Nightmare before Christmas before Labor Day

My partner and the kiddos are off having lunch at China Buffet right now--it's a place into which I will not step, but I did ask them to steal me home an eggroll, so do with that what you will. We've cleaned out the car, and put laundry on the line, and built some rickety shelves in the playroom (because that's just exactly where you want your shelves to be rickety), and I've done a rough draft of this semester's syllabus, updating all the grammar assignments from my concise and readable Longman to the newly required Wadsworth (the university gets a cut from this one, I think), and the kids have painted, and we've all cleaned more than I, personally, feel like cleaning (our house doesn't look like this person's house or anything, but my parents' house kind of does), and I finally finished sewing (and resewing) my most awesomest Nightmare before Christmas mini T-shirt quilt:

I really, really, really, really love it. It's not one of the T-shirt quilts I'm going to keep, though, so it's currently living in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop for a while, until it goes off to live in its new forever-home.

I bought the rest of the bolt of this skulls netting on clearance at Joann's a few months ago, and although this is its debut, I basically plan to sew skulls netting every single place in which a person could possibly sew netting. Shower curtain liner? That's not too weird.

And the lovebirds, from that Nightmare before Christmas T-shirt I bought at the best-ever garage sale:

There's nothing more beautiful than the love of the undead--it's unending, you see.

You know, photographing for etsy is a real art--some product photos on that site look like museum gallery photos, and some, on the other hand, are blurry and gross. I think product photos are very important--they're the only way your web shoppers are going to know what your product looks like, and your artistic style. The best photographers make me not only want to buy their stuff, but also to basically be just like them and be as cool and awesome and tidy and bright as they make their stuff look.

When I photo for etsy or for my craft fair photo album, I make a few standard photos. I take basic front and back photos of my product in an attractive location that allows me to get a straight-on shot. This is desperately hard for quilts, so often I have to fudge there, but smaller stuff is easier. I take a couple of detail shots, to show off the quality of my sewing or soldering, and to give a clear idea of the condition and/or unique characteristics of my vintage or recycled materials. And I always try to include one shot that has personality, with my kids doing something cute with the product, or the product hanging out in a weird location, or even a quirky angle to the product--something that makes my product stand out and reflects my overall artistic style. You can take photos of whatever you want to show off, though. Some people take a photo of their packaging, if it's really cool. Some people include a photo of the whole product line, maybe to encourage customers to buy more than one.
You also want to crop nicely, because etsy photos, in particular, thumbnail as square. So, if you don't crop to a square, or at least don't center your product in your shot, your product might not actually appear in its own thumbnail. You also want to crop things like this--

--to, you know, take the pajama-clad legs wearing her husband's socks out of the frame. Or you might want to take a look at this photo--

--then go and get the lint brush out and then take another:

Nice, huh?

P.S. Interested in more of my geeky fanart? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Fourth Street Festival is Crowded

Even though it's a little too high-falutin' for my tastes and I can't afford to buy anything, I look forward to the Fourth Street Festival for most of the year. It's a genuine large, important craft fair right here in humble old Bloomington, Indiana. It has its flaws--there's not enough walking space in front of the booths, so it's mighty crowded, for one thing--but a craft fair is a craft fair is a craft fair, and this one is very high quality.

I have to go back tomorrow, though, because my visit there was spoiled today. First, the people at the booth with the amazingly complicated set-in wood puzzles--Noah's ark, for instance, and it's a real wooden ark but also a puzzle consisting of all the pairs of animals die-cut into the wood--that cost a billion dollars not only refused my nice request to take a photo of one beautiful puzzle, but also acted like I was a spy committing industrial espionage. Okay, okay, I know this does happen sometimes, or people claim it does, but seriously, is a mom with a toddler in a mei tai on her back and an amateur camera set to auto-focus who wants to take one photograph of one cool puzzle really and truly going to then go and have that puzzle made for a buck in India to sell at Wal-mart and undersell these craft fair people? Um, seriously, no. And even if I did, it's not like die-cutting a puzzle is really a trade secret the discovery of which will throw these craftsmen out of business--the puzzle was super-cool, but even I know how to die-cut, and someone whos's going to pay $500 for that Noah's Ark doesn't even go to Wal-mart. Admittedly, I'm a rank amateur at craft fairs, but I like to be nice to people, especially if they ask for things nicely. Maybe it's the southern in me, but even if I have to decline someone's request, like if they want to bargain, and even if I think their request is rude, like if they tell me they make quilts that are better than mine so how much should they charge at a craft fair (happened!), I still turn what I say into a little conversation, not just a "Sorry, no," and a turn away. Fine, I admit it, I felt snubbed and it totally bothered me--how old am I?

Matt and I also got into this insane fight because he doesn't listen to me. When I said, "I'll be right here. I'm going to walk up and then down," I meant that I'd be right here in the craft fair, walking up the aisle we were on and then back down. Is that really that hard to interpret? Well, Matt interpreted, "I'll be right here in front of this one random pottery booth, walking up and down right in front of it for the twenty minutes you'll be gone." Seriously? So I walk up the aisle and then back down, and it only takes about five minutes because I'm still mad about that industrial espionage of die-cut puzzles thing, so I figure I can catch Matt coming back from the car, where he'd gone to get Syd's water bottle. I rush back and do see Matt coming back, but as I'm waiting to cross Kirkwood he grabs Willow's hand and disappears down a back alley. Seriously. I rush around and try to cut him off, but he's just gone. So I go back to the end of the aisle, the "back down" part, and it's also, incidentally, where we all came in. Where do you meet someone if you lose them someplace big and crowded? Why, you meet them where you came in, of course! Merely common sense. And after several minutes, I do see Matt coming through the crowd, carrying Willow, peering into booths looking for me. Except, six booths from the end of the aisle, too far for me to shout and hear him and apparently too far for him to see me standing right there in the middle of the road, he ducks between two booths and totally disappears. Again. I run around to try to catch him, but he's gone. Syd and I still wait for another half an hour, until she's bawling in her mei tai, and then we head to the other place you go if you lose someone someplace big and crowded. Can you guess? Of course--we go to the car. We wait at the car for at least another half an hour. We miss the kick-off for the IU game we're supposed to be attending. And, yeah, when Matt finally comes to the car he starts to yell, then I start to yell, then he yells "Don't you yell at me!" and yells something else and gives me a little push just like a man who has lost his mind and I walk home. And that's why my day sucked.

Librariness

Today I took Sydney to the dentist (she loooooves her dentists, who are so supportive of my hippie-granolaness that the free samples they give the girls are of Tom's of Maine toothpaste), bought a case of beer at Kroger's (for beer bread--really!), bicycled both here and yon, trimmed the overgrown ivy on the tree in the side yard (up to a six-foot-level only, on account of arm reach limitations, so the tree sort of looks like Sideshow Bob now), re-hemmed a vintage dress I wore when I was Sydney's age but that Sydney, given much more free reign and scope for creativity and independent activity than I was at her age, cut up the lacy sleeves on (I'm thinking of hand-stitching on white beads now to mimic the sleeve embellishments of old), and watched two episodes of The O.C (Why, oh why, did I ever think that show wouldn't be AWESOME? I'd be happy to mother that poor little abandoned urchin--I hope the rich lady comes around), but the most, most, most important thing is that it's LIBRARY DAY! I have my second cup (okay, third) of coffee for the day and a slice of beer bread, fresh from the oven, spread with locally made cherry raspberry jam, and Matt and the girls are...actually, I have no idea what Matt and the girls are off doing, but they're not home, so here are the highlights from Library Day:

• Selina and the Bear Paw Quilt The book is actually pretty much a downer, with Selina and her family, Mennonites during the Civil War, having to flee to northern Canada, leaving behind dearly beloved granny, who gives Selina a quilt top as a farewell gift. In Canada at the house of relatives, Selina misses granny something terrible, but is comforted when she sees that the quilt on her strange bed contains many of the same fabrics as granny's quilts back home--the making and giving and using of quilts, they bring us together, y'all. The awesome thing about this book, though, is that the border to each illustration is an actual quilted border--I read the book through quickly, then pored over it again to steal some ideas for my own quilted borders.
• Mother Earth and Her Children: A Quilted Fairy Tale The illustrations for this book are off the hook. The story is a German folk tale, but the illustrations are all close-ups of sections of this ginormous awesome quilt that a very gifted artist made to retell the story. Seriously, off the hook. Willow warmed my heart when we were looking at this book together by saying, "Momma, let's us make this quilt today." God, the child has no concept of reality.
• Lasagna Gardening: A New Layering System for Bountiful Gardens: No Digging, No Tilling, No Weeding, No Kidding! It may surprise you to know that I am a lousy gardener. Lousy. I have no patience, no tendency to follow rules, no strategy for labelling what I've planted, no regular system of watering, and when it first starts to get really hot outside, I'm done. Our yard looks like crap. But I can change, I tell you, I can change. With lasagna gardening, I can change.
• I have been so excited for this book that I asked the public library to order for me, and it finally came! I heart Built by Wendy, and I plan to read this book with my very first pattern in hand, a Built by Wendy shirt pattern, no less--how can success not be the result?
• ReadyMade: How to Make [Almost] Everything: A Do-It-Yourself Primer This book might be a little hip and industrial for my tastes (how many loaves of beer bread would it take to make their beer can room divider?), but I always love the possibilities inherent in ReadyMade's designs, and their recycling methodology can't be beat.

What's your favorite recycling methodology?

In Which I Mend My Family's Clothes

I need to wait for batting to go on sale at Joann's this weekend before I can finish my quilted T-shirt wall hangings (Isn't that always the way?), so this week I've been taking up the huge piles of mending that I've been steadily putting aside for months, waiting for a time when mending didn't actually sound like something that sucked. So instead of telling you that I did sooooo many awesome things today, I get to tell you that I sewed a hook back onto my bra strap, put a zipper into a too-small jumper I made for Sydney last year so that she can wear it throughout the winter-- --although she'd rather wear it like this--
--reinforced all the seams in my Ren Faire dress, threw out two pairs of ripped pants that I looked at again and thought, "What's the point?", made bias tape and hemmed my most favorite pair of jeans ever--
--and printed and cut out with an exacto knife some of the stencils I'm going to paint over weird stains in my family's clothes. So far I've been able to use stash for my repairs--vintage zipper, polka dot fabric gifted from a previous craft fair attendee, etc.--but tomorrow I'm going to get to wend my way over to Hobby Lobby for fusible webbing so I can embroider over holes Syd has been cutting into her T-shirts.

My goal (except with, um, the bra, and I guess the Ren Faire dress, because it's already so awesome) is to leave each of the mended clothes with more personality, make each better looking, than it looked when I originally acquired it. Mending my family's tattered clothes involves more than what the mom of one of Willow's schoolmates must have thought today when, upon hearing what I'd been up to while Will was at school, she exclaimed, pity on her face, "You must be so frugal!" Well, yeah, I do like to save my family's money for take-out pizza and weekend trips to Chicago, but that's not why I ironed the word "STELLA" over the permanent marker stain in Willow's green shirt and then hand-sewed star beads all over it--I did that because sure, it's not as easy as just throwing the shirt out and buying her a new one at Target, but she's not easy, and raising her isn't easy, but I do raise her lovingly, with thoughtfulness and care, as well as mess and fun, and if that love and care and fun (and mess?) can be reflected in external ways, what she wears and plays with and lives in, then so much the better for the world to look at my happy, bright, energetic kiddos in their hand-embellished T-shirts and think, "Somebody loves those little girls."

Hmmm... but what does the world think when it sees my partner in his hand-stenciled Darth Vader T-shirt?

On-line Project Findings

Searching for online stencils of horses (the pony panties, they are a-comin'!), I managed to come across--amazing how full of detours online research can be!--lots of interesting how-tos and patterns for cool projects. 

Wanna see? 

HomeStudio gave this tutorial (look for the link to the pdf) for making Scrabble tile pendants with the pretty papers on them to the Make and Takes blog. I've been wondering how this was done. 

I haven't yet made the Bitty Booties from HellomynameisHeather (look for the link from Free Patterns), but FINALLY Matt's cousins have some babies amongst them, so--hello, Christmas!

Pony panties, again--I pulled tons of stencils from Spray Paint Stencils for freezer paper stencils--dinosaurs, vegetables, a unicorn that I ruthlessly cut the horn off to transform into a pony for my big kid, Godzilla, and the Death Star. I found some other Star Wars stencils from Grrl to cover a couple of bleach stains on Matt's shirts.

What's on your on-line project list?

Chock Full of Happiness

Yay, Sunday--

Finally getting an entire summer's worth of hair buzzed off, alternately at the hands of husband and two-year-old:Blueberry-oatmeal muffins and a SECOND cup of coffee made for me by Matt and the girls, with only a minimal amount of yelling during and a fair amount of clean-up afterwards:Lots and lots of children's artsy projects at home while Matt played a softball double-header in the mugginess across town. Tempera paint in gallon jugs, we hail you:Prior to the bath...Several hours of crafting, for the first time in a few days. I can tell when I've really needed the crafting time, because instead of watching streaming Netflix on the computer while I work, I just... work. Silently. Breathing...Resulting in no fewer than TWELVE quilt tops, soon to be quilted into wall hangings, destined, hopefully, for future lives with some strange folk: Did you get a chance to breathe calmly this Sunday?

Ex Libris Juliae

Either to reflect my status as pretty much a PhD dropout at this point, or to more readily inspire my creative work, which is lately mostly focused on handicraft, I reorganized my bookshelves this evening. I moved, from their ready-reference position over my desk, my collection of foreign language dictionaries, grammars, and canonical book lists, and replaced them with my collection of mostly kitschy, mostly thrifted, handiwork books. My personal handiwork reference collection to date:

• Today's garage sale purchase--for 50 cents! All 101 have full-size patterns for foundation piecing.
• Happy Endings - Finishing The Edges of Your QuiltAnother garage sale purchase today, another 50 cents! This one shows rounded bindings, pieced bindings, pleats, points--you name it.
• Reader's Digest COMPLETE GUIDE TO NEEDLEWORK: Embroidery, Needlepoint, Knitting, Applique, Quilting, Patchwork, Macrame, Crochet, Rug-Making, Lacework (WITH COMPLETE ILLUSTRATED INSTRUCTIONS)This gift from my partner in the Bargain Hunter's swap has me pretty stoked by its section on rug-making. I've been considering making a rag rug from denim or old T-shirts...
• I'm not happy with the baby bottle pattern, which actually had caused me to not purchase this one earlier, but I love Jenny Hart so much that I can't stay mad at her.
• When I was crazy, literally crazy from studying for my qualifying exams (I later failed them--thanks, politically-driven, anti-family administration!) and I somehow convinced myself that I NEEDED to learn to solder, this book saved me. It saved me, y'all.
• Singer-Quilting by MachineI really like the clarity of the definitions and instruction in this book, particularly, again, for bindings.
• Sewing for Dummies I'm still too dumb for the more advanced instructions in here, but I'm totally making the sewn holiday cards.
• From the prairie: A child's memoriesFirst rainy day, the girls and I are going to make these rag dolls and doll clothes all freakin' day long.
• This is probably more eye candy than actual instructional book, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be satisfied with any block unless it looked EXACTLY like the perfect one in the book, and since the book blocks were made by the artists who made the Muppets, well...
• Things You Can Make for ChildrenHmmm...Should I make a loft bed with a slide or a smocked sundress?
• I kind of want to knit the flames and the devil tail on everything. Everything.
• Sew Fast, Faster, Fastest: Timesaving Techniques and Shortcuts for Busy Sewers (Rodale Sewing Book)Okay, her taste is a little tacky, but man, does she know her way around a shortcut.
• It's kind of my dream to find a vintage quilt made from this book--huge patchwork flowers in vivid colors, etc. If it clashes with everything, then it also kind of goes with everything, right?
• Woodstock Kid's Crafts The section on how to perform a play (Kind of a craft, sort of? Um, no) includes a photo of a small child with a cigar in his mouth and a Budweiser can in his hand. Awesome.
• The Woman's Day Book of Weekend Crafts: More Than 100 Quick-To-Finish ProjectsYou know what they think you can do in a weekend, women? A needlepoint lion. A stained glass lampshade. A hanging planter. A stuffed clown head for the nursery.

What does your kitschy library consist of?