From Mirror-Writing to Rainbow-Writing

Oh, the trials of a left-handed child. Unless your parents/teachers are left-handed, too, every darn thing is modeled with the wrong hand. Cutting is harder, writing is harder (lower-case a, how does a leftie ever write you?), and I do not even know what I'm going to do when Willow is ready to learn to knit.

Mirror-writing is still developmentally appropriate at this age, but it's also developmentally appropriate to be moving past it by now, and since Willow is beginning to be able to read a little, and clearly knows which way words move across the page, I've been just pointing it out to her when she writes backwards, and very occasionally, usually when she's written a word that she's memorized or when she's written a word that needs to be accessible to other people (cards to grandmas, name on her Summer Reading Program chart), asking her to correct something. Since Willow writes so much, what I don't want is for her to internalize mirror-writing--that would be harder to unlearn (some people theorize that Leonardo Da Vinci engaged in mirror-writing secretly because he was a (gasp!) leftie).

Montessori has a lot of moveable letters and moveable words, and one thing that I think Will's been doing when she copies is to put the word on her right side (of course!), and then mirror-writing is very natural--it's much more difficult to figure out how to copy a word going the correct way when the word is on one side of you or another. We're going to have that problem here, too, perhaps, because one of our projects this coming week is to write some sight words to label everything in the house. But one thing that's been working so far, especially with unfamiliar words, is to have Willow put the word above her paper--it's easier to line it up and follow the correct order when she's copying the word directly below its model.

Another thing that works for words that are more familiar to her, and that thus she's a little more used to mirror-writing, perhaps, is to make a game in which I write the word with each letter a different color, and then challenge her to copy it. Hence Willow's favorite word of all time:
Not bad. And besides, everyone knows that N is the bugbear of the alphabet.

Lucy and I Didn't Always Agree

A couple of weeks ago I participated in a half-hour usability study for the new IUB home page. Usability studies are right up my alley--five different problems to solve using the web site (finding where the list of part-time jobs for students is located, finding a map with Woodburn Hall located on it, finding the requirements for study abroad, etc.), and My. Opinion. Matters.

Hells, yeah.

In exchange, UITS gave me a $20 Barnes & Noble gift card. I know, right? I carried it around in my pocket for days until we all had a chance to get to Barnes & Noble, and I pored over every single craft book in the store until I finally settled on .
and the Skull-a-Day book were both close contenders, and
(inspirator of the rainbow patchwork marker roll) might have won altogether if there'd been any in stock.

There are some VERY cool things in Weekend Sewing. I have laid out on my cutting mat right now the pattern for Ruby's Bloomers, but the absolute first thing I needed to sew was a baby gift for a dear friend of mine who's expecting her second daughter next month. I already have permission to hold that baby anytime I want to, and if I'm going to enjoy dressing her up and loving on her and taking pictures of her little feet and then dressing her up in a new outfit, she needs some teeny little clothes to be dressed up in.

I sort-of sewed to a pattern once before, but not really. And wow--it's harder than I thought. I chose the Lucy's Kimono pattern as the one that I would most look forward to dressing up my little baby in, and I found a dumpster-dived pale green striped button-down blouse in my stash. I got everything cut out just the way Heather Ross wanted me to, and all nicely pinned and everything-- --and then... I don't know, I kept not being able to figure out things. In step 3, for instance, the instructions asked me to attach the kimono fronts to the kimono back at the shoulder seams, with the WRONG sides together. I stared and stared and stared at that for a while, but I finally decided that it just couldn't be correct--wouldn't that put the seam on the outside of the kimono? The hand-drawn illustration of step 3 (it's picky, but hand-drawn illustrations/patterns in craft tutorials are a big pet peeve of mine) seems to have the right sides together, so that's what I went ahead and did. Kind of made my mind melt for a little while.

My biggest headache, however, came from the darn sleeves. I think this might just be my unfamiliarity with pattern sewing, but there wasn't any indication of how the sleeves might be oriented to attach to the body. Each sleeve was a sort of trapezoid, with two long, straight sides and two short angled sides--what end gets sewn to the body?

I made my most educated guess, sewed it up, and felt comfortable enough with my choice to finish the kimono. I dont' know, though...when I looked at it, it just seemed odd. Funny how my sleeves are long and skinny, and the sleeves in the book are short and wide...Crap.

After I ripped out the stupid sleeves, I didn't have enough material left from the button-down shirt to make them anew, so I cut them instead from the quilting cotton I was using as the bias fabric: Even more freakin' adorable than the first try, if I do say so myself.

So the end result would maybe be: Book Errors=2 (asking for the wrong sides together when it should be the right sides, not including the location for the side ties on the pattern piece). Human Errors=1 (sewing the sleeves on sideways. Unless sleeves are supposed to have their edges marked, and then that would be another Book Error). Anyway, only the sleeve issue was dire--everything else, even if I didn't understand it at first, I was able to figure out. And it was well worth the trouble.

It seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth for my mom friend to have to find a matching bottom for the kimono top, so I sewed the baby a pair of tiny little pants from the sleeves of the button-down blouse: I can't decide if I love them, or if they just look like two sleeves stuck together:

And then, and THEN, I found in the girls' blankie stash a little baby blanket I'd scavenged years ago, with an awesome circus print on it in green, to serve as the wrapping for the outfit.

And once that baby is born, I get to dress her in that outfit and wrap her in that blanket and hold her anytime I want. I have a promise.

Wildflowers, Interpreted

Due to a little "incident" yesterday evening (Cake aptly named this incident "When Ice Cream Turns into Tragedy"), the girls are enjoying themselves a Land Before Time glut this morning, leaving me with, ahhh----free time on my hands.

So Matt's been teaching nights for a change, so the girls and I hiked over to the Chocolate Moose for some ice cream--The Chocolate Moose, did you know, is immortalized in my favorite John Cougar Mellancamp music video:

After getting ice cream we usually walk over to Third Street Park to enjoy it. Last night there was a play practice going on in the outdoor theater, so the girls and I sat on some steps nearby to watch it. Next to the steps are a wall and a hill below it and Willow, who's been fascinated lately with jumping off of fairly high surfaces, was having me play Humpty Dumpty with her--I have to recite the poem as she acts it out. It was unfortunately quite distracting to the play people--in the distance they could apparently clearly observe a child jumping off of a high wall and lying crumpled on the ground below it for several seconds, before hopping up and doing the whole thing over and over again. There were a lot of blown lines, etc.

Sydney has the unhappy distinction of being the "little" sister, alas, and at one point I looked up just in time to see her not quite so much jump as lurch off of the same high wall, full of happy anticipation--yeah, when she lay crumpled on the ground below it, it sure as hell wasn't so I could finish the last two lines of the poem.

Anyway, the kiddo's ankle isn't sprained, I don't think, but it's sore, deserving of lots of foot baths and TV time and just generally getting carried around everywhere--not such a bad deal, when you think about it.

In other news, one of our favorite activities so far this summer is to do a wildflower walk--we walk around the neighborhood, picking wildflowers off of lawns (if they look unintended) and medians and ditches, and when we get home we try ineptly to identify them from our numerous library wildflower books and then we draw pictures of them.

I don't know what it is about wildflowers that seems to call for watercolors, but it's certainly our favorite medium:

That's me doing my darndest to paint a dandelion and a clover and a wild rose. Willow's daisy and clover are much more inspired:

I love the way she does the leaves on the daisy. It's not terribly accurate, but it's totally the way they SHOULD look, you know?

Etsy Children's Showcase Showdown

We'll see if this was worth the seven dollars that I threw at it, but for the entirety of today I have a Showcase spot in the Children category at etsy.

The concept sounds cool. Twenty-five sellers total get a gallery shot of their product (and a link to it, of course), on the first page of the Children category. Three show up right on top, and then you scroll through if you want to see the others--the order is random each time the page is visited, so sometimes I'm on top, but usually you have to scroll (I keep going there and refreshing the page until my item is on top, because I like to see myself).

You get one product shown, but you've put your items in a queue, so when the first item sells (here's hoping...), then the next item in your queue gets that spot, etc.

Here's my queue which I was nervously working my butt off on all day yesterday--photographing, listing, queuing it up, finishing up some sewing sometimes, fretting, planning more for myself than I could possibly get done, etc.:

Rainbow Patchwork Crayon Roll

Four Brown-and-Gold Upholstery Fabric Crayon Rolls

Royal Red Upholstery Fabric Dress-Up Crown

Two Green-and-Gold Crayon Rolls for Play and Travel

Disneyland Bambi Vinyl Record Bowl

Two Vinyl Record Bowls from Children's Music Albums

Spider-man T-Shirt Quilt

Captain America 4T T-Shirt Dress to Adult Top
Personalized Denim Bunting

So, yeah, the freaked-out overachiever in me wanted to have a complete selection of every single thing that I make for children--pillowcase dresses, T-shirt aprons, crayon rolls and marker rolls, T-shirt dresses and aprons from every random T-shirt that I have in my stash right now--as well as a ton of new stuff that I've been stewing over creating--beanbags, play dough in recycled containers, stuffed upholstery fabric owls (I've never gotten over the Just Us Chickens incident of two years ago).

The stay-at-home mom previously happy in her summer vacation was all, "Um, whoah. Aren't there some rabbits to chase out of the birdhouse gourds or something?"

Turns out there were. End of story.

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.