December Favorites: The British Navy, Suicidal Misanthropes, and Drawing with Waffles

Why yes, I DID spend an evening flipping through every single sewing book in the library, looking for the perfect zip-top tote bag pattern.

And that's just one small example of all the roaring good times that books and I spent together this December!

First of all, Friends, I have discovered a new book series! AND it's actually an old book series, so there are a bunch of books and I can read them all as fast as the library can check them out to me!

If you remember how much I love the Temeraire series, an alternate history of the Napoleonic Wars told through the perspective of a British Navy captain and his dragon companion, then I think you'll understand already how much I love this book:



It's a historical fiction novel of the Napoleonic Wars told through the perspective of a British Navy captain and his surgeon companion. It's immersive, in that if you don't already live in the early 1800s, you absolutely do while you're reading. Both Aubrey and Maturin have flaws--Aubrey, in particular, has a LOT of flaws, the poor, bumbling, unsocialized oaf--but somehow you find them both ineffably charming, and their relationship to each other is a treasure. I will vote for anybody who refers to another adult as "my particular friend!"

And yes, of COURSE there is a fan-made map for reference. How could you trace the Sophie's travels without it?

If we see each other on Facebook, you'll know that I already went on and on (and on...) about my other favorite book of December:



It's the incredible, unbelievable, heartbreaking history of the AIDS pandemic, and the story of the grassroots activists, themselves victims, often literally dying as they worked, who educated, memorialized, searched for a cure, and advocated for each other.

You guys, everyone needs to read this book. If you're shocked at the way that the current administration is willing to dehumanize immigrants and seems actively working for their genocide, then it's because you haven't read this book, in which the government was willing to dehumanize gay people and seemed actively working for their genocide. There are so many stories in here that sound so crazy that you want to believe they're not true--why would the FDA insist on drug studies that involved placebos even after it became clear that 100% of the people who received the placebo instead of the drug were dying? Victims were deliberately martyring themselves by continuing to participate in such studies, just because that was the only way the FDA would eventually approve the drugs.

It was so bad that one day a New York City activist read in People magazine an article about Ryan White that made it clear that his doctor had never heard of a life-saving prophylactic drug that he could have been taking. The doctor had never heard of it because the FDA wouldn't approve it for that use, even though it had been known for years that it was saving lives. They wouldn't approve it because people weren't willing to submit to a drug study that involved placebos for it, because if they got the placebo they'd die. People were literally having to resort to word-of-mouth to pass along these kinds of tips, and that's what this activist did: he called Ryan's grandma, who put him in touch with his doctor, who then started Ryan on the prophylactic drug.

It's a stunning book. Read it as soon as you can.

And here's what else I read in December!



Will had quite the December with books, as well. Somehow she managed to read 44 books in 31 days, bringing the total number of books that she read in 2019 to 350!!!

I'll just say that one more time and then just kind of leave it there: my child read 350 books in 365 days.

And one of her favorites was this one!



Will read it happily, but claimed afterwards that she didn't understand it. I pushed back, though, and told her that the book report that she was supposed to be reading it for was non-negotiable, so she spent a VERY sulky afternoon out in her shirtsleeves in the cold, sitting out on the back deck with her book, pencil, and notebook, in full sight of the picture window so I couldn't miss her (self-imposed) suffering, and finally came back in, triumphant, with an absolutely terrific book report in hand. She understood the book quite as well as any fifteen-year-old could possibly understand philosophical fiction, and I think that spending the afternoon forced to delve into it and think about it and make herself figure it out made her like the book quite a bit more than she would have if I'd originally replied, "Oh, you didn't understand Steppenwolf? Oh, well. Choose something else for your book report, I guess!"

Although its morals might be a little suspect... Will had a LOT of fun with the plot of a suicidal misanthrope who is taught to appreciate the existential indulgences of the bourgeoisie, murders his girlfriend, and learns to accept himself while visiting a trippy magical theatre.

In other incredible news, I recommended two of my favorite books from November to Will, and not only did she read them, but she decided that they were two of HER favorite books, too! GASP!!!



My specialty is magical boarding schools and their graduates, apparently.

Here are Will's other favorite books from December:



And here's the rest of what she read in December!



Yeah... that was a lot of books.

I can't give you links to my favorite December podcasts because Spotify and I are fighting--EVEN THOUGH I pay them ten bucks every single month, they've got some glitch or hack going in which every time I try to play my music, some crappy instrumental song cuts in. The people on reddit (whenever I have a problem,  I always go to reddit first) who've had this happen to them, too, say that disconnecting their account from Facebook and changing their passwords solved the problem, but I can't disconnect my account from Facebook without temporarily deactivating Facebook, and I can't do that anyway because Spotify also won't let me update my email address so if I tried to reset my password it would just send the link to an email address that's deactivated, too.

UGH!

I am THISCLOSE to deactivating my Spotify account and losing a decade's worth of carefully curated playlist memories, but you guys, is there even any other comparable music streaming service?

Okay, my first-world problems are not your problems, so instead, check out Syd's current favorite YouTube channel, Drawing with Waffles!



She's this super sweet and upbeat artist who videotapes herself completing little drawing challenges, encountering setbacks and troubleshooting problems she runs into, etc. She's a TERRIFIC influence on my own little artistic perfectionist. Isn't it nice to find positive influences on YouTube, of all places?

Speaking of my little artistic perfectionist... she makes her own YouTube videos! They're primarily animated music videos, and as her mother, I find them adorable:



Syd dominated our TV time in December, it seems, but when I got a turn to choose a video, I generally just made everyone watch one of these English Heritage cooking shows.



I want to make trifle!

Girl Scout cookie season is about to start, which means I won't have much reading time until mid-March, but when I do get to eke out some time for myself, at least I'll have my British Navy captain and his pet surgeon to enjoy!

Making Bubble Tea with My Teenager

You guys, I cannot afford bubble tea.

Rather, I can afford it on the younger kid's birthday, and after her ballet recital. Maybe on Mother's Day, but definitely not as often as the kid would like to drink bubble tea, which is daily.

Seriously, Friends, bubble tea is something like $4.50 here! It's not a steak dinner, sure, but I have a hard time paying that for a beverage, especially one per person because friends don't let friends get bubble tea alone, ahem. I don't buy steak dinners, either.

You know what's cheap, though? I'll tell you what's cheap:

Tapioca pearls. Matcha powder. Almond milk.

None of those ingredients are even close to $4.50 a serving, and what's better is that I don't have to get out of my pajamas to turn them into bubble tea!

All the credit goes to the kid for this experimental process. Back in the spring she requested tapioca pearls, and I helped her play around with them some, mostly putting them into cold-brew coffee spiked with chocolate milk, which I let her drink, because whatever.

But the kid wanted more the restaurant-quality, $4.50 per serving type of bubble tea, and what we were making wasn't nearly cutting it, so off and on over the past few months, she's kept experimenting. And finally, just this week, she's nailed it, and now we can make ourselves absolutely delicious matcha bubble tea whenever we want.

I get to be in charge of the tapioca pearls. They're super easy to make, which is good because they don't keep AT ALL, so you have to make them fresh whenever you want them. You just follow the instructions on the bag, but instead of scooping them into simple syrup when they're done, I stir a whopping spoonful of honey into them and that makes them perfect and delicious.

Since we have a Vitamix (I remember having an anxiety attack about the cost of that blender once upon a time, but I've had it by now for well over a decade, and the only thing that's ever gone wrong with it is the pitcher cracking back in April, and I'm almost positive that happened when I accidentally blended the plastic cap a little bit, oops), the kid uses this recipe from the Vitamix website, but I know for a fact that she doesn't bother with blooming the matcha. She says she can't taste the difference, and I sure as heck don't care!

When the separate ingredients are ready, she divides the tapioca pearls between our cups, then adds the matcha milk, and our matcha milk tea is DELICIOUS. 

We've had these exact metal straws since May (and I LOVE them), and they're the perfect diameter for slurping up boba. If we didn't own them, though, I wouldn't be above taking my store-bought boba tea straw home and washing it out for this.

Right now, my partner in the other room giving the kids a lesson on how to use Powerpoint (I'm eavesdropping, which is how I know that he's assigned them to create a presentation about tacos to prove their mastery), and I am just about to fall asleep in my chair, but I'm toughing it out, because as soon as he's done the younger and I have HUGE plans.

We're going to jammy up, make a double batch of matcha bubble tea, and then settle into my bed to watch the 1976 version of Carrie, which the kid has been longing to see since October. It's a cheap date, and one that I am very, very, very excited about.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Crafty Book Review: Playing with Creative Alcohol Inks

One of my favorite things to do on stay-at-home holiday days is explore new art supplies and craft projects with the kids. Over Thanksgiving break, we did several hours of origami, for instance, and ahead of us on this peaceful holiday vacation is latch hooking using the supplies that I splurged on this morning (and yes, I DID go to both the big-box craft stores so that I could use both of my 50%-off coupons, mwa-ha-ha!).

We did this even when we traveled for every holiday--I vividly remember introducing the kids to homemade modeling beeswax during one summer visit with my Pappaw, and dyeing dried pasta vivid colors during another Christmas visit a full decade ago. I'd happily give several years off my own life to have Pappaw back, but I will say that it is very, very, very nice to stay home for the entire Christmas holiday now. It's absolutely my favorite thing about Christmas.

On an earlier trip to both big-box craft stores to use another set of 50%-off coupons (Will also needed metallic embroidery floss for her recent obsession with making friendship bracelets, showing that my holiday-break-equals-new-craft-project tradition is passing itself down quite nicely!), I bought a small set of alcohol ink, and then I hit up Amazon for a small pad of Yupo paper, all recommended by this book, Creative Alcohol Inks, sent to me by a publicist:



The kids and I loved doing faux alcohol ink art using Sharpies and rubbing alcohol so much that I thought it would be worth seeing if they might also like using real alcohol ink.

Reader, they DID!

The day after Christmas, while Will was off reconnecting with her best friend, the public library, after two entire days of it being closed, and Matt was at the gym, Syd and I sat down with a billion supplies and tried to recreate some of the techniques from Creative Alcohol Inks.

Just as with Sharpies and rubbing alcohol, alcohol ink, itself, is a fun process-oriented supply. The Yupo paper, too, is very forgiving, and I was able to goof around with the alcohol ink on a single piece of Yupo paper, then saturate it with rubbing alcohol and essentially wash all the ink off before doing it all again.

At one point Syd looked over at me and said, "Wow, that piece of paper has been through a LOT." Thanks, Kid.

When I was done messing around, I made one of the suggested projects from Creative Alcohol Inks, an embellished porcelain ornament:

My ornament isn't actually porcelain, but a clear plastic ornament coated on the inside with white acrylic paint. Pro tip: that makes it look like porcelain!

While I was playing around, though, Syd was steadily mastering everything about alcohol ink:

We had one mishap associated with the Yupo paper; it's technically a plastic paper, and apparently shouldn't be combined with long blasts from the heat gun that we were using to dry the alcohol ink (because I'm the kind of person who knows where her heat gun is but not her blow dryer #nOtLiKeOtHeRgIrLs).

You can see in the below photo how the corner of Syd's paper is warped from the heat gun--oops! Fortunately, short blasts worked fine, so I did not, in fact,  have to go hunt down the blow dryer:

I have a new phone, which was my Christmas present from Matt (OT Question: How many presents do you and your partner exchange? Is it one? Is it five or more? I'm more of a multiple present person and Matt's more of a one-present person, but frankly, I always love my one present from him way more than I'm pretty sure he mildly likes his multiple presents from me. Dude is DIFFICULT to find presents for!), and this phone is amazing! And does time lapse videos! And from now on every one of my blog posts is going to include a time lapse!

So here's a time lapse of Syd's process creating something awesome from alcohol ink, Yupo paper, and paint pens:



How cool is that?!? Please ignore the fact that all of y'all have probably been able to do this on your phones for a decade by now and tell me it's super cool.

I'm really eager for Syd to scan in some of her alcohol ink creations and then embellish them in Photoshop using her Wacom tablet, but on this evening she was was more into hand-drawing on top of them.

Hey, do you want to know that looks like?

OMG, you DO?!?

Okay, here's a time lapse!



You're welcome!

And, fine, here are some still shots, as well, because having a fancy new camera on my fancy new phone doesn't mean that I'm not still obsessed with my behemoth single-lens manual camera:

Here's my finished product, hanging up happily on our Christmas tree:

And here are Syd's favorite two masterpieces!

You might remember that we had some trouble figuring out a good way to seal our tile art creations without desaturating the Sharpies, so I was super excited to see that Creative Alcohol Inks includes the specific supplies and techniques that you need to seal these creations.

Including yet another mention of resin, which I have been seeing mentioned EVERYWHERE lately, and it's making me more and more invested in the idea of buying some and playing around with it.

Perhaps a project for New Year's Day?

I received a free copy of Creative Alcohol Inks, because I can't write about a book until it's inspired me to spend an afternoon low-key sniffing rubbing alcohol and hanging out with my kid.

Topics in STEAM: Origami

Origami isn't one of our enduring passions, but it IS super fun, and I'm always stoked whenever something randomly reminds me that, "Hey! We like origami! I should get a bunch of how-to books from the library and make an evening of it!"

This time, it was reading the leader manual for the Girl Scout Cadette Designing Robots badge, and noticing that origami is one of the suggested starting activities for Step 1: Pick a challenge.

Hey! We like origami! I should get a bunch of how-to books from the library and make an evening of it!

Which, with the addition of the first season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (on DVD, also from the library), is exactly what we did:

Syd made a small fleet of foxes from Origami Wild Animals:

I busied myself make the stars from Hello Origami, trying to get the folds even and then making myself an entire rainbow. Later, Syd sneaked them onto the Christmas tree for me!

The folds are for sure not even, but whatever.

Will is our origami champion, though. She made the Compass from Modern Kudusuma Origami and made us our tree topper!

We have a nine-foot tree this year, so that star is HUGE!

On another night, we watched the NOVA episode on the way that engineers are attempting to integrate origami into robotics, and that sealed our connection between our fun project and thinking about efficient, effective, and appealing robot designs.

And speaking of sealing... previously, we've experimented with sealing origami designs with beeswax. The five billion coats of polyurethane sealant that I just put on my lap desk, however, had made me wonder if we could also seal origami that way. I don't know what the benefits of it would be, though, as our origami paper is already pretty archival--perhaps it would stiffen it and make it even more workable as an ornament or in a garland?

Stay tuned!

Here are the origami how-to books that we still have on our shelves:

I want to make the folded box and the lazy Susan. Will wants to make the dragon.

I think the Christmas tree and Santa would make good embellishments for the front of a greeting card. And the Star of David looks super easy!

I am seriously going to try the gift tags before I wrap the last of my Christmas gifts, because I've really been needing a DIY gift tag!

Honestly, we're not going to make anything from this book, but I'm keeping it on our shelves until it's due so that I can pretend like we are. I SUPER want a giant paper sphere made of origami octagons folded as edges!

I thought that Syd was going to go nuts for this origami book all about folding miniature articles of clothing, but she's not into it. Nevertheless, *I* want to fold a couple of the skirts and then see if she'll draw me a person to match.

Okay, we are legitimately going to make EVERY SINGLE THING in this book. It's got a ton of geometric solids, and then interesting extensions of them, and creative embellishments... I'll be fine having this be our weekly math enrichment activity for the rest of the school year.

I think we've got enough to keep us occupied on all of our long, cold winter nights!

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I Made our Dry Erase-Boards Look Like New, Because of Course I Did

We haven't used much of these little dry-erase boards lately, but for much of a decade we used them constantly:

Here's Syd learning how to read in 2013. Look at how clean that dry-erase board is!

Here we are playing Compound Sentences against Humanity in 2015.

Here's Will writing a letter to Uncle Mac in 2012. He's since died, which is almost the worst thing that has ever happened, and I'm so pleased that I have a picture of this letter to him.

Here the kids are learning how to square binomials in 2017. Look at how dirty that dry-erase board is!

As of last week, then, our dry-erase boards looked like this:

It took rubbing alcohol, a soft cloth, and about five minutes to turn both dry-erase boards back into this:

Doesn't that make you just sigh a happy sigh?

I Rebuilt My Lap Desk from the Ground Up

If, you know, the "ground" consists of plywood and a pillow form...

This particular lap desk is surely at least a decade old, and I know for a fact that when I bought it a decade ago, I bought it from a yard sale, and because I also know myself I'm also taking it as near-enough to a fact that I wouldn't have paid more than a quarter for it.

It used to be grey on top, with a grey fabric pillow underneath. Over the last year, though, that grey top started to peel away from the plywood base, and the fabric holding the pillow also began to peel away. When I finally got fed up with it I helped it all along until I ended up with this!

That's a plain plywood top, and somewhere off-camera, probably on the floor, is a plain pillow form.

Just as basic as I am!

Speaking of basic, how long has it been since I've decoupaged comic book pages all over something?

The answer, ALWAYS, is "Too long!"

That photo above represents the exact moment that, looking through the camera lens, I realized that I was decoupaging the comic book pages upside-down.

Eh, whatever. I'm not covering up that Dr. McCoy pic!

I used a 1:1 solution of Elmer's white glue/water to decoupage the comic book pages to the plywood desk top, but when it was completed and dry, I painted on a LOT of coats of water-based polyurethane sealant.

Like, a LOT of coats. I don't want to find myself rebuilding this lap desk again within the next decade!

I don't have a picture of the process of putting the pillow form back on, and covering it with new fabric, because just to get that job done I needed about fourteen more hands than I actually had. I'm pretty stoked about the fabric that I used, though--it's a little more of that beautiful batik on canvas that used to be our bedroom curtains back in our old house.

There's a LOT to be said for being a hoarder!

Lacking any other elegant solutions in my mind, I simply hot glued the snot out of it. That part might need to be rebuilt within the next decade, but fortunately, hot glue is cheap.

And now I LOVE my new-again lap desk!



I think it looks quite fine on top of my Star Wars quilt, and it holds a book and a glass of wine handily:

P.S. Here's how we built our headboard, which is just about the only other interesting thing in our bedroom.

DIY Wooden Headboard for under $60

This article was originally published here on Crafting a Green World in 2016.

Guess what we did over winter break?

I don't have a "before photo," so just imagine that prior to building our DIY wooden headboard, our bed was basically consisted of a mattress on top of a platform.

Super classy, right?

I really like the look of a giant, rustic, wooden headboard, but I don't have access to antique barnwood or other salvaged wood, I'm not comfortable with keeping pallet wood that close to my head, even if it's well sanded and well sealed, and I didn't want to pay for or really even use fake but easy-to-apply laminate. That left us with using new, though natural, materials, from our local big-box hardware store.

With those supplies, plus a little jiggering around, we figured out how to get the look that I wanted in a single day for less than sixty dollars--and that includes buying the wood stain, which you may not necessarily need to do.

DIY Wooden Headboard

Here's what we used:

• two shelving unit end frames. These are wooden frames with metal brackets, designed to allow you to add your own shelves. You'll be turning these on their sides and stacking them, so that you'll have a large frame that's about 6 feet wide and four feet tall. People want to get rid of these all the time--we actually had one randomly sitting in our garage--so you could try to find one at your local ReStore or on Freecycle before you buy it new. It won't matter if it's in poor condition, as it won't be visible. 
• tongue and groove wooden planks. These are plain, unfinished wooden planks with tongue and groove edges so that you can line them up nicely. By using these, I had to give up on the staggered look that I'd wanted, but the ease of placing them perfectly and making the job quicker and simpler was worth it. We used seven of these for our headboard, although one is completely covered by the mattress, so we could have skipped that one and saved a few bucks.
• screwdriver, drill, and drill bits. You'll need to screw the end frames into the wall, and the wooden planks into the end frames. 
• water-based stain (optional). For some reason, I find that whatever stain I buy, it always looks much darker than I think it will, so I generally go a couple of shades lighter when I choose it.

1. Lay everything out to make sure that you like it. There's no cutting involved in this project, so you really can lay your entire headboard out on the floor to make sure that the pieces will go together the way that you want and that you like the look. 

2. Stain the wood planks. My kids helped me with this step, and although I was a little afraid that they'd do a wonky job, fortunately stain is very forgiving.

And yes, as our headboard that stain looks at least two shades darker than it does in this photo.

I did not seal the planks, and I may live to regret that, but it saved me a lot of time, they look fine, and really, how much wear and tear can a headboard possibly get? Don't answer that if you're gonna be gross. 

3. Screw the frames to the wall. Matt set the bottom of the bottom frame just above the top of our platform, so that the platform could still sit flush to the wall (and he found my Fitbit! I thought that I'd lost that thing forever!), leveled it, and screwed it into the studs. Remember, you're setting these frames sideways, so that each one is six feet long and two feet tall. Once the bottom frame is in, the top frame can sit right on top of it--just double check that it's level before you screw it into the studs.

4. Screw the wood planks into the frame. Although you have to be mindful of those metal brackets, you can otherwise just screw the planks into the wooden frame. I also did not fill in the screw holes, and although I was a little afraid that the screws might catch my hair, they're far enough to either side and inset enough that they don't. You can see in the photo above that these planks extend just far enough to each side of the frame that we were able to hide a power strip on each side--of course, all the crap that we plugged into each power strip has wires sticking out, but it still looks better than it did before. 

Three years on, the headboard still looks brand-new, so I'm super smugly satisfied that I didn't bother to seal it. The rest of our bedroom is still pretty janky, but maybe in another three or four years I'll be in the mood to update something else...