Stash Upholstery Leaves for Its New Home

Sending stash out of my life makes me happy. It makes me happy not so much to just get rid of stuff, but to know that this stuff, that I collected, scavenged, was given, bought for a crazy-cheap price no telling how long ago, turned out to be useful after all, and off it goes to its new home.

Hence my happy goodbye to my early-in-the-week project, 24 crayon rolls that I sold wholesale through my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop (way less money for each crayon roll, but way more money total than I'd usually earn at one time--does that make sense?) to a tourist shop up north:

The inside of each crayon roll is made from stash fabric that I was given by a women who saw me at a craft fair and thought of me when she cleaned out her own sewing space; the thread is stash, a combination of large spools bought at 50%-off at Joann's and smaller spools in prettier colors that I inherited from my partner's grandmother; the stash elastic is also a combination of some bought on sale, some inherited, and some picked up for free at a local garage sale; the crayons are stash, bought for anywhere from 20 cents to 24 cents for a 24-pack at various back-to-school sales this summer; and, finally, the upholstery fabric for the crayon roll fronts is stash, of course, leftover from the several large books of upholstery samples that I bought from a local thrift shop.

How much do I love those upholstery fabrics?

So much.

My favorite thing about my stash is the myriad of uses that present themselves solely through its existence in my life. That fabric from a craft fair friend did sit for a while on my shelf until I needed a nice, sturdy, plain fabric to back the wild patterns of the upholstery, but the crayons have made themselves a luxury in our home, accompanying gifts, being taken on car trips, being opened any time it would just be a nice treat to have a new box of crayons. And that upholstery fabric? It's been art rolls, birthday crowns, monogram wall hangings, scrapbook embellishments, bookmarks, and I don't even know what all else.

My newest idea, now that I've been scanning everything lately, was to scan some of those upholstery patterns as I was sewing up the crayon rolls:

Isn't that kind of cool? I'm thinking I could use it for digital scrapbooking, which I'm not that into (right now...) or other kinds of digital design work.

So now it seems that I have an electronic stash, as well.

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!

And I Am Martyred by the Color Pink

Certain family members of the in-law persuasion have long made veiled accusations that I will not permit my girls to wear pink. This, I declare, is flatly untrue. Yes, it was completely true when they were infants--I actively put my girl babies in clothing gendered as male, but I'll tell you all about why I did that some other time. And yes, it's true that when I shop for clothing for my girls, I generally don't buy them pink stuff--when my kids don't care what they wear, I buy them clothes that I like. Who doesn't do that?

However, I firmly believe that I have always been extremely accomodating when they do show a preference. Why else does Willow have at least 12 dinosaur shirts? And pants with dinosaurs on them? And dinosaur jammies? And a dinosaur dress? And don't even get me started about the ponies and the rainbows, because I really don't feel like discussing it right now.

And therefore, since Willow has lately been complaining that she has no "pretty" pants (and since my suggestions that, since she doesn't like the pants I've bought her previously, she should really get a job so that she can buy her own pants hasn't led to her actually getting a job, alas), yesterday at the Goodwill 50%-Off Storewide Sale I invited her to come over to the children's clothing section so that we could pick out some pretty pants together.

It's hard, obviously, for a five-year-old to find clothes at Goodwill--they're sorted by color, which does help one zero in on the "pretty" pants, but only a Momma can accurately evaluate fit and condition and quality and appropriateness. Fortunately, it turns out that I'm actually quite good at ascertaining the kind of pants that my daughter will find "pretty".


If the pants are jeans, they should be fancy jeans:Otherwise, light blue is pretty:
Light green is also pretty:Purple, too, is pretty:So, yes, Willow and Sydney both came home with scads of pretty pants, and a few other pretty necessities----and even a couple of other awesome items:The future farm girls have a system for who gets to wear THAT shirt on any given day, let me tell you.

Other than that, some work shirts and work pants were bought for the man, some record albums and vintage sheets and T-shirts were bought for crafting, and the babies got more books, of course. But did I find any awesome clothes for myself, you ask?

Well, you can fail the PhD student concentrating on medieval studies through a feminist lens out of her qualifying exams, but you can't erase the ridiculous amounts of useless information about the medieval time period and its literatures out of her head: And also? When I was a little kid, I never, never, NEVER had cool clothes. And in junior high, one of the MAJOR things that I wanted (along with stone-washed jeans and T-shirts in two different colors so that you could roll the sleeves up and see the color of the shirt underneath and leggings and the dexterity to tie an oversized T-shirt into a knot at one bottom hem, etc.) was THE FOLLOWING KIND OF HOODIE THAT ALL THE COOL KIDS WORE:

Childhood dreams really can come true, can't they?

Especially when they're simple:

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.