Dummies

Guess who's come to live at our house:
Dressmaker's dummies!

I've been thinking for a while about constructing a DIY dressmaker's dummy, but never got around to it. But at our last garage sale of the morning yesterday, at the house of a fellow Montessori mom, there these babies were!

I leapt out of the car, dragging Willow along with me and leaving Matt to get Syd, ran across the road, and put my hands on both dummies to claim them. The lady said that she had bought them off of ebay to use for photographing clothes that she, herself, wanted to sell on ebay, but that (familiar story) she'd never gotten around to it and now she was moving.

We paid $35 for the two of these (after a little haggling) and I am pleased as punch. The lady mannequin will take a few hours of work to get padded to my correct size, and the child's mannequin is still quite a bit big even for Willow, but for now I can use the both of them as displays in my craft fair booth.

In between craft fairs, I can't rule out the possibility that I will dress them up in strange outfits and pose them in my windows. Only natural, right?

The Wonderlab, and Increasing Our Vocabulary on the Bus

Two-hour parking and Montessori preschool take us away from the glory of an entire day spent at the Wonderlab in the winter, but in the summer, on a rainy day in which the only other option for two little girls who live in a house chock-full of books and games, art supplies and building blocks, and who have an entire basement playroom full of toys, is to tear said house apart and fight like a cartoon cat and mouse, an entire day at the Wonderlab is a nice bus ride and short walk away:

Not to mention, we always have the BEST time on the bus. This time, on the way back (on the 1 South), there was this awesome fighting couple--the woman was mad because the bus driver wouldn't let her bring her soda on the bus (no open containers), and the thought of the 75 cents that she had wasted was enough to remind her that she had given her partner her entire paycheck after they'd visited the check-cashing place, and he had never repaid her. The partner replied that he'd bought groceries using that money, and Arby's, and beer when Brad came over, and rented the movie, and that thus he'd basically spent all her money on her. The woman insisted that if he didn't give her back the rest of her money, she was going to call 911 right there from the bus. The partner replied, EXCELLENTLY, "Here's your money, woman!" and took a wad of bills out of his pocket and threw them on the floor of the bus! Then the woman said that she was NOT going over to his mother's for dinner that night.

Mind you, I missed a little of the fight, because I had to hold the girls' attention rapt with a story about two little baby squirrels (named Willow Squirrel and Sydney Squirrel) who lived in the forest with their mommy who was a teacher and their daddy who drew pictures. As you can imagine, the f-bombs were falling hard and fast and my girls, they already know how to swear in appropriate context--they don't really need to learn all the creative appendages that one can add to swear-words.

Blooming

We have been...

reading Dr. Seuss books (even the esoteric stuff, over and over) and swimming at the public pool (no stolen toys yet, but one splash bully got the smack-down from Momma), and making homemade play dough (scorched play dough? I don't recommend it), and having playdates, and lucking out-- --at the park, and playing chess and Scrabble long and often (modified, of course, although Will is getting pretty handy at setting up a chess board), and spending many quality hours at the Wonderlab and the public library, and getting our faces dirty----in the garden, and watching documentaries (TriviaTown? AWESOME!), and planning our trip to Wisconsin later this month, and cooking up loads of pretend meals (and a couple of real ones, unwillingly)...

In all my free time (ahem), I've been working, however, on Ruby's Bloomers, again from . This pattern, unlike Lucy's Kimono, is easy-peasy--one pattern piece, sewn in a few different places, with elastic thread (squee!) and an elastic casing. After the first one, I didn't even have to read the instructions over again.

I've been modifying the pattern to work with some silks that Willow's been eyeing, and T-shirt material-- --(I have an unhealthy love for scavenging old tie-dyed T-shirts and then sewing with them. Wouldn't it be great to live in a culture in which the most common hand-altered fabric was someting like batik? But America=tie-dye), but I've also been making a few from the quilter's cotton in my supply.

It's technically not stash, since this is the fabric that I use for the rainbow patchwork art rolls that I still make, but who can turn down a little girl's request for pink bubble-print bloomers?

Surely not I.

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.