DIY Potion Bottles

 

Will and I had a ton of fun making these spooky potion bottles for our Halloween decor, but I was the most stoked to figure out that I could make them from the antique (but worthless) bottles that we're continually pulling out of the back of our woods.

Dear 1950s, please stop leaving your trash lying around.

To make these spooky potion bottles, I first scrubbed 70 years' worth of mud out of some old amber beer bottles. I have so many of these lying around that I'm sick of them, and while I ought to just recycle them, I always feel like I ought to DO something with them, you know? I mean, they're part of history!

It's the history of people bringing beer to a drive-in movie, guzzling it, and then throwing out the bottles, so, not exactly interesting history, but still. History.

When the bottles were clean and dry, I painted them with the primer plus flat black spray paint that I'm currently obsessed with (it's the new slate grey!), then Will and I drew our designs on the bottles using pencil and traced over them with hot glue.

My hot glue devil's trap is pretty killer, right? Lay the hot glue on thick, so that it stands out really well later, and rub away all the little hot glue strings so they don't mess up the painting that you'll do later. 

After this step, you're mostly just going to be dry-brushing the bottles in different colors, letting them hang out to dry between coats. It took Will and I a couple of days to finish, but most of that is hands-off time.

We used artist's acrylics for all the painting. Just between us, I use them even when craft acrylics are called for, because I like how thick the paint is, and how saturated the colors are.

The first coat to be dry-brushed on should be black. Don't worry about covering the entire bottle, which should already be flat black; instead, you're deliberately covering the hot glue, especially in the cracks and corners where it meets the glass.

The next color to be dry-brushed on is whatever you want for the final color of the bottle. Will and I made all of our bottles grey (slate grey?!?), but brown/bronze would be really cool, too.

You still want to mostly cover the bottle with this color, but leave a lot of the base color showing underneath. Also try not to get any of the paint into those areas where the hot glue meets the glass; you want those lines and cracks to stay black to emphasize the embossed look you'll be adding later.

After this, Will and I added a few more colors, just a little and very lightly, to give the bottles more depth and texture and age. Some darker and lighter greys, a little bit of brown, tiny bit more of black, etc. It was a nice day, we were listening to Halloween music, and Matt was puttering around outside, too. Why not hang out, add a zillion more colors, and enjoy your kid's company?

My devil's trap looks pretty great, right?

I don't have a good picture of this next step, because I was having too magical of an afternoon to even so much as breathe too loudly, much less take tutorial photos. But in the background of the below photo, you can see that Will is finger-painting silver paint onto the very top of her hot glue designs. 

Use your absolute shiniest, most silver paint, and dab it on so that none of it gets into those cracks that you so carefully painted black and kept that way.

Is there much better than shirtsleeves weather on a sunny early October day?

To make the tops, we used whatever bits and bobs and fancy little things that I had squirreled away. You can sand the winery stamp off of a real cork--

--then slice it and shave it down so that it looks like it's a stopper in use when you glue it to the top of your bottle. 

You can glue any further embellishments to the top of the cork, but I have a billion eye pins on hand, it it worked really well to add my embellishments to the eye pin, push it through the top of the cork all the way through the bottom, and then glue the bottom so it didn't show.

Use an epoxy glue to attach the cork to the top of the bottle--

--and then sit back and admire your handiwork!

Will and I had a lot of fun making these, and we both think they look super awesome. I wouldn't be opposed to adding a few new bottles to our set every year...

...and we might just leave them out all year round, especially considering the large percentage of the rest of our decor that also wouldn't be out of place in a Halloween store.

The Newest Bark Ranger of Indiana Dunes National Park: Day 1

While my partner and I were exploring, we learned that not only are most of the beaches at Indiana Dunes National Park dog-friendly, but that they also participate in the Bark Ranger program!

And that's how one week after we returned home from our trip, I was pulling out my credit card to book an AirBnB for my older kid, Luna, and I to come back later this summer and have our own fabulous adventure. Because as much as my kid enjoyed 60 hours of screen-time without adult interference, she's also my best travel buddy, and Luna is hers. 

I packed only the essentials, as you can see.

We stopped at the visitor center so the big kid could see the museum, watch the informational film (I fell asleep during my own viewing of that film, so she is now more knowledgeable about Indiana Dunes than I am!), and collect both Junior Ranger and Bark Ranger books:

And then it was off to Luna's first real beach!

Luna doesn't really know how to play, so once upon a time when the big kid and I took her to our local dam's spillway, we were absolutely delighted to see how absolutely delighted Luna was by the rushing water and the waves. She ran at them, leaped at them, snapped at them, barked at them--we had NEVER seen her act like that before, and would never have believed that it was part of her character if we hadn't seen it with our own eyes.

The big kid and I started dreaming, then, of taking Luna to a whole entire beach full of waves, but I'm pretty sure that when she snaps at the water she's actually swallowing it, and I worry about salt poisoning from seawater. But Lake Michigan is salt-free, and when Luna saw it--or rather, when she saw its waves--she lost her ever-loving mind:

With the kid in tow, she ran up the beach and down the beach and up the beach and down the beach, barking hysterically most of that time:

Meanwhile, I hung out in a supervisory role:

When Luna had worn herself out so much that I was pretty sure she'd try to lie down halfway through the long walk back to the car (spoiler alert: she did!), we made the long walk back to the car, then hit up the grocery store, then found our AirBnb. This was my very first AirBnb ever, and it was thrilling. So much space! So many amenities! SO MANY TV CHANNELS!!! 

I mean, I know we came here to go to the beaches, but this Airbnb had Netflix AND Disney+! 

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Astronomy Chapter 3: Radiation, the Information from the Cosmos

Chapter 3 of Will's Astronomy textbook is titled, "Radiation: Information from the Cosmos." This chapter was especially fun because after, you know, reading the chapter and answering all the questions in the Chapter Review and doing all the actual book learning, we got to play with lots of toys!

Well, after also studying a few more supplementary resources:

• Electromagnetic Spectrum Poster (perfect for printing and hanging on the wall)
• Wavelength Tutorial
• Interactive Virtual Prisms

Laser Khet is a game that's probably more thematically related to our later unit on telescopes, as it models how visual information is transmitted via mirrors, but I like it better as a sort of sensorial study of the way that wavelengths reflect off surfaces at interesting angles. You can see these reflections in the interactive virtual prism, above, and in the real-world prism exploration that Will also did for this chapter, but I like the challenge here of working out the angles in your head and problem-solving and testing predictions, etc.

And it's also a fun game and you get to play with lasers!

In an extension activity that involves both reflection and refraction, here's Will's further exploration of prisms, including an experiment she created, performed, and wrote up in her Astronomy Lab Notebook.

We've owned this spectroscope since our solar eclipse study, so Will was able to play around with it, then use it to conduct another experiment:

This is also when we made the wave machine that still lives in our family room. Especially when used in combination with the electromagnetic spectrum poster, it's a terrific model of how electromagnetic radiation travels. Just between us, though, I'm a little sad that I didn't give Will fresh popsicle sticks (not ones formerly used as plant markers) for this project, or even spend time with her dying the sticks with liquid watercolors or otherwise prettifying them, because this ugly-ass wave machine with various types of kale written on each stick is basically the focal point of our entire house now, and everyone who comes over looks at it and plays with it.

As a final activity for this chapter, Will explored how radiation is interpreted by coders in a way that makes it visually meaningful and easier to analyze at a glance. She further extended this work in the textbook's next chapter, which is fully focused on spectroscopy.

And then we'll move onto comparative planetology!

Here's an Easy Way to Make a Hogwarts Robe

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World back in 2016.

If you want to be a character from Harry Potter, you need yourself a good Hogwarts robe. I mean, of course! But how to obtain the perfect robe? 

You could buy a fairly cheap Hogwarts robe in a costume store, but then it would look cheap. You could buy a super-nice, super-expensive one, but then it would be super expensive. There are loads of tutorials for making your own, either from scratch or by altering existing patterns, but if you price out the fabric needed for making a good-looking, reasonably accurate Hogwarts robe yourself, you'll realize that in that case, you might as well just buy one of those expensive ones, after all (and therefore, how on earth are the people making those robes, even the expensive ones, being paid a living wage? Sigh...).

 However, if your goal is an inexpensive, sustainable, good-looking, DIY Hogwarts robe, there is one very simple, very inexpensive, very good-looking solution for you: You need a used graduation gown!

 If you've got a month or more until you need your Hogwarts robe, check around your local thrift stores. We live in a college town that has a surplus store for random used university equipment, and every now and then they sell off a load of old black graduation gowns. Churches sometimes sell their worn-out choir robes. You NEVER know what's going to show up at Goodwill. 

 If you've got a few days until your costume party, I'd suggest checking out ebay. I bought the graduation gowns used for this project there for about 10 bucks a gown, plus a refreshingly uninflated shipping charge. 

 Another option is, of course, your local Craigslist or Freecycle. People keep the most random stuff in their houses, just waiting for the perfect opportunity to offload it. Just last year, my MIL gave me my husband's old high school graduation gown so that I could upcycle it into a dress for my kid, and Reader, he is almost 40 years old!

DIY Hogwarts Robe from an Old Graduation Gown

To make your Hogwarts robe the most accurate, you'll also want an embroidered Hogwarts house patch; I bought patches for three of the four houses at Hot Topic, of all places, although my little Gryffindor is still without her patch. Apparently there are a lot of Gryffindors in our town! I was surprised that I couldn't find any of the patches at my local fabric shop, especially since they carry Avengers iron-on patches, but oh, well. Maybe YOUR local fabric shop has some! 

 Since graduation gowns have generous sizing, so that a wide range will fit, you'll only have to do any hemming if the gown's sleeves cover your hands. Only my ten-year-old's gown required this-- 

 --and even then, I only basted it, because I know that sooner or later I'll be re-hemming it; these kids grow like weeds! 

 Our Hogwarts house patches are iron-ons, but even so, I sewed them on with invisible thread in the spool and black thread in the bobbin: 

 I didn't even bother to research whether or not you could iron a patch onto synthetic fabric without something melting or something else not sticking, as honestly, I think it simply takes less time to just sew a patch on, and I think the end result looks and drapes better, as well.

Accessorizing Your DIY Hogwarts Gown

When you're dressing as a Hogwarts student, there are some extra accessories that you can take or leave. I decided against pointy hats, because they'd never stay on throughout an entire night of trick-or-treating, but wands are a must, even though they're just one more thing to carry. 

We went trick-or-treating on our university's campus last night, and the kids were called upon to perform several spells, particularly the one that my ten-year-old invented, which calls for pointing your wand at someone and yelling "Trick or treat!" It makes candy magically appear! 

 Since every Hogwarts student may bring an owl, cat, rat, or toad, my kids decided that their familiars should be part of their costumes. Each kid picked a stuffed animal (my Slytherin daughter is allowed to bring a snake as her pet since she's a Parselmouth, you know) and I attached it to her shoulder by means of safety pins. She also slicked back her hair, because Slytherin, but the rest of us wore our hair the way that we commonly do. 

 And there you go! Hemming, sewing, and dressing four people in these costumes took less than two hours, and I think they look better than some costumes that I'd spent days agonizing over. The year that one kid wanted to be a "baby deer," for instance? Ugh!

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!

In Which a Plague of Cats Help Me Reach My Goal (of Remaking a Hoodie)

I have wanted to remake the too-small hood and the stained front pocket on my thrifted Nintendo hoodie for... I don't even know. If someone told me it was a full decade, I wouldn't so much as blink in surprise.

Funny that for something I've had taking up space in the back of my mind for multiple years, it was a single morning's work to actually do it!

I strained the snot out of my poor myopic eyes ripping the old hood and the front pocket with Superglue all over it off the hoodie, then made new paper pattern using the much nicer hood of my favorite Titanic hoodie:

For fabric, I used a flannel shirt for the outside and some stash black flannel for the lining. Gracie helped a lot with this step:

I managed to do all that--AND sew the whole thing back together!--on Sunday morning while Matt mopped up an entire basket of eggs that the cats apparently spent the night throwing around the kitchen (note to self: the basket might as well just sit empty from now on, since the cats will clearly fight over that specific lounging space whether or not it's full of eggs freshly collected from the coop) and the kids followed behind him making an equally huge mess prepping their District breads for our Hunger Games Family Movie Night.

Darn that I was too busy to assist with any of those clearly super fun activities!

Matt drove the kids to driver's ed and when he came back, I asked if he'd take some photos of me in my new hoodie.

Spots helped:

Here she is having second thoughts about helping me model:

Here are her third thoughts in the midst of my clear delight:

And then I guess I wrongly assumed that the photo shoot was over...

Not gonna lie: I am REALLY looking forward to fall weather! I love layers and flannel and sweatshirts and hoods a lot more than I like shorts and sandals and swimsuits. Put me in a Nintendo sweatshirt with a two-layer flannel hood, a pair of jeans and some hiking boots, and a plague of cats to shed on me, and I'll be happy as a clam!

Make a Treasure in a Bottle Charm

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

If you've got something small that you want to show off, but don't want to get damaged, keep it safe AND on display. Make a treasure in a bottle charm out of it! 

 My kids and I have done this craft before with lots of little treasures, but on this particular occasion, we are going to make a treasure in a bottle charm or two out of some small fossilized shark teeth that we collected ourselves. We love fossils, and we love sharks, AND we love things that we do ourselves, so there's no way that we weren't going to show these beauties off!

Make a Treasure in a Bottle Charm

This project is a little unusual for me, as you do need a couple of special supplies that you likely can't upcycle or find in nature, so don't be afraid to spend a little time shopping around. 

  very small glass bottle. I prefer a real glass bottle--not plastic!--with a real cork. You may have to look around for this, as a lot of the jewelry findings that you'll come across will be plastic.

  glycerin or sand. There are a couple of different ways to do this project, one with glycerin and one with sand. Beach sand will work unless you want to add water or oil to make the scene look like an ocean in a bottle; if you want a mini ocean, I have learned--from experience!--that you really need to use clean craft sand, not beach sand, alas. 

  treasures. We used a shark tooth plus a couple of tiny shells for each bottle. 

  eye pin. If you're going to keep your treasure in a bottle on a shelf, you won't need an eye pin, but if you want it as a charm or pendant, you'll need this plus a pair of jewelry wire cutters. 

  epoxy glue. My favorite is E6000.

 1. Thoroughly clean the glass bottle. You want the opening, especially, to be squeaky clean, as that's where the glue will adhere, but you'd be surprised how much dust can be found on the inside of a brand-new, unopened bottle, sigh. I use rubbing alcohol on a q-tip, but if you don't like to use rubbing alcohol, vinegar will also work. 

  2. Add your treasure. The most frustrating thing for my kids is the fact that the mouths of the bottles are so small that not every treasure will fit inside. If you're going to suspend your treasure in a bottle, you don't really want one that's very large, anyway, so just keep this fact in mind for the purposes of expectation management. 

  3. Fill the bottle up to the neck with glycerin. I use an eye dropper, and try (mostly in vain) to keep the glycerin from touching the inside of the neck. If you do drip--and you will!--wipe it down again with your cleaning solution. 

 If you've got shells in your bottle, it's a good idea to let the bottle rest for a day before the next step. The little air pockets in the shells will gradually work their way out, and if you don't want bubbles in your bottle forever, you want them to do this before it's sealed. 

  4. Glue the cork on. Put a small amount of epoxy glue around the outside of the cork, then push it into the bottle. 

  5. Cut an eye pin to fit. You don't want it to poke out of the bottom of your cork, so trim it with wire cutters. 

 6. Insert the eye pin. Again, put a small amount of epoxy glue around the outside of the eye pin, then push it into the center of the bottle. 

 This treasure in a bottle makes a lovely pendant for a necklace, but also a beautiful Christmas ornament, especially for a tabletop tree. I think it looks equally pretty, though, just sitting in a shadow box, ready to be admired by all who walk by! 

Their Girl Scout Vests Now Have Secret Inner Pockets

 This is my best idea yet, according to the kids.

I cut the front and back pockets off of a pair of Matt's old work khakis and divided them between the kids' two Girl Scout vests.

Each vest got one former front pocket and one former back pocket:

Fortunately, my two kids are opposite-handed from each other, so I could place each front pocket on the side most convenient for her to reach in with her dominant hand:

Those front pockets are super deep, so that almost the entire front flap is now pocket on the inside! 

I also left the waistband, because that belt loop is the perfect spot to attach a carabiner and thereby hang even more stuff:

The back pocket went inside the other vest flap. It's not quite as roomy, but it has a button closure so will be a good place for the kids to store money, their ipods, or other valuable items:

The bad news is that now I've basically locked myself into hand-sewing the rest of their badges onto their vests. Each pocket is roomy enough on the inside that it will be no trouble to fit my hand in, but my days of stitching badges on in seconds are over, alas.

For that reason alone, if the kids were still Cadettes I wouldn't make this modification. They've both slowed the pace of their badge-earning quite a bit, though, and now maybe this will finally be the incentive that I need to let/make them sew their own badges on.

It wouldn't look perfect, though, so probably not...

Since I had to take all the pins off the vests for the sewing machine, I decided that this beautiful day was also a fine time to spot treat a few stains, give the vests a quick wash on gentle, and hang them to dry in the sun:

Also getting the stain treatment here are a placemat and my Nanna's quilt!

Even though I used invisible thread on the outside, you can see that because of the weight of the pocket fabric the stitching is still visible:

I think it's fine, though. If you weren't familiar with Girl Scout vests you'd probably just think it was part of the vest's construction. But I'll be curious to see if any Girl Scouts end up asking my kids what's sewn on the inside of their vests!

It's POCKETS!!!

As far as unauthorized uniform modifications go, I think this one is a winner!

Our Shell Collection is Also Pretty Grand

 

The shell collection was in storage in the same place as the rocks and fossils, so if Will and I were going to spend a day playing with, organizing, and displaying her favorite rocks and my favorite fossils, we might as well do the same with our favorite shells!

I love Will's organization of shells in this Riker mount:

My favorite of the displays, though, is this one:

Remember that day nine years ago when the kids and I spent an afternoon playing with the shells we'd collected in Florida?

We also did a little identification then, labeling plastic sandwich bags and sorting shells inside. We researched some shells further, and pinned slips of paper with more details to the baggies.

Obviously, then, I had to use one of our precious Riker mounts to preserve some of our work. Look at that sweet little Syd handwriting labeling the Atlantic Kitten Paws! 

In the ensuing years, our crafting collection of seashells has been well-loved. We've made seashell pendants, glittered and painted them, used them in sailor's valentines, and incorporated them into all kinds of other projects. We've got shells on the Christmas tree, and shell mosaics on the walls. Our scientific display will be in good company!

When I look at our other scientific displays, the fossils from Penn Dixie and the rocks from here and there, I mostly think about how cool my specimens are. Even the Penn Dixie fossils, the gathering of which are some of my most pleasant memories, mostly inspire in me awe at my little trilobite pieces, not reminiscences of how contentedly I chipped them out of the rock.

But when I look at these Riker mounts full of shells, labeled or not, I remember walking on the beach with two little girls wearing swim trunks and surf shirts, their sandy hair in their faces, Dollar Store plastic buckets in their hands. We collected all the best shells, used most of them to decorate sandcastles, then the kids ran out to float on the ocean in their pink and blue inner tubes while I played lifeguard. A storm was coming, but was still far out on the horizon as we played, just enough to make the edge of the sky look interesting when I took my photos. We had a hotel room booked for the night, in which we'd eat Easy Mac and peanut butter sandwiches, and we thought that in just a few days we were going to watch a Space Shuttle launch. 

It was peaceful, and pleasant, and I've never been happier.

Anyway, that's what I think about every time I look at these Riker mounts of our shell collection.