Photo Shooting

Another good photo shoot day. Some highlights:

Some things will be going up daily to my etsy shop, the dinosaurs will probably be heading over to the gallery shop at the Waldron Arts Center, and the little girl--well, I'm keeping her.

I Heart

One of my favorite things about etsy is the ability to heart, or mark as a favorite, certain items or even entire stores. I admit that I feel validated when people heart me, not only because it lets me know that my shop is being seen and that something might prove to be popular even if it hasn't sold well yet, but also because, well, I like being hearted. I like even better, though, to mark and keep the items I love--I rarely have the disposable income to actually buy any of my favorites, but I like to have them at the ready to moon over. Here's what I heart lately:


The Atlantis Found Pendant no. 37 takes the simple concept of a broken china pendant to a whole new level with beading and wrapped wire. I like how the shape of the wire matches the pattern in the china fragment:

The Discarded Books Make Great Jewelry resin necklace has my favorite animal in an unexpected color, works from the recycling ethic, and is contained in a really simple and elegant form, I think:

The Little Prince is also a piece of recycled art. The character is from my favorite and most awesome video game ever, . Seriously, that game is the most fun that anyone could ever have at any one time. Or, the most fun that type A completionists with a hoarding compulsion could ever have.

It's generous of the Custom Order Hoodies people to offer custom ordering, but I can't imagine that I would be alone out of all the other people to say, "I totally want one of these. Um, can you make mine look exactly like the one in your picture?"

I have the feeling that I talk about this Birth pendant all the time, but I find it so moving. A realistic depiction of a gently assisted natural birth is what I see in it. Of course it was one of a kind, and of course it was sold, and if I'm ever lucky enough to see the neck that it's on right now, I will snatch it off that neck and run away really fast.

What do you heart?

Rainbow Play Dough: A Tutorial

As the kids get older, they tend to get themselves invited to some snazzy birthday parties. I've got a go-to list of birthday presents--on the super high end, you get a handmade quilt, if I'm on my way to your party right now, you get two blank puzzles at a pitstop at Learning Treasures, and if I was sick as a dog a couple of days before (I'm as sanitary as the next person, but I seem to get sick A LOT--faulty gene? Lousy immune system? Seriously, I get the stomach bug when not even my breastfeeding toddler does. Weird.) but I have a little time right now, you get my personal favorite, handmade play dough. Let the party begin.

Handmade Play Dough

1. Make your stove and counter top look nice and pretty-ish:

Eh. Good enough.

2. In a small pot, mix together

• 1 cup flour (the bleached white stuff--I buy cheap flour only for this)
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2 teaspoons cream of tartar
• 1 cup water
• 1 tablespoon oil
• coloring (optional). The cheap food coloring works, but you can get some amazing colors with professional-grade food coloring. If your kids no longer shove stuff in their mouths, you can even spring for liquid watercolors or powdered tempera!

3. Heat slowly while stirring continually.

4. When the dough becomes solid rather than liquid and tends to ball up in the pot, remove it from heat and pop it on a plate to cool off. While it's cooling, you can wash the pot out to cook up another batch in another color, but while your back is turned, I warn you, the baby might get into the professional-grade food coloring. Hello, yellow poop for the next three days!

5. When the dough is cool enough to handle, knead it some to finish mixing it and to get the right elastic consistency. You can also knead in some glitter, if you'd like, or an essential oil to scent it.

When you're finished, you should have enough play dough both for your kids to do a little play doughing, and this:

Happy Birthday, Phillip!

And so how was the party, you ask? It went like this:

Um, yeah, it was awesome.

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

Christmas in July

I'm an atheist, my partner's agnostic, but who doesn't love a good holiday? You got it, we'll celebrate it. Add to that the fact that I'm a lapsed scholar of the medieval period, with its flat-out obsession with Jesus, and we've got Christmas covered. Never mind that our family believes neither in God nor Santa, we've still got Santa hats and homemade cookies and hand-made gifts for all the loved ones. We're still a young family, though, with the chaos of two kids two and under barely behind us--add to that the fact that we always spend the week around Christmas not in our own home, but with my parents in Arkansas, and perhaps you won't be so surprised to learn that we have nearly no holiday decorations. We've never had a real tree yet in the house, we have only a very few tree ornaments, we have a hand-made quilted tree skirt from Grandma Bangle and two hand-made wooden reindeer from Grandpa Bangle, and about a thousand strands of Christmas lights that are part of the general interior decoration of our house, and yeah, that's it.



This year will be different, however. Willow is old enough now not only to participate in the making of holiday decorations (heck, I consider an infant who can hold its own head up old enough to "participate" in pretty much anything), but she's also old enough to really want decorations. My etsy shop is up and running enough that I'll be able to sell decorations on it, if I make any that are nice enough. And my Christmas in July Stashbuster swap is providing me with the impetus to think about all this and even make or plan the making of a few things well, well in time.


Obviously, we prefer handmade in this house. We prefer to craft with recycled materials, and we prefer our stuff to be, if not entirely badass, at least not Country Christmas. I've been playing around with sewing some tree ornaments out of denim with cookie cutters as templates, but these are still in the works (just last night, one really, really, REALLY ugly example went straight from the sewing machine to its new home in the trash bag--sigh). I've also found in reference sources some really cool project ideas that I plan to try with the girls:


Simply Swank has a cool gallery of soldered glass ornaments on their web site. Last year I made ornaments with the girls' photo inside for the great-grandmas in the family--they were cool, but very small. Larger sizes would be more in proportion with most people's larger trees, and I also plan to utilize the random selection of old holiday cards we've got hanging around in a scrapbook box somewhere.


Since Willow was a baby, we've been making these cinnamon ornaments for every holiday. Here's the recipe:

Cinnamon Cutouts

• 
  
  one cup cinnamon (yes! one cup)


• 
  
  1 1/2 tsp. ground cloves


• 
  
  1 1/2 tsp. allspice


• 
  
  1 1/2 tsp ginger (the spices are just to smell nice, so really you just put in whatever you want)


• 
  
  1/2 to 3/4 cup applesauce

Mix everything up and knead it with your hands until it's a nice dough ball. If the dough is crumbly, add a little more applesauce. If it's sticky, add a little more spices.

Sprinkle a flat surface with spices and roll out the dough to 1/4".

Cut out shapes with a cookie cutter, using a drinking straw to make holes for hanging.

Preheat oven to its lowest setting. Bake cutouts on an ungreased cookie sheet for 2 hours, then turn off the oven and leave them in overnight to dry out completely.

When we did this recipe last winter, Willow spent the whole time making "Christmas poops" out of the dough. We might try this recipe for Salt Dough Ornaments this year, because I like the fact that it incorporates different colors. Rainbow Christmas poops?

The Craftypod blog includes a photo of an ornament the author's mother made:

It looks very much in the style of a beautiful pendant necklace I bought at the farmer's market craft fair last month, with the spiral wire and the large bead--and we know I currently am up to my butt in beads, right?

I've seen several tutorials for stacked fabric trees, and they all look pretty easy, but these might look the easiest. I like how this tutorial in particular lends itself to the use of a variety of not necessarily mitchy-matchy fabrics.

Other ideas--felted wool ornaments and stockings, garlands and ornaments made from our dress-up jewelry, wall hangings or banners from children's picturebooks--shoot, the baby's crying.

Do you ornament?

Beady Photos on Etsy

My favorite part of selling on etsy is taking the photos of my stuff. Just to be braggy, here are the photos from the first set of beads I unstrung, cleaned, and am helping into a bigger, better life:

Such bright, happy beads from such an ugly necklace. Wish them well, these beads, that they find the urban chic or boho or contemporary casual jewelry item they've just been dreaming of belonging to.

Garage Sale Beads

On Saturday, as soon as Kid #2 wakes up (whining for nursie, if she's younger, or just stumbling around groggily, if she's older) and joins Kid #1 (already nursing, if she's younger, or still stumbling around groggily, if she's older), I go in and beat my partner around the head with pillows until he, too, wakes up and makes me some &^(*@)(# coffee, already. Then, of course, we hit the road with all the other sleep-deprived parents and their bright-eyed little children for a morning of farmer's market, garage sales, and the YMCA.

This Saturday we walked nice and early over to a garage sale just around the corner from our house. Dishes, Christmas stuff, stuffed animals--yawn. And yet...over by the peony bush, all those organizers and plastic containers and toolboxes and baskets all over the table and on the grass around it--I wonder what's in those? VINTAGE JEWELRY, that's what! But how much are they selling it for, you ask? ONE DOLLAR EACH?!!? "Each" including the huge Ziploc bags full of jewelry, as well as individual necklaces and rings and bracelets.

Commence tunnel vision. I systematically worked my way through every single organizer and plastic container and toolbox and basket. Oh, the awesomeness. Gawdy 70s brooches and beaded necklaces in crayon colors. Chunky 80s plastic geometric beaded jewelry. Native-style dyed-wood beaded chokers and stones set in wrapped wire. Neo-Victorian-style ornate metal bracelets. At some point, Matt wandered over and asked if I was almost done. Without looking up, I told him to give me all his money and take the girls for a bike ride. I'm sure he stiffed me, though, because there was a long pause before he handed me all of twenty bucks. How did he know that there was at least eighty bucks worth of jewelry covetousness in my heart?

In the end, I presented the little old lady who said that she used to collect jewelry but then stuck it all in storage for 20 years with exactly twenty items (a couple of them being the previously-mentioned Ziploc bags crammed with stuff) and handed her exactly twenty dollars. The joy, the joy, the joy in my heart cannot be expressed. Seriously, look what I scored:

Out of the 50+ pieces of jewelry I ended up with, 23 are super-tacky-enough and strung with such beautiful beads that I can de-string them and repurpose the beads in my own work and sell them as recycled supplies in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop. Look at the awesome wooden beads on this very ugly necklace:

There are also a ton of these 70s-era necklaces with their 70s-color chunky beads. I think these look like Jelly Beans:

These wire-wrapped stone necklaces will be especially cool, I think, unstrung and used a little less, um...exuberantly?

And then there were at least twenty or thirty other pieces that I handed over to the kids for craft projects and dress-up. We already used our newest favorite tool, the hot glue gun, to bling up the shelves over my work desk with some strung-bead swag, and here's what the kids have been doing at least twice a day every day since the garage sale:

Little Xsa-Xsas, aren't they? I like how even the kitty has been bedecked.

And amazingly, even with me being kind of about the butchest girl on the planet, I actually found three pieces of jewelry to make my own heart go pitter-pat--a brass chain to wear around my neck, a string of 70s orange beads, and this:

  

For one dollar! That there is the stuff that legends are made of.

The sweetest finds, though, were a couple of pieces of genuine jewelry for the kids. Just look:

The little one has the chunky, shiny, marbled beads, and the big one--can you see what I found for the big one? Yep, a delicate silver necklace, just her size, and the pendant is a W. Its whole life, that pendant has just waited for this moment, because it's finally where it was meant to be--nice when you can make destiny happen for only one dollar.

Finally, a Photo Shoot

Finally, a free morning with no rain, perfect for walking over to the park with a bushel basket of stuff for a photo shoot. Our property is so shady that a good product photo shoot basically requires going to the park, and while I can do a few items and still supervise the girls, if Matt can come, too, then I can do forty items while he supervises the girls. Of course, we're young parents, so we can't actually go to the park with the girls without getting a little "friendly" advice about steps we could maybe take to parent just a little better. Mind you, I'm all about the "it takes a village" idea, but that's only if the other people in the village share my particular parenting values. And I have one particular parenting value that pretty much no other parent shares, it seems: on the playground, I do not say to my girls, "be careful," or "that's dangerous," nor do I prohibit them from doing any activity on the playground that they apparently feel themselves capable of trying. If, in my heart, I'm pretty sure that they will fall and collarbones will be broken, I'll casually spot them, and I've talked them through many a challenging feat, but I will not physically assist them. I want the girls to be brave and self-reliant, and to challenge themselves, and to develop a knowledge of their own bodies and the capabilities and possibilities of those bodies without my overhead dominance. Who am I to tell them what their bodies are incapable of doing? And they usually surprise me and don't fall, and when they do, they usually climb right back up in the tree. The girls have thus tended to learn some playground abilities, such as climbing up and down a ladder or navigating the open distance from a ladder to a platform, way before a lot of other kids their age, probably with more bruises, but who remembers bruises?

So when Sydney is climbing a ladder and a mother, ignoring me standing right there, runs up and snatches her off that ladder, as happened a couple of weeks ago, or when she's again climbing a ladder (she's big on ladders lately) and a woman comes up to Matt standing right there and tells him, "That's dangerous. She could fall," as happened this morning at the park, it pisses us off. Matt, of course, who is unreasonably calm when faced with unreasonable people, simply replied, "She's fine." The woman argued, "I saw her fall just a few minutes ago!", and Matt said again, "And she was fine." Who can argue with such implacability?

Here's Sydney on that same controversial ladder:

Awesome kid.

Anyway, now that I'm down off my soapbox, here are some highlights of today's photo shoot, most of which I'll probably be writing about in more detail later in the week:

Stash-busting:

Some fabulous finds:

Yes, I did make even more soldered glass pendants out of reclaimed images, but Girls Love Astronomy, too:

My newest etsy listing:

And, spinning...

Dizzy? Dizzy!Did you make yourself dizzy today?