Crafty Garden

While my Matt did design work on my book proposal all day, the girls and I spent breakfast-time-- (yep, we even have to dye our cream cheese pink around here) to dinner time--
(What? You don't permit your preschoolers to have a nice candlelit dinner every now and then?) wreaking havoc in the garden.

There were blossoms to pick off of things that I wish the girls wouldn't pick blossoms off of:

And dinosaurs to romp amongst the birdhouse gourd seedlings (and mulch leftover from the neighborhood clean-up day!):
Other components of my crafty garden are bushel basket gourds, lavender, rosemary, spearmint, catnip, and sunflowers. I'm hoping to grow my pole beans up my sunflower stalks, by the way--that sounds reasonable, right? I'm also hoping to include some obviously reclaimed elements into my garden design--powder blue sink I found by the side of the road YEARS ago, a couple of old drawers, etc.

The girls also had a ball picking out critters from our yummy compost harvest:

And we managed to completely uproot an entire ant colony--oops:

Yep. All day, a trip to the recycling center for newspapers and cardboard, and several emergency consultations with , and I managed to plant, like, eight things.

You're not going to believe the crazy-best news, though--this worker came over to our house this afternoon and warned us not to park our cars on the street on Monday or Tuesday because our next-door-neighbor's sugar maple tree is rotted out and they're going to have to cut the whole thing down.

He's talking about the sugar maple that sits JUST SOUTHEAST OF MY FRONT GARDEN PLOT!!!

I may just have one spot in my yard this summer that can accurately be described as "full sun"!!!

Rest in peace, next-door-neighbor's sugar maple. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

P.S. I've finally had some time to list the first of my vintage button alphabet. Check it out in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

We're All Going to Be Max

I swear that I'm not a fan of book-t0-movie adaptations, and an entire movie based on a picture book? And yet...

Where the Wild Things Are looks AWESOME!!!

It might be the song that makes me so happy, because I'm a fan of Arcade Fire, but also, that Max costume kills me. So iconic, nostalgic but not in a saccharine way, because Where the Wild Things Areis all about childhood angst. Who can't relate to that?

And the release date is October 16. Know what that means?

Well, Will expended quite the amount of energy last year thinking up a Halloween costume, but she won't have to this year, because this year I am going to make them each a Max costume.

And perhaps one for myself...

Cookies and Course Evaluations

I looked up this morning from finishing up posting grades on a few last homeworks to find a monkey in the mulberry tree:
I stuck my head out the window to say hi, and Willow mentioned she was stuck, so we discussed some strategies for remedying that unfortunate situation--Will's first suggestion was that she climb further out onto the branch to make it bend lower to the ground, which I actually thought was pretty clever, but I had to point out that it just seemed a little too risky to try. Eventually she compromised with my suggestion that she wasn't so high that she couldn't lower herself from the limb, hang by her hands, and then drop to the ground. I'm very big on proper dropping procedure--loose muscles, land on your feet, immediately let yourself fall onto your butt--so it ended up going pretty well.

That, however, was not the big adventure for the day, because today was (Hallelujah!!!) my last class of the semester! My students drive me nuts, and I never do grow to like all of them, but over the course of the semester I do become very fond of most of them, and extremely fond of a few of them. They're usually funny, most of them, and sincere, and pretty good sports, and on the last day of classes I like to bake them cookies. It's my secret way of giving them a little love.

Some semesters I go homemade, some semesters I go straight Pillsbury, but this semester I went for Pillsbury with homemade cream cheese icing. I've got some professional-grade food coloring, and I had this whole plan to let the girls explore color mixing, but why the hell would you want to discuss the difference between a dye and a pigment and what a tone is versus what a shade is when you could just be doing this? Or this? Ah, well. It was a Practical Life exercise, in that I taught them how to mix the icing inside a sealed plastic bag and then cut a corner off of the bag to decorate with it, and an exercise in Good Works for Others, in that we decorated the cookies not for ourselves, but for my students. We'll do color mixing tomorrow.

My cookies are pretty luscious-looking, I think, with the course number of the composition class I teach iced on top: Pretty festive, don't you think?

The girls' cookies, however, are in a world of their own:

I let them decorate with some of the Ouchie Candy Stash (you and your sister only get a piece if one of you is SERIOUSLY hurt, real tears, no faking) which itself is left over from a holiday gingerbread house.

But don't worry--there are a couple of cookies (and a couple of cold beers) left over for my own private end of the semester celebration. Because I'm fond of them, but they were still assholes for most of the semester, and also?

I have 42 final papers to grade now.

P.S. Check out my rules for tree climbing over at Eco Child's Play.

In Which My Button Fancy Gets a Little Ridiculous

So you might remember that one of my ongoing projects is to incorporate some digital design into my product line--prints, perhaps, or digital collage elements, or even scrapbooking supplies. It seems like a better long-term crafting choice, since I can continue to get payback from the same piece of work over and over, along with the physical handicraft option of one payback for each piece of work that I craft.

Add to this the crazy amount of time that I've been spending lately rifling through my button collection, futzing around to make monograms and such (I'm also trying to reinvent the button ring--more on that later), and I've been thinking that likely the whole world would really pretty much enjoy digital access to all my beautiful physical buttons. I listened to this one episode of the some crafty podcast in which Maggie Taylor Carroll, who did this super-awesome digitally illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ( Other illustrated Wonderlands that I like are ) talked about how many elements of her work were made from actual stuff that she just threw on the scanner and scanned, and...
I'd title it "Button Porn," but when I titled a Crafting a Green World post Quilt Porn a few months ago, I got some weird traffic.

But see, that's not even porn-y enough for you, is it? I know that you're looking at the big scan, and you're thinking, "All those buttons make me so happy, but they're so small that I can't really see the detail in each button. Darn!"

Here you go, then:


So now instead of just futzily gluing and hand-sewing buttons to make each monogram, I can first futzily lay the buttons that I want to use out on the scanner and scan them, and then later I'll be able to futz around some more with the digital images of the buttons!

My summer is looking so fly, I tell you.

In other news, it's a rainy morning here. That means that instead of letting the girls run around outside for hours on end (they keep taking their pants off outside! What's UP with that?), we'll be spending a hoppin' few hours on...
You guessed it. Dinosaur Bingo.

Perspectives

From above:
From below:From above:From below:
Those kids remind me to change my perspective MANY times daily.

Luna? Not So Much.

Ominously, the first craft fair of the season was quite...eh.

Mind you, all the stuff was there. Quilts:
Pinback buttons: Gift Tags: And some new stuff that I've been making with these terrific upholstery remnants that I scored a few weeks ago:

There was even my own personal troll-girl who crouched under the table and played with stuff for five hours:

Customers, though? Not so much. And customers wishing to purchase things? Um, there were even fewer of those, at least for me--the hallway where we set up is kind of narrow, so vendors could have been making a killing just three tables down and I wouldn't have known. There wasn't so much being killed right near me.

The experience was educational, however. All of my sales were very small--I didn't sell any item that cost over $5--so that tells me that I'll likely need to bone up on a LOT of really small items for my craft fairs this summer. Of course, it's actually harder to make a good profit if you're selling really small items, because you obviously have to sell 60 $1 buttons to make the same amount of money as you can from one $60 T-shirt quilt, but whatever a girl's gotta do, I guess.

People seemed to like the belly dancers. Perhaps I could belly dance just inside my booth? Draw in the customers? Earn some extra singles?

Day in the Sun

It was the best sunny, warm, breezy, cloudless day yet! I know I was pretty stressed at times in the past few months (what odd freshman comp classes I've had this year...), but it must have been a harder winter than I thought, because I never remember being this ridiculously stoked for Spring!

But finally, finally, the lilac is in bloom right outside our front door:
And although I did spend much of the day at a cloth diapering class and the Montessori Garage Sale (I bought a lathe! A LATHE!!! For $15!!! I can't even let myself think about it until my semester's officially over, but I'm so excited), much more of the day was spent outside, at the park, in the sunny, cloudless, warm, breezy air.

I finished my last photo shoot for my book proposal:
One awesome kid permitted me to join her high, high up in her favorite climbing tree:
While the other kid stayed on the ground, enjoying some watercolors al fresco:
And now the babies are asleep, although the sun is barely down (thank you, day full of fresh air and tree climbing), and my Matt is at a Flight of the Conchords concert (I can't stand them, so thank you as well, small children in need of a mother's care), leaving me to happily blog away and craft a few last-minute things for tomorrow:

If only it wasn't Little 500 weekend, causing the emanations from my open windows to sound more like a zombie invasion (sirens, wordless screams, drumbeats, squealing tires) and less like a peaceful warm spring night...

Eh. As long as Matt makes it home tonight without getting a "walking drunk" violation, which my students tell me totally exists, but if you have $265 in cash you can pay your fine right then and avoid being sent to jail (what these kids are doing here without their mothers, I'll never know), it'll all be good.

P.S. Check out my post about crafting with wood over at Crafting a Green World.