It's Mostly about Piecing, not Stripping

The last time I made patchwork rainbow art rolls, I miserably cut a billion little 1.75"x 4.5" pieces, and then miserably sewed them all together piece by little piece. It really wasn't all that fun.

This time? I'm strip piecing, Baby.

To strip piece, you measure all your pieces at the right width, but make them all super-long. Then, after you sew the widths together, you just have to cut each block at its correct length, and there you go. If you consider that most of your time spent piecing is actually spent carefully measuring and then cutting, not actually piecing, you'll realize that this actually saves a TON of time.

So, to strip piece my crayon rolls, I cut out eight colors of quilting cotton, each 1.75" wide. I didn't measure the length at all, just cut a 1.75" slice down the entire length of each fabric I used (another time-saver in strip piecing). And then I sewed them together, right sides facing, in the order in which I want them to be:
I usually iron all my seams to the same side, usually towards the side that has the gradation to darker fabrics.

I'm experimenting with some different construction methods for these crayon rolls, so another benefit to strip piecing is that I was able to cut a separate top and bottom, each short enough that it would have KILLED to have had to piece all these little pieces individually:
And then I had to go pick up the girls from school, and then, lord help us, we went to Joann's, so we'll have to revisit these crayon rolls already in progress at a different point in time.

In other news, the Bryan Park Neighborhood Block Party was tonight, and it's always pretty darn fun. I enjoyed sending Will out with the camera to take some photos:
Photos taken by a five-year-old are nearly always unposed, because no one expects a camera to be coming at them from just that darn low:
You get your fair share of butt-shots, too, as you might imagine:
I was reading my friend Cake's blog last night, some posts when she's just in the process of moving here to Bloomington, and I was getting a huge kick out of how she was describing parts of our town as she was experiencing them for the first time, and LOVING them, of course--the bike lanes, the farmer's market, the recycling program, Bryan Park itself. I had this weird mental vertigo of wanting to suggest to her other things that she'd probably like, while at the same time recognizing that she's lived here for years now, and she's definitely found them by now--hey, Cake, you should check out the children's playroom at the public library. Hey, Cake, have you seen the Sidewalk Exchange at the Recycling Center?

Dude, Cake, you will totally love the block party our neighborhood association throws each year.

School Girls

Yesterday's big event:

Will gloried in the status of kindergartner, but I have to say that for me, at least, the major milestone was my big girl Sydney's first day of school ever. Montessori starts at three, and so yesterday Sydney officially earned the status of youngest grouper in the girls' classroom.

With Will, Matt and I were two stressed-out parents worried about how our three-year-old would react in a new environment without us, and among a peer group that included children over two years older than her and with teachers with whom our own personalities did not mesh. Will, herself, had a difficult transition and was almost expelled because she spent two-thirds of each three-hour day for that first week throwing a two-hour unholy tantrum.

With Syd, we just get to enjoy the experience. Sydney is thrilled to go to school, thrilled to get picked up and see me again, and thrilled, in general, to be on the ride that she's on. I don't know if it's the second kid or this kid that changes the experience so much for everyone, but for the most part, this kid?

It's just a joy to be in her world.

Down on the Farm

So that I could surprise the girls after school today (SCHOOL!!! SCHOOL!!!! SCHOOOOOOL!!!!!), I finished up some little laminated cut-outs that I've been thinking about and figuring out for the last couple of days. The theme?
The farm, of course. We've got a nice big barn, a farmer, a horse and cow, a fat little pig, a duck and a chick and a nest. I drew the templates on template plastic and then cut them out double-sided, with scrapbook paper on one side and this really awesome vintage wood-grain printed paper on the other side (I found the paper at the Goodwill Outlet Store, as part of a book of samples for some Japanese company that printed laminate? Anyway, FULL of paper with faux wood grain and marble and cork and stuff). I did it a really stupid way that made it take forever, however--next time, I will spraymount the papers together, then cut them all as one piece, instead of cutting out each side individually and then fussing them together interminably.

Laminated, they're nice and sturdy, and their simple forms and two-dimensionality is actually really engaging--I've already seen the girls use that in some interesting ways in their play this afternoon, and when Sydney spilled her chocolate soymilk all over the farmer and her barn, I was extra-stoked about the laminating. It's as easy to make two of something as it is to make one, by the way, so I have a second farm play set up in my pumpkinbear etsy shop today.

It seems, yes, that for my girl Willow, the farm, unlike her other passions of outer space, the ocean, earthworms, the Nutcracker, rollerblading, and all the other billion things she loves and forgets about and then loves again later in a slightly different way, farming is no passing, here-and-there fancy.

Willow loves farms like she loves dinosaurs.

I totally get this, by the way. Although Sydney and her dear daddy are generalists, interested in billions of things but not to the exclusion of billions of other things, Willow and I are obsessives. She loves dinosaurs and farms the way I love handicraft, say, or medieval literature, or 1980s pop culture.

The fun thing, though, is the way Will gets us all passionate about her passions. Sydney, at almost two years younger, is always a willing follower (and growing to be sometimes a leader, that big girl), but I wouldn't have told you this time last year, a brown yard languishing out the window, that this time this year I'd have a little garden--A lasagna garden, to be exact, and today I harvested cranberry beans, orange tomatoes, husk cherries, and jalepeno peppers. Tomorrow I plan to cut some kale.

I also couldn't have told you that during our trip to California, in between all the beaches and aquariums and hands-on museums we could handle, I would research and discover a wonderful little farm for us to tour one day. Ardenwood had enough baby goats for Sydney to get over her goat-phobia slightly, and a lovely docent for me to once again obnoxiously out-docent (I can't help myself--she tells me that farm women had to hang all their clothes to dry, and I talk about the benefits of shade-drying versus sun-bleaching. She shows me the one-piece clothespins they used, and I tell her how to make clothespin dolls. She tells me that blue jeans take forever to dry on the line, and did I know that they were invented in California, and I tell her that the adoption of the clothing of poor workmen into mainstream society is a metaphor for Americanization, etc.) It also had some handy tips for my own at-home gardening and someday farm dreaming:Most importantly, however, it had, as have the best tourist farms we've visited, several working fields of crops to examine. Upon seeing them, my future farm girl stooped to examine a few plants up close, then immediately took off down the rows:
Trying to envision just where to put the big barn with the baby chickens and the baby kittens and the stall for every horse, I bet.

I Made It!

We are home [insert squeal here]. The girls are regularly staying awake until midnight now, which is oddly even later than their California bedtime, and the suitcase exploded all over the living room, undoing all the work I did cleaning before we left so that I could come home to a clean house, and I suspect that Matt hid some of our stuff, like our sweaters and his nice suit, at his parents' house to be discovered and mailed home later so that we could fit all the stuff I bought into our one suitcase, but we are home.

We came home to a couple of very nice surprises, by the way. One of our adorable tadpoles transitioned into an even more adorable, and very teeny, little frog during our absence:
Look at that--his little tadpole kibble is as big as his head! Now the girls and I have to determine whether or not he's a native species, and see if we can release him into the small creek by our house.

The other surprise:

Me! In Make magazine! This is my article that was destined to be in Craft, before its sad print demise--since we still have Craftzine to love and adore, I'll tell you secretly that I'm even more excited that I get to be in Make instead. Check out my custom memory game, writing and photo credits to ME(!), in volume 19 of Make at your local library or bookstore.

To my new friends who are here because you saw me in Make, I swear, this really is a crafty lifestyle blog, heavy on the parenting + hijinks. Yes, the last ten posts have been about my vacation, but that's where I've been for the last ten days. But never fear, for today, in between grocery shopping and taking the girls to the Montessori open house and reading the longest encyclopedia about farming ever written for children and shouting my ref calls at two children who have been, I swear, at each other's throats all day, I did something a little fancy with template plastic, a glue stick, and a book of vintage faux-woodgrain paper samples that I bought at the Goodwill Outlet Store.

I'll talk about that tomorrow.

All the Little Fishes in the Deep Blue Sea

You might have noticed from the photos, but this has really been Willow's vacation. Syd is the best of sports, but at just three years old, a week-plus is a long time to be without the regularity of the home routine, as well as the familiarity of the home stuff and the hometown people and places. She's grown very close to her grandmother this trip, which is as terrific a goal as anyone could have, and otherwise my focus has been to keep her as even-tempered as possible and encourage her to participate in whatever adventure she feels ready to participate in.

But at five, Will has come into her own as a kid. She is enjoying her grandparents, agreeable to any kind of activity, and relishing every single new thing that presents itself to her. And we've been learning so much about her on this trip, as well. The kid loves the beach, loves rides that spin around really fast--she loves adventure. Five is a good age.

I wanted the girls to engage with the concept of the ocean as more than just the beach, so we drove down to Monterey to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, another landmark that we hit every year. It has touch tanks where you can handle everything from seaweed to starfish to sea urchins--
--and extensive habitats both of old favorites, like the jellyfish--
--and new favorites, like the seahorses: Almost all of the exhibits are at a height appropriate for a child Willow's age----and, happily, there are outdoor as well as indoor portions of the museum, and interactive components to all of the exhibits (the thoughtfulness of the interactivity depending on how recently the exhibit was put together), and a playroom for small children with dress-up materials, art activities, and stuff to climb all over.

And when you're done with the aquarium, you have to save some energy for the Dennis the Menace Park. It was created by Hank Ketcham in the 1950s, and yet it is still an innovative and engaging playground, with just a few traditional jungle gyms and plastic equipment pieces, and lots of concrete and stone structures to scramble on, with slopes that allow you to climb up them or slide down them, a real train for hanging off of in a death-defying fashion in order to get a glimpse of the bay----a looooooong suspension bridge, a hedge maze, a rock wall, and several really terrific slides for the slide-fiend in the family: Whew. And when you're done with that, even though it's very late in the day, almost sunset, take a quick trip to the Seaside Beach:
The waves are excellent, and occasionally there are harbor seals, and if you run really fast, you can maybe pretend that you, too, are five years old and an adventurer at heart.

I Stood Directly on the San Andreas Fault WHY?!

I'm sure that most of you could probably think of lots more examples, but in my opinion, this photo demonstrates my single worst parenting decision EVER:
Yep, there are the babies, in sunscreen, hats, and matching T-shirts. And the blue post? Why, that's placed at regular intervals throughout the Point Reyes National Seashore to mark the exact line of the SAN ANDREAS FAULT.

I encouraged my precious children to stand directly on top of one of the world's most active and most notorious faultlines in our modern era. And then I snapped a photo.

Other than the constant threat of imminent death should California decide to finally up and fall into the ocean as it's been threatening to do for ages now, our visit to Point Reyes was as peaceful and pastoral as you'd expect at any national park, or at least one with a pretty active seismograph right there in the visitors' center. We went on a nice long hike out in the tule elk reserve, and saw sights both vast--
--and intimate:And in the land of a billion beaches but not as many climbing trees, our little tree worshippers finally found themselves a good one: And worship they did: Point Reyes is north of the Bay, so this was actually our first trip across the Golden Gate Bridge in a couple of years--normally we head southwest on our daytrips. There's a great spot for viewing the Golden Gate on just the other side of the bridge. If you've ever seen a photo of the bridge, this is likely the shot you saw: It's wonderfully iconic, both up-close and fitting the entire bridge into one frame, with the city behind it, and incorporating an interesting diagonal line. Just to the right of the bridge in that shot is Ocean Beach, actually a really nice beach for being inside a big city, and the beach at which we spent our sunset on this day: Because a day without a beach?

That would hardly be any kind of day at all.

When You're Goin' to San Francisco...

...be sure you know ahead of time what day of the week the Exploratorium is closed.

We drove up to San Francisco ostensibly to visit the Exploratorium (as a hands-on museum it's a little schizo for my tastes, but the girls love it, and as long as you take some Tylenol pre-emptively before you enter their doors you should fare alright), but alas, the Exploratorium is closed on Mondays.

But, you know, it's San Francisco. I'm sure we can find something to do.

We chilled at Crissy Field for a while, with its ridiculous view of the Golden Gate Bridge:
And whenever we stood still long enough, we gamely complied whenever tourists wanted us to take pictures of them with their cameras. I NEVER ask someone to do this, because their photos are always crap, and I usually make Matt take the photo when a tourist asks us, because I'm a camera snob about the boring poses and boring cameras of the tourists, but I actually wish I hadn't been such a snob and had been the one taking this shot: I bet Matt's photo was crap, though.

We ate some sourdough bread, of course, although we did not ride a cable car, and we went to the California Academy of Sciences, which I was REALLY excited about, since it just re-opened late last summer after a renovation that took so long that it's never been open in the decade or so that I've been coming to Cali for Matt.

The Academy of Sciences' renovation makes it look much more like a modernized natural history museum. You can see where many of the dusty old stuffed animals were moved to, to be incorporated into brighter, more interactive exhibits, and you can tell where the big bucks were spent, on a huge aquarium that is reminiscent of the Monterey Bay Aquarium----except that there's an albino alligator--and a big rainforest habitat that exists in a huge glass globe in center of the museum.

If you don't mind dead bugs on pins, there are some very cool exhibits on butterflies, and one in particular that shows the genetic diversity of one specific insect by showing just thousands of them stuck on pins so you can see their tiny little subtle variations of color and size and shape and spots and stuff.

The children's play room, which is a necessity, I think, in any modern museum, be it science or art or natural history, was imaginative but small, and the baseball caps were crazy-overpriced (although I really wanted one), but the Galapagos and Madagascar exhibits were really excellent, and Willow and I spent a VERY long time hanging out by the pendulum and learning that the earth spins:

Not a bad lesson for such a fine day.

Tomorrow--Point Reyes National Seashore.