Bib It

I might possibly have a bit of a caffeine problem--my partner slept in for freakin' ever this morning, and even though he doesn't drink coffee himself, he's the only one who knows how to operate the French press and he has some sort of mysterious, elaborate ritual every morning to make coffee for me, because I am spoiled. So with my partner asleep, the kids and I had breakfast, and read a million books, and did some laundry, and gardened out in the backyard, and basically lived whole entire lives by 10:00 am, and I was just getting madder and madder. How dare he sleep for half the morning? We literally just had this exact fight about how he acts like he lives in a hotel and is not happy with the quality of the maid service, and here he is acting like he lives in a hotel! And so it's something like 10:30 am, and I still can't find the really gross smell in the backyard that's coming from...somewhere, and the little kid upends an entire peat pot of seedlings, so I pick her up, bust into the house, put her in front of some toys with her sister, bust into the bedroom, shriek "GET UUUUUUUPPPP!" and burst into tears. I then proceed to have a nervous breakdown while my partner apologizes, treats me gently, and fixes my coffee, and as I drink it, I inexplicably start to feel better. By the time I finish my coffee, everything is completely all right again. That's a caffeine problem, not a partner problem, isn't it?

I am, at the moment, utterly obsessed with tie-dyed bibs. They're really quick and easy to make, because I made two in literally five-minute spurts throughout the day (I cut out two while my partner read a board book to the kids, later I ironed on the interfacing in the time it took him to search all over the house for two matching shoes for each of them, later I sewed one up while the big kid played a computer game from the library and the little kid napped, I sewed up another one in a few small moments both before and after this additional small moment...

...later I topstitched one and added snaps while my partner took his turn to give the kids a bath, and so on). They're also really satisfying, because I think they look just terrific. They look as if they'd been sewn, and then tie-dyed, and it's just a really unusual yet fun look for a little kid, and non-cutesy--I am so anti-cutesy. Anyway, here's a tutorial:

1. Create a pattern. If you're just making them as gifts or for yourself, there are numerous free patterns on the internet, but if you're even contemplating the possibility of accepting compensation for them, even in the future, it's worth the time to create your own pattern. I looked through several patterns for bibs before I made my own, and they're all really similar, as you might imagine, but I made mine to be very simple, since the tie-dye itself has plenty of impact, and wth a longer and wider base and a longer neck strap than most patterns I'd seen, and after having some early trouble with snaps, I reinforce the whole neck area with interfacing.

2. Cut the bib pieces, front and back, out of an old tie-dyed T-shirt. I've gotten to where I get a ton of use out of each tie-dyed shirt I come across: I end up with two large quilt panels, one bib, and either an entire set of coaster pieces or several small quilt blocks.

3. If you're going to fasten the bib with snaps, you should definitely reinforce the neck with fusible interfacing--otherwise, the snaps often won't set properly, and can pull out of the material if a lot of force is used. If you're going to fasten with Velcro, you don't really need to add interfacing, but nevertheless I like the structure it adds to the neck area. Alternately, you could cover the entire bib with interfacing, or even a layer of batting or plastic. Your two bib pieces should be sitting front-to-front, and if you're using interfacing, iron it to the outside of one of your pieces, so that it will be inside when you turn it after you sew:

4. Sewing T-shirt material can be a little tricky. You want to use a small ball point or stretch needle, and you'll usually have to loosen your thread tension and lengthen your stitches, as well. If your material gathers, your tension is too tight. A medium zig-zag stitch will always work, but the stitch edges will show through, then, at the roundy parts of the bib after you turn it. I don't think that looks bad, but it's something to think about. If you're worried that a long, loose stitch won't be strong enough, though, know that we'll also be top-stitching around the whole bib again later:

5. Don't forget to leave a hole, and then turn your sewn bib right-side out. You can iron it at this point, or just smooth and shape it by hand, but then top-stitch again around the entire bib. This flattens it, strengthens those earlier loose stitches, and I think looks very nice as a border. The top-stitching also neatly closes the hole you left for turning the bib.

6. Here's where you choose your fastener. I dislike hand-sewing Velcro, but frankly, snaps are usually overkill--I mean, it's a bib, people, not your pants. I like a sturdy fastener as much as the next person, but having a fastener much stronger than your material will wear on the material a lot when you open and close the fastener. That being said, I still mostly use snaps--the snap fastener is a tool, and I'm a sucker for tools:

And that's it!

P.S. Love family-friendly crafts? Then you'll love my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Craft for My Kids Conclusion

The Craft for My Kids Swap is OVER, at least on the giving end. Being as my partner just, you know, gave birth and all, I reckon I can wait patiently to receive my goodies. Here's the swap gallery in which my partner very generously compliments my crafts, and here are my photos of what I made:
My partner's nursery is decorated in blue and sage, so this denim quilt has a sage wool felt backing and binding and is tied with an embroidery thread that sort of, but doesn't quite, match the backing:



I made this baby powder by sieving cornstarch over and over with lavender essential oil. It smells so excellently awesome that I wish I had an excuse to, um, powder myself...I used some different essential oils in these vegetable glycerin soaps. Lavender is calming and soothing on the skin, peppermint is energizing and helps upset tummies, and lemon-eucalyptus clears up stuffy noses: I think babywearing is critical to attachment parenting, which I think is critical to raising calm, confident, creative, and self-actualized people. I make a lot of these ring slings, and I teach babywearing locally at Barefoot Herbs+Barefoot Kids, so I felt very comfortable making a ring sling for my partner, but I still wanted to weight-test it, of course. Yeah, I think it will hold a newborn...One of my partner's kiddos loves turtles, so I wanted to make a turtle stuffed animal out of felted wool, but I never ended up totally happy with the pattern. I've got some more ideas, though, so I'm going to keep sussing it out:

I've made so many of these crayons in the past year that, seriously, the girls are running out of crayons. Is it still a recycled craft if you have to buy your kids new stuff so you can craft with their old stuff?This is my most favorite thing ever--I made my partner four of these, in different colors. These are made out of old T-shirts, y'all!I like to make kiddos doll ring slings to match their mommas' slings. Only Sydney uses them to carry actual baby dolls, though. Willow is more partial to hauling dinosaurs...On the whole, this swap was a huge success, and I haven't even received my own package of goodies! I learned some terrific new skills that are already serving me well, which is one of the big reasons why I love these swaps, and I developed some great new ideas for new products for my web shop and craft fairs. The essential oils soaps went over really well at their first fair last weekend, and I'll be bringing out the tie-dyed T-shirt bibs really soon. The felted wool turtle still needs some work, but I think it has potential.

I spent a little time today making black bias tape to frame up a tie-dye quilt I pieced, but most of the day was spent running a child-labor fruit salad sweatshop in my kitchen in preparation for Willow's school birthday party this afternoon. Willow's teacher, who is some kind of preschool evil genius, has a beautiful birthday celebration for her students. At circle time each birthday child gives a proper introduction of their family to the rest of the group--"This is my momma, Julie, and my daddy, Matt, and my baby sister, Synee"--and a large model of the sun is placed in the center of the ellipse on which the children sit. When it's your child's turn, she holds the large model of the earth and walks around the ellipse as many times as the earth has been around the sun since she's been born, while a parent reads a brief biography of the child, prepared earlier with the child's help. Willow was insistent that I mention she'd been to France as a baby, for instance. After every birthday child has had their turn, all the birthday children stand in the center of the ellipse while the teachers and their schoolmates sing the "Tall as a Tree" song to them. Reader, did I weep? Oh, freakin' yeah, I did.

Recycled Scrapbooking

So for some reason I can't get out of my scrapbooking kick, even though I have tie-dyed bibs and felted wool dinosaurs to make, so today, in between baking vegan cupcakes with the girls and offering unsolicited breastfeeding advice to the next-door neighbor and writing "Z was zapped" on Willow's self-assigned "handwriting sheet" and getting snitty about Matt's cousin's utterly ridiculous decision to exclude children from his wedding celebration, I played with some ideas for including recycled/found elements into scrapbook pages.

These came from a poster of a John Williams Waterhouse painting, one of those things that hung in your dorm ten years ago and you really ought to get rid of but you looooove pre-Raphaelite painting so...

I cut a couple of 12"x12" squares to serve as background papers, but one of them, the close-up of the Belle Dame sans Merci and her intended victim, was so striking that I think I actually will reframe it for the bedroom, a warning for my partner, perhaps... I also cut out some title letters for a page of the weekend trips we like to take to St. Louis, and some random shapes, using my daughters' cookie cutters, for photo mattes or whatever.

These are paint samples from Lowe's--I keep repainting in the house, and while I moon over the paint swatches in the store the girls have taken to collecting them. Sydney, who I'm starting to feel may be color-blind, just likes to hunt and gather, but Willow like to collect pairs to play matching games with later. Later than that, I find them all over the house, and they become...

The top title for the Wonderlab is from those coordinating three-colors-to-a-swatch sample cards, and the other titles are from swatches that demonstrate textured colors.

I also have tons of free fabric swatches that I got online from places like distinctivefabric.com (where I often go to visit this shaggy heart fur fabric, which I long to slipcover the chair in the master bedroom with and make some matching big pillows for the bed, if only I wouldn't have to take out a second mortgage to do so) or fabrics-store.com--I've been to just about every fabrics store on the web in my unsuccessful attempt to score a thick bamboo or hemp terrycloth with which to sew towels. French terry? Bleh. Even though stores ask you not to request free samples JUST for crafting purposes, if you got the samples legitimately, I'm pretty sure that THEN you can use them just for crafting purposes. Same with the tons of swatches of recycled rubber flooring that I've collected in my search for a suitable floor for the basement. Of course, many of these swatches I was able to get courtesy of my IU email adress and my stated (personal) research goal of "soliciting products for environmentally sustainable interior design." That's legitimate, um, right?

Other ideas: bottlecaps turned upside down to serve as tiny photo frames, tiny little stuffies sewn and then stuffed with shredded paper, old CDs covered with paint or paper, cassette tape used as ribbon or tied into bows, Altoid tins redecorated as tiny treasure boxes, illustrations from children's books cut out to embellish a theme. What else?

Fair of the Arts Begins

Today was an awesome day. Yesterday, not so much. A rep from A Fair of the Arts, our local monthly craft fair at the farmer's market, called yesterday morning and asked if I'd like to sub in an open vendor spot at the first fair today. Heck yeah, I'd like to. Of course, then I had to make signs and craft a few last-minute items (last-minute like 11:00 last night!) and figure out a display and buy some stuff from Lowe's to manufacture said display and pick up some change and clean out the car and load up the car, etc. I generally like to get most of this stuff done earlier than 12 hours before the craft fair begins, but what can you do.

Good thing, then, that it was an awesome day to vend at a craft fair. It's been a miserable, rainy week, but today was calm and clear, and tomorrow is set to be miserable as well, so everyone scurried out of their houses like a break in the storm to indulge in a little retail therapy before scurrying back in. Once it stopped freezing, it was nice to sit in the sun and people-watch and chit-chat with passers-by. It was also nice to make some hard-earned money.

Here are most of my quilts--denim and khaki, Incredible Hulk, two dinosaur quilts, and the world travelers quilt:

This is the best and most terrific display that Matt designed and we made and I painted in two shades of purple. It faces the outside, so it's got photos and display stuff. You can see the IU quilt and the Superman quilt, which got bought for a little boy's bed, although the dad seemed awfully happy about it, too:Here's the business side of the display. I'm really proud of the signs I made last night--I utilized my newfound scrapbooking skills! My pendants are on the left, including the one that I later bartered for eggs and watercress with a little girl at the farmer's market. The backside of my front-facing quilts are on the right, and the felt flower pins, including the red-buttoned one (it's also the one in the photo) that two women wanted at the same time. I reassured the loser that I have more red buttons for next time:I had to put out an extra sign for these soaps a little later--the weird combination of direct sunlight and extra humidity caused moisture to condense on them, but happily people still seemed to like them anyway. Essential oils are always so tempting:Record bowls rock, as always, even though I was up until 11:00 pm cooking these:
And the buttons--it's a really eclectic mix, I admit, mostly culled from the pages of Entertainment Weekly, so that when someone finds a button they adore, they tend to act as delighted as if they'd just rediscovered a part of their own head:The weather was so, so nice, that after tear-down and the celebratory very large meal (being from the South, the buffet is the traditional food of my people), we had the whole rest of the day to slave outside in the yard and do this: Awesome day.

Messy Monkey

I'm starting a new web shop in my pumpkinbear shop at etsy. The girls and I love to make art supplies and I then like to make natural cleaning supplies to clean up after their use of said art supplies--thus, a web shop. Here's what I've got so far:

They're little one-ounce vegetable glycerin soaps with esential oils added in--I nerded out in my product listing, listing each of the essential oils from which a patron can choose, along with its therapeutic benefits and a description of its scent. Stuff like that is important to know, though, because peppermint soap really does make you feel better when you're nauseated, and eucalyptus soap really does clear out your congestion when you have a cold. The photos are all a little grumpy because it's been raining here for days and our house basically gets no natural light, so I might replace them when the sun shines again and I can make everything look cute out on the grass.

Stuff in the future Messy Monkey shop: two more sizes of heart soaps with essential oils, soap crayons (still in the r&d phase--I tried out a recipe yesterday that left my hands indelibly stained in purple), scented baby powder, recycled and remelted crayons, and kits for making your own art supplies and art projects with the kiddos. Any requests?

Busts, Bitching, and Subversive Seamsters: My Birthday Favorites

Bust Magazine is my favorite!

Since I'm supposed to be using this precious naptime to frantically clean the house so that our dear friends attending Syd's birthday dinner tonight don't realize how filthy we are, I am obviously blogging instead. The very first book I picked up to put away is overdue at the library, but it's an awesome how-to book and I wanted to scan some projects from it and blog about it, and if I'm doing that I might as well blog about the other reference materials I've found recently, and, well, here we are...

I'm a big fan of the Stitch 'n Bitch franchise: I'm not a scarf-and-sweater gal, but I'd actually make a ton of these projects if I could do more than knit back-and-forth in a straight line until someone casts off for me, and the editor, Debbie Stoller, also does Bust magazine,which I adore. Son of Stitch 'n Bitch: 45 Projects to Knit and Crochet for Menis the best of the bunch, in my opinion, because I prefer wearing masc clothing, and this book is all about projects to knit and crochet for men-like people. My favorites are the beer gloves, which are the type of fingerless gloves I rocked in junior high, and the Cobra and Pub Crawler sweaters, which are very understated and comfy-looking. I'd totally make someone knit my kids the Ernie sweater, though, which is, yes, the one of Bert-and- fame.

The Vogue Knitting The Ultimate Sock Book: History*Technique*Design (Vogue Knitting) is also appealing, even though most of the patterns aren't to my taste, because of its lengthy, cogent, and illustrated instructions for sock knitting, which I reaaaaallly, reeeeaaaaallly want to learn. I keep building up the supplies during sales at the crafts store--I bought circular needles when they were 50%-off, only to have my friend Molly the Knitter tell me that it's double-pointed needles you use, and so then I bought a pair of double-pointeds at a different sale only to see in this book that you need more like two or even three pairs...Sigh.

Matt is getting frustrated with sneaking back into work at night to print me some business cards on the fussy and easily-broken color printer there, so I'm thinking about investing in these 2.75"x1" Moo cards--you can upload a beautiful photo, and put your business info on the back, and get 100 for about 20 bucks. That would be nice, because using an actual product photo or a photo of the kids would be much more relevant and evocative of my work.

I'm thinking about applying to sell at Yarncon in Chicago. Even though I don't knit, I'm really getting into the possibilities of creating with felted wool yarn, and my friend Molly the Knitter knits, so... I did apply to the Shadow Art Fair in Ypsilanti. Even though it's quite a drive, it fits my criteria because Matt's granny lives just around there, near Ann Arbor where my favorite store ever is.

The book I just can't stand to return to the library is Subversive Seamster. I had the library buy it, which means I get first dibs, but then someone else went and requested it before I could renew it! The best thing about this book is that one of the creators is an ample woman like I am, so I'm confident that most, if not all, of the designs are ample-woman friendly. This contrasts with some other remaking clothing books like T-Shirt Makeovers: 20 Transformations for Fabulous Fashions, in which I've tried to make a project or two, but I just don't think they work with my body. My favorite projects in Subversive Seamster are the duct tape dress form, which I totally have the duct tape to do, the turtleneck bolero jacket, the Hawaiian shirt pillowcase, the poncho skirt (I'd wear it over jeans), the men's dress pants shorts, the Catholic schoolgirl plaid skirt tank top, the bridesmaid's dress tie, the muumuu peasant top, the sports jersey toiletries bag--yeah, I really like this book.