Thank Goodness for Record Bowls

A lot of factors combined to make today's craft fair far more successful than May's craft fair--rain was forecast but never came, which always makes people happy; I was in a REALLY good location; there weren't any other major events (such as IU graduation) to compete with the day; and due to some long and hard thinking and some lucky garage sale scores, I've managed to put together a much nicer and more distinctive booth display.

Remember my dressmaker's dummies? They helped a lot:
Miss Dilley is sporting my vinyl record pendant necklaces (put together with a lark's head knot and a fisherman's knot, thank you very much) and my comic book pinback buttons:
Little John has the monograms over book pages pinback buttons----and Scrabble tile pendant necklaces: I haven't made the time in my schedule to go thrifting often enough to add to my T-shirt stash, so I wasn't offering many T-shirt quilts, but I did have the printouts of my digital button monograms displayed in the gaps where I didn't have quilts: The big winner, however, is always record bowls, and I finally got my act together enough to display them in an accessible and attractive manner: Let me tell you, that scavenged shopping cart is worth its weight in gold. It holds as much as a big Rubbermaid bin, but you can push it, not tote it; you can haul extra stuff to your both site there at the bottom; and once you get there, it's also its own display, so it saved a ton of time, too.

But where did it originally come from? No telling...My dear friend Betsy and I gossipped away happily while I took money and she crocheted plastic bags into other plastic bags (she gets a lot of sightseers when she does that craft in public), Matt eavesdropped on our gossip and read the newspaper and took the girls on trips to get honey sticks, and the girls played in the water fountain and small stream just behind my booth (perfect location!), colored with the special markers-- --and played with some AWESOME stuff that my blog friend Anna gave them. Check OUT these masks!

Sydney's channeling Picasso with this one:

I'm in such a good mood after that craft fair that I might get ice cream later AND try my hand at making jam.

Even Lemonade Looks Better in Pink

Will's been really keen on reading and writing this summer, and since she's pretty clearly a whole language reader, I've been, among other reading activities, checking out for the girls every single Dr. Seuss book and CD Reader that the library owns--not just the normal stuff, like Green Eggs and Ham or One Fish, Two Fish but the more obscure stuff, like Scrambled Eggs Super and I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, etc.

Doing a search on the library search engine, I stumbled across the COOLEST book: . The author read all the Dr. Seuss books, of course, poring through them for references to food, and then she made up recipes for them. There's actually a recipe for Scrambled Eggs Super, for instance, and for Green Eggs and Ham, as well as the Pink Yink Ink Drink and Beautiful Schlopp and Sammy's Six Soda Pops.

Matt's going to have to handle Green Eggs and Ham with the girls (secret ingredients: avocado and green apple jelly), but with a little friend over for a playdate yesterday afternoon, I thought we could handle ourselves this one: Lemonade is actually a pretty easy recipe to do assembly-line style with a bunch of little kids, because each kid can make her own individually. And no, of course I didn't follow the recipe.

Let's see...first I had each kid roll her lemon back and forth to get it nice and juicy:Then I came around and sliced each girl's lemon in half and made her taste it: Then, in turn, they each got a chance to use the lemon reamer twice (two circuits around the table):Ah, the pleasures of learning to wait patiently: And nope, I didn't care if they got seeds in their cups--I think the technical term for that is "half-assed."

After that I just winged it--I got out a shot glass (lord, don't tell the little friend's mom!) and let each kid pour herself about a shot of sugar and then two shots of black cherry juice into her cup, then pour in some nice, cold water from a pitcher, and then I gave them each a straw to stir it with. And Willow's little friend Ella didn't even notice (or declined to mention) that she was basically just drinking sugar-water because she'd spilled all her lemon juice onto the table (twice) and I was too lazy to get her another lemon.

Lemon juice is supposed to be good for wood tables anyway, though, right? Eh.

The coolest COOLEST thing, however? A little more research uncovered yet another cookbook: .

I'm so there.

A Sweet Valley High Craft Fair

One of the huge benefits of being a graduate student/instructor at IU is the library system--not only is the IU library system AMAZING, but my library science degree is pretty much the minimum qualification that one would need to actually be able to understand how to access and search and obtain all the information available in such a huge and complex system.

For instance, the IU libraries will get me anything I want. Anything. And I can want it for any reason. I wanted a copy of for Sydney, for instance. It's the soundtrack to the first film, is lauded as having one of the best film scores ever, features a rare Diana Ross cover, and is out of print. See how much it is on Amazon? Yeah, I interlibrary loaned it from IU, and they picked it up off of a public library in Portland for me. Mine for two weeks.

Take another of my obsession--crafting in literature. I find it highly amusing to read an author's non-professional take on crafting whenever it's included in a novel for some random reason. So when Margo Rising reviewed Sweet Valley High's Boy Trouble, including a secondary plot involving Jessica and a craft fair, I WANTED it. So I interlibrary loaned it from IU--they only had to go to New Albany, Indiana, to get this one for me.

Okay, there are so many ridiculous things about this book. Check out Margo Rising for the complete plot recap--here, all you need to know is that DeeDee is Elizabeth's friend and she's an "artist". When we join her and Elizabeth and all the other juniors at the lunch table--Todd Wilkins, Winston Eggbert (swoon!), Enid Rollins, and Bill Chase, in case you were curious--she's showing off her hand-painted shirt (barf!) and tell Elizabeth that she has a big craft fair this Saturday.

In the parking lot of the mall.

Vendors from all over the state are going to come hawk their wares in a mall parking lot. Um, really? I guess in the early 1990s...

And speaking of, how did a popular teenager ever get the idea to sell at a craft fair in the early 1990s? It was all ducks in bonnets and dried flower wreaths back then. Not that DeeDee's crap is much different: A black and turquoise seascape design, my friends--are you picturing it? Now picture it in a size large, because that's the way you LIKE it, and picture it on your body. Yep, it's the early 1990s, all right.

And an alligator-skin wallet? Is that supposed to tell me she's rich? Thanks for handing the planet down to me, lady.

But look, y'all! Craft fairs give you positive self-esteem!Now I know that a lot of crafters consider a lot of their work art (I admit I'm one of them, with some of my stuff), but I have yet to meet an "artist" who would sell at a craft fair. The one time I suggested to one of my artist friends that he could make a lot of money selling his ceramics at a craft fair, he made it VERY clear to me that he would not be caught dead whoring his work out at some low-rent craft fair. So it makes me laugh that DeeDee is written as seeing craft fair vending as the start of an art career.

Of course it's inevitable that Jessica gets involved in some hijinks--she booth-sits for DeeDee and gets caught up in some kind of mistaken-identity fiasco in which she decides to paint her own T-shirts to sell to a boutique owner who comes by, and of course they're fugly, but the boutique owner doesn't even rat her out when he gets ahold of the real DeeDee to offer her the real deal (Wholesale, DeeDee! Never consign!). The real plot, however, is some laughable business in which Patty and her boyfriend break up over a misunderstanding that neither will talk to the other about--don't worry about it, because it's really boring.

In other news, on the same garage sale day in which I found my dressmaker's dummies, Matt had a world-class score of his own:
It's a few of the issues from the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, the one with continuous covers. Matt's especially excited because the big geeky thing is that Mr. Fantastic's stretchy arm can be seen, I guess, stretching through the whole thing. See it over the big green face?

Yeah. I'm not sure how many more issues Matt needs to get the whole scene, but there's always another garage sale, right?

P.S. Ever figure out why I would use a Dremel to cut a vinyl record album? Check out my tutorial for making vinyl record album pendants over at Crafting a Green World.

The Day Camp and the Dremel

The monkeys have been spending their mornings at a little daycamp over at the YMCA this week--a whole morning in the woods with a few very little kids, poking around and singing songs. It's especially fun because it's run by local singer-songwriter Miss Bobbie--Willow told me, "Miss Bobbie plays GUITAR while she sings with us. Have you ever thought about doing that?"

It's awesome and exhausting, just what a daycamp should be. Last night at dinner Willow actually crawled underneath the table and then fell asleep:
That's the picture of a kid who had fun at her morning day camp.

While the girlies have been frolicking away from me, I've been indulging in creating some things with pretty much the only tool that I can't use around them: the Dremel.

Ooh, the Dremel. If you don't have yourself a hand-held multi-purpose rotary tool, I highly recommend getting one. You can drill with this baby, through plastic and entire books. You can cut with it, through wood or glass or tile. You can grind solder or cut glass or ceramics with it.

You really want to do all those things, right? I know!

Anyway, I've been trying to think up some other things to do with my vinyl record stash (Stash-busting is always an approved activity, but I'm also hoping to have an exceptionally successful day at the farmer's market craft fair this Saturday--gotta pay for day camp, don't you know). Two guesses to figure out why I would do this to a vinyl record album:
Clue: I've also checked out several knot-tying books from the library.

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.