Shrink Plastic Buttons You Need a Microscope to See

I've been really really REALLY wanting to get my hands on , but it's not yet my turn in the library queue, and anyway my vintage button stash is dismal (it's a dream of mine to someday go to a garage sale and find a gallon jar of vintage buttons marked at something like 50 cents...someday), but I heard that there's a shrink plastic button project somewhere in the book, and I did have an old empty container of Kroger's pumpkin chocolate chip cookies languishing in the #6 Plastics crate on the kitchen counter (yep--we have a storage container in the kitchen just for #6 plastic. That stuff is useful!), so...

I punched a bunch of one-inch circles out of #6 plastic, punched a couple of buttonholes in the center, and the girls and I got out the Sharpies and worked--

--and worked----and worked. I had a plan to make some buttons around the alphabet for my VWX Alphabet ATC Swap over at Craftster (you'll see in a moment why this is no longer part of the plan), and Sydney seemed to greatly enjoy making entirely black button after entirely black button, but Willow did this funny thing where she made faces out of the buttons, using the buttonholes as eyes:

Ahhhh, negative space.

With more forethought, I would have cut out circles of varying sizes and thereby avoided the below phenomenon in which all of our shrink plastic buttons are now nearly microscopic--But, eh. It's crafting!

What fun is forethought?

P.S. Check out my shout-out in the Weekly Craft Round-up over at The Long Thread. Woot!

P.P.S. I think it's really funny when people rename my posts when they link to them--they're all, "I'm sorry, but I am not putting the word "RAWK" on my blog!" Justifiable, I think.

The Flight of Europa, Re-Imagined

The other day on a school holiday, I took both the girls up to Indianapolis to visit the Indianapolis Museum of Art. You might remember that the idea of this trip filled me with trepidation, on account of the huge, screaming fit that a certain 4-year-old threw within eight minutes of entering (after standing in line for over an hour) the San Francisco Modern Art Museum. This trip was certainly better, in that we got the chance, you know, to see some actual art this time-- --but it did end, of course, in me tersely escorting the girls from the museum an hour after entering, and I wasn't quite successful in convincing Willow, at least, that a museum without anything to climb on is still super-fun, but after spending 5 seconds looking intently at The Flight of Europa--

Willow did sit down with her sketchbook and colored pencils and create this:

When Willow asked me why the lady was riding the bull, I told her that it was a big, friendly bull named Zeus and it was taking the Europa lady off on a special ride across the ocean. For anyone else who knows the myth of Europa, you can join me with a quiet "ahem" inside your heads, as well.

Next time (probably the IU Art Museum), we'll spend ten minutes looking at art, twenty minutes hanging out with sketchbooks (the girls were inspired to draw in the museum for quite a while after looking at the art, even if they weren't necessarily impressed by that art, so I'm calling the enterprise a success)--

--and then we'll move on immediately to some very different activity that requires a lot of climbing upon things.

If only art museums had a playroom.

Teeny Tiny Little Quilt Blocks

I'm taking a little mental health break from query letters this week (my worst rejection so far--"pass but god bless") and re-charging my creative batteries, so to speak. There's been a lot of list-making in the sketchbook (birthday ideas for my cousin Katie, projects I want to make and modify from ), lots of planning of crazy-elaborate projects I may or may not make (Will wanted a pretend birthday cake, so I was thinking some high-density foam, denim, piping, and Eco-fi felt applique decorations?), and hopefully some sewing to come soon (rainbow birthday buntings, help me make time for you!), but today, during Sydney's all-too-short nap, I had an extremely happy time watching the first four episodes of Dollhouse on hulu while cutting out blocks for my postage stamp quilt squares swap over at Craftster:For those of you not CRAZY like I am, postage stamp quilt blocks are 1.5" square; when pieced, these blocks will appear to be 1" square. I do already have a ton cut out from a previous swap, but I've been afraid of touching them for a really long time after I somehow messed up piecing them, I do not know how, and ended up with a bunch of quilt blocks whose finished size when pieced was 1"x1.25". I'm still scared by the fact that I DO NOT KNOW what I was doing wrong.

The fun thing about cutting out postage stamp quilt squares is making fussy cuts, so that you preserve the image of a flower, or a kittycat face, or whatever, in your tiny little block. The challenging thing is cutting extremely accurately. A gridded self-healing mat and a gridded clear plastic rule make this much easier:See how, at the left edge of the picture there, you can line up the clear ruler on the gridded mat at the appropriate lines so that the fabric to the right of the ruler is cut accurately?

Good times.

In other news, Willow took a photo of the first flower of springtime in our yard:Since she's just started using my camera this winter, I think this is her very first photo of a growing flower. Ever.

How cool is that?

P.S. Check out my list of art museum web sites that offer interactive children's activities--it's over at Eco Child's Play.

Shout-Outs

First of all, a shout-out to Sydney's most favorite toy in the world, photographed by herself:She honestly hasn't seen The Land Before Time or any of its eight thousand sequels often--a sick day of her own every now and then, a sick day of mine every now and then--but they've really captured her imagination. She pretends about all those little cartoon dinosaurs all the freakin' time, using wooden blocks, or her fingers, putting them into time-out, whatever.

I was really quietly irritated about all of it for a while--I mean, here are two kids who can tell a brachiosaurus from a diplodocus and that a pteranodon and a plesiosaur are NOT dinosaurs, and here they are talking about three-horns and the sharptooth and "I'm not a long-neck, YOU are!"

But you know, I finally figured that Matt and I are certainly big enough fangeeks in our own right--comic books, Buffy, sci-fi TV shows--let the kid own her fandom. So while we certainly don't let Syd watch the shows all the time, I did do some web research and downloaded her a DIY mobile, and some masks, and some coloring pages from the Land Before Time web site, and put some easy-reader Land Before Time books on hold at the library, and even checked out ebay to possibly buy her more of those little plastic critters (not for love nor money, apparently).

So, yep, baby's a fangeek. And now the rest of the shout-outs are all about me.

So Matt came home from work yesterday, and sat me down at the computer first thing, and he's all, "Now, Newsarama and Comic Book Resources are the premiere comic book resources, blah blah blah, but Robot 6 is the most popular blog and blah blah blah, and so I was taking a break at work and thought I would check it out, blah blah, and in this one post I was scrolling down, and I see a link to a tutorial for making gift tags out of comic books, and I know you like that stuff, so I click on it, and what do I see? YOU!!!"

I guess Robot 6 was kind enough to pick up my post on Crafting a Green World about making comic book gift tags, and now I have officially impressed my husband.

In other news, I have warned everyone and warned everyone about how bad I am at interviews (this one time, after I won a spelling bee at my junior high, the five o-clock news interviewed me on television, and... it was not pretty), but nilochlainn was nice enough to risk it anyway and interviewed me for the INCrowd Team blog over at etsy. She asks me a lot of interesting, nice questions and I basically go on and on pedantically. Apparently you do not need to get me started about the concept of traditional "women's work."

And if I can go on about that, remember that my official field of study is actually medieval studies, and think about how much more it is possible for me to go on about a single field of study.

P.S. Check out my ode to Artist Trading Cards over at Crafting a Green World.

Bye-Bye, Birthday Bunting

This past weekend I spent sewing up a personalized bunting from my pumpkinbear etsy shop and sending it off to its new home in Alaska!My favorite thing about doing custom sewing for people is that I'm usually called upon to use color combinations that I normally wouldn't consider--you never could have told me before this project that I would like the combination of lime green, lavender, and rose......but after sewing with it, I love that combination! It's youthful and playful and fun without being too childlike--the colors are a little unexpected together, but the fact that they're all pretty light versions of themselves allows them to pop without being garish:So now, of course, I'm all about the birthday bunting. I'm thinking of adding a listing just for a pick-your-own-colors Happy Birthday bunting in my shop (with a simple symbol on either end as well as in between the words----it comes to 16 pennant flags), as well as sewing up a few in some more traditional colors to be able to sell instantly and to show at craft fairs, and I've also, of course, been planning out some bunting ideas for my own girls' happy summer birthdays.

And of COURSE each girl has to have her own. Sydney's I'm thinking of doing in rainbow colors, but I asked Will to draw me a design of what she'd like her birthday bunting to look like:Oh, dear--where to even begin?

And If You, As Well, Like Things That are Free...

I'm taking a break from my Yourself Fitness workout (Five minutes of heel jacks? Really, Maya?) to participate in this meme I found at One Gal's Trash (she got it from Vintage Rescue Squad). It's super-awesome, because here's what I get to do:

The first 5 people who respond to this post will get something made by me...it will be my choice, but made especially for you. This offer does have some restrictions & limitations...

*What I create will be just for you, and it will, like most of my work, include recycled elements as primary components.
*I make no guarantees that you will like it...but I hope you do! Feel free to tell me the kinds of stuff you're most fond of, ESPECIALLY if you're a big, dorky fangeek just like me.
*You will receive this item before the end of the year...or sooner.
*You will have no idea what the item will be, or when you will receive it.

*****The BIG catch is you have to repost this Meme on your blog and put together something to be sent out as 5 surprises of your own. These surprises can be anything....a piece of art, a photo, a poem...whatever you choose...

On account of I have always wanted to be involved in my own pyramid scheme, of sorts.

So, friends, put on your thinking caps, send along this meme and then comment back here to let me know that you, too, will send a surprise into the lives of five more friends this year.

P.S. Look what I made! I'm going a little crazy with the comic book love, I know. These particular bad boys will be going up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop as soon as I've finished my workout, fed the girls lunch and gotten them dressed, written my lesson plans and homework for tonight, and baked beer bread and roasted tomatoes so that Matt doesn't feed the girls sauce-less tortellini for the THIRD night in a row while I'm teaching tonight--
--but if you happen to be local, I dropped 50 more over at the gift shop of the Waldron Art Center yesterday afternoon. My goal is to eventually inspire the entire town to walk around wearing non-sequiter comic book dialogue by the end of the year.

We Love Books. We Also Like Them to be Free.

It's a well-known fact that the girls and I can generally be counted upon to know the time and location of every large garage sale free day, thrift store store-wide sale, and book sale free day. Monday, of course, was the free day of the Monroe County Public Library Friends of the Library book sale, and therefore, on Monday, there we were:Mind you, the book sale free days are actually really important to me professionally, because as part of my students' work analyzing gender ideologies, I give them each a romance novel to analyze. That's 46 Harlequins a semester, and no, I don't get funds for supplies. Fortunately, book sale free days are often just teeming with Harlequins, and I can usually even score a volunteer who's so stoked to get rid of some of them that she'll actually sit down on the floor with me and help sort through them ("How about this one, dear?" It's about a cowboy and a Russian czarina, although I'm afraid it looks a bit racy...").

With my two little girlies also scoring free books, with their own perfectly-sized real metal shopping cart (I once had to scream at a lady ACROSS A WAREHOUSE to stop stealing some of the free crap from my kids' shopping cart while Willow stood there right in front of her and cried--some people will do anything for a creepy vintage doll), I, as a rule, never get to look for my own reading material, but I did manage to grab several awesome 80s Christmas crafting books, a whole wheat cookbook, and some California travel guides for cutting up for scrapbook embellishments.

The girls, too, got lots of awesome-to-them stuff--books about Botswana, the digestive system, the making of the 80s-era Ramona the Pest TV show, etc.--and I usually respect their haul, but this one I had to take away when they weren't around:Really?I mean, really?

The worst thing is that it totally makes me want a cigarette right now. Seriously--the picture of the smoking cat makes me want a cigarette.

My week is turning out to be a little stressful.

P.S. Check out my tutorial for making scrapbook embellishments from comic books over at Crafting a Green World.