Branded

It was a day busy with Pumpkinbear branding, but I did get most of it done--along with a little laundry, a little Numb3rs Season 2 DVD set (my newest obsession from the public library, now that I'm apparently stalled in the hold line for Season 2 of The O.C.), several hands of dinosaur flash cards with Willow, who can now pick out the ending "saurus" AND tell you that it's Greek for lizard (happy homeschooling moment!), and a trip to Sam's for that freakin' EZ-Up and some frozen foods that Matt can feed the girls while I'm teaching in the evenings (neither of us are geniuses in the kitchen, it turns out).

The idea is that our whole family will wear Pumpkinbear shirts all weekend, although since I only made one shirt for each person and the craft fair is two days long...well, one can hope, right? Mine isn't quite finished: The logo is freezer paper stencilled on a green raglan tee, originally from the Gap, but new to me when I bought it at Goodwill some time ago. All the fabric paint on all the T-shirts will need to be heat-set with the iron tomorrow night or, since I teach, Tuesday morning. After that, I can iron some tear-away stabilizer to the back of the shirt and sew on the pumpkinbear applique--I freehand stitched it on my sewing machine with green thread on black flannel, and I am quite proud of how it turned out. I've never tried freehand stitching words before, but now I'm going to do it every day pretty much.

Matt's shirt is totally the awesomest, though. I didn't feel like cutting out two insanely complicated Pumpkinbear stencils, so I decided to reverse-stencil his shirt: It looks really cool and butch and I can't wait for him to try it on.

Then the girls came upstairs from where they'd been "helping" Daddy in the basement, and I had to set up some fabric painting for them. I had them painting onto black flannel because I thought I might then be able to do something with it for Halloween decorations, but now I don't know--nothing jumps out at me. I was able to hover a little less this time over my expensive fabric paints by allowing each girl to choose a color, which I then poured a little of into an individual cup. Halfway through, they switched colors, and then when they got bored I used up the rest of the paint in their cup by painting some simple little designs that I can later cut out and applique as patches onto their clothes or to cover stains: I'm not as totally in love with the girls' shirts as I am with mine and Matt's, but since they'll probably get them filthy and ruined a few minutes after they put them on, anyway, that's probably for the best.

I freehand stitched with orange thread another "pumpkinbear" onto a piece of white linen from a pillowcase dress I was making today, and I'm going to applique that over the Old Navy branding on the back of Willow's orange shirt, and Sydney's shirt will have a "pumpkinbear" applique in white thread on grey flannel below her stencil to cover a couple of stains.

I still need to make either a bunting or a banner and to finish up my second table cover, but I'm so sick right now of my own brand name that I'm instead going to sew up a half-dozen or so pillowcase dresses as a little treat--I had planned to be all cool and relaxed this week, but instead I think I'm probably going to push myself frantically to make a bunch more stuff because I so desperately want to earn enough money for that new serger that I want so badly I can taste it.

Mmmmm, serging.

Goodwill Gives Us Reason to Dance

Yay, Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale!!! Both Goodwill locations!!! I've mentioned before how much I heart Goodwill, and I heart Goodwill 50%-off storewide sales just that much more. I hit the west-side Goodwill at the crack of 9:00 am and the College Mall Goodwill right after I was done with that one--fanatic, I know, but I buy almost all of my recycled crafting materials at Goodwill, and almost all our family's clothes and household goods, etc., so the storewide sales are serious stock-up occasions for me.

The kids, of course, always make out like bandits, but it's interesting, always, to see what comes up and who gets what. At the last storewide sale back in June, for instance, I only bought the girls a couple of shirts, but today they totally scored:So Will got a velvet dress, formerly of the Children's Place, a stripey long-sleeved shirt, a dinosaur shirt (cause she needs more of those!), a black turtleneck, a batik shirt done by a local artist that I can't BELIEVE I found at Goodwill (If I ever found one of my quilts I'd sold back at Goodwill, I think I'd be really upset) but was a total score because I can't really afford the shirts new, an old-school Mr. Happy shirt that was probably around when I was Willow's age, a Darth Vader shirt, a dance outfit, and a cutie little green dress with big green buttons.


Sydney never needs as much as Willow, because she has the "benefit" of hand-me-downs, so I generally just buy her something if it's particularly awesome, such as a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer long-sleeved shirt, or embroidered Mary Janes, or an awesome embroidered jacket, or black cowboy boots (that will fit next summer, perhaps?), or a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt.

Is there anything cuter than a bad-ass baby?

In the past I've gotten most of our family's adult, "professional" clothing at Goodwill, but this time we only made off with one pair of nice work pants for Matt and a vintage top for me:

The category of crafting/interior design was a big hit, though, with another bunch of T-shirts for quilts (probably none for Strange Folk), a bunch of wool sweaters that are already cut up and in the basement next to the washing machine waiting to be felted (it would be nice if I had time to work some of these up for Strange Folk--Matt really wants me to sell some of my felted wool stegosauruses, but I don't have any already made up), and a big mirror that I plan to put on the wall in the girls' room as part of a dress-up area for them: We didn't really get a lot of toys for the girls--Willow picked out a toy pony (of course), Syd picked out a wand, and I bought them a set of dinosaur flash cards (of course) and an addition to their Lincoln logs collection:

Our goal is to eventually be able to build an entire Lincoln logs civilization, don'cha know?

The biggest score, however, occured at about two minutes past 9:00 am, when I practically shoved two tween boys into a clothing rack so that I could get my hands on something that I have been waiting YEARS to find: A DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION MAT!!!

While I later hit the College Mall Goodwill, Matt and the girls hit the mall to buy a used copy of Dance Dance Revolution (which we'll return later this week for, ideally, a better copy and/or a better price?), and all evening we took turns busting the kind of moves that only our family can bust:

Hopefully, this Sunday will be unlike last Sunday in that our power will stay ON, and hopefully we'll take enough breaks from Dance Dance Revolution to buy an EZ-Up and freezer paper stencil our Pumpkinbear T-shirts. And find a King Kong DVD for my class this week. And get the car fixed, on account of our turn signals don't work. And get my bike fixed. And...mmm, take a nap, perhaps?

We are Pumpkin+Bear

Look what my awesome little kiddo learned in school this week:

The teachers incorporated 15 minutes of singing into the daily curriculum this semester, and so the kid's absorbent little mind is chock-full of folk songs now: This Land is Your Land, Where is Thumbkin, Looby-Lu, The Paw-Paw Patch, The Name Game--if Pete Seger sang it, my kid knows it. Thursdays are request days, and although I keep secretly wishing that the kid would request something that rocks, like Rufus Wainwright or Kimya Dawson, she's pretty into her teacher's lap dulcimer-thingy.

In other news, the family here is deep into prep for Strange Folk, festival of awesomeness, which is NEXT WEEKEND! For those of you who will be there with bells on, my booth is #243, by the tennis courts. There are still some things that I'd like to make, but this coming week is all about display and branding. We're going to buy a cheapo EZ-Up from Sam's this weekend and set it up in the basement playroom for a mock booth, and then after Strange Folk we're going to return that EZ-Up, because the EZ-Ups from Sam's suck. Matt is in process designing me a logo that I can freezer paper stencil onto some shirts for us and perhaps potato stamp onto bags or print onto fabric that I've soaked in Bubble Jet set. Here's the one he made that I like the best--

--but Matt has to make me a simpler design for the stencils, so I don't have to deal with all those islands on the bear or the thin little lines on the pumpkin.

And in between cleaning house, and sewing one more miniature T-shirt quilt (I can't stop!), and finding a big bag of wet laundry that I put out on the back porch YESTERDAY and never got around to hanging up, and having a friend over to cut out felt shapes for our felt boards, and zipping by the grocery store with the little kid (Bob's Red Mill pancake mix and baked dessert mixes were on SALE!!!), the kids and I worked on a table cover for one of the two tables that I'll have in my booth.

In my artist's statement, I think I made it clear that I consider all my work collaborative with my kids, and so I wanted that to be reflected in the booth display. While I hope that my other display items will be a little more sedate, most of the table covers will be, well, covered, anyway, so we went all out. We painted and colored--

--and cut and collaged (the books are usually outdated textbooks or children's books that we get for free from various places and they live in one special bin in the art room--not even the toddler is confused by what books we cut and color in and what books we don't, and the toddler cuts the couch and colors on the walls)----and the end result might be a little wacky--

--but you can surely tell that some joyful children participated in its creation.

Next up, a bunting and the logo T-shirts for the family. Also, the preschooler wants to make and sell something, too, and I'm all for the idea...but I can't think of what! I tried sewing her some books out of old book pages for her to dictate stories in and illustrate them, but they're so precious that I can't sell them! Could she attractively color on old picture book pages or other vintage papers and I could turn them into greeting cards? Model stuff out of dryer lint dough? Paint rocks?

Any ideas?

I'm Picky

It's not so much that I'm a brand-slave, because I'm not, but... If I'm going to spend my money on something new, I like it to be perfect, exactly what I want, and in pursuit of this goal I tend to do a ton of research. A TON. And I have a degree in library science, so my mad research skills don't come cheap! Therefore, when I finally, FINALLY find something that is absolutely perfect in my eyes, I prefer to take advantage of all the research I've done and, instead of re-comparision-shopping and review-reading and brand-researching all over again, I like to buy the exact same thing again. And again. And again. For instance:

• Crest Whitening Expressions Extreme Herbal Mint: Mmm, it's delicious! It tastes so very awesome that sometimes, if I'm bored, I'll brush my teeth--feel free to add that to your Too Much Information file under my name. In the best of worlds, I'd prefer a natural-brand toothpaste, but I haven't found one so yummy yet, nor have I found a toothpaste I'm in love with for the girls--perhaps one day I'll make my own!


• Regis Hair Salons DesignLine Tea Tree Oil Shampoo and Conditioner: I probably haven't been to an actual hair salon in a decade, and I've never been to a high-end one--I like shaving my own head into a buzzcut once every few months just fine, thank you very much. But my mother, of all people (I'll explain over a pitcher of margaritas sometime if you'd like THAT whole story), turned me on to this stuff when I was visiting her house one time--it smells, oh my god, so freakin' good that I could seriously just sit on the couch and huff it from the bottle while watching TV. Again, though, not a natural-product choice.


• Bob's Red Mill mixes, especially the gluten-free ones: I've mentioned before that I'm a disaster in the kitchen, right? Just an hour ago, Matt got home from work to find me in the kitchen cooking, with Sydney at my feet digging her fingers through a mound of sugar she'd poured onto a plate on the floor, and Willow sitting naked in the sink washing dishes, and he blinks and is all, "What are you doing?" "Cooking," I say. "Is something in the oven?" he asks. "Pizza dough," I say. "Can I check?" he says, and pulls open the oven door and looks in. He needed to make sure that I hadn't stuck a plastic ice cube tray or rubber lid or glass bowl in there, and that I wasn't also incinerating some other thing I might have stuck in the oven a week ago and forgot about! I've done all those things before, yeah. Anyway, one of the reasons I'm always messing stuff up when I cook, aside from treating all times and amounts as estimates, is that I'm always trying to make something "healthier," substituting whole wheat flour for unbleached bread flour or agave nectar for sugar, stuff like that, and it always just makes stuff gross. But Bob's Red Mill mixes are easy, and delicious, and HEALTHY. They're too expensive for me to buy often, however, but you know, I don't cook often, so there you go.

I'm also really, really picky about shoes. I don't buy them often, and I wear them for a long time, and for myself I need them to be vegan, although I don't necessarily have that same requirement for the girls (sturdiness, quality of materials, and supportiveness for growing footsies are my biggest priorities for them, and kids' vegan footwear often just isn't good enough). Generally, my goal is to have one pair of light shoes for summer, one pair of heavy boots for winter, and a pair of tennis shoes for high-impact activity (although I avoid high-impact activity when at all possible, so I do not own tennis shoes). For summer, the girls and I buy Converse, which is light and stretchy and made mostly of cotton canvas, and comes in an awesome spectrum of colors, because you also get bonus points for originality, don'cha know?

This summer I bought Willow and Sydney matching candy-pink (Willow's choice) Converse Chucks. I doubt they'll still fit in the spring, but I'll put Will's aside for Sydney and Sydney's will go in her keepsake box, because I cannot give away my baby's Chucks! Seriously, how cute are they?

Unfortunately, my own Chucks are pretty much just bad news at this point--they are two years old, after all. I should have let the little punk at Journeys talk me into the grown-up candy-pink Chucks that matched the girlies back when I bought theirs, but at the time I didn't see it as the totally awesome idea that it obviously is. Next summer perhaps?
My steel toe heavy winter winter boots are over a decade old--when Matt and I were dating back on our beautiful, oak tree-lined campus in Texas as undergrads, he used to call them my "acorn stompers." Since, alas, they no longer keep my feet either dry or warm in winter, I just bought these vegan steel toe boots online. I almost wish now that I'd bought them in green, but blue is pretty cool, too, right? I was trying to get as close to Dr. Martens as I could, because obviously Dr. Martens is my gold-standard for boots, but they're not vegan.

The girls, however, have no such ethical qualms, and so, although Sydney's old brown hand-me-down boots (I'm normally opposed to hand-me-down shoes, but these clearly hadn't been worn much) should fit through the winter, here's what I'm going to buy Willow:

They're kind of awesome, right?

Do you have awesome shoes?

An Army of T-Shirt Quilts Attack!

Finally, a nice morning with no hurricane-level wind gusts, no rain, no just-after-the-rain dampness, no biiiiig chill--I know it was a morning like this, on account of I woke up at 5:00 am. Normally, Matt is the night-time parent for the kiddos (after I night-wean them at around fifteen months, that is, which is an arbitrary age, I admit, but is also the exact amount of time I can stand night-nursing without losing my mind), bouncing Sydney back to sleep on the yoga ball when she wakes up, nudging me to get up and stumble into the nursery to lie down next to Will if she cries in the night. I've actually sort of trained myself to ignore the girls' cries and stay sleeping, since Matt always wakes for them, and the reason for this system is thus: when I wake at night, I bolt awake, with a huge shot of adrenaline. I don't waken like "Yawn, I'm coming, Sweetie..." but like "OHMYGODWHATISITWILLOWMOMMA'SCOMING!!!!!!" Therefore, when something in Willow's cry did awaken me at 5:00 this morning--perhaps she'd had a nightmare and sounded frightened?--I went to lie down with her, she fell immediately back to sleep, and I... didn't. I lay in bed and wondered what I'd do if a burglar broke into the house while I was alone with the girls. I wondered what I'd do if a zombie or rage virus suddenly occured and I had to attempt to get the girls and myself into the attic crawlspace. I wondered how I'd manage to obtain food and water for us if we were trapped in the attic crawlspace. I wondered what I'd do if the zombies attacked as I was bicycling home--should I sequester myself in the garage or risk drawing the zombies into the house? I became panicked by these scenarios--clearly, in a zombie attack, our chances to survive as a family are slim. I got up.

So, yeah, you all know the downsides of waking up at 5:00 in the morning; the plus side, however, is this: I tried not to fall too in love with these, because they're destined for etsy and Strange Folk: I loooove the quilting I did on them, however, and even though I'm not really a Christmas-y kind of person, I'm really feeling the "Ho Ho Ho" one for some reason.

The girls helped with my photo shoot at the park this morning, Willow still in jammy pants----and Sydney really just adding more background interest to the photos than actually promoting the products:

Of course, then Willow fell backward off of a swing and completely lost her flipping mind and I had to walk back home with not just one hysterical child but two, because my toddler, duh, can't handle abrupt transitions, and I thought to myself, "God, Bryan Park is across the street! I can't even cross the street without utter chaos being the result!"

Eh, at least it wasn't a zombie invasion.

This time.

Door Shelves! From Doors! Now They're Shelves!

At the Habitat for Humanity's Restore a miraculous discovery was made--old closet doors, $5 a pop, were exactly the perfect size to fit into the playroom nook in which we'd wanted a bank of sturdy shelves. So, down came the rickety plywood shelves that Matt slaved over making and that I constantly griped about hating (on account of they sucked!), and after an entire afternoon of this--

--we now have, awesomely, this: Finally, space for beads (Perler beads for mosaics and regular ones for stringing and collaging and decorating and embellishing...)Finally, space for toys you need space to spread out with, board games and floor puzzles and Legos and blocks:
Finally, space for the art supplies that I insist on buying in bulk, because frankly, I'd rather run out of food than art supplies:Finally, space for the kind of good non-fiction books that you really need to lie down on your belly on the floor, maybe with a big pillow or two, to explore:Finally, space!!!!
What with life, natural disasters, and everything, I haven't had too much time to throw all the stuff on them that I want to, and I won't be doing it tonight, either. On Tuesday nights, I feed the girls an early dinner before my office hours and their dance class, and after office hours I put them to bed while Matt goes to get grown-up take-out from a real restaurant, and then we sit down, at a table, just the two of us, and eat and talk like adults. What do we talk about?

The kids. Duh.

Back on the Grid, Free Stuff Included

We're just now recovering from our 23-hour power outage here (I want to be one of those mothers who looks at a power outage as a chance to reconnect with her family without the intrusions of technology, but I am most definitively not one of them), which blew all our big Sunday plans--Matt was going to do all the household laundry, and fold it AND put it away, which is a BIG DEAL, while watching football, and the rest of us were basically just going to craft and play and stuff, but with, you know, a light to pee by--and so instead of the photos of the brand-new awesome door shelves in the playroom, which I didn't get to take, or the photos of all the awesome craft fair stuff I made, which I didn't get to make, I'll show you what we got today from the public library's book sale FREE DAY!!!!!

Wait, that's the cat. MOVE!!!Ah, here we go! The girls' shopping cart (which they took into the sale because they are just that awesome) and the stack next to it are all romance novels for my students--I'll make them take one and read it and write a paper analyzing it when we study the romance genre later this semester (right now we're on Star Wars--I just tonight had to break it to them that Luke Skywalker was a member of a terrorist organization attempting to overthrow a ruling government. Yes, friends, blowing up the Death Star was an act of terrorism). The romance novels range from the 1940s old-school Harlequins with the duchess who falls in love with the brutal yet passionate czar to the contemporary ones that all seem to revolve around a single woman looking for a father figure for her adorable yet troubled child. Weird.

The girls picked clean the children's area (they got all the awesome geography picture books that nobody wanted to pay for--Tasmania, and Eastern Bloc, and My Mommy was Born in Germany) and then ransacked the young adult shelves for all kinds of inappropriate titles, but I bribed them into letting me sort through their collection and take out the teen heartbreakers by offering them a set of animal encyclopedias, so now we're flush on good animal pictures to cut out and do stuff with.

I got a couple of books to read for real, but mediating my kiddos requires so much energy that I really didn't have time to give the sale a good go-through just for me, so mostly I just grabbed all the halfway-decent crafting books that I saw. I got Needlepoint: The Art of Canvas Embroidery, which I'm not that excited about except that it does have some construction patterns for canvas containers; Better Homes and Gardens Gifts to Make Yourself, which has instructions for making those big cardboard puzzles that little kids like; Sewing The New Classics: Clothes With Easy Style, whose clothes are mostly baggy and ugly but from which I think I can figure out how to make jammy pants; Have a Natural Christmas 1980, from which I am totally going to make some pomanders; and , which has a pattern for bell bottoms(!).

Yep, it took me three trips to the car to drop all this stuff off, while the girls sat on a bench on the sidewalk and spilled chocolate soymilk on themselves (from Bloomington Bagels--don't get me started on how much I hate taking my kids to a restaurant by ourselves, but we were off the grid, and we had to eat!), and then I got yelled at by some guy who'd apparently been waiting on me to leave in my car so he could take my space, but I'm sorry, it's not my job to watch my kids and where I'm going and figure out what the people in other cars are doing, too, and then we went back into the playroom and the girls played while I utilized the library's electricity and wi-fi to write my lesson plans and grade my online homework submissions, and then we left the library, and I was yelled at AGAIN by some woman who got out of her car to come over and ask me if I was leaving my spot because I put one kid in her carseat, then the other kid in her carseat, then got in the car, then got each kid a book, then a different book, then got one kid a snack, then called Matt on the cellphone to see if he knew if the power was back on at home or if I should drive the kids to a restaurant--again, not my job to leave a parking spot as quickly as possible so someone else can have it. Have I ever mentioned that I LOOOOOVE to bike to the library with the girls? Weather willing, that's what we'll be doing again tomorrow morning, because come rain or come shine, storytime comes every Tuesday morning.

When is your storytime?