together (Go, Ballantine Tool and Die!!!), we used to joke that adult recreational sports are so interesting to watch primarily because of the very real possibility of seeing an adult seriously injure themselves. I saw people blow out knees and backs and break feet and ankles, and those were just the non-contact injuries.

I had my own non-softball, non-contact injury last week when, while racing the girls to their school building, I tripped and fell and skinned my knee something fierce. Oh, what did I trip on? Um...nothing.

I'll save you the descriptions of the blood and gore and scabs and general grossness--let's just say it was AWESOME--and turn, now, to the damage done to my third-favorite pair of pants, a comfy pair of cargos bought for two dollars at Goodwill. They were, of course, ripped to all get-out. It was tragic. Heartbreaking. It called, clearly, for a jaunty applique patch. Here's how to make one:

First, you have to seam together the rip in your pants:
See, isn't it huge? Hearbreaking, I tell ya.

Next, you have to cut yourself out a jaunty applique. Use a pre-washed fabric that's the same weight as, or heavier than, your pants fabric. I'm using pre-washed upholstery sample fabric, and I used my Cricut to cut a pattern template from
out of cardstock: my patch is going to be a volcano.

Pin your applique exactly where you want it on your pants. I don't use fusible webbing or any of that heat-set crap for clothing anymore, so use as many pins as you need to feel confident that your patch won't shift. Feel free to add on whatever you want to make your repair job not just functional but super-awesome:
The plume of fire coming out of the volcano? Just there for show.

Now that wide-legged pants are in style, you can satin stitch your applique without having to open up a side seam, although it does require a little fiddling:See, here I've got the fabric fiddled in such a way that I can sew all those roughly parallel spots pretty easily, and when I've done those I'll shift and futz the fabric around to get a new angle and sew the perpendicular spots. If you're getting skipped stiches, it probably means that you need to move to a heavier needle--you're already using a jeans needle, right?

When you're done, you'll have an awesome, sturdy applique that makes your pants look even better than they did originally:
And you'll discover how hard it is to get a good photograph of your own knee.

Tablet Non-Rasa

In our house, we write. The girls have their stories and letters to grandmas and I have my lists and my blogs and the book proposal revision that I am currently freaking out about, and even Matt has his on-again, off-again secret blog.

When you write, you need a lot of paper. Bookmaking is DEF on the collective to-do list (Matt has for years been on the verge of signing the two of us up for a bookmaking class at Pygmalion's, but has always been thwarted by family nights at the girls' school or classes that I'm teaching or classes that he's taking, etc.), as is a beater laptop for the girls (not exactly PAPER paper, but you know what I mean). And, of course, there's an ample supply of notebooks and blank paper and dry-erase boards and chalkboards and scrapbook paper and whatever. But we always seem to be out of that nice, wide-ruled, newsprint tablet paper that little children have learned to write on since god knows when.

So I bought us a buttload from Lakeshore Learning (I could have gotten a reasonable amount for free from Amazon with my swagbucks, but what's the point of a reasonable amount when you can buy a year's worth?). And how fun! Did you know there's kindergarten-ruled tablet paper AND first-grade ruled tablet paper (it's narrower) AND really big story tablet paper with a blank area at the top for illustration? Of course I bought it all. We're homeschooling next academic year, ya know.

So often, as I drink a big mug of coffee and read the newspaper every morning, the girls join me for some time of quiet industry (I don't know where they get that impulse--most of my own life is spent avoiding quiet industry at all costs). Sometimes they have workbooks, sometimes they have coloring pages, and sometimes they have tablet paper for the writing of stories or the catching-up of their correspondence.

Sydney dictates to me, and then I leave a space below each line for her to play at copying. I love the look of concentration on her face here:
Willow will dictate her entire piece to me, and then re-copy it onto her own paper:

I've been pointing out to her the spaces between words, but it hasn't caught on yet, so I'm sure that receiving one of her letters is like having your own little mental puzzle to work through--good for the mind, keeps you from getting Alzheimer's.

My favorite thing, however, is when a girl draws a picture, then dictates a story about it. Here's part of Sydney's writings (the illustration tablet paper is BIG, and won't all fit on my scanner) about various creatures that have crowns and thus are royalty:

If you like what you can see of her story about Ladybug Crowny, you should hear some of the adventures of Princess Kitty.