Everyone Sleeps Sometime

It's generally Matt's job to put the babies to bed--I only take over on the somewhat infrequent occasions when he begins to shout. My bedtime strategy is a little different--whereas Matt reads books, sings lullabies, and then lies down with the littles and makes them close their eyes so he can play inappropriate video games (his success with that last part is often the subject of some vehement parent-to-parent debates, especially when Sydney comes to me in the morning and tells me, "I had a dream that I was a skeleton and I fought a big man with a sword." Thanks, God of War II).

My strategy is to lie down and read a boring book silently to myself, watch a boring TV show (bonus points if it's in Spanish), or, perhaps most often, just go to sleep myself.

As Matt documented, it's not necessarily pretty, but it does work:

See my red snowflake-print pajamas? Cute, right? And oh-so seasonal...

A Baker's Dozen of Crayon Rolls

The preparation for Wisconsin is continuing apace, with tasks both usual--packing, cleaning house, trying to get just two more loads of laundry line-dried on this humid but rain-free day, getting a copy of the house key made for the house sitter (it took Matt two tries to get this particular chore done. On his first try, he copied a key that not only is NOT the house key, but that, despite its existence on his own key ring, is a key that Matt has no idea what it unlocks)--and perhaps a little more unusual.

Goodwill pants to crop for me. Matching pajama pants to sew for the girls (from , of course). Presents to make to give to relatives to take back to little cousins not in attendance. An etsy shop in need of an On Vacation notice. And the girls insist that they need new crayon rolls, sewn from some butterfly upholstery fabric that they found in my sample stash.

And of course all this is to be done today, the day that we're leaving. Of course.

On the positive side, a few afternoons spent watching Jericho on Netflix have resulted in the following wholesale order of crayon rolls (here's my crayon roll tutorial, if you're interested):
See? I can't let the babies go without new crayon rolls when all they've seen me do for the past two days is sew new crayon rolls. After all, I wouldn't expect them to go without making huge messes today, for instance, when all I've seen THEM do the past couple of days is make huge messes.

Like that logic? That's why I went to college, to learn how to think so good like that.

Makeup for Momma

On shelves and in bins, in closets and behind cupboard doors, I keep around the house all kinds of random things that the girls can choose to do independently--art supplies of all kinds, obviously, and typical stuff like toys, but also just random stuff. Books and magazines for cutting up as well as books and magazines to read. Encyclopedias as well as picturebooks. Thousand-piece puzzles as well as twenty-piece puzzles. Free access to the garden hoses as well as the sandbox. Just random stuff that I find or buy used or on clearance and squirrel away for whenever somebody's in the mood.

Yesterday, after a several-months period of neglect, the girls re-discovered the huge stash of face paint I bought at 90%-off after Halloween last year--chock-full of lead, I'm sure, but whatever. It was actually very interesting, because the last time the girls were into playing with the face paint, they were obsessed with painting themselves, but this time Willow spent a very long time carefully and elaborately painting Sydney's face--
--and Sydney, and then Willow, spent a VERY long time carefully and elaborately painting my face: I never wear makeup as a rule, but this is a good look for me, don't you think?

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.