Summer of the Close-Toed Sandal

The girls and I needed some sandals for the summer--good for creek-stomping, hiking to the Bryan Park Pool, jumping in puddles, etc. My priorities for the shoes I buy for myself and the shoes I buy for the girls are different. For myself, I want something non-leather and non-girly. For the girls, I want something sturdy and with terrific support for growing feet.

We all three ended up with Keens:
We ordered them off of Zappos, which Matt will NOT do. Matt insists that he needs to try on his shoes before he buys them, but I don't know why, because he always buys the cheapest shoes from the crappest stores and then refuses to admit that he has to buy shoes at least three times as often as I have to buy my more expensive, better-quality shoes. Anyway, I'm all lovin' on Zappos right now--at 8:30 pm the other night, right after the girls' bath, I called them in to pick out the color they wanted for their sandals (they wanted to match each other, but couldn't agree on the color, but then I pointed out that I bought orange for myself, so they both wanted to match me. I'm so all about these years prior to the ones in which the fact that Momma picked orange for her shoes means that they'll want anything EXCEPT orange for theirs).

The shoes were on our doorstep at around noon the next day. That's so fast that it feels kind of wrong.

Perhaps Zappos offers free shipping because their shipping method is illegal. Or uses technology that they can't yet admit to having. Or somehow involves Satan?

Dinosaurs are Bigger Than You

Along with plenty of sewing, gardening, a drive-in movie, a visit from a friend, and enough rain to wash away our plans of building a bonfire in the backyard and teaching the girls how to cook hotdogs on sticks, I carved out some time to gather Matt and the girls at the local park for a project that I have been dying to do forever: life-size dinosaur drawings.

First, we lay down on the basketball court and outlined our bodies in sidewalk chalk:
This is terrific fun in itself, because you can measure them and compare them and stomp on their heads, etc.

You also have to have with you a very good dinosaur encyclopedia (we have four). A good dinosaur encyclopedia will give the length of every dinosaur, and will either give its adult height, or will show a small picture of it next to a person outline so that you can estimate its height. With that and a tape measure, you and some kiddos can measure out the length and height of a dinosaur (don't even try to do a diplodocus, though--it's almost as long as a football field).

The girls wanted to do a T-Rex--about 40 feet long. Definitely do-able.

I turned the actual T-Rex drawing over to Matt--he's so skilled, and I'm so not, that it just seemed ridiculous to muddle through it myself, but if you're not super-skilled at drawing, yourself, you can also make yourself a big grid on the basketball field and a small grid over your picture, and copy--but I brought our artist's chalk set so that the girls could decorate their own chalk outlines while Matt worked:
This turned out to be such an awesomely fun activity in itself--
--that I imagine the girls and I will go back often to the basketball courts just for this.

So after your artist-in-residence has finished his masterwork, you have yourself a life-size drawing of your dinosaur of choice for your girls to explore. And the girls...well, the closest that I can get to a description is Glory. They gloried in their life-size dinosaur drawing:
Sydney ran around and around and around and around it, but after a while Willow just had to lie down in an ecstacy of happiness and just simply wallow:

I was thinking that you could probably do this same kind of activity with all kinds of things--sea life, trees, cars. How awesome would it be to draw a life-size picture of your house, or a blueprint of it that shows all your rooms and your furniture?

But you could leave out all the junk that's all over the floor, probably.

Sort-of Sophisticated Crayon Roll Tutorial

One of my favorite things about crafting primarily with recycled materials is the act of thrifting or scavenging something that looks awesome, but that I don't necessarily know what to do with yet. I just sort of throw it physically into my stash, mentally into the back of my mind, and then see what happens with it. I've got everything from dinosaur postage stamps to awesome T-shirts to vinyl record albums to fleece blankets and wool sweaters in my stash, which really isn't that bad since my mental health remains its healthiest when I do some crafting every day, and so junk raw materials are everyday being transformed into handmade junk that goes into other parts of the house, or outside the house for birthday gifts and craft fairs, etc.

It goes in phases, too. For a while I was in a felted wool mood, or a vintage button mood, or a comic book mood. Right now, though, I am absolutely in an upholstery sample mood. It's the perfect sturdy fabric, with enough body to stand up to a ton of projects from birthday crowns to scrapbooking. Lately I've been making crayon rolls with the smaller upholstery samples I've got. They're less fussy to make than my rainbow patchwork crayon rolls, but I think that the upholstery fabric, which comes in colors and patterns that you wouldn't normally associate with a children's item, makes for a sophisticated and unusual look, especially since I'm not in love with typical kiddie-type fabrics. And yet I think that the intricate color combinations and detailed patterns and rich feel actually make these still really kid-friendly--it's like my perennial search for kids' music that doesn't also annoy me (Wee Sing is the stuff of my nightmares, but the girls looooove it).

Anyway, you could make these with home-dec fabric that you bought from the store, I'm sure, but if you do happen across your own upholstery sample book and snatch it up, the smaller-size samples will already be the perfect size for this.

You will need:

• home-dec weight fabric, approximately 4.75"x11" (it isn't hard to change the math, though, if you want to use a different size, perhaps to make a marker or colored pencil roll instead of a crayon roll)
• complementary fabric for the inside and lining, the same length as your home-dec fabric but twice as wide (approximately 9.5"x11")
• sewing machine with heavy-weight needle inserted and matching thread
• approximately 6" of 1/8" elastic

1. Using a satin stitch (or a zig-zag stitch whose length is close to 0)-- --stitch across the two 11" sides of your complementary fabric. This will finish the raw edges, and it gives a nice border to your fabric.

2. Lay your home-dec fabric face-down on a gridded cutting mat and lay the complementary fabric on top of it. Both fabrics should line up along the 11" length. For the width, however, the complementary fabric should stick out 2" farther than the home-dec fabric on one side (this will be the top, if you want a pattern to face a certain way), and the rest of the extra width will stick out from the other side.

3. Fold both sides of the longer complementary fabric so that the folded edge is even with the raw edge of the home-dec fabric (you can iron this crease or just finger-press it), and pin it into place.

4. Satin stitch around all four sides. This will close any remaining raw edges, and give you two pockets running the entire length of the fabric, a 2" wide one at the top and a wider one at the bottom.

5. Lay your crayon roll back on your gridded mat with the complementary fabric facing up and the 2" wide pocket at the top of the roll. Across the wider pocket, from seam to seam, mark a straight line with a pencil from the top of the pocket to the bottom every 1.25".

6. Sew over these pencilled lines, locking your stitches at the top and bottom. These are the pockets the crayons will fit into.

7. At either end of the crayon roll, sew your elastic. Fold it in half and use a zig-zag stitch with a length set to 0 to sew the elastic to the crayon roll.

8. Insert crayons and give it to somebody to color with.

I have a few sets of these rolling around the house to throw in a bag when I'm going somewhere with a kid, and I also give them out as birthday and Christmas presents and sell them at craft fairs.

If you scored your own book of upholstery samples, check out my post on sewing with upholstery samples over at Crafting a Green World.

Crafty Garden Sprouts

I'm a total novice gardener, but I love my teen-tiny, baby sprout-y crafty garden:

Orange Tomato (for eating)

Don't you dig my non-lead vinyl blind plant markers?

Catnip (for the cat)

Birdhouse Gourd (for birdhouses)

Spearmint (for soap)
Melon (for eating) Speckled Cranberry Bean (also for eating)
Sunflower (for pretty, and also a support for the beans)
Asparagus (for yum)
And finally, some muscle helping out (for a change)
Matt loathes gardening (he has bad knees, and longs for one of those lawns you see on the toxic weed-killer commercials), so it was quite sweet that he actually helped out for a few hours today, complete with many fervent and stoutly-defended (and completely ignorant) opinions about how best to do things.


No, dear, the mulch works best if it's not actually on top of the plant itself.


Um, and yes, sweetie, you do need to take the sprout out of its plastic pot before you plant it into the ground.


Next thing you know, I'm going to turn around and find him also engaged in the children's favorite garden activity when they think I'm not looking, which is to dig up our seeds to see if they've sprouted yet. It makes me kind of want to do it, too, which is NOT helpful


Did I mention that I'm a novice gardener?

Adventures of Wormy

So the day was not even two hours old, and already two nice men of the Jehovah's Witness religion were keeping me company as I put laundry on the line. I know the day was less than two hours old because all I'd done was wake up, have a lovely cup of coffee out on the back deck while the girls puttered away next to me with some worksheets (I know--worksheets? But they have trouble getting started in the morning, and engaging them in something keeps Matt from stuffing them in front of PBS Kids), see Matt off to work, check my email, read a book about kelp and a wildflower alphabet book to the girls, start a load of dishes, and switch over the laundry.

Anyway, it was a fascinating conversation. We started off a little rocky when I was asked whether or not I was "religious" (totally a leading question, right?), but being 1) shy, 2) a teacher, and 3) a writer, if there's one thing that I know how to do, it's change the subject, and so I managed to segue that little convo into a question about the stance of Jehovah's Witnesses on Obama.

They don't vote! Fascinating. They should really work that sort of thing into voting statistics--you know, like, noting the percentage of non-voters whose religions forbids them to vote. But Jehovah's Witnesses, according to my friends, don't want to involve themselves in worldly government affairs. Government money is okay, though, because I asked about public schools, but they register as "conscientious objectors" in the Selective Service. And so I'm all, "But what about Korea, where military service is mandatory? Are there any Jehovah's Witnesses in Korea?"

Yep, and they all GO TO JAIL!

So then my visitors started talking about the Bible, and I don't know, it got a little dicey here, in my opinion. So this one guy is talking about how they retranslated the Bible "from the original" so that they can know exactly what Jesus' word is, and that this translation is the most accurate of the Bible translations, and I think that is very interesting. I'm very curious to know how the translation standards and procedures differed from other very popular Bible translations, like the Septuagint and the Vulgate, and how they choose what texts to include, etc. My friends were unable to help me out on this, which made me sad, and I have to say that I'm a little concerned about their declaration that the Bible is Jesus' word, flat out. I asked how they resolved the dilemma of multiple authorship--I was interested in hearing, you know, the religious decree or something--but we couldn't quite find a meeting place to get that question answered.

But the guy does say that Jehovah's Witnesses try to live as the first-century Christians lived, which I think is very cool. But they're still doing the Jesus' word thing, so I'm all, "What about Peter?" And there's this silence, and then the braver guy is all, "What do you mean?" And I'm all, "Peter the Apostle? The Rock? The guy in charge of spreading the religion and Jesus' message and basically founding Christianity, since Jesus died, you know, abruptly?" There was no Word then, no Gospel to consult--they hadn't been written yet. You had to ask Peter. But Jehovah's Witnesses don't seem to acknowledge Peter, or the role he played in transmitting, founding, setting the guidelines for Christianity--I'm finding that a little naive, I guess. But again, I'm sure if my witnesses knew there would be a test, they would have studied more esoteric knowledge about their religion prior to entering my backyard.

Anyway, then I was finished with my laundry, so I thanked them for a lovely conversation, we shook hands, and they scored me a couple of issues of Watchtower. I wonder if I can request, like, a historian as my new neighborhood Witness? I'm feeling a little academically unsatisfied by that conversation, although really, they were quite amiable--I imagine you learn to be a good sport when you witness in a college town. The people hanging up their laundry keep turning out to be Medieval/Classical scholars and stuff.

So then I went and found the girls--thank gawd they hadn't drowned themselves or fallen down the stairs while I was spending a half-hour getting my comparative religions geek on--and it turns out that Willow had been creating this:
I only sort of halfway admired it at the time, because I was still all "How can you not have heard of the Vulgate if you're talking about Bible translations?", but I did let Will fill my CF card with photos, so I'm getting to admire it now:
I like how it's basically all these animals that have somehow managed to trap a brachiosaurus inside a block fortress, and now they're all just gathered around staring at it and gossiping amongst themselve and saying "Holy CRAP! What are we going to do with that thing now?"

So then I got to sew a little and we read some more books outside on our He-Man bedspread and the girls ate apples and pineapples and I sewed yet some more and then Sydney showed up with a worm and asked if it could be our pet, and I said yes. Enter Wormy, Will's new soulmate:
We are only keeping Wormy until tomorrow--I'm pretty sure the only way this will work is if we switch Wormies VERY often. So--jar, holes in the lid, dirt, mulch, greenery, a little water.

I tried being all natural and put Wormy in an old applesauce jar, but this was STUPID. Wormy's house lasted through lunch, through more goofing around in the yard, through a trip to Joann's and Matt's work, but on our way into Barefoot Kids to buy sunscreen and bug spray Will was so excited to spot a bumblebee sniffing around a rose that she dropped Wormy right on the sidewalk and smashed the jar into a billion bits. Of COURSE. Then freaked out that Wormy was hurt. Then wouldn't sit on the steps like I told her to while I cleaned out the glass. Then cut her hand on the glass. Etc. etc.

Fortunately, Barefoot's proprietor, my buddy Scott, gave Will another GLASS JAR for Wormy, so, you know, yay. And Scott and I got to do the whole townie thing where a lady came in from out of town, asked for directions somewhere, and Scott and I fought about the best way to get there. I LOVE that. We're all, "So then you take a right on Walnut. Is it Walnut? It's the one that goes South. And it's one-way, but it'll turn two-way and then you take a left. And the building you're looking for, it's brand-new, blah, blah, blah."

I know, I know, you'd think the day would be almost over, but it's not. First we have to go home and watch an episode of Planet Earth (on account of I am exhausted), and then do some more laundry, and then go on a nature hike to pick wildflowers and get super-excited to see this ladybug--

--and then go home and I go out shopping (I bought 16 Kashi frozen pizzas. They were on HUGE sale) and Matt feeds the girls dinner and they con him into letting them watch Land Before Time, and NOW they're finally asleep, and I'm trying to figure out if I'm too tired to make myself a smoothie, or if I should just watch Step Brothers with Matt until I fall asleep, too.

And tomorrow we're going to garage sales, baby.

Dinosaur Summer

We love dinosaurs around here, did you know? My kiddos' obsession colors every aspect of our days together, from the big, such as the little kid's AWESOME picture of a dinosaur that she drew yesterday--

--to the small: see the dinos on the big kid's jammies?

We've got some awesome dino-lovin' activities planned for this summer. We'll be practically in the front row for the Walking With Dinosaurs Live show when it comes near us in July (we're having to forgo our traditional huge summer birthday bash to afford the tickets, which are OUTRAGEOUS, but it's going to be worth the budget re-allocation, I know), and do not worry, I've already mapped out the locations of the dinosaur museums that we can visit on our June trip to Wisconsin--the Milwaukee Public Museum, the Dinosaur Discovery Museum in Kenosha, and the Field Museum in Chicago, likely. Wisconsin is light on dinosaur museums because it doesn't have a fossil history because dinosaurs never lived there because it was covered in water during prehistoric times; this is what you get to learn when your children are obsessed with dinosaurs.

We'll also have the time and the nice weather to do some other dino activities that require more time than the big kid's three-hour daily preschool would allow (three hours doesn't seem that long while I'm living it, but I have to plan my whole damn day around it!). Whenever we can wrangle my partner (I'm begging him to ask for flex-time at work this summer. I really want him to work four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days, and since he's a designer, he actually could use the extra time at work in the evenings, no phone calls, no visitors to his cubby, to focus on his designs), we're going to make measurements on the basketball court over at our neighborhood park and then draw life-size dinosaurs in chalk (this Smithsonian handbook on dinosaurs is our most precious family resource!), and I also want to score a load of helium balloons on some calm day and use them to measure out dinosaur heights in the park--ooh, I'll also need a lot of string.

We go creek-stomping around here a lot, and the kids enjoy searching for geodes and crinoid fossils (the big kid claims that she is "the best fossil hunter out of all my friends," and I have to say that it's probably true), so depending on how interested they are, it would be fun to add on more of that into our dino activities. Where we live in Indiana is actually a superb place to explore for fossils--a shallow prehistoric sea left lots of little ocean critter fossils, and a glacier later on the same site kept the bedrock from being too covered with subsequent layers of earth, so now you can easily fossil hunt (where it's legal) in most creeks, road cuts, and limestone quarries (but not caves! All the Indiana caves and sinkholes are closed to the public this year in hopes of stopping White Nose Syndrome from spreading. Sucks).

Perhaps we could even find a brachoid!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

To Remember Her By

Willow's favorite teacher won't be returning to Montessori next year. In a school in which classrooms encompass three "grades", transitions out of the class are a big deal. Graduating kindergarteners will be honored in an intimate ceremony on the last day of class (Montessori is big into ceremonies, I think you might have gathered), and I think the students are also preparing a different sort of celebration to honor their departing teacher.

As part of that, we parents were given a 12"x12" piece of scrapbook paper and asked to make a page with our child to present to the teacher at the ceremony. So in between breakfast (peanut butter sandwiches and watermelon, prepared and eaten and cleaned up after completely by delighted little girls, who think that being in charge of their own breakfast is the height of grown-up luxury) and laundry and goofing around (the girls with bubbles and Dinosaur Bingo; me with Awkward Family Photos--I'm totally going to submit some from my own childhood) and lunch (me this time, maximizing the usage of the peanut butter and bread demolished in the making of breakfast) and drawing out on the back deck and bullying Willow through getting ready for school (only two more days, I told her, and then yes, you can wear your shorts without panties), the girls and I made this scrapbook page for Willow's sweet teacher:
It looks a little funky where I awkwardly stitched two separate scans together in Photoshop (whenever my scanner finally craps out--and it has lasted FOREVER--I am buying the scanner with the largest scanning bed that will fit in my house), and the color scheme scanned a little strange (Is the scanner starting to crap out, I wonder?), but it's a pretty accurate estimation overall.

The photo mats are some pieces of upholstery remnant that I had cut and sewn to be coasters, but I didn't like them and threw them in the scrap pile. The photos themselves, and Willow's name, are printed on a sheet of printable fabric--I didn't use my Bubble Jet Set because it takes some time to soak and air-dry, and I was, of course, over deadline with this page. Nifty little trick--super-saturate your print job when you print on fabric, because the fabric sucks up so much ink that otherwise your photos will come out a lot lighter than you'd intended.

Willow drew and decorated the hearts with Sharpies on brown paper bag, and then I cut them out (oh, the tragic cutting of lefties! While the girls were drawing on the brown paper, I actually drew and cut out some practice cutting pages for them--I'll show you those some other time, because they're neat-o) and hand-stitched them on with buttons and red thread. Will also put her handprint, done in brown acrylic paint, on the bottom right upholstery mat, and then I machine-stitched the upholstery mats to the scrapbook page and the fabric photo prints to the upholstery mats. Done and done.

Now for end-of-the-year gifts for all three teachers...