Felt Food for Fun

Today was both a school holiday for Willow, an occasion that I love because I love having both my girls with me all to myself all day, and a rainy day--a double cause, therefore, for some weird, elaborate project that filths up the house and keeps us excited all day. And so today, the girls and I were felt food fools!

Look at the awesomeness we created:

We just kept on thinking of things to make for the entire day. The simplest stuff to make, of course, is in the "flat" category. Bread is just a brown bread shape with a white smaller bread shape stitched on--if you're into a pleasing shape, by the way, or you're just not a skilled hand-drawer as I am not, it's simple to find a template for most of this stuff by doing a Google Image search for, say, bread slice, printing out a picture that has a shape you like, and cutting it out. And once you have bread, all the other sandwich fixins are easy--cheese slices (don't forget a holey Swiss or my own personal favorite--American!), lunchmeat, the peanut butter and jelly I made above, etc., don't even require sewing, and items like lettuce leaves or tomato slices just need some embroidery for definition.

And with flat stuff, you can always pile on more flat stuff, and then you have...frosted cookie and slice of pizza! Even though we never have either sausage or pepperoni on our pizzas (we always, always order half sundried tomatoes or broccoli for me and half pineapple for Matt), Willow requested the above "saussaroni" on her pizza.

For foods that you want to have a little more body but that are still pretty flat, you can cut out two identical front and back pieces, sandwich another, slightly smaller piece of felt or low-loft batting or fleece or whatever scrap in between them, and sew around the edge for something like...

Mmm, pancakes, but I actually had to cook eggs over-easy for the girls this morning, because they'd never seen this exact food before.

And then you can quilt through your layers for additional detail if you want. And notice that this ain't necessarily super-realistic--if you want to make really elaborate and detailed and perfectly realistic felt food, that's awesome and you can, but that's something that's all about you. If it's something you're doing because it's cool to do with kids, then remember that kids don't want perfect, they just want you to finish up their grapes, already, so they can add it to their lunchbox and go on the pretend picnic.

Stuffed foods are a lot like the quilted foods except that instead of putting a layer of batting in between the front and back pieces, you leave an opening when you sew them up, then stuff them--in my case, with the fill out of an old pillow--then finish sewing. If you want to add a stem or leaves, don't forget to put it between the layers before you sew.

But probably the best part about making felt food is using your creativity and your three-dimensional constructions skills to make awesome stuff that doesn't fit into these easy categories. For the watermelon, for instance, you can start out with just a red circle, but then you've got to make and trim a paper mock-up of the rind to figure out just what shape and size it needs to be, and then you'll probably want to hand-sew it and stuff it. You can make seeds just by sewing back and forth through the stuffing to both sides of the flesh and taking tiny stitches. This was Willow's special request, and it's her favorite piece of food from today:

I'm the one who likes sushi, and these are really easy: roll up long rectangles, hand-stitch the felt nori closed, and take a few stitches back and forth across the whole piece to keep it all together.

The fortune cookie is another circle with a little hand-stitching to close it, but it's kind of weird to fold unless you pull up some real fortune cookies off of Google Image to look at for reference:

Such an easy, fun, and satisfying creative outlet. What felt foods do you make?

Craft for My Kids Swap

I am rocking this new swap that I joined on Craftster. In it, I get to make stuff for my awesome partner's awesome kids, and she's making stuff for my awesome kids. So if you're wondering why I haven't been posting my projects, it's because I don't want to spoil the surprise! I'll post everything when the swap is over, however, with tutorials when necessary.

Doing a craft swap is really excellent for a lot of reasons. Chances are, if you have a craft that you really enjoy doing, you do it a lot, and that results in a lot of finished projects...a lot for you, a lot for your family, a lot for your friends, a lot for your kids' friends, etc. For instance--and this is not something I'm making in the swap!--I loooove to solder, and particularly to make pendants out of old postage stamps sandwiched between microscope glass. So I made myself some out of some cool stamps, I made Willow a couple of dinosaur stamp ones, I made all the grandmas necklaces and all the great-grandmas ornaments out of a photo of the girls, I made some of Matt's cousins necklaces of photos of their respective babies (and only received a sweet thank-you note from one of them!), I made a couple dozen dinosaur and superhero ones to post on etsy...and now, whenever another mom compliments me on the necklace I made from the girls' photo, I say, "Give me a little photo of your kid, and I'll make you one, too." I have also offered to do everything from patch another child's torn pants to making my daughter's dance teacher her own no-sew tutu to making my librarian friend's son a [insert item I am crafting for my swap] of his own. So having another recipient (especially a willing one!) for something I love to make allows me to keep indulging in a relaxing and useful pastime.

Craft swaps are also really excellent as motivation for learning new skills. In my very first swap, I learned how to cut out quilt blocks not with a template, but with a clear gridded ruler. I also indirectly learned how to use fusible webbing. In this swap, I've so far modified an existing pattern and created my own take on a certain baby item and learned (sort-of) to sew Velcro (sticky needles!), and I plan to create some new patterns/recipes for new items before I'm finished. It's part of my obsessive personality that I really, really, really like to learn new things, so this, for me, is the best thing about crafting.

Finally, who wouldn't want to have, in exchange for these pleasures, a few beautifully handcrafted items lovingly made just for you (or in this case, your kids)?

A Clean Table

At last, at last! And mind you, this one took several days. Before...

• diaper bag
• stacking blocks
• drywall screws
• shelf board
• circular saw (have I mentioned before that my partner has a habit of doing woodworking in the living room, using those two red chairs there as sawhorses?)
• flashlight
• dirty bowl
• knit cap (temperature is in the 70s now)
• seed packets
• mail
• big purple ball
• Ziploc bags of Easter eggs
• two shaggy rugs bought for the kids' playroom we're going to build in the basement
• ornament hangers (from my last craft fair, not Christmas)
• pants

And, um, that's just the top layer. Notice, again, that hardly any of this stuff is actually, you know, MINE. But I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned and my partner helped me clean and now we have:

Below the table of course, is an empty honey container and a sock and a library book and a sandal. We've eaten at the table now a couple of times, but that was yesterday, and tonight before bed I have to go back and clean the whole thing off again, because today is a new day, and a new day brings new stuff to bring into the house and pile on the table.

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!

Everyone Can Love Dinosaurs Now

It took forever, but the Girls Love Dinosaurs section is finally up and polished on my etsy shop. Some highlights:



Go check it out!

Let There Be Shorts

Um, still working on that living room table. I had an edge cleaned off this morning, but then the girls and I immediately used that clear workspace to start seeds in the peat pots we'd filled with dirt a few days ago. Gourd, tomato, brussels sprouts, and peppers before they got bored, and I'm totally cleaning off that table tonight!


More pressing matters are afoot, anyhow--the big garage sale fundraiser for Willow's school is next week, and in lieu of giving the school any meaningful monetary donation this year (except for the meaningful size of tuition) on account of we're very poor, I'm poring through our house, which really isn't crammed with stuff we don't need despite photos to the contrary, to find all the stuff we can donate. This coincides neatly, of course, with the seasonal transition of winter wardrobes to spring ensembles, and so what have I been doing? Cutting pants into shorts and long-sleeved shirts into short-sleeved shirts, of course.


This is a very useful thing to do, but with more than one kid, the calculations of what gets altered can be quite complex. Sydney is simple, since I don't plan to birth more babies: long pants that aren't fancy enough to attempt selling to Once Upon a Child and that likely will be too small in the fall are cut into shorts. Same for long-sleeved shirts. Long pants that Sydney grew too tall for during the winter are dragged back out and any her waist still fits into are cut into shorts. Weird stains I haven't been able to soak out are covered with jaunty fleece or uphostery fabric appliques. She tries them on, and cuteness prevails:

Notice that some fabrics do better with hemming, and with some, you don't have to bother: kids are the only group who can still pull off the frayed look.

Now with Willow's clothes, I have to set aside not only what she'll likely still be able to wear next fall, but also what is in good-enough condition to pass down to Syd. This winter was the first one in which Will was hard enough on her clothes to actually blow out the knees of numerous pants. Any pants with thin knees get cut into shorts. Pants that I hated the look of often look cuter as shorts. Don't forget to cut the shorts long--not only might you want to hem them after all, but with all the sunshine they're going to get, the kids are going to grow like weeds. I always cut the kids' stuff pretty long, anyway--I do NOT like the look of short shorts, even just girl-style short, on little girls. My girls are proud of their bodies, and I'm fine with them showing them, but this look just seems, maybe because teenage girls also like to get their hoochie on in short shorts, too sexualized for kids. So cut them long, hem them if you want, add appliques over weird stains.

Winter clothes--sweaters can be worn longer if you add a front zipper so you don't have to squeeze protesting heads through outgrown neckholes. Or, you can cut the sleeves off and hem them with a zigzag stitch for a cute vest. Or, you can cut them in half in the front and hem the raw edges and just let the kids rock it like that on a cool night.

The joy of bare knees and elbows after a long, wet winter--do you remember how awesome that is? If you don't, ask my kids. They'll tell you it's pretty sweet.

Let There Be Light

Ah, the ease with which stern resolutions fade happily away. Seriously, I am going to clean off the living room table one of these days really soon, but in the meantime, I just got home from a Hillary Clinton rally at which Bill himself spoke, not that I actually got to see Bill speak because he ran three-and-a-half hours late and I had to leave two hours before he actually arrived to go get Willow from Montessori, but still, I went. Here's a photo of a crazy old coot to prove it:
So anyway, Adobe Lightroom is the miracle program that's going to replace my eight-year-old bootleg Adobe Photoshop that suddenly refused to function or reinstall correctly a few weeks ago--I suspect that something in my Microsoft auto updates was actually some sort of sniper program for bootlegs, and although Matt calls this unduly paranoid, he certainly can't come up with a better explanation. Lightroom is Photoshop, only geared toward "professional and serious amateur" photographers--I'm a serious amateur, y'all! It's pared away all the gadgets and tools that are useless to you if all you use Photoshop for is photography editing, and at the same time it's made all the tools you do use for photography editing readily available and more intuitive--for instance, the access points for tone and color and level changes and stuff are always on the screen, and you can scroll down through them, and you can always see your histogram and how every change affects it, which I think is really helpful for developing an internal and intuitive model for editing. Ooh, and you can make metachanges to an entire group of photos, like if you know that all the photos you took at a certain shoot need additional exposure, you can make the same change to all of them at once, saving time. And you can overlay a grid that will allow you to crop to your magic thirds, and you can set it to crop at a particular ratio, say an 8x10 photo, and however you move your crop around or expand or narrow it, it will stay at an 8x10 ratio, which is awesomely less maddening than in Photoshop.
Developing a photo, and the creative additional changes you can make, is really important, because even a well-shot photograph, especially when taken spontaneously in an uncontrolled environment, will need a lot of tweaking to make it perfect. Take this photo that I took of the girls after school on Tuesday:
It was a really grumpy day out, and the light was just lousy. This is pretty much how it looked right then, but that's not the moment I wanted to capture. But after half an hour with my freshly installed Lightroom, not even having read the manual, this is the moment I captured:It's still not perfect, of course--I actually have to read the Lightroom manual, but it's much closer to what I wanted it to be.
Photography is really important to me, and having a good digital editing program that I can use on my laptop is as crucial to me as having an excellent (though bell-and-whistle-less) digital SLR. A digital darkroom is less expensive than a physical one, it takes no time away from my family, it's better for my health and for the environment, and frankly, although old-school photographers are going to freak at this, it allows much more scope for creativity. When I was a postpartum mom, my camera gave me something creative and intellectual to do while following Willow around all day to library and park and Wonderlab, Sydney in the sling, instead of sitting around looking and feeling like a bored, mindless slug. One of the many things I want to leave my daughters are thousands of beautiful, loving photos of them, showing them just what awesome kids they were and what precious childhoods they had. And when they ask why I'm never in any of these photos, I'll say, "Momma took these photos of you. Momma was looking at you the whole time."

A Clean Floor

Something I should admit: my house is filthy. Like, really filthy, can't walk on the floor without stepping on stuff filthy, filthy as in barely sanitary, filthy as in I'm always sort of vaguely fearing the sudden, unexpected visit of a social worker who would step in the doorway, take a look at the filthy living room, and snatch my babies away to foster care filthy. Sure, I want to clean, and sure, I do clean, every single day, but mostly I do other stuff--play with the girls, read books to the girls, do art projects with the girls, grade papers and create lesson plans, sew, read, garden with the girls, eat delicious things, goof around on the internet--you know, stuff.

But part of being committed to an environmental ethic is a commitment to not filth up your living space. How different is filthing up my own house to filthing up highway medians, or the oceans, or the atmosphere? It reflects and teaches my children an irresponsible attitude to one's living environment, and to one's possessions. Although it might not seem so, an environmental ethic should be very concerned with stuff--we should be mindful of our possessions as one of the many aspects of mindful living. We should, obviously, have few things, but those things that we do have should be really important to us. When something is important to us we keep it rather than disposing of it for a new or "better" something, and when something is important to us we take care of it, keeping it nice and in good repair so that we don't have to dispose of it and purchase new stuff.

So this morning I got disgusted with myself and my house and decided to make a change. In the morning, I took "before" photos of one filthy part of my home, and made a vow to straighten it, organize it, and clean it before bedtime. And so I give to you.....my study floor and the things it contains:

• Pizza Express cup
• construction paper
• crayons
• Legos
• miniature bead path
• lid for Tupperware container that's supposed to hold crayons
• two books that show diagrams of the insides of stuff
• paint pens
• collage materials (ie. stuff)
• foam letters and letter cut-outs
• basket that's supposed to hold miniature racecars
• pipe cleaners

• cat
• stickers
• more construction paper
• more crayons
• Sydney's artwork of fingerpainting on construction paper
• wool leftover from Fatty Stegasaurus creation
• fleece blanket leftover from dino quilt creation
• another Tupperware lid, this time for colored pencils
• Ziploc bag of collage materials
• Ziploc bag of stickers
• cloth book of color recognition in French
• Willow's artwork of stickers on construction paper
• book cover separated from book in previous photo
• record bowl
• matching dinosaurs game piece
• more construction paper
• filing box holding computer equipment
• more Legos
• Longman's grammar
• scooter
• dinosaur
• top of a racecar storage box
• stacking tower pieces
• purse for dress-up
• cropped edges trimmed from photos
  
• wrapping paper from purchased hook-and-latch kit
• fleece blanket trimmed from dino quilt
• more construction paper
• miniature race cars
• library books
• My Pretty Pony from my childhood, now Willow's
• romance novels leftover from a freshman comp class project
• bottle of vinegar used for cleaning the glass in soldered pendants

I'm actually surprised to see that hardly any of this filth is actually mine. Hmm. So I worked away at the floor off and on all day, in between reading books and playing with the girls and going to the library for storytime and drawing on construction paper and making it into fans with the girls and telling each other "April Fools" and gardening out in the cold and working out at the YMCA and making dinner and eating dinner, and here's what I finally have:

Glorious. Mind you, the actual floor itself still looks like crap, partly because the previous owners had a really pissy dog or something and also didn't put down tarps when they painted the walls white and partly because the girls and I use the floor as our work surface for all sorts of projects and I'd just rather refinish the thing in ten years than harp at them over spilling paint or glue or being momentarily careless with markers or scissors--I'll get into my manifesto about children's art in today's society some other time.

And here's what happened literally five minutes after I'd finally finished:

Willow's rubber ball bounced under their art cubbies and Matt and the girls began scraping everything out from under the cubbies onto the floor in search of it. Just after this photo was taken, Matt turned to me and said, "You forgot to clean under this," and I replied something that is unprintable and is largely why Willow is able to swear so impressively, although I usually blame that on Matt's dad, a former Navy sailor. But then while I sat across the room and muttered to myself some things about husbands, Matt and the girls picked up all that stuff and put it away, which he certainly wouldn't have bothered to do if the floor had been otherwise covered in stuff, and later when Willow emptied all the crayons out of her big crayon box looking for chalk she put all the crayons back, another thing she definitely wouldn't have done if the floor had been filthy. Thus encouraged, tomorrow I tackle the livingroom table.