Leafy: A Leaf Rubbing Tutorial

Friday really was a leafy sort of day. I needed to sign my teaching contract, so it was a walk to campus to visit the English Department (where the secretaries ALWAYS have ample candy to offer to little girls) and the IU greenhouse:
Hallelujah, nobody touched the spiky plants this time:
The girls and I had a lovely picnic lunch on campus, which is quite wooded and broken up here and there by small, winding creeks (although, as a first-semester graduate student living alone on campus, hoofing it to every class, I did rather wish that they'd just demolished all the lovely foresty bits and stuck the buildings all together in one easily-walkable city block). The girls passed the time by throwing large chunks of limestone and shale into said creeks, while I read my Entertainment Weekly in the company of a small discarded cicada exoskeleton:But after the girls got out of school--and thus after I'd had for myself a nice break to eat my own lunch, shower, straighten the living room, do a little laundry, and plod away happily on the crayon roll wholesale order from my pumpkinbear etsy shop while watching some Netflix--we had renewed energy for new projects.

And thus we found ourselves back in nature, collecting leaves from all the neighborhood trees, and taking them home for leaf rubbings (finally!).

You will need:

• lots of leaves (flat ones, of course, and nice and supple)
• several sheets of thin paper (typing/copy paper works fine, and Strathmore sketch pads work REALLY well)
• crayons with a wide drawing surface (we broke open a brand-new Crayola 24-pack for this project (20 cents at the Wal-mart back-to-school sale!!!, but there are lots of other kinds of crayons that would work as well, or even better, frankly, for little hands)
• for a very small kid, Scotch tape or its equivalent can be a big help

1. Peel the wrappers off of your crayons--for some kids, this is the best part:2. You need a really flat drawing surface that has no discernable texture of its own--a concrete sidewalk or wooden picnic table won't really work, for instance, but a deck table or inside table or inside floor will work just fine:

3. Lay out your leaf nice and flat (to hold it really steady, you can double up a piece of Scotch tape, sticky side out, and stick it to the surface underneath it--this is especially helpful for small kiddos, who are the most fussy about wanting a nice result yet have the least dexterity to make it happen), and put a clean sheet of thin paper on top of it.

4. Holding the paper down very flat and keeping your leaf perfectly still, rub over and all around it with the flat side of your crayon:Or, if you're littler, just draw yourself a picture. It's equally fun:5. You'll be left with the impression of your leaf on the paper, showing all the great veins and other textures of the leaf, and looking really great and pretty:6. WARNING: Leaf rubbing may make you very, very sleepy. Go lie down with a kitten:In other news, we almost took a hot air balloon ride this morning, but it was too windy. Such is life, alas...

WIP Wednesday

Winter-themed pajama pants for Willow and Sydney

I had to move back to doing school stuff, and then craft fair stuff, and then etsy stuff, before I could sew these pants up or modify, since the patterns in Weekend Sewing seem to run small for adults and large for kids, the pajama pants pattern for myself and cut out some mitchy-matchies for me and the girls, but I'm glad that I was stalled, because that crotch seam, which the pattern leaves unfinished, did, as I had suspected it might, split in both Matt's and Willow's pajama pants. And so now I have those to repair, as well, as fellow WIPs. I can't decide if I should just reinforce the crotch seams on the pajama pants yet to be sewn, as I will with my repairs, or if I should switch to a stronger method--a french seam, perhaps, or is that a little much for some pajama pant crotches?

Twenty-Four Upholstery Sample Crayon Rolls for Wholesale

It makes such a difference to have a block of time to myself during the day, every day, knowing that the kids are happy and engaged at school. It's okay, too, knowing that next school year that block of time will likely go away, again, unless a windfall of private school tuition money somehow makes its way into the Montessori account books under our name. I'm just savoring my time to work alone during the day this year, sometimes running errands without two little helpers, sometimes grading papers and writing lesson plans, and sometimes, as I am this week, making up a large order of crayon rolls from my pumpkinbear etsy shop while watching Glee on Hulu and Swingtown on Netflix--insert happy sigh here.

Many Craft Books To Read and Be Inspired By

I'm especially looking forward to making a little time for and --both of these are looking to be crucial for my Christmas present crafting. I'm Pumpkinbear on Goodreads as well, so you should totally be my Goodreads friend, BTW!

Playing with Spoonflower

I don't know if I would ever get up the nerve to actually order something from Spoonflower--my free Spoonflower swatches were pretty great, but Spoonflower itself is mighty pricey--but I'm still interested in playing with it, and my dream is that someday Spoonflower will look something like Cafepress, in which you could purchase yardage of ANYBODY'S pattern, and they'd receive a nice commission for it. I'm also looking forward to getting the girls to draw some things to use as Spoonflower patterns.

Oh, and I also want to make a vintage buttons and upholstery sample set of numbers, introduce painting with acrylics on canvas to the girls, set up interviews with awesome IU alumni to write up for the IU Alumni Magazine (Jamie Hyneman and Greg Der Anian, call me!), bind some terrycloth with quilting cotton to finish the towel sets I started making for Matt and the girls a LONG time ago, sew two more mattress pad covers, revise my book proposal to send to a new set of agents, make a bunch of photo frames out of cardboard and hang up all my photos in the living room, put a new floor in the kitchen...

Freebies from the Public Library, or, Your Romance Needs Fulfilled

If you can get up at 7 am and get your coffee drunk so that you're ready to face the world, and if you can bully the girls into getting dressed in a reasonable amount of time (not always a sure thing, as evidenced by this morning, when Willow's failure to dress herself in an hour sent her into hysterics when I told her that we were going to miss Storytime at the library), and if you can feed them a breakfast that doesn't contain ANYTHING messy that would mean they'd have to change clothes again before going out, and if they can find their shoes, and if you can find the car keys, then you could go to the free day at the public library's book sale and you, too, could bring home all of this:
The bag on the left is all romance novels--50 of them from which my 46 students can choose later this semester, for their final paper that will be a comparison of a gender ideology within their romance novel to a subversion of that ideology in another cultural artifact:
The bag on the right is my stuff--outdated craft books that sometimes have some really interesting projects or methods, cookbooks, travel guides to use in scrapbooking vacations we've been on, and educational materials that might be good to use with the girls:And the girls' shopping cart--that's all their stuff, carefully filled to the maximum allowed capacity. At the book sale there was this other kid, maybe four years old? Now, I don't necessarily offer my own children appropriate supervision, but my kids fortunately don't go get all up in strangers' business when we're out and about, either. So as I'm trying to pick out 50 romance novels, squatting in the middle of an aisle and the girls are "helping" me and I'm trying to read back covers so I can pick out ones that will be useful for my students, this kid comes up and keeps trying to throw books into my paper bag and I'm all, "No, thank you," and he's all trying to move my arm so he can get the book into the bag and I'm all "NO, thank you!" but trying to be nice because he's not my own kid, so I can't yell at him, and where the heck is his parent?

So then he walks over to the girls and starts fighting with them over domination of the cart, and I'm all "It's their special shopping cart, sweetie, but you can have a turn pushing it if you want," and then he shoves Sydney, who shrieks, and starts grabbing their books out of their cart, and I'm all, "NO, sweetie, those are their books!", and then I'm all done, so I tell the girls we are leaving posthaste and the kid STANDS on the girls' cart so they can't push it and I'm carrying two full bags of books and trying to tell this random kid to get OFF and he's ignoring me and I'm wondering if I can maybe just kick him, just a little, but then his parent finally sees him and threatens to whup his ass so we're free to leave, the girls with their ample treasures intact:
If that kid tries it again at the free day of the Red Cross book sale I WILL kick him, because the Red Cross free day is hard-core.

There's Only One Way to Skin a Tomato: a Tutorial

At least I think that there's only one way. Maybe only one good way, and a lot of lousy ways (tiny little paring knife? Fingernails? Sandpaper?)

Note to my friend Betsy, who is made nauseated at the sight/smell/taste of raw tomatoes in anything but their pristine, whole, unviolated form--don't read this post.

You will need:

• loads of tomatoes (I skinned a good twenty pounds of tomatoes from the farmer's market yesterday)
• a big pot of boiling water
• a nice big colander that fits well within the big pot (you can work around this, but a nesting colander is by far the easiest way)
• a big bowl of cold water (ice water is the best, but I can't stand to waste the ice, so I just use cold water)
• paring knife and cutting board
• second bowl for tomato cores and skins for the compost pile

1. Rinse your tomatoes off, then cut out the little woody core at the top and any funky/mushy/brown spots.

If you do this, you don't need to score the skins, as well, because the hot water will slip in through the cut you've already made.

2. Fill your big pot about halfway with water and set it to boil, and fill your nesting colander about three-fourths full of the cored tomatoes. The boiling water will come up over the top of the tomatoes once the colander is fit down into the pot. 3. Fit your nesting colander full of cored tomatoes down into the pot of boiling water, making sure that the water rises to cover the tops of the tomatoes, and set your oven timer for one minute.If you don't have a colander that will fit into your pot, just dump the tomatoes right into the boiling water, and fish them back out with a slotted spoon. You risk stewing some of them a little this way, however, since some of the tomatoes will stay in that boiling water for longer than others. Another method is just to dump the whole pot, boiling water and tomatoes all, into a colander resting in the sink after a minute, but that's a waste of water and energy if you need to scald more than one batch of tomatoes.

4. The scalded tomatoes should look like their skins are about to fall off (don't look, Betsy!)----and you should be able to slip the skins right off with your fingers. If the skin of a tomato doesn't come off easily, pop it back into the cold water to soak for a couple more minutes while you do the other tomatoes.

And when you're done, you're left with these fine beauties:
Now it's time to make tomato sauce.

Read About Me on the Galactic Interweb

Tonight the news is all about:
I can be difficult to interview, because I never stop talking, and because what I do talk about can be kind of odd and obscure and pedantic (Wanna talk etymologies, anybody? Or medievalisms? How about hair bands?), but every now and then some brave soul becomes interested in parsing the train wreck that is my life and, behold, I am interviewed. On that note, check out the article Eco Craftivism is Serious Business over at Naturally Savvy, in which I am featured and I say lots of things, some of them even comprehensible.

In other news, although both the print and digital editions of Make cost money, one of the editors of Make kindly gave me a free link to my memory game article in Make 19, and told me I was allowed to share the link AND post it here on my blog! Awesome, right? So now you can find my article at the bookstore OR the library OR online! Pass it on, because everybody needs to know to make random stuff out of other random stuff.

How to Have a Happy Harvest

It requires at least one (but preferably five) sleepy kittens--
--some very busy little girls-- --and a finished total of 16 pints of diced tomatoes with basil:On the whole, now that my very first experience in canning is over, I'd say that the process is way easier than I'd thought it would be--if I can do it the first time with no major mishaps, then it's DEFINITELY easier than I thought it would be--but it did require a major fight with my spouse (who agreed before we started that he would not try to tell me how to do anything while we were canning, on account of I have read and watched probably a dozen tutorials on canning and he has read/watched none, and who did not last half an hour before breaking that promise and being asked to go spend some time reading comics at the bookstore), an unplanned trip to Wal-mart on a weekend night to grab more wide-mouth mason jars, and waaaaaaaay more hours than I thought it would. I mean way more, like midnight more.

I've been researching canning and getting advice from real-live people who know how to preserve their own food (thanks, Cake!) for months, now, but this tutorial on canning diced tomatoes and this canning tutorial video were especially super-helpful, and both short enough to look over several times on the day itself. I also was able to follow the instructions that came with my brand-new pressure canner for how to can tomatoes, and thus I was pretty much all set.

I had sort of hoped that the girls would be uninterested in the canning, and would prefer to entertain themselves independently all day while I worked--this was naive. And thus I am now also the expert on how to let a three-year-old and a five-year-old "help" one preserve food. The trick? Have them hand you stuff. They handed me tomatoes from the cold-water bath so that I could peel them, and then they put each skinned tomato into a bowl (and then, sometimes, from that bowl into another bowl...). Or give them scissors and a bowl and let them go mangle your basil plants. And then they can wash the basil, and the tomatoes. And then they can use the scissors to cut the basil. They can stir the pot in which the diced tomatoes with basil needs to boil for five minutes. They can hold the ruler and measure the half-inch headspace in each mason jar as you pour in the hot tomatoes. They can wipe up the ridiculous amount of tomato juice that you spilled. They can carry all the tomato peels out to the compost bin, and help you fill the dishwasher. See? Helpful! And it probably only adds an extra hour or two to the total time you'll spend canning!

So that's one winter's worth of vegetarian chili taken care of:

Now, anybody have a good recipe for a nice, versatile tomato sauce? Cause I bet the farmer's market will have canning tomatoes again this Saturday...

Because in the South, You Do Your Christmas Shopping Early

I received a very nice email from my mother yesterday, reminding me that after two solid months of reminders, I still have not told her what Willow and Matt want for Christmas (my presents and Sydney's presents she's already purchased, the desires of daughters and toddlers likely more transparent than those of ever-changing five-year-olds and sons-in-law).

Do all mothers do this, or just Southern ones? To me, having to declare my Christmas wishes in late summer has its firm place on the seasonal calendar of my childhood with the other mainstays of spring cleaning, a week in Ft. Walton Beach, Florida, in the summer, purchasing my Halloween costume from Wal-mart, and eating black-eyed peas on New Year's Day. I'm not the early bird that my mother is, or my Mama was (I don't remember anything about how my Nana shopped, although Mama surely acquired the habit honestly), but since I make most of the presents that I give to friends and family, right now there's a batch of spearmint and rosemary cold-process soap curing in the basement that, if it turns out well, will be Christmas presents for some, and this weekend's tomato sauce that I make and can will, if it turns out well, be Christmas presents for some others, so I'm no day-before-Christmas do-er, either.


So here, mother, and everyone else in the world, are some things that my husband and my daughter would like for Christmas:

The girls and I have been playing around with our small second-hand set of soft pastels enough to know that my Matt, a wonderful artist and a man who never buys himself ANYTHING nice, would probably really like himself an excellent set of soft pastels of his own:
Willow, too, of course, loves her art, and is as creative and natural an artist as any child could be. I consider it one of the most important responsibilities of my parenting to provide her with as wide a variety of enriching experience as possible, and to give her as many artistic tools and media as I can. How awesome would it be to have a few sets of these blank nesting dolls realistically painted by my Matt, a few sets "abstractly" painted by myself, and a few sets for the girls to paint, not to mention a few sets to keep naked?

Matt is currently in the habit of toting his to-do items back and forth to work in the dumpster-dived cut glass bowl in which I put those items--mail addressed to him, forms and bills, packages to mail, etc. I really would like the nice bowl to actually stay on the shelf on which it lives, dear. Wouldn't you prefer to tote your stuff in something a little more butch--a robot messenger bag, perhaps?

Willow's great love of dinosaurs is legendary by now, but one simply can't wear a dinosaur T-shirt every single day of one's life (this is my claim, not the child's). On the days on which one chooses to instead wear a Star Wars shirt, or a housefly shirt, or a camouflage or tie-dyed shirt, how nice to also be able to still sport a subtle, sophisticated shout-out to the awesomeness that is the dinosaur:

Matt's a good sport when people tease him about his beard, because he's such a nice guy, but frankly, his whiskers are just plain hot:

Will's dream is to have a playground installed in the basement, and I have to say that it doesn't sound unreasonable to me. Matt and I dream about installing in the girls' basement playroom a reading loft, a slide, and something great to climb on: As a digital designer, Matt does most of his work with a keyboard and a mouse, but he's also an excellent freehand artist, and undergoes elaborate permutations twice a week to transform our comic strip, which he draws by hand, into a digital document to send to the newspaper. He has wanted a really good computer stylus and tablet for several years now:
I don't know what it is so appealing about lots of tiny little things. I'd say that it's just a kid obsession, but well...you've seen for yourself my relationship with buttons. As math manipulatives at home or just for playing with--dinosaurs! Or ocean creatures! Or vehicles! Or fruit!
Star Wars plus delicious treats, two things of which Matt highly approves:

Both of the girls, but Will especially, have been really into acrylics lately. I've been making them use the cheap-o craft acrylics that are the best that I can afford, but for works like painting onto canvas or tole painting, how nice to have a set of really super acrylics:

The reason that I can always tell you in a heartbeat what I or anybody else wants is through my etsy Favorites or my wists. I like to keep track of crafty stuff I find online that appeals to me somewhat as a wish list, but also quite largely as inspiration--it's like my own little digital sketchbook, or scrapbook, of stuff to modify or emulate or think about or inspire. My etsy pumpkinbear favorites have all my favorite stuff from other etsy sellers, and my pumpkinbear wists have all my favorites of everything else.

What's the link to your etsy favorites and your wists?