The Golden Rule of Flash Photography

Today the baby learned Rule #1 of self-portraiture:
You can't shoot towards the mirror if you're also shooting flash.

It's still awesome, though, right? My kids are compiling quite the photography portfolio.

And my camera? Well, regular upgrades are something to look forward to, I suppose. While the girls try for that extra-close-up of the area behind the toilet bowl, I'll just hum quietly to myself and pretend like this one's in my future:

On the other hand, I do like for my family to eat, so maybe I'll go rescue my camera.

ATC Swapped

My first grown-up ATC swap (can you believe that Will did an ATC swap before I did?) was pretty much super-fun, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Here's my X card, entitled "Mac's X-Ray":
This didn't photograph well, but it's an x-ray image of a brain tumor that my Mac (different from my Matt--rumor has it that Papa, who is hard of hearing and before my marriage saw me with my best friend as much as he saw me with my boyfriend, combined with the fact that Mac, my best man, wore a tux that was carelessly identical to Matt's, never was quite sure exactly which guy I was marrying until the actual marriage. Gawd, how I love all three of those dumb guys) battled a few years ago, printed onto transparency film and stitched to Bristol board. The words were printed individually onto adhesive paper and adhered to the front of the transparency (I'm afraid they're going to fall off, though--next time, I should figure out how to attach them from the other side of the transparency?)

Here's the X ATC of one of my swap partners. It's entitled "X-Ray":
It's three ATCs that accordion together using those metal rings, which is awesome cool. The images are x-rays printed onto matte paper and then glued onto the ATC paper.

Here's another X, by a different swap partner. It's entitled "Xenograft:"

The top and bottom of the figure are individually cut out and glued together--the proportions are perfect, which amazes me. The background is stamped with lots of letter x, and the postage stamps carry the letter, too.

Here's the V card from a swap partner--it's entitled "V=Villain":

There are a ton of collage elements to notice here--photos, typing, black-and-white copy images, inked parts, parts shaded in with colored pencil, etc.

Here's my W card, entitled "My Little Willow Tree:"

It's cotton quilting fabric quilted to Bristol board, then embroidered using the free-hand tool on my sewing machine with a willow tree.

And here's my V card, entitled "Aunt Vicki":

Again, the photo is lousy, because it's really hard to photograph a transparency. This is a photo of my Aunt Vicki printed onto a vintage book page (The Christmas Carol, I believe), lined up exactly with an identical photo printed on an overhead transparency--they're all quilted to Bristol board with a double row of stitching. The words are again printed individually on sticker paper and adhered to the top, and I'm betting they fall off before the year is out.

I think it takes a year to do all the swaps to equal an entire alphabet--how cool would that be?

Oh, no--I am now also obsessed with alphabets.

What To Do With Four Pounds of Buttons

Did I ever mention that just a few days after winning my super-awesome vintage button auction on ebay, that I won another 2 pounds of vintage buttons with a low-ball minimum bid? I don't know why one auction went so high and the other so low, but there you go...

Four pounds of buttons.

And they become: A button alphabet! I'm so totally stoked by them that it makes me kind of giddy--a perfect de-stresser from a stressful week.

It took me a while to figure out a method, and it's still some convoluted pattern of designing the alphabet in Photoshop, printing it, cutting it out, slicing it down the middle, tracing it onto the paper bag, then gluing each button on, then SEWING it on, because what's the point of a button if you're not going to sew it?

I'd like to eventually make two entire alphabets of these--one to sell individually, and one to sell as a set--and I still haven't figured out what to mount them on or how (fabric? Quilted? Felt? Mat board? Cardboard?), but hopefully by Luna Fest I'll have a first-generation in stock.

Oh, and one for my baby, because for some reason she's going to be three years old next month:
If anyone knows what committee I should contact to protest this whole "time flying" business, I'd appreciate their email address.

We Have Easter Eggs, But He Has a Secret

You might remember how much I've decided that I love the Maine Wood Company (it's now Casey's Wood Products, but I'm SURE it used to be the Maine Wood Company)--I bought all the girls' simple dollhouse dolls there (although I can't BELIEVE that I didn't buy these Star Wars peggies off of etsy), and some dinosaur cut-outs for future kid crafting.

Well, somehow Willow learned about Easter--the egg hunts, the bunnies, the candy, etc. You know, all the important stuff. I figured we could just pagan it up to be a nice Spring celebration (although I sort of already did that with St. Patrick's Day, finding it too odd to be explaining to a four-year-old why we celebrate a holiday about Ireland). The beauty of making it a Spring celebration (just like in pre-Christian times), is that you get to keep all that important stuff!

And that is why I (over)ordered a LOT of wooden eggs from Casey's Wood Products this week. Now, some I want to felt over with my nice rainbow wool roving, and some I want to leave natural, obviously, but the other thousand or so?

The girls and I have been creating our own wooden Easter Eggs. And it RAWKS!

The first thing we discovered is that Sharpies work GREAT on these wooden eggs----you get great color saturation (and now, I do not know why I let the baby use Sharpies while wearing that dress), way less mess, and the marker tip allows you to get a ton of detail: Later I'll show you Matt's Mexican wrestler Easter egg--I am totally going to make him color all the girls' dollhouse dolls now.

Of course, though, it wouldn't really be our house if we weren't sloppily wielding some dangerously messy art supply, now would it? And so OF COURSE we got out the acrylic paints, too: In order to lessen the general level of mud-making (most of the wooden eggs are really quite inexpensive, but of course the girls gravitate toward the goose eggs, which are $2.25 each! Don't worry, though, because I'm going to steal the ugly ones and felt over them later), I limited the acrylic paints to two tones within the same color--red and pink, for instance, or blue and navy. The girls didn't seem to mind, and actually had fun observing the different gradations of pink their advertent and inadvertent mixing came up with:
Next on the Easter (uh, Spring) trail, I have to go over to Joann's tomorrow to buy elastic on sale, and I'm really really REALLY hoping to find this chocolate Easter bunny kit there. I loooove the idea of chocolate Easter bunnies, and hell, I'll eat one, but the chocolate always tastes cheap to me (unless it's also filled with peanut butter, obviously), so I'd be stoked to be able to make myself a yummy bunny with some nice dark chocolate.

Okay, in other news, last night I was doing some stuff on the Internet--I've been totally stressed lately, because some people on this etsy team I'm in are really taking this whole "political is personal" worldview, and basically acting the kind of crazy that you're supposed to just back slowly away from, NOT engage--and Matt walks into the room, sipping a cup of juice from a straw, and says, utterly out of the blue," Would it make you feel better if I told you that I have a secret blog?"

Did you get that, friends? Feel free to do the double-take with me. My husband has a secret blog.
If your husband told you that he has a secret blog, what's the first thing you would think of? Here are my top three: My Blog About the Cats I've Killed. My Blog About All the Little Boys Who Live in Our Neighborhood. My Blog About Funny Things I Do to My Wife While She's Sleeping.

But no, my husband's secret blog is way better. It's super-geeky, but super-awesome. It is--get this--a blog that he writes from the perspective of a super-villain wannabe (kind of like Dr. Horrible, but Matt TOTALLY denies the connection). It actually marries the crappest parts of our lives in a really cool way, since the super-villain wannabe is an academic, but is also tortured by student assistants and mired in bureaucracy.

Seriously, Matt doesn't want me to give you the link (his Google Analytics reads: 2. Me and him. And I thought my blog was underappreciated), but you will be so happy if you check out Super-Villainy. Only Matt says that you have to, HAVE TO start from the beginning, way back in September (can you believe that my husband has had a secret blog since SEPTEMBER???), and read the posts in order.

Oh, and he hasn't posted since January, but he says that's all part of the overall plot and his post tomorrow will explain everything. My guy, such an artist.

P.S. Want to follow along with all the rest of the messes we make? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Come to the Moon

The moon, like Spanish: la luna? Old English: mona. Greek: mene. Latin: mens, mensis (literally, "month"). Welsh: mis. Like, you know, Luna Festival?

I'm so absurdly over-educated that I can't tell if my jokes are actually funny.

Anyway...come to Luna Festival!

Come to buy or come to sell--there are actually still a couple of tables open, and I can forward you the pdf application if you're feeling a little crafty. Otherwise, definitely come to buy.

I really like Luna Festival because it's like a craft fair pre-game--I signed up for five(?) sessions at A Fair of the Arts, and one of my New Year's Resolutions (oh, man, I just re-read those and noticed the "limit junk" one--whatev) was to get into some more national-level craft fairs this year, so Luna Fest is like my small, relaxed beginning to the season. I can try out some new stuff I've been working on all winter, test my pricing, have that extra time to work on signage--all that good money-making good stuff.

I also like to mix up my theme a little: last year I sold at Luna under Girls Love Dinosaurs, and this year I'm thinking of combining some kind of craft kit/rainbow thing. The girls have me unhealthily (unholily?) obsessed with rainbows, of all things----all those pretty colors! Lined up in a neat row! How organized! Fussy yet unfussy!

It's tiresome even for me to hear myself talk, sometimes.

What the Heck is an Armscye? A Tutorial

I have been futzing over armscyes lately.

Not really for my book proposal, since I'm def going with the T-shirt apron instead of a smock, but I'm also (since I did all that work for the smock pattern before I decided to ditch it for the proposal) working on some pattern zines probably to sell in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, but I'll likely have a few copies at each of my craft shows, as well.

Anyway, you might remember that I have yet to sew a single thing utilizing even the simplest of patterns. I have a couple of Built by Wendy patterns, but I haven't even opened the wrapper yet. I'm a really big fan of reading instructions or tutorials, or even just looking at finished projects, and then just sort of figuring things out for myself.

And I've figured out that when you're making a pattern or sewing anything you're inventing, the straight lines are no prob. Especially sewing for kids--they're such straight little noodles that it's basically just your kid's measurement plus a seam allowance. Curves, now...

That's another story.

An armscye is basically your clothing's armpit, and a LOT of items of clothing become ridiculously simple to figure out how to sew if you can just get that one curve:

Easiest way? Copy it from a shirt or dress you already like and that fits well. If you lay the clothing out really flat, you can actually place a piece of typing paper over the armpit area and use a pencil to draw the curve, feeling where the seam sticks out a little. You'll probably need to draw a couple of different armscyes, say one from a T-shirt, one from a fitted top, and one from a dress, because we like our armpits to fit differently depending on the item.

Easier way? Use a pattern drafting template, like Short Kutzor, if you really know what you're doing, a patternmaker software program.

Harder way? Get a piece of wire or bendable ruler that will hold its curve and bend it around your armpit, then trace that curve.

Then make something goofy for your kid:

In other news, this is unrelated to anything and is also pretty offensive, BTW, but I cannot get over the awesomeness that is Why the Frak Do You Have a Kid? It's really bad, like snapshots of groups of smiling pregnant fourteen-year-olds in prom dresses and goth guys holding babies while playing video games, etc.--you know how much I love parenting train wrecks (Hello, Toddlers and Tiaras!). Check out the entry for April 3--I started screaming out loud and basically could not stop for a Really. Long. Time.

It got to the point in which I was drinking a glass of ice water, and I'd have to consciously take a drink, swallow, and then put the glass to the side before I pulled up a new photo.

I'm such a cliche.

Buttons, Buttons, I've Got the Buttons!

So my Matt spent practically the entire day slaving over the computer--he formatted my laptop, reinstalled Windows, reinstalled all my software programs, futzed over drivers that wouldn't install correctly, futzed some more--rendering my computer and himself virtually useless in all other regards all day, during a month in which I have online grades to record, book proposals to write, blogs to post in, an etsy shop to update, research to do, and finally, FINALLY everything is reinstalled and I'm back in the game.

And if the internet is acting wonky again (which was the ORIGINAL PROBLEM, remember?), well, for now I'm inclined just to overlook it and be grateful for what I have.

In other, CRAFTY news for a change, I've been reading and re-reading , and whining to everyone I see all about how in all the other crafty blogs I read, everyone in those blogs is just swimming in vintage buttons, and I have like five buttons, total, that I ripped off of an old Gap shirt (from Goodwill, of course, not The Gap, not that you care) of Matt's before transitioning it into a dishrag.

I couldn't stand it anymore. In a shocking move and a nail-bitingly tense auction, I bought over two pounds of buttons on ebay: This auction actually went a little higher than most of the vintage button auctions tend to do, because of two reasons:

1) The seller, who clearly had no idea of the awesomeness of what she was selling, just sort of mentioned in passing that most of these used to be her grandmother's buttons (DING! DING! DING! DING!)

2) In the sort-of blurry photo of a bunch of the buttons spilled out of the Ziploc bag onto a table, you could see studded all over the pile beauties like these: And now they're mine, ALL MINE!!!

Come on, even if you're not one of my crafty friends, you gotta love a shot like this one:P.S. Check out my shout-outs on Craftzine and Recycled Crafts! Remember, only make plant markers out of vinyl miniblinds that were made after 1996, or you and your loved ones will all die of lead poisoning.