Super Etsy

Sometimes good product shots require more than one photo shoot, I've mentioned. So after school on Friday, I drove the girls over to the ginormous playground at Lower Cascades Park, and put the superhero capes that I wanted to sell on them before saying, "Go play."


It was perfect weather, in a perfect playground, and we happened to stumble upon a group of some mom aquaintances meeting there (including the blogger behind Blog Schmog, if you're familiar with that one), so the girls even had a few playmates that they knew to frolic with.

I snuck in probably the barest minimum of what you could even generously call "product" shots, but I figure the most important things for potential customers to see, anyway, are how much freakin' fun it is to play with superpowers:

For a while when the girls were babies I had this thing for collecting fleece baby blankets--they were just so simple and so practical, and you could pick them up for a song at thrift stores--and I accumulated quite a few, none of which I would part with no matter how many times Matt would suggest that the babies were no longer babies anymore.

I'm glad I'm a packrat, because fleece baby blankets are PERFECT for superhero capes. Seriously, perfect. Although only the blue with polka dots fleece superhero cape and the patchwoork with elephant applique superhero cape are up right now in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, I do have several other cool blankies in the line-up, but the absolutely most coolest thing that I'm trying out in my shop is a listing for a custom superhero cape from a kid's own outgrown fleece blankie. I'm hoping that other people might think, like I do, that transforming a kid's old baby blanket into a superhero cape for them to treasure all over again is a fun idea.

I'm also trying out offering a free monogram on each cape (using my good old upholstery swatchbook, of course), although I'll have to remove that aspect from my listings if I get as busy before Christmas as I'd like to be.

I have a couple of other things that I want to kick into gear for my pumpkinbear etsy shop in the next few days--an ad spot on Craftster, some more listings, a coupon for my shop available to Craft Knife followers--but for now I'm going to bake a strawberry half-cake and grill some halves of veggie dogs and Amy's burgers.

Because, as a certain baby will tell you, she is, after all, three-and-a-half years old.

I Glued More Things to My House

Searching for something novel the little girls could make for a friend's birthday party today, I dragged down my first-generation Crayola Crayon Maker from a high, high shelf and showed them how to use it. I never really found the crayon maker that fun or satisfying to use (hence its years-long residence on the high, high shelf)--I think it's fiddly, painfully slow, and prone to error.

The girls, however? Fascinated:
And in all honesty, other than having to seal the crayon mold with duct tape each time to keep the liquid crayons from leaking through the leaky crevices, the crayon maker does still work as advertised, and Will and Syd could work it independently from start to finish--isn't that the main benefit to the light bulb line of craft toys?

And yes, I put it back on a much lower shelf today, to facilitate easier child access.

In other news, I've been gluing things to my house again:
I scored a huge swatchbook of vintage wallpaper at the Upcycle Exchange during Strange Folk, and after discovering (by means of trashing my Cricut cutting mat) that it's all waaaaaaay too brittle to craft with, I decided to decoupage it to the built-in bookshelves in one living room wall.

I know it looks kind of crazy--

--but for me, really, it's rather sedate. First of all, the bookshelves are small, so it's a controlled explosion. Second, all the wallpaper swatches come from the same book, so their colors and patterns are largely complementary. Third, since the living room walls and trim are blue, I just used the wallpaper swatches in the blue color scheme. And fourth, the two shelves done up with florals are moderated by two shelves done up in non-florals.

See? I'm practically falling asleep, it's so sedate.

P.S. In case you, too, want to ruin your house's resale value (as if that hasn't already been taken care of for you), here's my tutorial for vintage wallpaper decoupage over at Crafting a Green World.

More Than One Photo Shoot is Usually Necessary

In preparation for a big update in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, I've spent the past couple of days taking tons and tons of photos of my stuff, glorying in still being able to take sunny outdoor shots, however chilly, before the long winter of grey indoor shots comes into play (my big winter plan is to build an indoor photo studio, btw).

Etsy photo shoots are a lot of work, especially with two little helpers--a half dozen photos here, before pushing the girls on the swings and then heading home for lunch, a half dozen photos there, in a sunny spot on the back deck just before the baby melts down, a half dozen photos on a pretty brick wall that we pass while walking to campus one afternoon. I generally have to utilize careful cropping, or a generous amount of retakes.

For instance, in this photo of a blue and polka-dotted superhero cape that I'm going to hopefully put up in the shop tomorrow (and offer a free upholstery fabric monogram with it, for as long as I have time to make them and mail them before Christmas, so tell your friends!), I meant for you to see Will running around and enjoying the cape and acting all super in it:I did not, of course, mean for you to see that she's running around and acting all super in Rose Hill Cemetery, where we found ourselves YET AGAIN late this afternoon after gymnastics:
I swear, I cannot stay away from that place. I wonder how the caretakers feel about people camping there?

Duct Tape Removes Warts

Y'all, don't think bad about me, but I used to have a wart. It's gone now, but it was totally gross. Just ask Matt--I was all the time showing it to him and saying things like, "This is so gross, look at it!"

It was a plantar's wart, I think, and smack on the bottom of my foot, which tells me that I need to start wearing sandals when I go to the public swimming pool, and it was crazy-painful to walk on, so much so that I was actually popping ibuprofin every morning just to take the edge off.

I tried that over-the-counter wart removal stuff, which just peeled away a bunch of skin which then callused and became even more painful to walk on, and I tried the doctor's office, where a physician's assistant froze it but told me that freezing didn't always work and told me to use duct tape.

And so let me tell you--duct tape is the business. You put the duct tape on to cover your wart, and then every now and then you rip it off and put on a new piece. You can leave the tape off for a while every now and then to let your skin rest, and the whole process does take a while. But it absolutely works.

Nothing happened for a couple of days after I started putting the duct tape over the wart on my foot, but then, on like day three, all these other tiny little warts suddenly started erupting all around the original wart--my theory is that this was other places where the virus was embedded in my skin, and the duct tape was just bringing them all to the surface at once, instead of one-by-one over time for the rest of my freakin' life.

Some people say that the wart will turn black and then fall off with the duct tape, but this isn't what happened with me. All the little warts, and the larger plantar's wart, turned to dead, callused skin, and then, every time I peeled off the duct tape, I would also take off some of this skin. Sometimes the tape would peel off a huge, thick chunk of skin, basically showing how deeply the wart had been embedded--seriously, it was crazy-deep, you should ask Matt--and then leave this huge crater in the bottom of my foot. It was disgusting. And also awesome.

The duct tape didn't hurt, although I've actually been trying this process on Willow, now, for a plantar's wart that she also has on the bottom of her foot, and she doesn't like it when the tape peels off part of the wart, although I think that it may just be the unpleasant sensation of peeling skin that she's reacting to, not actually pain. And it's working on her just the same, although I'm taking my time with the process and letting her foot have plenty of time away from the duct tape, as well.

And when we've used up all our duct tape on all our weird and disgusting skin ailments? I kind of want to make us some commemmorative duct tape roll bangles.

Walking on warts makes feet sore, so we both liked warm footbaths with tons of apple cider vinegar and a generous amount of tea tree oil and epsom salts, as well. But what doesn't a nice, warm footbath cure?

In other news, the girls and I have been spending an oddly large amount of time at cemeteries lately:

I've gotten really into photographing old headstones, because I'm weird and weird people have weird hobbies, apparently. I love looking at the entire landscape of an older cemetery, however--I mean, doesn't that photo above remind you of a sort of post-modern Stonehenge, with the huge chunks of limestone all skewed and plunked down into the green grass?

Once after visiting Stonehenge, I planned this elaborate hiking trip to visit all the mysterious standing stones all around the countryside in Great Britain. And then I grew up and got less weird, but I think I'm cycling back around to more weird again, so perhaps that trip will make it back on my to-do list someday soon.

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?