Super Kids

One of my biggest pet peeves is parents who throw a birthday party for their child and say, "No presents, please."

Dude, it's not your grandpa's sixtieth birthday party--let your four-year-old get the prezzies!

Perhaps I'll feel differently when my kids are older and there's a birthday party every week (although there nearly has been for the past couple of months), but frankly, I have ALWAYS loved to get gifts for kids. When my baby cousin was born I was all of nineteen, and I vividly remember having the best time picking her out a little outfit with watermelons on it at Gymboree. I remember how awesome I felt when I scored another little cousin's most coveted Rescue Hero toy for Christmas, hidden behind some less popular toys on a shelf at Wal-mart. Another time I bought him a stuffed hedgehog that could really roll up into a ball, and I bought the baby cousin teeny-tiny little panties with hearts on them at Baby Gap to convince her to give toilet learning a go, and once my partner and I went in together on a cool little batting machine that had my cousin throwing a tantrum by 11:00 on Christmas morning because he couldn't hit the freakin' ball.

I've coalesced my present-buying strategy a bit over the years, into one in which I no longer actually buy presents, and I get an even bigger kick out of it. Last Christmas, with my partner's help, I made that former baby cousin a set of bookmarks with quotes from the Twilight books on them, and I made that former little cousin a redneck T-shirt quilt--John Deere logos, and Gone Fishin' illustrations, and a lot of camouflage. This year the baby cousin has requested a T-shirt quilt made from her own T-shirts, and the little cousin's present is still a secret, but can you say Tuba Playa?

Anyway, I don't attempt nearly that level of meaning when I make presents for the kids' little friends on their birthdays, but a five-year-old is a five-year-old, and they all like pretty much the same stuff. I've made buntings for kids, and crayon rolls, and play dough, but for my big kid's bestest little friend's birthday this weekend, a friend who has been a bestie for enough holidays that I do believe I've already given her a bunting and a crayon roll AND some homemade play dough, a new awesomeness was in order:

I'm super-excited, because I have been wanting to make the kids superhero capes for EVER. It took a while to figure out a pattern that pleased me (it's all about putting the proper angles on the trapezoid), and it took even longer to figure out the kind of closure that I wanted, but I think I nailed it. The capes are a little on the narrow side, the better to keep out of kids' ways, because the lamest thing around is to be flying around all super and to get caught in your stupid voluminous cape. But the closure? The closure?

Let me tell you about the closure.

I thought about ties, and these work pretty well because you can do them loosely, but I don't know a single kid who can tie her own shoelace, much less her own cape under her chin. Snaps are a sure-fire way to get a kid to hang herself from a tree limb or a chimney post or something, and Velcro? I dislike sewing Velcro, although I will under duress.

Instead I, and this is brilliant, used super-stretchy narrow elastic, stretchy enough that a kid can actually pull the cape on over her head, and stretchy enough that if she did snag herself on a fence, there'd be plenty of give to get herself untangled. Hello, Montessori independence!

So yes, one for my kid, and one for my other kid, and one for a little friend whose party is next weekend, and one for the little bestie, which looks like this:

It's monogrammed with her initial on it in upholstery remnant fabric (washed on the sanitary cycle first and hot-dried, because there will be no running dye on my watch), and on top of it are resting the kids' presents to her. A few months ago, feeling like I was sort of bogarting the whole birthday present business by taking it upon myself to make the present for each of their friends myself, I made up a rule for them:

When attending a friend's birthday party, my child must do one of the following:

1. Buy the friend a present with her own money (the only money around is earned by doing chores, mwa-ha-ha!).
2. Make the friend a present with things found around the house.
3. Give the friend something of her own.

And that's why my big kid bought her friend, with money earned sorting laundry, a set of Halloween yo-yos and a Christmas candy, and the little kid gave her the yellow ball with sparkles in it that is almost her favorite toy.

A super birthday, then, for a super friend. And I am absolutely going to stock my etsy shop this week with some capes made from fleece blankies, with the option of a free upholstery remnant monogram, and perhaps I could have done that today, but I didn't. The super kids had some super stunts to do over at the park, you see, so we were far too busy for money-making.

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!

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

I am not enjoying teaching right now, or grading papers, or dealing with the idiot student who thought it would be a good idea to steal some other idiot student's paper and pass it off as his own and now I have to fill out paperwork and meet with the Director of Composition and THEN meet with this student to give him his big fat F in my class before I can give papers back to any of my other students, and if you think those students are happy to have their grades delayed then, boy, you don't know students these days.

When do you think I'll get a nationally-mandated minimum wage for being a committed stay-at-home parent who engages my children and exposes them to enrichment opportunities and cooks them nourishing meals and constantly strives to do better by them? Cause I'd really like to stop moonlighting with these college students--they'd rather be moonlighting somewhere else as well, anyway.

In other news, my own happy kids are rockin' their own school, as usual. One of the sweeter traditions, in a classroom full of sweet rituals and traditions (don't take my word for it--the Montessori birthday ritual is gorgeous everywhere), is to have each child draw a self-portrait twice a year, just before the fall and spring parent/teacher conferences. The work table has a mirror set up in front of it, and blank paper and colored pencils, and the older children (and even the youngest ones, by the spring self-portrait), add a sort of handwriting sampler at the bottom. It's a fascinating look at how a child sees herself, and fascinating how that perception evolves over the months and the years.

I posted Willow's self-portrait at four years and ten months, and so here is her self-portrait at five years and nearly four months: Such an evolution in that kid!

Now, it's possible that Sydney didn't quite understand the purpose of the self-portrait work, since this is her first time, but frankly, I think she understood it quite well, and thus I think that her self-portrait is a pretty clear reflection of who my kid is inside:Yep, that's my kid. Her sister is introspective, socially cautious, and very concerned with understanding the social script of any situation. Sydney, however, is an extrovert who craves attention, and is extremely socially clever, particularly in regards to manipulating situations to achieve an optimum outcome. At the parent/teacher conferences Matt discovered, through shrewd questioning, that the two sub-teachers in the girls' classroom have apparently been unwittingly letting Sydney basically do nothing in the classroom except wander around and hang out. One teacher tells Sydney to hang up her coat. Sydney looks at her blankly, so the teacher demonstrates the activity, in the process hanging up her coat for her. This happens every single day. The other teacher demonstrates a new work to Sydney, and then asks if she'd like to try it. She says no. This happens every single time.

"She's very observant," noted one teacher.

"Observant, my butt. A Montessori classroom is not a cocktail party. It's an experiential education lab, and it's very expensive. Get the kid playing with something."

They promised they would.

Finding My Photography a Home

Well, it's not even really photography. I mean, some of it is--I have a whole set of the alphabet created from photographs of cemetery headstones that I'm working on this week--but most of my printwork consists of handwork pieces scanned at super-high resolution and cropped and color-corrected in my usual photography workflow.

What do you call that? Mixed media? Still life? No idea.

Anyway, with my vintage buttons alphabet I've had several download options available on my pumpkinbear etsy shop for a while now, but for a while now I've also been looking for some good print-on-demand options. My printer has good color and tone, and I'm reasonably happy about using it to print stuff for myself, and especially using it hard to print on freezer paper and fabric and whatever (knowing that if I do eventually break it from making it print on something weird, I'll get to buy myself a new one, yay), but I'm not confident enough in the durability or stability of its work to print so much as a greeting card for a friend with it, much less an art print or something to sell. At two different craft fairs this year, the same woman wanted to buy some prints I'd made for the girls and just had on display, and I was all, "Um...no."

I also don't particularly desire, anyway, to make or buy prints of my work and then sell them--my overall goals in life as well as crafting are to sell stuff and get rid of stuff, not buy stuff and then keep it on hand hoping to sell it later on.

So, yeah. Print-on-demand.

I decided (finally) to try out ImageKind, because I lurve their main company, CafePress--it's another overall goal of mine to someday woo my overworked graphic designer husband into putting some of his cooler free-time sketches on CafePress, but strangely enough, he balks at being stretched too thin.

After much futzing and fiddling, I got a profile (I'm Pumpkinbear there, of course), and a gallery of my vintage button alphabet:

I mostly imagine it being used for its high-quality printing process on greeting cards and notecards and postcards, but I have to admit that it is pretty fun to play around with all the high-priced matting and framing possibilities, and then get a preview of the fanciness that can be had for just a couple hundred dollars:

High-falutin', huh? And I'm quite happy to have this checked off of my to-do list, because now that I have a place to put them, I get to start on some other pieces that I've been wanting to start on...

Don't you love how completion of a to-do list leads to another to-do list?

Babies in Diapers, Babies on Film

Babies in diapers sitting:
Babies in diapers fleeing:Babies in diapers with Velcro:

Babies in diapers with snaps:

Babies in diapers getting bribed with whatever I have around to bribe them with:

I did a little photo shoot over at Barefoot Kids this weekend for a cloth diapering tutorial that I'm writing up. It made me realize that just as I didn't take enough photos of my baby girls breastfeeding, I didn't take nearly enough photos of them in their comfy cloth diapers. I still have a few of their diapers for my teaching stash, but not any of my own handmade wool recovers (what did I do with those? Who was so awesome that I gave them my own wool recovers, and yet so un-awesome that I don't even remember anymore?), and I have absolutely zero breastfeeding mementos, although to be honest, I NEVER, NEVER WANT TO SEE MY OLD NURSING BRAS AGAIN!!! I didn't even try to pass them on, or take off the bands or the elastic or the snaps to re-use. I JUST THREW THEM IN THE TRASH!!!

To be fair, I was nursing one to two people continuously from 2004-2009, so those bras and I were done with each other by the time Sydney weaned herself.

And also? You should totally see my new bras. Underwires and everything.

Two Girls, Two Elaborate Skeletons

This comes directly on the heels of Halloween, but it isn't really a "Halloween" activity, except that, you know, it involves skeletons and I got the idea from somebody else who was doing it as a Halloween activity. So okay, it's probably a Halloween activity, but we did it more in terms of human biology than Halloween.

So there you go.

Anyway...I was inspired by the skeleton puzzle over at Chasing Cheerios enough to dig out (after Halloween, of course) a really cool pdf of another put-together skeleton that I had downloaded and saved almost two years ago. Do you do that? See cool stuff on the internet and save it, even if you don't know when/if you'll ever do anything with it? I have an external hard drive, with something like a terrabyte of space on it, pretty much just for that and my itunes and my digital photography compulsion.

So two years ago I found this really cool skeleton pdf online, meant to be put together with brads as a Halloween decoration but pretty detailed as to its bones and stuff, and I saved it to my hard drive. And yesterday, I printed out two copies of that skeleton and gave it to the girls to color. The girls get really perfectionist and self-judgmental when it come to cutting, for some reason, so they made me cut all the pieces out. Which I did. I'll have to think about whether or not I should go cold turkey on the cutting assists in the future.

And today I got out some of my cheap stash scrapbook paper (I just remembered that I should have used my huge sample book of super-brittle wallpaper that I got from the Upcycle Exchange and that almost ruined my Cricut, it was so brittle. Shoot) and let the girls pick out pretty papers, then gave them glue sticks to glue the skeleton parts to the back of the pretty paper. While I cut that out (again), I gave them each a page on which I'd printed all five pages of that same skeleton all teeny-tiny on one page. They colored the teeny-tiny skeleton parts and I cut them out (ugh).

The girls arranged the big skeleton pieces, colored and backed with pretty scrapbook paper, sandwiched in the pockets of laminate, and we laminated them. Then, while I cut out those laminated pieces (definitely going cold turkey on the cutting assists), the girls glued their teeny-tiny skeleton to a new piece of cardstock, which we also laminated. Sydney made a lovely abstract arrangement of bones, but Willow made, as I encouraged her to, a teeny-tiny skeleton put together correctly to use as a key in putting together the large skeletons.

I had wondered if the whole fun of this activity would be in the creation, but the girls actually then spent quite a bit of time on the floor together putting together their skeletons. I had also assumed that each child would put together one skeleton, but I was pleased to walk by later and see that they were both working together on both skeletons:

And making them hold hands, no less, and go for a walk together.

Such friends that sisters can be sometimes.

Another Halloween for the Record Books

The clown costume was FINALLY finished:I could write books about that yarn wig, let me tell you. And the logistics of actually SEWING, on the sewing machine, with two little girls whose heads are about to explode, they're so excited. Made my head just about explode, too, if you know what I mean. But I digress.

The pumpkins were finally finished, too:

Although Matt had to take over that one after 1) I decided it would be a good idea to try to carve using my Dremel but without the Dremel pumpkin carving kit and turned the livingroom into a pumpkin slaughterhouse and 2) it was discovered, a little too late, that Willow's pumpkin was starting to go bad on the inside and, you may remember, I've had a little thing about smells and just grossness in general after being hyperemetic during both my pregnancies. Matt is now, officially, the yearly Pumpkin Parent.

Makeup was applied judiciously:
And then, with great glee, not so judiciously. Made Will a bit more of a horror film clown than I'd been expecting, but it worked.

It was a perfect night for trick-or-treating:
Our stickers were not exactly the hot item of the neighborhood (One kid, seeing Matt about to drop a handful in his bag, actually pulled his bag away and quickly said, "Uh, no thanks"), but we didn't get egged, either, so there you go.

Of course, all our neighbors are more awesome than we are, so OUR kids got plenty of candy.

Even some candy to share:
When they're too old to share candy, I figure they're old enough to start making their own costumes, don't you think?

With my kids, hopefully it'll never come to that.

One Deer Down, One Clown to Go

This year for Halloween, my baby wanted to be a "baby deer." Good luck finding yourself a toddler fawn costume at a costume shop, but we are crafty people, and we can make that happen:
Once again, as with Willow's zebra costume last Halloween, I used a long-ago thrifted Old Navy fleece romper as a pattern to sew a Sydney-sized romper out of tan stash fabric. I even sewed in a zipper, for goodness' sake--
--referring back to a handy zipper tutorial or two (the glue stick method=AWESOME!).

I ironed some stash white flannel to Heat n' Bond iron-on adhesive, freehand cut it into fawn spots, and had the girls help me lay out the spots-- --and then iron them down. And also? I am NEVER buying Heat n' Bond adhesive again. I thought it would be quicker just to bond the applique to the romper instead of sewing each one down. What I forgot is that heat-set applique is fiddly, in that you have to, you know, follow the RULES for it, and I have the constant companionship and assistance of two small children. What the use is of something that a three-year-old can't do correctly I just don't know. At least when you sew something on the sewing machine with a three-year-old, even if the stitches are sloppy or the seam wobbles, that thing at least has a fighting chance of STAYING SEWN. Heat n' Bond? Blech. I'm sorry, Heat n' Bond, that I was incapable of ironing you down with moderate heat for 8-10 seconds per section, overlapping slightly, but seriously, you're going to fall apart on me?

Seriously?

I've already had to take a glue stick to about half of these appliques after my child was instructed to show up at her gymnastics class in costume, so we'll see if the damn things last through tomorrow's school party and the Bloomington Area Birth Services party and the pipe organ concert, and Saturday's festival at the Mather's Museum.

Oh, and trick-or-treating. Can't forget that.

Anyway, the applique was simple to do before sewing the romper up, but I wish I'd taken the time to actually do them right.

I freehanded and sewed up a tail and attached it to the outside of the costume (it's white on the underside, because Sydney's a white-tailed deer fawn)--
--but I used a pattern for the hood of the deer costume, a vintage Simplicity 5739 that I scored during the Upcycle Exchange at Strange Folk in September. Hopefully, when the girls are between the ages of 10 and 12, they'll really want to dress up as some sort of faux-fur rompered creature with a tail and a furry hood with ears, because that's what this pattern is for. I freehanded the ears, but fortunately the hood, even though it's super-large, still fits fine:

Even skipping all the niceties that I ran out of time for, such as trimming the neckline with bias tape or lining the hood or adding elastic to the wrist and ankle hems, etc., I'm still quite pleased with the outcome, and fortunately, so is Syd.

And if all her applique does fall off before Saturday, I can always just fashion her some pipe cleaner antlers and make her a buck, I guess.