The LOLCats Live at Our House

We clearly all needed more chaos in our lives, so enter the litter of foster-kittens. Five kittens, to be exact, although an exact count at any one time is extremely unlikely. Two look like this:
Two look like this:
And only one looks like this:She's also the bruiser of the bunch, outweighing the others at a whopping one pound. We'll probably have these babies for a month, until they're old enough and weigh enough to be able to be adopted, and then we'll bring them back.

Lots of people are actually pretty horrified when I tell them about our regular influx of foster-kittens. They're all, "Oh, won't the girls be broken-hearted when the kittens go back?" No, it's totally a reasonable question, and I don't know, perhaps my kids have hearts of ice or they're just exceptionally oblivious, but Matt and I have never even so much as implied, through word or association, that there would even be the slightest of possibilities that we could actually keep these kittens. They are our visitors and our guests, and guests ALWAYS go home eventually. So I don't know, maybe a more clued-in kid would figure out what's really going on, but it works for my kids.

Here's my list of reasons for why everyone with kids should absolutely foster:

1. Kittens are cute, fun, and entertaining. They make kids happy.
2. Caring for kittens and handling them appropriately are useful skills to learn--they teach kids that having a creature under your care requires a lot of work and a lot of self-restraint.
3. The kittens will need to go back in two weeks to a month, which is about as long as it takes for the novelty to wear off, anyway.
4. Kittens need to be put in foster families at first, because they're very susceptible to stress, illness, and the development of bad habits at the Humane Society.
5. Fostering kittens makes them more adoptable, because they will be litter-trained and very well socialized, especially towards children, and are far less likely to develop bad habits.
6. When it's time to return the kittens, saying goodbye to creatures that the children loves teaches them that we can't always keep what we love, that love carries on even after loss, and that pleasant memories comfort us and eventually become what is important.
7. Expending love and care on creatures that the children know they will eventually give to someone else teaches them the skill of service, that we should also work for the benefit of others, even if we won't ever meet them.

And, finally, 8. Sleeping with a kitten is an experience everyone should have:

At least a few million times before you're six years old, especially.

I Bought the Farm

My little girl was so busy writing her name (upside down AND backwards, oddly enough) all across the back deck----that she did not notice me busily photographing something just behind her that she would have otherwise been VERY interested in me photographing: I bought this set of farm embroideries from Andrea Ceramics, and I am THRILLED with them. There are 12 embroideries in the set, including a rooster: A horse:

A cow in a barn:

There's also a goat, a pig, a scarecrow, a sheep--all the best farm animals, Willow would tell you. Ideally, I'd like to use my secret kid-at-Montessori time to incorporate these into a farm-themed quilt for Willow for Christmas, perhaps.

In other words, it will join the dinosaur T-shirt quilt and the denim Valentine quilt, also DEFINITELY to be done this fall and winter (ahem).

A Few Colored Pencil Rolls Before the Semester Starts

Each August, before I return to two brand-new classes of freshman composition students, I have to spend a good amount of time getting my head back into the game, as it were. It's always a very difficult transition for me--all summer, I've been a full-time stay-at-home momma of two bright and happy girls, with ample time to play and learn with them and to play and learn on my own, and to watch late-night movies and eat take-out with my Matt. Starting next week, and for the most part of the next eight months, I'll still be a full-time stay-at-home momma by day, but for two full evenings a week I'll also be teaching. On those days I'll have a quick change-of-kids with Matt as soon as he gets home from work, and I won't be home until late. I'll answer student emails every day, and spend most of the girlies' Montessori time grading papers and planning lessons. Office hours are another tightrope-walk of organization. So is taking a shower, frankly. And I won't even get into how mentally and emotionally exhausting teaching is--if you're a teacher, then you know. If you're not a teacher, then I imagine it's like the mental aspect of playing sports--very focused, very in-the-moment, lot of thinking on the fly, lot of power dynamics, etc. Anyway, exhausting.

Ask me later in the semester, and I'll tell you that I love teaching. I'll tell how how grateful I am to the director of the composition department here at IU, who has, for the past three years, consistently scheduled me for evening classes so that I CAN be a stay-at-home momma by day. I love my identity as teacher, my positive contribution to the world and all that, and seriously, teaching these young adults how to think and write clearly and cogently is a HUGE positive contribution to the world at large.

Anyway, I'll tell you all that AFTER I've gotten my head back into the game.

Until next week, though, it's still summer. There's plenty of time to start a fire without a permit in the backyard, and roast things both savory--
--and sweet----and to eat those things up, yum:And there's plenty of time (at least there WAS plenty of time--starting today, I am not permitting myself to sew a single thing until my syllabus and first week's lesson plans are finished) to nail down a new pattern for colored pencil rolls made from upholstery fabric:I worked these out mostly like my upholstery crayon rolls, although colored pencils are so tall that the roll needs a tie enclosure, not elastic, and a narrower top pocket. In my next batch, too, I think I might add 1/8 of an inch to the pencil pocket widths, although the width works out well for these Crayola colored pencils: And upholstery fabric? Just generally rich and delicious:

I've got one upholstery colored pencil roll up on my pumpkinbear etsy shop right now, but I mean it--no more sewing until this syllabus is written.

And the babies desperately need matching pajama pants and kimono-style tops that are awesomely identical to the infant kimono tops in so it's, like, an emergency.

Retro Read-Aloud

By now, y'all probably know what I tend to like: I like handicraft/DIY, I like a dirt-cheap good deal, I like thrifting/garage sales/dumpster-diving, and I loooooooove learnin' with my babies. I make my own panties (sometimes). When something goes on Manager's Special at Kroger, I buy ALL of it and throw it in the chest freezer. I will wake up earlier on a Saturday than I will on a weekday, just to sneak out of the house and hit a couple of 8 am garage sales (today I bought two skeins of yarn for the littles, and although I REALLY wanted the spinning wheel, which was 250 dollars, I did not buy it). I consider it the height of a good time to make Spanish-language flash cards for the girls, or to read to them from the encyclopedia.

I'm a dork, yes, but a happy one.

When two, or even three, of my passions come together into a sort of holy combination, I achieve super-dorkdom, a joy and enthusiasm that my daughters will, one day, put into the memoirs that they will write about their strange childhoods and their crazy Momma. Thus imagine my joy, imagine my enthusiasm, when I learned that the children's department at our public library was selling off its entire collection of VHS and cassette tapes.

VHS tapes? I don't have a VCR. But cassette tapes? I have that player.

We're talking children's music. We're talking audiobooks, both fiction and non-fiction. And because it's the children's department, most of all we're talking picture books and read-aloud cassettes. They're used, so I'm thrifting. They're hella educational. And at 25 cents per item yesterday and 10 cents per item today, they are way dirt-cheap.

It's super-dork heaven.

On Friday, I bought 44 picture books with read-aloud cassettes, 18 audiobooks, and 4 music cassettes. For 35 dollars. Today I went back (of course), and I didn't count my haul, but since Matt was with us and so I could concentrate on shopping (not mediating fights and picking up knocked-down merchandise and shouting across the room for little people to stop running, etc.), I was able to look more at the fiddly fine-printed music cassettes, and I spent 11 dollars.

And look what I got!I'm putting aside all the audiobooks of more than two tapes to bring out for long car trips, stuff like The Mouse and the Motorcycle(and all its sequels), The Secret Garden, The Boxcar Children, Alice in Wonderland, and other awesome stuff. I also might bring these out when the girls are a little older to listen to independently here at home.

But in their collection that they can choose from independently right now are other audiobooks of two hours or less, stuff like Little Bear and Frances and Winnie-the-Pooh collections, and Henry and Mudge, and what seems like eight thousand Hank the Cowdog titles. I hesitated for a second when Willow picked all those out, because she's never read them and I sure don't like Westerns, but then I thought, "Heck, they're 20 cents each," and let her get all of them, and yes, she has proven me wrong by spending two hours this afternoon sitting at the living room table and listening to an entire hard-boiled Hank the Cowdog mystery book, figuring out how to change the sides of the tape and then change to the next tape without my instruction.

I am the happiest, however, or rather I should say THRILLED, about the picture books with accompanying read-aloud cassettes:I'm not sure, but over the two days I think I bought at least sixty of these. And imagine, it was the children's department's ENTIRE collection, so other than the few that the girls chose before they got restless and left me to it, I had my own entire pick of some really premiere titles. And all the cassettes work (a couple that we've tried haven't been of perfect quality, but most have), and all of the picture books are, though well-used, lovingly repaired. Among the titles that I bought are several Dr. Seuss, Where the Wild Things Are, Runaway Bunny, Babar, The Little Red Hen, several fairy tales, and a few books of poems. Considering that nearly all of these, except for a couple that the girls snuck through, are titles that we didn't already have in our print library, it was quite a haul.

The best part, though, has been the girls' reaction to our new wealth of listening opportunities. Sure, I know a lot of it is the novelty of learning how to work my cassette player (now theirs) and choosing from nothing but a billion new books and tapes, but I think this collection really will become an important part of their lifestyle. We encourage reading books and listening to stories and enjoying music, and we sure as hell encourage doing all of this independently, and every now and then for the past two days, when I've walked through the living room and had the chance to witness this:It does make me feel very enthusiastic and joyful, indeed.

I Made Myself Some Soap

It probably wasn't that hard to guess what handicraft I was trying for the first time in my previous post. Seriously, how many craft projects involve a pot on the stove?

I bought my very first cold-process soap-making kit at a soap-making class at Barefoot Herbs + Barefoot Kids, run by The Kitchen Girls. This was way back in the winter, but with lye and all, I wanted to wait until I had a good bit of time without the girls with me to make it.

Y'all, it took me nine months to achieve that block of time.

Yeah, it's been a while since my one workshop, but my kit has instructions in it, plus all the ingredients I needed except for the distilled water (remember that part--that's important), plus I did quite a bit of reading about soap-making last winter, so all in all, IF the soap turns out in six weeks, I did pretty well for a first-timer.

I got everything to the right temperature eventually:
And I wore my goggles like a good girl:
Because, of course, I've seen Fight Club many times (I used to teach it in my freshmen comp classes), I was TERRIFIED of the lye, and it didn't help when, as I stirred it with my rubber spatula to cool it down, it turned slushy and started to hiss and fizzle, and then turned brittle-hard and began to make really loud cracking noises.

Noises that definitely didn't happen during my soap-making workshop.

So obviously, I throw off my gloves and run to the internet, searching Google for "soap lye troubleshoot*". I think my problem was thusly (but those of you who ACTUALLY know how to make soap, please correct me if I'm wrong): the oils and lye used in soapmaking are measured by weight, which is why a kitchen scale was on my list of supplies. The water, however, is measured by volume? So when I saw that my recipe called for 16 ounces of water, I measured 16 ounces in my kitchen scale, and that was about half a cup. But 16 ounces of water by volume is more like 2 cups.

And so I added in another cup-and-a-half of water and stirred and stirred, and eventually the lye uncracked and dissolved and I had to reheat the oil to get it back to the right temperature, and stir and stir to get the lye down to the right temperature, but eventually they were happy together.

My other worry is that, after I finished my soapmaking, I was reading about it some more (never do this--it's like looking in your book to see all the questions you missed after finishing a test), and one author was talking about this think called false trace, in which your immersion blender beats so much air into your mixture that it lowers the temperature of your mixture enough that the oils begin to solidify again, and you think you get a trace even when saponification hasn't finished, and so you pour prematurely. You're supposed to turn off the immersion blender frequently and hand-stir for a few seconds, which I did not do, and thus the freaking out.

But after a day to harden, don't my soaps look okay? I've got some cut into blocks: Some poured into Lego molds with a little Lego inside as a treat (see the poorly hidden Lego?):

And some poured into heart-shaped molds with a vintage heart bead inside each, although you can't see it this time:

That's about how they're supposed to look, right?

Now...anyone know a good place to buy soapmaking supplies? My kit was a one-time-only deal, but now I'm hooked, and greatly desire a lifetime of hand-crafted hippie-dippy essential oil-and-herb soaps.

And At Least a Million Buttons

I sort of have a thing for the newspaper Classifieds. Maybe it's because it comes last, and so by the time I get there I've already slogged my way through world news and the political cartoon and the crackpot letters to the editor and all the awful things that happened the previous day to children or nice animals that the paper always seems to need to run. By the time I get to the Classifieds, too, I've been awake for at least twenty minutes, and I'm likely just about finishing my nice big mug of coffee that Matt always hands me on his way out the door (the man does not even drink coffee himself, but he makes a big cup for me every morning. He loves me, and he wants a sane caregiver for his children while he's away).

Really, though? It's because the Classifieds has weird stuff to buy. And do I want to buy it?

Oh, boy, I do. Currently, I'm coveting the $25 log cabin dollhouse kit, and the 30+ pounds of golf balls for $20 (no, I don't play golf). I've also seen a lathe advertised, and a workbench that I'm sure would have been just perfect in the basement workshop, and a bunny costume for a five-year-old, and enough prom and bridesmaid's dresses to have me sewing satin fancy-dress outfits for the girls until their own proms.

So every morning, coffee in hand, when I get to the Classifieds I call out to one girl or another, "Oooh, quick, run get Momma a marker!" And I know in my head that I'm acting, perhaps, the kind of crazy that the girls will write about so evocatively in their memoirs about how bizarre their childhoods were and how nuts their mom is, but I can't help myself, and the girls get just as stoked as I am as I try to describe to them, my TV commercial-deprived babies, exactly what a PowerWheel is and does and why they totally want one. And then I circle all the awesome ads. And then I call Matt at work and spend a couple of minutes attempting to make him, too, understand why we need a model train set-up, or fifty pounds of pea gravel, and I generally can get him to copy down a phone number or two, admitting that yes, he guesses we could perhaps use a trampoline, or 100+ sci-fi and fantasy mags from the 1980s, but he never, NEVER actually calls and purchases any of the awesome stuff that I totally wish he would.

Until yesterday, when Matt came home with a gallon of vintage buttons under his arm for me.

Here's what a gallon of vintage buttons looks like, if you're curious:
There are a lot of buttons that make up a gallon. And they're really cool ones, too. You know how sometimes you get someone's old button collection or see someone selling their old buttons at a garage sale, and all the buttons are brown or white and boring and just really lame? These aren't those buttons:

These buttons are all AWESOME! I do already own quite a number of vintage buttons from ebay, so many that I'm toying with the idea of separating out some that are awesome but that I probably won't use--the shank buttons, for instance--and re-selling them again, but I actually do incorporate a lot of buttons into my work. I'm still hugely fond of my button and upholstery remnant monograms, for instance, and I'm thinking of doing a set of numbers for my pumpkinbear etsy shop, as well, or perhaps an entire name in script (which I have seen done somewhere--Susan Beal, perhaps?).

And when I'm not using my buttons, I set them up on my shelf in the study and look at them with love when I'm thinking about something. Something like how awesome my husband is, for instance, for surprising me with a gallon of buttons.

Talk about knowing someone well enough to know what they'd like for a present.

In other news, I was THRILLED today to practice, for the very first time, a brand-new handicraft. No cheating if you're a Facebook friend or a regular blog friend and saw me going on about it earlier, but if you're not a Facebook friend (although you should be), can you guess?

I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.

A Million Kinds of Crayon Rolls

I am taking a break tomorrow to use my precious and rare (Can I still call it rare? Still novel, certainly) child-free time to learn how to make cold-process soap without having to worry about burning anyone but myself and possibly the cat with lye, but otherwise, I am on a serious crayon roll kick.

I have always been of the mindset that if you want to learn to make something very well, then you have to make a lot of it--this is obvious, of course, but it's also one of the propelling forces behind my pumpkinbear etsy shop. Otherwise, what to do with two children and twelve crayon rolls? And then, a month later, when the idea materializes for a slightly different method that might solve a small problem on said crayon rolls, what to with another twelve? I can't say that my pumpkinbear etsy shop has been especially lucrative, but it has given me a way to divulge myself of excess products while honing my craft and earning more supplies money.

And that is why I am revisiting the rainbow patchwork art roll. The ones that I made were lovely, and they were all sold or gifted away, but still, I had quibbles--the bottom pockets, the method of construction borrowed from , was too thick, really just overengineered, I think, and after several trials I decided I wasn't in love with the method of quilting/creating the pockets that the book recommends. I also wanted a slightly roomier crayon pocket, to ease the work of less-nimble little fingers, and I really wanted a top pocket to get rid of any small chance of the crayons falling out when turned upside down. Oh, and the cutting and piecing of the rainbow patchwork took freaking FOREVER.

A lot of improvements to make to a perfectly good crayon roll.

To quicken the cutting and piecing, I tried strip piecing this time--worked brilliantly. I also modeled the construction of these rainbow patchwork crayon rolls more closely on the upholstery remnant crayon rolls that I also enjoy making. Because I wanted to make the crayon roll fit the upholstery sample that I already had when making those, I got into the habit of sewing a generous crayon pocket, and because the upholstery fabric is too thick and stiff to fold over and sew, I learned to face it with a nice, unbleached linen, and to make the pockets from that fabric, and I liked the look of it.

I loosely applied those ideas to these rolls, and I like the look of them, too: Although in my upholstery remnant crayon rolls the facing and top and bottom pockets are made from the same length of fabric folded at top and bottom, these top and bottom pockets are two separate strips cut from the fabric that I strip pieced--I'd worried that it would be too tricky to get them lined up accurately with that gap in the middle, but it seems I'm not quite the novice sewer that I used to be.

My sewing machine was kicking up a fuss, however, and being just generally unhappy and unwilling to encase the pocket seams with a satin stitch as I usually do, so I just sewed a straight stitch and then pinked the raw edge: I really didn't like the look of it at first, but now I'm quite smitten, and I'm not at all worried about it raveling--it's really unlikely.

I made a few denim rainbow crayon rolls, but I'm happy, too, with the corduroy pants that I cut up to make some corduroy rainbow crayon rolls, especially this yummy corduroy:Next time, however, I'm thinking of putting the rainbow fabric on the outside of the roll, and the bottomweight fabric on the inside. And then I can fold over the top and bottom pockets in the bottomweight fabric, because it won't matter if their back sides show behind the pockets, and I could stitch in the ditch all the way up each rainbow piece, sewing the bottom pockets at the same time, and then fold over the top pocket and stitch it down...

See? I'm sensing the sewing of another twelve or so rolls after the soap is set, and I haven't even started constructing the marker rolls or colored pencil rolls that I have in mind, either.