Spoonflower Swatched Me!

Happy Free Swatch Day, indeed! You can check out my Spoonflower pumpkinbear profile (be friends with me, in case I ever design something for real real!) for these designs that can tile and expand, but here are the scans of my designs on my swatches! Mind you, they look like scans, which on my scanner means lousy, but here they are in my hands, and that's what's important:

Here's a photograph of the rocks at Pebble Beach that's done on organic cotton:
I didn't intend this to tile in any way, which is good because it won't do so neatly, and I can't think of any way within my current Photoshop design skills to rig it, although my Matt could, I'm sure. So for photos, since I don't have a wide-format camera, the biggest I'd probably do is a fat quarter, which for a detailed photograph of what is basically a texture, like this one is, would actually probably be pretty cool.

And here's a scan of buttons, also done on organic cotton:In retrospect I should have done a swatch of something super-saturated with color, because the tone on both my designs is pretty muted, but the color transfer is accurate (I used LAB color, which Spoonflower suggests). Something like this would actually work as a larger print, but there would have to be white space between the buttons so that I could tile them, and I'm thinking that I'd definitely want to use a better background--perhaps a vintage print, or some scans of old book pages?

Anyway, I'm exhausted but done teaching for the week, and now I get to sew.

And watch Mythbusters with the girls, while kittens sleep on us:
The best thing about being a working girl is that I get a real, live weekend again!

I've Got the Whole World in Her Hands

So if you're feeling kind of stressed about the start of the school year, about lesson plans and class prep and grading and just the pure logistics of the kids' school and your school and office hours and playdates (Example A is Tuesday office hours: the kids and I start at the public library for story time, then I drive them and their packed lunches to my partner's office, where he meets me in the parking lot and we switch cars, and he feeds the kids their lunch and takes them to school while I drive over to my office hours with my work stuff, and find a parking spot and walk to my office, then leave promptly at the end of my office hours to walk back to my car and drive back to my partner's office to get the car with the car seats to drive to the kids' school to pick them up--stressful, right? And we haven't even talked about the evening hand-off twice a week so I can teach!), and you haven't crafted anything lately, which you REALLY like to do, because you've been too busy writing your syllabus, and the house is a wreck because you've been too busy to clean, AND the yard needs to be mown very badly...

...then I suggest that you take your kid's suggestion that you spend the entire morning with her drawing a pretend map of a world. You are to use your biiiiiiiig Strathmore sketch pad (leaf rubbings are still on the docket for sometime) and crayons, and there will be lots of ocean and many fanciful continents--

--and also bridges between the continents and sea plants for the people to eat and outer space and volcanoes that erupt into outer space.

The big kid and I filled one entire sheet of paper with our map, collaborating together, and we were going to do the other side of the paper together, as well (the world has to have an other side, of course), but she got impatient while I was out hanging up the laundry and just did the back side herself. It was amazing, of course.

The little kid did not want to draw, but she did want to sit near us at the table and play with ponies, so there you go:I have a few more interminable teaching tasks to do tomorrow--a lesson planned around the introduction to The Hero with a Thousand Faces that we'll be reading, an assignment sheet for my students' first analytical paper of the semester, a bonus reading to scan and upload, as well as some miscellaneous plans, in-class writing assignments, and hand-outs to revise for this semester--and then that's Week 2 done and all I have to do is teach it, and I WILL NOT plan anything for Week 3 (which is mostly peer review days and instructor consultation days, anyway) until I have made the kids some nice autumn pajamas, and bonus points for some matching jammie pants for myself.

But if that stresses me out too much, there are always kittens to watch. This one is attacking a shoe!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Leafy

Yep, we are blessed with a bounty of kitties. We don't have to do all the work to spin our own spinner when it's our turn at Hi-Ho Cherrio, what with the kittens around--
--and our fat, lazy Ballantine keeps us from having to read all the bad news in the newspaper:
Unfortunately, she also likes to lay on the comics, the drive-in movie times, and the garage sale listings, but that's the price you pay, I guess.

In other news, Willow woke barfing at 3:00 this morning. She felt better, fortunately, after just three or so hours of being VERY ill, but I still kept her in bed all day (thank GAWD for Netflix's Watch Instant--Willow had her first exposures today to Meercat Manor, Blue's Clues, Kipper, AND the Wiggles), and she's been sound asleep, I'm hoping for the night, since about 5:00 pm, poor kid.

Syd, of course, absolutely basked in being the only kid on call today. The constantly-running television soon paled in comparison to a set of parents able to completely focus on her (although probably asking her if her tummy hurt or if she felt like throwing up a little too often to be quite normal). She hung out at the drop-off laundromat with Matt (this is the first time we've tried it, and I'm a little squeamish about it now after Matt described in detail the burn-out employee who will likely be the one to wash all of my panties), and helped him clean the kitchen, and there was a lot of wrestling worked in there somewhere, and this afternoon she and I went to the park all by ourselves, and I pushed her in the swing for as long as she wanted.

We brought Sydney's bucket to collect leaves, because I've been wanting to do leaf rubbings with the girls for a while now. Not necessarily to learn all the parts of the leaves or anything just yet, but mostly to admire the shape and the form and to see the detail, all that good stuff.

Unfortunately, it's been too long since I've brought out our huuuuuuge Strathmore sketch pad--it's too big for the girls to get out independently, and I guess I just don't think about it very often--and Sydney was way more interested in just drawing than in doing any particular project. Don't you find that kids have to spend a lot of time, I mean a LOT of time, exploring any specific material or medium before they're ready to manipulate it in any kind of actual "project"? My kids are that way, at least.

So Syd and I spent a lot of time drawing with crayons on our huge sketch pad, and then, just because I'd been looking forward to it for a few days, I made some leaf rubbings myself:
I forgot how freakin' fun they are, but they are FUN! And very satisfying, especially to someone who can't really draw a lick. My goal now is to offer the girls the sketch pad a LOT in the next couple of weeks so that we can try leaf rubbings again real soon. I was thinking, though--wouldn't something like this make a cool Spoonflower print?

Black and Pastel

There were wildflower walks to go on:
(along with a wildflower encyclopedia, of course, so that I can knowledgeably mis-identify each flower); some wandering jew to propagate:(it's pricey and a bit unnecessary, but I occasionally buy these propagation gel container kits because it just makes it that much easier to do this project with two wriggling and impatient girls), and, of course, five kittens to adore:
but in the past couple of days the girls and I have also had time to develop a newfound love for pastel crayons. I've offered pastels to the girls a couple of times before, when they were younger, but I think that they were too young to appreciate the sometimes subtle difference between the pastel crayons and regular crayons, and the pastels were also a bit delicate for my boisterous artists.

However, we aquired another used set from Grandma Bangle (as opposed to our first used set, which was an old one of Matt's), and this time the girls were very stoked, especially at the color saturation, I think.

The girls also really like to use their pastels with black cardstock:

Not construction paper, and not textured cardstock, but plain flat cardstock or Strathmore black drawing paper with pastels is a pretty sweet combination.

P.S. I did some research, and what we have is apparently soft pastels, not hard pastels. I'm totally putting this set of 60 pastels on my wish list for after our used set of 10 has finished being worn down to itty little nubs.

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.