You Can Keep What You Can Carry

This can be my new mantra, since the girls and I went to a program at our public library in which the girls each received, and then got to DECORATE, their very own book bag.

I'm telling you, we go to the library a lot, and the library book problem here at home is getting pretty desperate. Not only do I have my entire bookshelf just for library books that I only return when I absolutely have to, and then when I do return them I just use another card to request them, but the girls have TWO entire bookshelves just for the library books that they, too, have a hard time returning. Even Matt has a little library book problem, although try and get him to admit it.

Seriously, we went to the library twice this week, and both times we came home with a huge stack of books for the girls. Does everyone do that? Are we the kind of family who thinks everything that we do is normal just because we do it, but then the girls are going to grow up and learn that their childhoods were seriously? Messed. UP.

Anyway, the library program was awesome, and not just because our favorite librarian, my dear friend Mrs. Christina, was in charge (she and I were talking about this, like, truck porn you can get for little kids who are into cars and trucks and heavy machinery--it's hour-long videos with just these shots of trucks, you know, and zooming in on the headlights and the wheel wells and watching them spin their tires in the mud, real fetish stuff, but you're not supposed to call kid obsessions fetishes, please remember that).

No, the program was awesome because of all the fabric paint! Tubes and tubes of it, in color after color, the kind you brush with brushes and the kind you squeeze from the tubes directly onto the fabric and TWO kinds of fabric markers! We get there and get our totes, and all the other kids are kind of hanging back like they don't know what to do or they're scared to draw on their tote bag, but my kids are all, "Hell, YEAH!" and in they dive:
I'm not kidding, y'all. It may be hard to notice in this photo, but I'd like to point out that in it, Syd is painting with a brush--in each hand:
We were the first ones there and the last ones to leave. Christina actually had to give Will an old shirt of her own kid's because I couldn't take Will to school looking the way she ended up, in her thrifted Gap velour dress, no less (I'm sure the program notes read "dress to mess," but I forgot to read the program notes).

The cost of mess, though--look at those bags!

How many books do you think will fit in each one? Ten? Fifteen?

Forty?

P.S. Check out my cloth diapering class tomorrow from 2:00-4:00 at Barefoot Herbs + Barefoot Kids--new location!

My Avatar is Also a Fangeek

You might remember that directly after Sydney's toilet-training celebration (the new panties, the present, the Baking of a Treat), I bought a butt-load of these little wooden peg people from Casey's Wood Products.

I had always intended to paint them (there are some examples of exquisitely-painted little peg people on etsy, if you're curious), but they are really small, and whenever the girls and I paint...let's just say that we work well with a LARGE canvas. A large big-ole-mess-of-acrylic-paint-everywhere kind of canvas.

However, decorating our wooden Easter eggs with Sharpies went so exceedingly well that yesterday we dragged all the Sharpies (fine and larger points) back out, kidnapped a handful of peggies from the dollhouse, and went to town.

As I'd expected, the kiddos were more interested in experiencing the process of coloring the interesting curves and wooden texture than in drawing "dolls", per se, but after much careful work in which my reach just nearly exceeded my grasp, I did succeed in creating my own little peggie avatar:

I decided to go minimalistic, to disguise the reality that I have no idea how to make proportional arms, or a nose, or even a mouth. Or even eyes, really, so it's a good thing that I wear glasses, because I can totally do those.

But not the earpiece parts. That seemed hard.

We'll do this project several more times, I imagine, so it's my hope that Willow, at least, will eventually want to make her own peggie avatar. If not, though, I plan to recruit my Matt to finish out the family.

Cause don't YOU want to watch your private family dynamics played out by preschoolers in the setting of a dollhouse?

Controlled Chaos (Except for the Controlled Part)

This is what the work table in my studio looks like right about now:I count three different types of craft projects in the making there. I'm hoping to finish up one complete set of button alphabets tomorrow, which I'll likely sell by the letter. I'd like to do another complete alphabet to sell as a set, but it might be nice if at my first couple of craft fairs this season I had something to sell OTHER than two sets of button alphabets, ya know?

Ooh, and a third set just for the babies, but since we have nowhere to put that one it gets to be low priority for now.

I am so stoked for craft fair season.

And garage sale season.

It would be nice to see the sun again, too...

P.S. Check out my post about appraising your vintage stuff before you craft with it over at Crafting a Green World.

Egged

Easter really isn't so much one of my favorite holidays. I'm not religious, so that whole part's lost on me, it's not one of those holidays in which you're supposed to be sitting around on your butt all day if you're not busy cooking a big meal, so it's not really that restful or relaxing, and it takes place on a day that's already a weekend, so basically it just means that some extra stores I might want to go to are closed now.

But I did buy five dozen regular eggs and maybe five dozen more wooden eggs for making all awesome and colorful, so there is that:
We were busy dyeing some of these particular eggs on Friday night. Matt got home from work, looked at them, and is all, "What do you use to dye these?" I'm all, "Um, food coloring?" He's all, "You don't have to use a special kit? You can just use food coloring?" I'm all, "Well, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's why they put the directions on the food coloring BOX, dear." You see what my life is like, right?

And we didn't even blow out any to decorate--that's five dozen hard-boiled eggs that I'm talking about here. I thought about blowing out some for a terrific fine motor skills activity for the girls, since you have to be so gentle, but I figured that the girls are both too young for it to be at all a successful activity. But then I saw that Chasing Cheerios had her two-year-old painting blown eggs, so there you go. I could be eating scrambled eggs for a week, but no, it's egg salad and devilled eggs and diced egg on salads for me.

Oh, and there's candy, but I tell you, if Matt looks at me nibbling my chocolate and peanut butter rabbit and squeals, "It's a REESEter bunny!" one more time, he is NOT getting lucky tonight.

Of course, there's also the egg hunt. And that's pretty freakin' fun, if you ask me, and I didn't even have my own basket. Five dozen eggs, plus the wooden ones, makes for a sweet hunt for two kids. See? Syd's snapping up the results of our "red" session:
And two happy little girls--

--who have no idea that their diet for the coming week is going to consist primarily of hard-boiled eggs.

Belch.

P.S. Check out my post on how to craft with Easter trash over at Crafting a Green World.

P.P.S. It's so, so wrong that I keep visiting this site, but this particular picture from Why the Frak Do You Have a Kid had me laughing so hard that I could not breathe. It'll take about seven seconds to see what the big deal is, though, so give yourself time.

I swear, though, the girl in that picture looks kind of familiar. Sarah Edwards, that's not you, is it? You're a social worker!

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.