Turkey Cards from Monkey Girls

Here's what we did with the hand turkeys: While the girls were at school, I scanned their turkeys, re-scaled them to 4"x5", and printed them in color on plain typing paper. I cut down a piece of 8.5"x11" cardstock to make a card about 5"x7", and glued the turkey prints to the fronts of the cards. They still needed a little something-something, so we used our letter punches to punch the word "TURKEY" on the front of each.

In case, you know, you couldn't tell what you were looking at. Which I admit is a distinct possibility.

We might use this same format for at least a couple of the Christmas cards that we'll be making this week for the Kids Craft Weekly handmade card swap. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to have the girls start making cards before we got our recipients list this morning, but the girls now have until December 1 to make ten cards, so I'll be thinking today about how to set up the activity so that it does NOT resemble a sweatshop.

The girls desperately wanted to give all their cards to friends at school, but I forced them to write out a bare minimum (in our house, that generally equals 2) to actual relatives. Can you tell which relative this one is for?

Okay, if you were up to that challenge, here's a way harder one. Can you tell which relative this card is for?

Happy Thanksgiving, Uncle Chad!

Which Photo Will Win?

For some reason, I really enjoy the photo contest that our local newspaper runs every year. They always have some theme, and tons of people enter, and it's never totally clear by what exact criteria the photos are being judged, but everybody gets to be in the online photo gallery!

I missed out on entering for the past few years, but the last time I entered, in 2006, the theme was Christmas (or Winter? Or Winter Holidays? Surely not Christmas...). Anyway, here is my photo that was given an honorable mention and published, in the NEWSPAPER, on CHRISTMAS DAY:It kills me that I used to get to snuggle with kiddos that young.

The theme for this year's photo contest is Down to Earth, soliciting photos that depict "some aspect of the natural or built environment in the state." They have to have been taken in 2009, duh, and in Indiana, duh, and it's a little vague exactly what sort of photo manipulation is allowed, but to be on the safe side I kept it pretty vanilla. I also added my own personal criteria that I wanted either one or both of the children to be in the photo, but that the photo shouldn't focus so much on the child, but on her environment or, better yet, her interaction with her environment.

Here are the seven that I've narrowed myself down to, in chronological order with the year, from Monroe Beach in February to Anderson Orchard last month:Beyond that, however, I'm having trouble deciding. Which do you like best?

My Cold-Process Soap Has Cured

Check it out!After letting it cure for six weeks, then using a bar in the shower every day for a few days, I feel it's safe now to pronounce my cold-processed soap a success. There are a few things I'll change next time--I probably should have pared all of my bars before I cured them, because I'm not in love with their lumpy tops compared to their knife-straight sides and bottoms, and, it might be my nasty cold talking, but I'm also not in love with the way that the lavender-spearmint essential oils cured. It smells almost too sweet, now. On the whole, however, I'm definitely making soap again, and soon.

I did end up liking the soap I molded in my silicon heart molds----but not liking the soap molded in my silicon Lego mold. I think that spells the death knell for the Lego molds, therefore, because I didn't like it with crayons or glycerin soap or even muffins, either, and after a good scrubbing you'll likely see the big and the small Lego molds up for a few bucks in my pumpkinbear etsy shop.

For this batch of soap I used a kit and recipe bought from The Kitchen Girls. Although I'm grateful that I had the kit the first time, to sort of baby me through, I won't be using that recipe again or buying another kit. Instead, here is a selection of the library soapmaking tomes currently residing in my house:

• Soapmaker's Companion: A Comprehensive Guide with Recipes, Techniques & Know-How (Natural Body Series - The Natural Way to Enhance Your Life)
  
• Essentially Soap: The Elegant Art of Handmade Soap Making, Scenting, Coloring & Shaping
  
• Handcrafted Soap
  
• Designer Soapmaking
  
• The Everything Soapmaking Book: Recipes and Techniques for Creating Colorful and Fragrant Soaps (Everything: Sports and Hobbies)
  

Out of these, I think that I'm going to use a basic cold-process soap recipe from The Soapmaker's Companion--perhaps the Soap Essentials recipe, or the hemp soap recipe, or the sunflower oil soap recipe--but make it without essential oils or dried herbs.

The independent hardware stores (but not the big-box ones) have the lye that I need, and I'm hoping that I can get most of the oils, the olive and coconut and whatever, either from a sort-of nearby restaurant supply warehouse that might have super-low-grade olive oil and such, or from Sam's Club. Whatever I can't get locally, Scott at Barefoot Kids said he could order online for me, and Barefoot Kids already has all the dried herbs I'd want to use in their brick-and-mortar.

After my basic cold-processed soap has cured, however, I think that I'm going to try hand-milling that soap in small batches (this is also called rebatching) to make the scented, herb-infused specialty bars that I want. There's a great Homestead Blessings DVD tutorial for this, if you can get past the denim skirts and gender role stereotyping and blessings of the Lord stuff, which I pretty well can if I'm in the right mood. Rebatching will keep the essential oils from altering their scent like they did with my cold-process experiment, and I like the idea of being able to make a single bar at a time of whatever random stuff I take it into my head to make soap out of.

Since rebatching also avoids the possibility of lye exposure (unless you messed up your soap in the first place), I'm thinking that's how I'll be able to include the girls in my soapmaking.

Although they do make a mean melt-and-pour glycerin bar already.

Talk to the Hand Turkeys

I still have papers to grade and children to give an after-school snack to and two more classes tonight to teach, not to mention meals to prep and a house to clean and other miscellaneous nonsense to look after, but my biggest accomplishment today so far has been Christmas shopping at the Wonderlab. I always buy from them during this week every year, when they double the member discount in their gift shop. And thus I am now the proud owner of two large bouncy balls full of glitter and snowglobe stuff (for little stockings), two small bouncy balls full of glitter and snowglobe stuff (for a future holiday--Easter, perhaps?), a farm magnet playset and a horse show magnet playset (for little stockings), a dinosaur magnet playset and an ocean magnet playset (for the next plane trip, whenever that may be), and a magnet playset of tangram mosaic tiles (to be set exactly between little stockings for sharing, because it was expensive).

Combined with the summer sale at Learning Treasures, which provided my secret stash of miniature chalkboards, dot painters, and blank books; the local comic book shop, where I bought a few Owly comic books; a friend's Usborne book party, where I bought a couple of sticker books; the Chronicle book summer sale, at which I bought a couple of very nice puzzles; and Daiso, where I bought some Japanese magnets and other tchotchkes, the little-girl present closet is full. I pull from that closet for holidays, long trips, and anytime a little girl has to go to the emergency room. We're still on the look-out for a full-size electric piano keyboard (suitable for piano lessons) for both girls and a Willow-sized bicycle for Willow, but those big-ticket items will have to wait until fate thrusts them, second-hand and reasonably-priced, into our path.

To add to the festivity of the secret shopping day (after spending the morning at the Wonderlab with the girls, I dropped them off at school and then went back to the Wonderlab to shop, mwa-ha-ha!), I encouraged the girls to make hand turkeys this morning while I drank coffee and read the newspaper.

Willow's turkey

Sydney's turkey

I scanned these, cropped them to 4"x5", and I'm going to print them and use them to make Thanksgiving cards for the girls to send to some friends and family this weekend. I keep a sort of list, so wherever they get bored and are finished scrawling "HAPPY THANKSGIVING" and their name at will be where they pick up with handmade Christmas cards, and wherever they get bored at with Christmas cards will be where we pick up with Valentines, and if you don't make it by Valentine's Day, you basically have to wait until next winter for a handmade card.

In other news, check out my awesome little cousin. He's a tuba playa in a marching band, an art form that I don't exactly get. It's a hold-out from the Civil War, I think, when formation fighting was incredibly important, and has simply been translated, through the centuries, into formation musical instrument-playing:
The flag corps and the liturgical dancers I can't integrate at all into my theory.

And Then We File Them Away Neatly

I have no context for the following picture, except to note that this is my typical view when blogging or editing photos or writing lesson plans, or otherwise attempting to work on my computer: Picture the computer keyboard directly under the cat (whose name is Ballantine), madly pinging away with irrelevant commands, or perhaps picture the cat lying directly on top of one hand trying to type on the keyboard. If it's morning, change the location to the living room library table and insert an opened newspaper in its usual place directly under the cat, with the most interesting article on the page being the piece of the paper most obscured. This is how the cat ensures that I still love her, even though I have two human children, as well.

In other news, the girls and I have been goofing around a bit lately with our newest novelty--file folder games. We first saw the link to the free file folder games web site on Chasing Cheerios, but we've since become fans in our own right, downloading and printing out and making far more elaborate (vintage wallpaper and plastic laminate are required for nearly every paper craft that occurs in this house, apparently) quite a few of the games, including an alphabetical order game that uses pumpkins for Sydney and an animal alphabet set for Willow to spell with. There are plenty of math games on the site, as well, which I'm excited about because that's the subject that I feel like I'm the least likely to offer casual daily enrichment for the girls in.

Making and playing with the file folder games has served to get the girls interested in their assortment of paper and laminated paper games and playsets again, everything from simple laminated alphabet letters or animal silhouettes to play with, to a large variety of matching games--
--to the various puzzles or other activities that we've downloaded and then personalized together:

I've come up with a neat idea for a child-made matching game that I'm going to try out with the girls this week. If it works, I'm hoping we can use it for Christmas gifts for little cousins, and I'll post a tutorial and perhaps a template for the benefit of all the other little cousins out there in the world.

But the best thing that this new interest has led us to is a vastly better organizational system for these paper-based activities. Previously, I'd been storing each activity or set in a Ziploc bag on a shelf in the girls' room, where it soon gets lost and/or forgotten about. However, these file folder games naturally beg for a hanging file box to store them, and it was then an easy task to round up all these other playthings and assign them to file folders in the bin, as well. And THEN I moved each of the girls' random activity pages (nearly all of them from the free Dover samples that I get each week) from clear plastic bins to folders in the file box, so that now they take up less room!

I've read about some homeschooling families, unschoolers usually, who never have their kids do "worksheets." I even read one book by an unschooling mom, I forget which (tell me, anybody, if you recognize it from the story I'm about to tell), in which anytime one of her children asked to go to public school she'd give them some worksheets to sit down and do quietly, and they'd soon realize from this that homeschooling was way better.

I'm sorry, but I think that's messed up. Mind you, we're not homeschoolers, much less unschoolers, but we LOVE worksheets over here. I love crosswords and puzzles and brain teasers, and my kids love worksheets and activity pages and copy pages and sheets of math problems and whatever else they can do. I mean, I don't enjoy sitting and filling out my taxes or medical forms in triplicate or anything, but seriously, who doesn't love a challenging worksheet?

They're good for your brains, my friends. They keep you from getting Alzheimer's.

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.