Treasure! Recycled Treasure!

My blog-friend cake and I, needing to exchange goods and services and being those kinds of blog-friends who actually sort of live only a block away from each other, arranged a couple of dead-drops at the local park this week.

I thought it would be super-fun but, I admit, that once I duct-taped (I over-use duct tape. I mean, I really over-use duct tape) a secret stash of one-inch pinbacks to the underside of a ladder leading up to a twisty tunnel slide, glared suspiciously at the lone basketball player forty or so yards away, and then LEFT that package to its fate, it actually became really sucky because I couldn't stop fretting. On the way out to the car to teach later I looked down the block and saw some kids ON that slide, and I had to stop myself from running over to double-check my treasure's safety. I kept saying to myself, "Your students will leave if you are late. If you are two minutes late they'll all leave," over and over to myself.

Of course later, after cake had received her package and she and Cosmo had left me a secret message on my light pole that told me that I had a package of my OWN to retrieve, well that was awesome fun.

I mean, look! A mysterious arrow pointing the way!We actually get to look in the hidden nooks inside a wall. We actually get to look there for treasure!And the treasure? Is encased inside something that I totally WANTED! A couple of issues of Family Fun magazine ago (Yes, I get Family Fun--what of it? It's awesome!) there was this tutorial for making a little orange juice carton wallet, and the coolest thing was that the lid was held on by the screw cap of the carton. What you see below...is that coin wallet:Do you think the kids liked their treasure hunt?
Yep. Awesome fun.

It is Banana Bread, but Does It Count As a Recipe?

If it's smack in the middle of the only two hours you have to yourself all day, the time in which you need to set up lesson plans and grade papers and answer emails and update your pumpkinbear etsy shop and work on your book proposal and maybe, I don't know...MAKE something, but the baby won't nap and hasn't napped all week and it's making you suspect that she's starting to give up her nap (oh, no, please no), what do you do?

You and the baby make banana bread.

Of course, you don't want to use refined sugar because you're so over refined sugar (why will the baby weight not come OFF?), so instead of refined sugar you use up the rest of the agave nectar and the brown rice syrup (which was a mistake, because now you have to find time on a Tuesday to go to Sahara Mart for more brown rice syrup so that you can make more baked nori). Oh, and you don't have cinnamon or nutmeg because you used them up making cinnamon cut-outs so instead you dump in some ginger and cut up some candied ginger, too. And if you're going to do that, you might as well throw in some dried blueberries and the rest of the bag of walnut pieces, right?

Anyway, if you make banana bread with the baby, you should absolutely turn your back so the baby can't see, and then pour some of the banana bread batter into a little heart-shaped tin. If you do that, and bake it, and then frost it with peanut butter, your babies----will be delighted. And when they see that you have cut the heart in two for them----so that they can break it apart like a puzzle--

Well, you know what little girls are like when they're happy and excited, right? They'll do that.

This banana bread that I made is nice and dense and moist and yummy. Again, I'm not really sure if what follows will count as a recipe--it's originally from the Bountiful Blessings Cookbook, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Indiana Midwives Association (I am also a sucker for cookbooks put out by churches and elementary schools and ladies' clubs and such--more on that later), and since out of the entire recipe I only accurately followed the cooking time and temperature and the number of eggs, AND since the recipe is technically for pumpkin bread, not banana bread...well, here it is, anyway. Do with it what you will.

Banana Bread

1. Preheat the oven to 350.
2. Mash up three bananas in a bowl.
3. Mix with four eggs and two-ish cups of agave nectar, brown rice syrup, maple syrup, or honey.
4. Add in nearly a cup of olive oil or cocunut oil or butter or whatever fat you happen to have handy.
5. Dump in 3 and 1/3 cups white whole wheat flour and a little salt and soda and mix.
6. You forgot the milk--pour in 2/3 cup.
7. Add in a random assortment of spices--ginger, clove, etc.--and a random assortment of mix-ins--dried cocunut, nuts, seeds, etc.--and mix it all together.
8. Pour it into greased little loaf pans.
9. Bake it for about an hour. Seriously. An HOUR.

See? It's good.

Where our Hearts Reside

Quite a while ago I found some Scrabble Anagram tiles and so I made words out of them, then glued magnets onto the back for refrigerator magnets. Yesterday, Willow was playing with them, trying to find words she recognized and arranging them into patterns. She'd call out, "How do you spell 'Matt'?" and I'd shout back and a few seconds later she'd say, "Oh, there it is!" Then I'd hear, "How do you spell 'Julie'?" and I'd shout back and then I'd hear, "Oh, there it is!"

She asked for her own name, too, which is silly because she can spell it, and she asked for Sydney's, and I was working on something of my own and so I was a little distracted and just shouted out the proper spelling and heard her say, "Oh, there it is!"

It wasn't until later that I remembered that I'd never actually found all the letters to make her name and Sydney's name into magnets, and I was glad that she hadn't come to me disappointed, but when I went into the kitchen later this is what I saw on the refrigerator:
Of course. Clever girl, she found just the right word for herself and her sister, and she put it in just the right place, too.

Felt Rocks RAWK!

I think she likes the felted rocks and the little felt beads we've been making:

I used this hand-dyed wool roving that I bought from The Arts at Eagle's Find (which I highly recommend, by the way). You might remember that I bought some Dyeabolical Yarns wool roving at Strange Folk just for felting stuff, but I am an ignorant novice and that roving?

Superwash.

I'm thinking, though, that the superwash roving would make a really cute grassy nest for some really cute felted wool Spring eggs (like pagan Easter, which is really a modification of a pagan spring festival anyway, so...)!

If you're more into the recycled kind of felted wool, check out my tutorial for felting wool sweaters and my list of projects that utilize felted wool over at Crafting a Green World.

So anyway, I loooooove the felted rocks, on account of they feel so good and hefty and comfy and soft, but you know me and my recycled projects. So tonight, I stole a small rubber ducky out of the girls' stash of bath toys, and tomorrow I'm a-gonna felt it!

Wish me luck. And discretion.

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!

Now We Have Button Eyes

I've been a fan of Neil Gaiman since my undergrad days (see this ode to Sandman that I sold on my pumpkinbear etsy shop a while ago?)-- --and when I was studying for my Master's in Library Science and took a class in children's literature, I developed an appreciation for his children's books, too (although I'm pretty sure that they're completely inappropriate for children-- --
*shudder*).

Anyway, Coraline is awesome. And creepy. With a kid who is just the way I was as a kid (also creepy). And the Other Mother? Her eyes?

Are buttons.

Crafty, right? And creepy-crafty, which is even better than crafty.

So even though Matt and I likely won't see the movie version until it's out on Netflix (and he has to read the book first, which is my one inflexible rule about that whole movie/book business), I was goofing around on the Coraline movie web site early this morning (I was supposed to be doing some etsy stuff, but there you go), and guess what I made?In the Other Mother's Workshop you can upload a photo into a frame and the photo's all antique-y and scratchy, and then you can choose from a whole bunch of buttons to make your loved ones look creepy. The cat looks creepy:And the baby looks really, really creepy:Now if you could just add some creepy crochet hair, we'd be all set.

In Which Each of the Groups Contains a Bedraggled Monkey

We left off last time in the weird story I wrote as a kid with me, a small child even in my story, having taken it upon myself to turn my bedroom into a home for abused animals (Matt ridicules to this day the poster that I still have from my childhood bedroom. I think my Aunt Pam gave it to me--she's known for her really thoughtful gifts--and she knew I would love it: a huge photo of a cat trussed up like the lead singer in a hair band, playing a guitar. Did she know that I would still love it 25 years later? Cause I do). As if that wasn't enough adventure, we happen upon an infinite, previously uncharted cave system that opens up one day from the backyard (It's the Ozark mountains--it could happen!): ...ball came back in the tunnel and pulled on my jeans leg. I got back on Choc and followed her. The gigantic cavern was luminous, too. There were three more branches leading into the cavern. As we watched, three more groups came out of the branches. I wondered what happened to the other fifteen. Each of the other groups had a bedragled monkey along to draw a map of the place. Our groups got together in one large group. Every bird flew up to the second level of the cavern with a rope and secured it. The three monkeys and I climbed the ropes while the four dogs held the ropes from below. All the mice explored the smallest holes leading from the cavern to see if they were safe. I had tied a string to all of them and each of them could explore to the length of a ball of twine. The birds explored aroudn the roof and the cats we took with us. The second level was just rock protruding out from the edge of the cave all the way around. It wasn't very wide. There were exactly four tunnels to explore. We each went into one. I had walked a long ways when I discovered something about the walls. Upon examining them, I discovered they were copper! Snowball dug at them with her claws and I discovered the copper was only an inch thick. But the copper extended a long ways. I could cut it all out and not make any damage to the caves. Just then Star, not more than a kitten, Popeye, a tough old tomcat, and Lelu, a mangy manx cat came in. Star had a piece of diamond, ...

...Popeye a hunk of gold, and Lelu a sliver of silver. I knew they would be the same as my copper. Then I heard barking from below that I would recognize anywhere. Bandit had found something! We all rushed out of the cavern and climbed down the ropes with the monkeys. What I saw next astounded me. One of my white mice was black and oil was tricling out of the hole he had been exploring. I took a bucket Bandit usually carried and put it under the hole becasue the mouse had been exploring a hole above the floor. Then I took Chalk, the mouse who had discovered the oil and put him on Barker's (a little daschund) back; I told him to find water and splash it on Chalk. I started wondering where the other fifteen groups were. I told R, G, and A (the monkeys) to go and get more natural wonders and put it in their knapsacks while I went back with Bandit to look for them. I was really worried. I could tell Bandit was, too. When we got back where we started, I checked on McKinley and Mickey. They were both dozing lightly. I softly whispered "Attention!" and they both snapped to their feet, staring straight ahead, and at the same time gave a squeak and a meow. Perfect! I lavished praise on them. Then I picked a tunnel at random but saw that it was the one we had just left so I let Bandit pick, instead. He walked into one and I followed. But by then I was exhausted so I called Bandit to me. I hooked him to his dog harness, then connected it to my miniature wagon I had stopped to get. I had painted it...

And friends, we've still got something like 26 more pages of this to go!

And, um... isn't copper strip-mined?

In Her Father's Footsteps

You may not believe that I was able to hold off this long, but y'all, I have signed my baby up for her first craft swap.

Well, really it's an art swap. House on Hill Road and Blair Peter are moderating what is possibly the FIRST Artist Trading Card children's swap. I am a super-big fan of Artist Trading Cards, but I've never joined in on any ATC swaps on my own behalf because, well... I'm not an artist. But mediating my baby's first forays into official artdom is actually making the concept seem a lot less intimidating and a lot more accessible, so I likely might jump in sometime soon.

And you know how I love arts and crafts materials, so one of the coolest benefits of Will doing this swap is that I'm being introduced to all those official kinds of artist's paper--watercolor paper, sketch paper, Bristol board, vellum, canvas, etc. You absolutely have to use a professional-quality artist's paper for an ATC; you can cut them down from larger pieces, but for this first time I just bought a few packs of each in the exactly correct size for an ATC (2.5"x3.5", if you're curious, or the size of a baseball card).

So this morning I explained the concept to the kiddos and off we went with our watercolors and our Strathmore watercolor paper:

And you know, it IS more fun to paint with watercolors on professional-quality watercolor paper--the way the colors flow, and they look so pretty, and the paper dries all nicely. The girls enjoyed painting with watercolors more this morning than they probably ever have previously, and I, too, was quite pleased with my efforts. I'd noticed that the Strathmore papers are on sale at Michael's this week, so this afternoon after school we went by and bought a pack of watercolor paper in every size--big, bigger, and poster-huge! I'm looking forward to a family-wide collaboration on that huge paper.

We're going to study art for a while around here, I think. I requested a ton of art books--kids' and adult, from the library, as well as
(which I'm pretty excited about), and I'm looking forward to exploring more hands-on art with the girls.

We can also incorporate some field trips--the IU Art Museum is terrific, and, so, of course, is the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Of course, Willow's last visit to an art museum went less than well. But she's what, six months older now? Whereas four-year-olds may shriek and act possessed the second they so much as enter the foyer of a world-class art museum, four-and-a-half-year-olds tend to appreciate their educational opportunities so much more, don't you find?

Don't you?