How the Hands On Art Studio Stole My Heart

At the Hands On Art Studio in Door County, Wisconsin (post garage sale weekend and the day after the Beachfront Inn), Matt melted glass to make me some jewelry:
He did this all by his ownself:
(Eric, who is awesome enough to actually live in a trailer behind the welding studio, helped a little).

The girls fed the chickens, and enjoyed walking around while the flock parted like a prow through the ocean at their feet: Then they treated the mosaics barn like their own private candy shop: Sydney decorated a triceratops: Willow decorated a bunny:

They were gracious enough to let me assist once in a while:

We ran out of money before I could try fused glass, but the lampwork was for me, after all:

And thus we all ended up mightily pleased with ourselves:

If I, too, could someday find myself running a crazy DIY art studio with a farm attached, husband and kids in tow, I'd consider myself fixed up just about right.

Ladder Ball, and Other Wisconsin Pleasures

Frankly, most of the beaches that we saw in Wisconsin were kind of gross (even a lake as big as Lake Michigan is still a closed system, I suppose), but nevertheless our little family needed a mindless getaway after the garage sale weekend, and fortunately we made our reservations at Beachfront Inn in Bailey's Harbor, and it had a private beach that, although it was still plagued by algae, was by far the best beach we saw.

The kids, at least, had no problem in wading in water dosed with a good helping of algae at the shoreline:

Matt and I became quite good at ladder ball:Don't ever buy one of those ladder ball games, because they look highly DIY--some PVC pipe, golf balls, and rope.

Every evening the owner of the inn starts a nice big fire on the beach, feet away from the water:
She gives you all the fixings for the making----and consumption of smores:

There was even a real live dock for standing at the end of and gazing out into the fog:Add to that the whole stack of Sookie Stackhouse novels that I was burning through at the time (nine books in seven days--they're real good), and you've got yourself one happy camper:

How to Run a Garage Sale: A Guide for Newbies and Yankees

Rule #1: When in doubt, don't do it. A garage sale is a huge and ridiculous amount of work, an insane amount of work, and you have to get up really early, to boot. If you are a Yankee or a newbie, you may possibly need to borrow a sarcastic Southern momma to help you.

Rule #2: If you're going to do it, do it up right. Do not be one of those garage sales with a couple of tables slung out in the yard with nothing on them but some baby clothes and Christmas ornaments--nobody wants that shit. No, if you're going to do it, then challenge yourself to sell every single blessed thing that you can possibly part with and still remain sound in health and heart. Be ruthless.

We didn't have to worry about this part in Matt's Grandma's house, because the entire reason we were there was to help the family clear out her entire house--I don't quite understand the whole plan, but apparently, Grandma Bangle is illegally immigrating to Mexico. No, seriously.

Rule #3: Sell the Cheesehead.
Rule #4: Figure out if you're having your garage sale to make a lot of money, or to get rid of a lot of stuff. If you want to make a lot of money, price high, haggle, and box your unsold merch up and store it in your attic until the next garage sale--my Aunt Pam does this, because she is like the Arkansas garage sale queen. If you want to get rid of all your stuff, price low, accept any offer, and get the remaining junk off to Goodwill by 4:00 pm.

Grandma's garage sale was in the "get rid of stuff" category, which is my favorite of the two.

Rule #5: Key words for your newspaper article: tools, furniture, computer equipment, video games, craft supplies. Thank god Grandma Bangle is a quilter, and Grandpa Bangle was a woodworker.

Rule #6: Do not sell the awesome stuff. Give it to the redneck momma who's helping you:
This includes sewing supplies, stash fabric, 80s vinyl record albums, old board games, vintage wooden map puzzles with missing pieces, Contact paper, commemorative iron-on patches--you know, awesome stuff.

Rule #7: Have really good signs. Make them really big, on big neon poster board, written with big black letters, and arrange them at every turn leading from the biggest main road in all directions from the house. EVERY turn, even if the only other option is a dead end--people are stupid. Put these signs up the night before the sale.

Rule #8: Price with colored dots color-coded to prices, or masking tape in which you write in amounts. If more than one person is working the sale, price EVERYTHING, or on the day of the sale everybody will eventually figure out that if they want a deal on the coffee table that the one redneck lady said is $30, they should just find the uncle from Germany and ask HIM what the price is--he'll take $5.

Rule #9: Do not price anything at 10 cents or five cents. Quarters and bills only. If the uncle from Germany wants to accept dimes, that's his business.

Rule #10: You'll need at least $50 in ones and $20 in quarters. Don't break open that quarter roll until you have to, though--people will often bring their own change, and you'll possibly never need extras.

Rule #11: If you want to sell big stuff, you gotta take checks. NOBODY is going to go to a garage sale with 150 bucks in cash on hand to buy your china cabinet and the tacky glasses inside.

Rule #12: If you wanna actually get rid of big stuff, you gotta let people pick up later. Slap a SOLD sign on that china cabinet, tell the two ladies to come back between 3:00 and 5:00, and let them spend the rest of the day wrangling a pickup.

Some tricks to get rid of more stuff:

• Find a box or bin you want to get rid of, fill it with like-minded stuff (sewing patterns, cassette tapes, silverware) and put one price for the box.
• Put a bunch of crap you won't be able to sell into a really nice container (an antique toolbox, a cookie jar) and sell the container "with contents."
• Give away stuff to kids.
• If someone buys three coffee mugs, give her the other two.

Rule #13: Take a break to climb a tree:

Rule #14: No last-minute take-backs. If you're unhappy with a price or want to keep something back, either figure that out or make your peace with it BEFORE the sale.

Rule #15: If you're selling a little kid's stuff, get rid of that kid.

Rule #16: The golden hours for a garage sale are Saturday from 7:00 to 1:00 pm. If you sell on Friday, most people will be at work instead, but your stuff will still manage to look picked over by Saturday. If you don't start by 7:00 am on Saturday, you're going to miss a ton of people. If you go past 1:00 or sell on Sunday, too, people will show up already thinking that all you've got left is crap. And they'll be right.

Rule #17: Go ahead and set up all your stuff the night before. Just throw sheets over the tables to hide the stuff until the next morning. Seriously, who is going to steal from a garage sale?

Rule #18: Get rid of your cars--you'll need the parking.

Rule #19: Remove all your jewelry and prescription drugs from the bathroom. If a tearful preschooler or elderly man with a prostrate problem needs to use your bathroom, are you really cold-hearted enough to say no?

Rule #20: Starbucks in the morning and fast food at 11:00 come out of the profits. It's bad form to request a frappuccino or anything super-sized when you send in your order.

Matt and I were halfway planning to have our own garage sale this summer. I think we may put it off until next year.

Home From America's Dairyland

Phew.

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.