Back in the Saddle

It feels good to be back in the swing of things, still home recently enough that daily life doesn't yet seem like drudgery. After all, I've been able to CRAFT again! I put aside schlogging away at my Ravenclaw house scarf until booth-sitting at my next craft fair, and made some real recycled crafts in the last couple of days. I finally thought of a use for some little panels my mother cross-stitched on recycled denim:

And since it's nearly the end of summer (sigh), I'm running low on my wool sweater collection, so I sewed up a few of these babies out of pretty much my last big pieces of felted wool: Do you recognize this doll as the handknit Ecuadorian sweater I scored at my Goodwill Outlet expedition?

The girls seem to have settled back into the routine here pretty well, too, which is nice, since they were starting to get pretty crazy those last couple of days in California. We went to the library for Say it in Spanish with Miss Nancy, a superstar who can breastfeed baby Mateo while singing and playing her folk guitar, and we checked out the following items:

• Eyewitness: OceanDVD
• Born to AddCD
• Echoes of Nature: Ocean Waves CD (I think it has an actual recording of the waves at Pebble Beach!)
• Reading Rainbow Seashore Surprises computer program
• Zoe's Hats: A Book of Colors and Patterns
• Lemons Are Not Red (Ala Notable Book(Awards)) (Neal Porter Books)
• Fish Clip Art CD-Rom
• Colors in Nature: Yellow
• Triceratops Gets Lost book and CD
• A Busy Day for Stegosaurus book and CD
• Velociraptor: Small and Speedy book and CD
• An Alphabet Of Dinosaurs
• Orange by Sarah L. Schuette
• Seashells by Adele Richardson

Can you tell what the girls are interested in this week?

After school I wanted to engage the girls in an art project so I could clean, but nothing I suggested (decorating paper bags to use at my craft fairs, painting on butcher paper, drawing pictures on cardstock for thank-you notes, etc.) struck their fancies, so I ended up printing out dinosaur coloring pages from Geoparent. Filling in coloring pages is a really lousy art activity, but it can be a pretty good activity for other learning objectives--map work, absorbing how different dinosaurs look, associating words with letters, etc.

And then I cleaned, and then we went to the post office to mail an etsy package, and then we went to Goodwill, and then we got pizza, and then we watched our ocean documentary, and now Matt is putting the girls to bed while I gear myself up for putting my textbook order in at the IU Bookstore. I really should get on it, because school starts in, you know, two weeks. But it is a loathesome activity, and now I think I will put it off until tomorrow.

What activities do you find loathesome?

...Jiggety Jig

Ah, the joy of being home! We couldn't find the housekey when we arrived home last night around 10:00 pm, but I managed to break in the back door all by myself (hmmm...mental note to FIX said back door this week), and there was only one weird smell in the whole house, from a bag of garbage Matt had put on top of the stove to take out before we left. Ew.

Our collective favorite activity upon homecoming is to collect all the gathered mail, and although neither my order from Dharma Trading Co. nor my swap package for the Christmas in July Stashbuster swap has arrived, my entire order from Dick Blick has made its happy way to our house--and I do mean happy.

We're a family pretty well dedicated to creativity and lifelong learning, so art supplies are dead important to us. Now that we have some serious storage in the basement (as soon as we, um, build the shelves), I chose to invest in some serious art supplies--class packs of markers, crayons, and tempera paint, as well as a few novelties, such as sun printing paper and blank puzzles, and, of course, a gallon jug of Mod Podge for me.

Class packs are actually pretty sweet. The markers and the crayons each contain numerous sets of 16 colors--with two kiddos, I bring out a set for each of them, labelled by kiddo, store the rest, and replenish when necessary. The paint set has a gallon jug for each color, with a lockable pump and a billion little paper cups:
Obviously, though, the box they came in is the funnest toy:Willow had this idea of drawing the entire map of the United States, so I dutifully pulled up a map online for her to copy:Her California looked pretty good actually, perhaps since we've been studying it so much lately; as for the rest of the fifty states--well, she is only four.

In other education news, Montessori starts tomorrow for Will. Our other home projects this week will likely include more map study, identifying some rocks and shells collected in California, helping me create things for a super-big craft fair I'm doing in September, and a trip to the library to check out every color book they have for Syd--I think it's weird that she doesn't have her colors down yet, but Matt thinks I tend to work with both of the girls mostly at Willow's level, and thus I haven't been doing enough color labelling for Sydney. We'll see...

Wedding! Wedding! Wedding!

There's nothing like how a wedding tends to take over everything in its vicinity, and it's not even your wedding. This weekend has been all "Wedding! Wedding! Wedding!", and I did not even attend the said wedding of one of my partner's cousins--they were doing a child-free wedding, which is their right, but my jetlagged children are already in a strange place at a strange time zone with all kinds of strangers, and I was not comfortable also having them babysat by a stranger for 10+ hours while I hung out up a mountain at a winery with my partner but, let's be honest, mostly just more strangers.

So while everyone else went to this wedding, I stayed back with the kids, in a strange home with not many toys, no car, the kids upset because they want Daddy, from 3:30 pm until everyone got home after midnight. I am so grumpy about it that I can barely stand myself, ahem, so you can image how pleasant I was to my partner, who woke up with an absolutely raging hangover and therefore did not immediately leap into active parenting to make up for his audacity of Going Out And Having A Good Time.

I'm not even going to do the thing where I tell you that normally I'm super fun and not at all usually a bitter bitch to my partner and everyone else around me. Honestly, I don't really think I'm that fun, and I'm pretty bitchy in general.

Anywho.... Boy, I went to some great garage sales on Saturday! I don't know if they just have more awesome stuff in California than they do elsewhere, or if, since garage sales aren't as popular here, they don't get picked over like they do elsewhere, but man, did I score!

A Nightmare Before Christmas shirt for a T-shirt quilt:

Lots of rubber stamps, and a white ink pad! How much do I love the sun stamps, and the Christmas tree? I love them a lot.

I don't actually do screen printing, but I did order some stuff from Dharma Trading Company for freezer paper T-shirt fabric stenciling (It will be waiting for me when I get home--whee!!!), and this would work for that? Elsewise, it's just awesome:

I was so excited to spy these little wooden embroidery hoops, because I've recently read about stretching great fabric in them and hanging them on the wall as art. Dinosaurs are possibly going in here:

Matching embroidered pillowcases for pillowcase dresses:

Dinosaur temporary tattoos! The sweeties warmed the cockles of my heart by both insisting that their tattoos be placed on their left ankles, "just like Momma." If only my tattoo was awesome like a dinosaur:

A quilted pillowcase, 20"x26". It has a commercial tag, but it still looks hand-quilted to me. Sweatshop?

And an awesome pair of red Converse sneaks for the big kid for next summer, and this great book called From the prairie: A child's memories, which has patterns for cloth dolls and, get this, clothes for the cloth dolls. Righteous.

The kids were invited to the rehearsal dinner, and they were, of course, charming and well-behaved. I, of course, was a joyless and bitter bitch who ate and drank everything I could reach--gotta get my money's worth, you know, since I'm not going to the wedding. Did I mention that my children aren't invited?

Next: Home! Home! Home!

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!

Ah, the Exploratorium! Engaging science activities for kids with ADD! Seriously, it's a huge warehouse filled with hands-on science activities, designed for flitting from one to another, all of which can be manipulated without having to so much as notice the concept that drives them. Right now, our kids love it--Sydney is still at the stage where mere manipulation, cause and effect stuff, is happy for her brain, and Will has the deep focus to concentrate on one single activity for half an hour at a time, undisturbed by the mania around her, before wandering off to another one. So, among other things, we sat in a photo booth and chose videos of people relating their own particular "sound memories," made three-dimensional shapes from geometric figures edged with Velcro, used hands and tools to draw designs on a rotating wheel covered in a light layer of sand, used a column of air to hold a beach ball aloft, played drums to accompany a Nirvana song, and etc. Matt and I always try to give a simple explanation of what's going on with each activity, but if we homeschooled here, we'd probably come all the time but steer the kids to activities that illustrated just the couple of concepts we were interested in focusing on at the time.

The symmetry mirror was fun to moon over-- --the rotating curtain made me nauseous, but not the kiddos--
--Sydney mesmerized herself, and perhaps fried her brain, in the light wand camera--
--and we seem to not be able to go a day without a visit to Crissy Field:
Before we hit the Exploratorium, however, we drove around the city for freakin' ever (no left-hand turns! Argh!) looking for The Curiosity Shoppe, a crafty little store I've been dying to visit. We only had three quarters (30 minutes), so I shopped really quickly, and fortunately found nearly everything I'd been eyeing in their online shop. I bought this birdhouse kit made of laminated cardboard, the Sublime Stitching book (I justified this purchase of a new book because it's got iron-on embroidery transfers in it--those get used up! Logical, right?), and inexplicably, not because it's not awesome, because it is, but because it was insanely expensive, this card catalog card. I am a library nerd, but still. I've had to retroactively justify the cost by asserting that I'm going to matte and frame it in my study. The justification engine is fully functional, you see.

I was a little sad that they didn't have the Built by Wendy Simplicity patterns that I've been wanting. They had some, but I specifically want the Slim Pants, Capris, or Shorts pattern, the Pants pattern, and the Jacket pattern, all in my curvalicious size. Odd because the online shop shows them in stock, but then I probably should have just asked the proprietor--that's what regular people do, isn't it? Ask shop proprietors when they need help? Not just quietly slink off? Huh.

The fam did manage to figure out how to make only right turns to get to the Out of the Closet thrift shop, however, where I contemplated buying a massive old store mannequin, but finally settled on Singer-Quilting by Machine. As a self-taught seamster to whom straightforward skills like, oh, zipper sewing, still seem impossible, I appreciate myself some how-to manuals.

Boy, I got a lot of knitting done!

There have been a lot of out-of-town relatives around, on account of the wedding to which my children are not invited. When out-of-town relatives sit and gossip, I knit and eavesdrop.

Next time: Garage sales! Rehearsal dinner! The rant about the wedding to which my children are not invited!

Beaches! Beaches! Beaches!

Back in landlocked Indiana, we heart ourselves some beaches. We happily go to Monroe Beach (volume alert!) and Indiana Beach and pretend, but a real, live beach? With an ocean and everything? And tide pools? And pelicans? I love it so much it makes me sick.



Pebble Beach has tide pools you can clamber around while the surf awesomely (or terrifyingly, depending on whether or not you can swim...ahem) cascades over the rocks a few feet away: Near the tide pools were all these big crabs hidden in the rocks, but if you sat very, very still for a while, say, looking at a starfish, they would creep out and do weird things with their mouths and go click, click, click, just like in The Dark Crystal.



Pebble Beach is made up of the leavings from a rock reef offshore, and it's a very nice sound when the waves move in and out. There are supposedly some very interesting stones here, because you're not allowed to take any of them:

But dance on them you can:

Davenport Beach, where some of Grandpa Bangle's ashes were scattered, is a more traditional sandy beach:

Add to that a visit to a real freakin' ORGANIC STRAWBERRY FARM, and the day was pretty well set, don't you think?

Care to see the third 24 hours of knitting?

I neglected to mention previously that I am not using the Cascade 220 that the instructions in call for--Uncommon Threads (sound alert!) didn't have those exact colors, but one of the shopkeepers whipped out this massive book of yarn samples and picked out for me the two same colors in Nashua Handknits Creative Focus Superwash. Hella expensive, though. Is knitting seriously this expensive, y'all? One of my secondary projects is now officially to figure out how to reclaim wool from ugly knitted sweaters.

Next time...Exploratorium! Boutiquey San Francisco craft store! Gay thrift shop!

Frisco Has Fits

You should totally never call the city "Frisco," by the way, unless you're a tool. But Yerba Buena was a hit, of course, with all its green space and pigeons to chase and awesome murals and painted tiles:
The Modern Art Museum, unfortunately, was so not a hit with the under-five set that Willow had a hysterical tantrum after a total of about eight minutes--a record? Back to Yerba Buena! I gave Willow a meaningful lecture then, the subject of which was the fact that since she was one, her dad and I have visited every children's museum, hands-on museum, zoo, and dinosaur resting place within a four-hour drive of wherever we've been, without complaint. Unreasonable, then, that the single time we'd like them to accompany us to an "adult" museum, she has a fit? Will did not agree. It turns out that I don't have kids who are as eager to engage in intellectual and cultural pursuits as I am, happily wandering the modern art museum, sketchbook and crayons in hand, or sitting, rapt, at the opera, weeping at all the right parts, re-enacting the death scenes later with the dress-up clothes. Off to Crissy Field.
Crissy Field rocks real hard.

This brings us to the second 24 hours of knitting--stop looking at how I messed up the color change!
Next up, beaches! Beaches! Beaches!

Berkeley Has Dinosaurs

Berkeley has dinosaurs:
And ample opportunities for knitting. Here's the first 24 hours of my Ravenclaw scarf, from Charmed Knits: Projects for Fans of Harry Potter:
You can see that I messed up the color change--I was supposed to change colors, knit two rows, then tie the new color on, but I added the silver, knit two rows with both, then thought, "Huh. That looks like crap." Knitting must bring out my anal side, because I actually thought for a minute about unraveling the silver and trying again, but I don't unravel--I've barely begun convincing myself to rip out missewn seams on the rarest of occasions. Eh, it adds character. And I did teach myself circular knitting in the very back seat of a minivan driving over the mountains, and I'm prone to motion sickness, so there you go.

Next up, San Francisco! More knitting!

P.S. It didn't take long for the unicorn band-aids to see some action:

I can't convince the girls to try out the skull-and-crossbones ones, however; guess they'll be for me, darn.