My Pumpkinbear Etsy Shop is Presentable Again!

What with, you know, parenting and teaching freshman comp and cooking food and starting seeds and sewing presents for little-kid birthday parties and cleaning and writing my book proposal and making patterns for my book proposal and creating some Artist Trading Cards for my Craftster ATC WXY swap and blah blah blah, my pumpkinbear etsy shop was growing sadly neglected, and it was starting to make me feel antsy.

So off and on this weekend, in between the sewing and seed starting and stuff, I found some time to update. It didn't help that the weather turned (AGAIN!) and so all my photos are weirdly lit, but perfect lighting or not, they're up, and that's better than perfect lighting.

The fun thing is that I managed to update with a lot of really different stuff, some of which I've been sitting on for too long due to just doing other stuff. So I've got some vintage crafting stuff, like this crazy-awesome lap loom, with all its parts AND an instruction book, that I happened upon fortuitously one day:

Matt made his first digital collage sheet for me, just a simple one-inch set of the international breastfeeding symbol images that we use to make pinbacks, so that other crafty people with button machines can make their own fundraisers for their own natural birthing advocacy organizations: I sold off all my other comic book pinbacks and doily pinbacks, so I FINALLY relisted a set of each: I have to make some more of the black doily pinbacks before I can relist those, but I'm still on this random rainbow kick, and so I'm also absurdly stoked by my rainbow doily pinbacks.

And finally, now that I've gotten my T-shirt smock pattern all worked out to my satisfaction I'm thinking of changing it into a T-shirt apron for my book proposal (more gender neutral, don't you think maybe?), which pattern I'd also need to work out (pushing the proposal mailing back just a few more days, squidge squidge), but anyway, now that it's all worked out and happy I can enjoy sewing up some crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt dresses out of my crazy-awesome fangeek T-shirt stash:

Captain America--such a nice guy. Too bad about Bucky.

P.S. Check out my expose on a big company that ripped off an indie crafter over at Crafting a Green World.

Because Everyone Needs a Dinosaur Dress

I've been working out this new pattern idea for making dresses/tops out T-shirts, sort of like the pillowcase dresses I make. Of course, figuring out a new pattern requires making up that pattern several times, and hence:

Velociraptor Dress

I think I'm actually liking this idea a lot more than the pillowcase dresses, because, duh, it's way more fangeek. It's tricky with the bias straps, though, because they ought to be all mitchy-matchy, but I hate to buy new fabric.

Fortunately, Mr. Velociraptor also has some pale green accents to complement the pale green fabric I used here:I'm making this pattern to include in my book proposal, but I'll also likely have a few of these dresses up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop this weekend after I'm satisfied with the way it's working, because it's a good way to use up my stash of awesome T-shirts.

Don't worry, though--I made the girl put on pants before I sent her to school:

Good Game Morning

With the rainy weather, the children didn't take to being booted outside first thing in the morning the way we'd been doing it earlier this week, so it was yet another indoor morning for us.


Prescription? Games, games, games.


I'm not at all into games--board games, card games, sports, about the only thing I will do is sit down for a good session of D&D if you've got a rockin' DungeonMaster--so the benefit when I do chill out with the girls and play a bunch of games with them is that, not only am I bored to tears inside my head, but I also get to feel like a REALLY good mother, you know, sacrificing my mental capacity and emotional well-being for my girls.


The girls are especially fond of Uncle Wiggily, a Goodwill score of a few months ago. Admittedly, it's a terrific game for their age range--you can use it to reinforce counting, number identification, basic arithmetic, as well as the usual turn-taking and sportsmanship and stuff:
When Sydney gets bored and wanders off to pretend that the toy dinosaurs are having conversations with each other, I liven the game up a little (and make it go a LOT faster) by playing Abacus Uncle Wiggily.

Do you guys have an abacus? They rock. Will can do all kind of crazy math using an abacus, and that's just the basic stuff that I know to teach her--if you really know, you can do all kinds of CRAZY stuff with an abacus.

Anyway, in Abacus Uncle Wiggily, you pull TWO cards (maybe even three, if you're brave) and add them together using the abacus: You get to hop forward your answer, of course. But if you're wrong...well, let's just say the consequences are dire.

After Uncle Wiggily, we played this ocean life card game that I bought the girls for Christmas. I don't know how you actually play, but sometimes we play a game using the front sides of the cards as flashcards--

And sometimes we use the trivia questions on the back. Okay, there is a game I do like: I LIKE trivia.

So a kid picks a card and brings it to me, and there are various permutations of which one or how many of the trivia questions on the back that I ask. If she answers the question(s) correctly, she adds the card to her collection. If she answers incorrectly, I add the card to my collection.

Because I was such a good mom, I gave myself permission to serve frozen pizza for lunch. With frozen spinach on top, though, so it's almost like a healthy lunch.

Sort of.

Meet My New Micron Pen Roll

Isn't it fabulous?Sydney put the colors in order for me, so you know they're in perfect logical order and aesthetically pleasing, to boot:Again, like my marker roll, this one is loosely based on the colored pencil roll in . I have a couple hundred other things I'm going to try out from that book, too. And now, a fancy shot:In other news--you guys, I cannot get the City Museum out of my head! How often do you start the day taking the girls to yet another hands-on museum and end up doing the funnest thing you've ever done in your entire life? Oh, and I was so sore yesterday that I could barely move.

So Matt and I were doing some research on the City Museum and the story behind it is also really interesting. Bob Cassilly is the artist/"serial entrepreneur" who's behind it, who also, probably not coincidentally, created our other favorite thing in St. Louis, Turtle Park. Anyway, he and his former wife bought the old St. Louis Shoe Factory for 69 cents a square foot and created the City Museum in it. Matt tells me that originally, it was a non-profit, and the wife was president of the board. Later, however, Cassilly insisted on buying the building back from the board to make it a for-profit enterprise, and his wife was forced out of the business and they divorced and all kinds of scandal.

You know, though, this might be a little Green Party of me, but I think the idea of a for-profit museum, as long as it doesn't go all McDonald's/Disney World, is fine. Cassilly is clearly, after seeing the City Museum, a creative genius, and not only might a board of directors stifle some of his artistic decisions ("You want to stick an old plane where?!!! And let people climb on it?!!!"), but the museum seems to have an ethical system that's both eco-friendly and local, it's not crazy expensive to visit (although it is sort of non-crazy expensive), and hell, brilliant artists deserve to make good money.

Check out this great article on Terrain about the City Museum--Through the Dragon's Mouth. I found it really insightful, both in the philosophies behind the museum that the author uncovered and in her observations about how adults and children interact there. I wonder if I'm so drawn to the place because it's perhaps the first public place I've visited that seems to share my own guiding beliefs.
Oh my gawd, y'all--the City Museum is my church!

Citified (and Sore)

As much as we love the St. Louis Science Center and the St. Louis Zoo (and their free-ness), I felt like doing something different during our day in St. Louis yesterday, a day that we usually spend every time we come home from visiting my folks in Arkansas, on account of St. Louis is so awesome.

At 12 bucks a person (excluding the baby), the City Museum was a pricey adventure, but oh my freakin' gawd, that place is better than Disney World for a recycling crafter and her two climbing monkeys!

Everything in the place is constructed primarily from stuff found within the city--steel pieces making up climbing structures, a couple of abandoned airplanes mounted way up high that you can climb all around, cranes and slides and big springs and even old shells and printing blocks and glass bottles making up mosaics on all the inside walls:
But most of what you do in the City Museum is climb:There are just all these cool steel pieces welded together to make gangways and ladders and tunnels and bridges and slides and just any awesome thing you can think of. And it's real, you know? I mean, you're not going to fall to your death or anything, but it's not all molded plastic and hand sanitizer, either. Syd busted her lip falling off a rope swing, and I ripped the pocket off my pants scrambling through a tunnel made of a big steel spring. You pick yourself up, nurse a little if you're two, then run off to do something else: There's also the same element of perceived danger that you'd get at an amusement park, but much more DIY: pretty much every single thing in that place challenged either my claustrophobia or Matt's fear of heights. Good to have a two-parent household, then, because Matt took this photo of me and Will--he was already on the second story himself:Notice here that even though Sydney is perfectly capable of doing this herself, I'm having to pack her across this bridge on my back while she squeezes my trachea and makes me feel a little light-headed: She liked the huge ball pit better:And that's just the outdoor jungle gym--there's also a huge indoor jungle gym that connects to it, a skate park area for running up and down and sliding and rolling on (who would have thought a skate park would be so much fun without a skateboard?), a circus area complete with circus classes, a huge DIY art area (that we didn't even visit, I was THAT revved up about climbing stuff), displays of artifacts found during archeological digs in St. Louis (lots of green glass bottles and awesome big marbles), a small shoelace factory (the girls and I are sporting new shoelaces today), a huge artificial caving system (oh-my-god-it's-so-small-and-dark-in-this-tunnel-I-think-I'm-going-to-die!), a gift shop featuring crafting stuff and local artists who create with recycled materials (meaning that I basically died in that caving system and found myself in heaven), and other huge climbing areas centered around eco-systems like the arctic, a swamp, and a big tree in a forest.

I think there was some other stuff that we missed.

I'M BAAAA-AAAACK!

I'm back, I'm here, I'm madly recording grades and alphabetizing papers and planning lessons and unpacking and wondering what's for dinner and replying to emails and scheduling cloth diapering classes and picking my A Fair of the Arts booth site and downloading photos and petting the cat and writing my book proposal and crafting for Luna Fest and washing dishes and...

...and maybe sitting down in a minute with a Shiner and some Netflix.

Tomorrow, I'm going to show you the most awesomest thing that we did today. You will not freakin' believe it.

It's that awesome.

One CAN Have Enough Stickers

Only a child's grandmother would buy her this ridiculous amount of stickers:

Add to that an unlimited number of Netflix-ed Land Before Time videos, a storytime at a different Ft. Smith public library branch every day, and a pizza supper with the cousins, and you have yourself QUITE the Spring Break.

Four the four-and-under set, at least...

P.S. Check out my ode to sketchbooks on Crafting a Green World and my shrinking #6 plastic tutorial over at Eco Child's Play.