Sydney Shines

Phew! Nothing like a nasty, mid-week stomach flu to take a person off of the grid for a while. No email, no Facebook, no housework, no book work, no craft work--it would be quite the refreshing break, if I didn't still feel about halfway this side of death.

Willow, fortunately, is fully recovered now, but she and I were both struck ill at almost exactly the same time, and were both VERY unhappy girls for a couple of days. Matt did as much as he could within his work deadlines, even skipping his drawing class when it became clear that I was NOT going to be able to cope, but Syd, my pampered, spoiled, sweet little baby of the family, was not only left to her own devices quite a bit (something that she is not used to, what with having a constant sister-in-crime at her disposal), but was also needed to help out quite a bit, and she made good.

While I was barely able to move, myself, in the next room, Sydney kept Willow supplied with water, dry cereal, Netflix, and plenty of snuggles:
I staggered into the room during one interlude to find Willow sound asleep leaning on Sydney, with Sydney still watching their movie and absent-mindedly stroking Willow's hair. When she saw me, she said, "Momma, can I get a blanket to keep Willow not cold?"

By Friday night, at least, Willow and I were well enough to be planted on the bleachers at the ice rink, holding each other up and swathed in blankets from home, while Matt handled all the preschooler-corralling so that Sydney could shine in another capacity:
The smallest skater in the Spring Ice Show may not have remembered her choreography, or consented to wear her costume (in the car later, Matt was baffled as to why Syd started to throw a tantrum when he tried to put on her duck outfit. I said, "I can guess. Sydney, was your costume pretty?" Sydney, from her carseat in the back, shouted, "NO!" Mystery solved), or even stayed upright for the entire time, but she does claim that she could see me in the darkened audience, waving frantically at her.

And I could not be prouder.

Today is Tuesday

Today:

I wandered bleary-eyed and fog-headed into the kitchen, whimpering for coffee, which my Matt made for me, because he is kind.

I set the girls up with a lemon reamer, two glasses, and a bowl of halved oranges past their prime on a table covered with newspaper. They were thrilled.

Thus, I was able to nearly finish my mug of coffee, and to read almost all of the newspaper, before being pestered.

I answered many emails, a chore that I find annoying.

By the time I finished, I had more emails in my inbox. I will ignore those until tomorrow morning.

I bullied the girls into clothes, packed a lunch, and off we went to the library.

Ms. Christina read LOTS of books, including . The girls have been singing "Zoli, zoli zoli!" all day long.

Ms. Christina also helped us make a drum from a can of coffee and half a balloon; a guitar from another can of coffee, three rubber bands, and a popsicle stick; and a telephone from two paper cups, a length of yarn, and a toothpick broken in half.

Lunch at the library consisted of an apple and carrot and cheese stick each, and a Ziplock bag of popcorn to share. A nice (and nosy, and lonely, likely) little old lady asked me if that was my childrens' snack, and when I told her that it was their lunch, she asked, "Oh, are you vegetarians?" What was I supposed to have brought--hot dogs? I just said yes, because I ALWAYS agree with strangers. It makes them stop talking to you sooner.

We came home with our own copy of Lizard's Song AND Lizard's Home. We have read them often since.

After dropping the girls off at school, I measured the width of the Parents' Library bookshelf, so that I can make it a beautiful sign. It is exactly two feet wide.

Matt blatantly stole Catching Fire from me, even though I'm the one who made him read The Hunger Games and requested the sequel from the library. So instead I'm reading the second Gregor the Overlander book. It's great. I read a couple of chapters while eating last night's leftover potato curry and injera bread. Teff flour=yum.

I do not want to do this, but I cleaned out the refrigerator while listening to podcasts. Gross. And we also have no food.

I uploaded some new favorite photos to my pumpkinbear Imagekind gallery, and spent WAY too long playing with previews. But doesn't my photo of Rose Hill Cemetery look extra nice on rag paper, with two mat boards, and an ornate metallic frame:
Yeah, that's $300 worth of nice.

Now, the greeting cards I could actually afford to buy for myself:
Isn't that cute? Now, who do I know who's going to turn four this spring?

I also uploaded some vintage Smurfs colorforms to my pumpkinbear etsy shop:I scanned these at a crazy-high dpi, and sometime in the future I have a date with these and the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop. And then I'm going to insert Papa Smurf into all my photos.

I picked the girls up from school, fed them granola bars, and chauffered them over to Sydney's rehearsal for the Spring Ice Show this Friday night. Her class is performing to "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." Sydney is going to be a duck.

Sydney fell down on the ice and threw a fit, so we got to leave early (secret yay!). At home, the girls played outside while I cooked macaroni and nutritional yeast nacho "cheez" from . LOVE that book.

Discovered that the girls had pulled chairs out onto the driveway, and were sitting and watching the traffic. Such cute little redneck kids.

Ate dinner, read books, went to the park after dark. The girls were beside themselves at the adventure of it all. See-sawed in the dark for a very long time, forced to alternate the Zoli Zoli song with See-Saw, Margery Daw. Secretly was listening to ipod at the same time.

Pajamas, toothbrushes, first chapter of Little House on the Prairie. New Moon soundtrack in the CD player.

In a moment, will fold and put away laundry while watching Grey Gardens. Will work on book proposal. Will wait for Matt to come home.

Or will just fall asleep.

WIP: The Dinosaur Log Cabin T-Shirt Quilt

That's an unfortunate mouthful. However, it is a T-shirt quilt--well, the center of each block is a T-shirt panel, with quilter's cotton prints pieced around it, so it's a kind of T-shirt quilt hybrid, perhaps:
And it is a log cabin pattern--Courthouse Steps, to be precise. It's not a perfectly traditional log cabin, because none of the pieces are necessarily the exact same width and I've not paid much attention to the values or the diagonal, etc. (you would not believe how difficult it was to figure out the simple math for this, although in our defense, when Matt and I were trying to work it out, we were enjoying a couple of nice glasses of sangria and we had two extra children running around the house--hence the sangria), but it is symmetrical:

And it is DEFINITELY dinosaurs. I can't even tell you how long I have been "working" on this quilt. I redid the pieces that I tried out originally, because they were awful, but I am super-proud of how everything is turning out this time. These hybrid blocks will likely be interspersed with log cabin blocks made solely of cotton prints, but I haven't gotten that far in my head yet.

I'm just going to roll with the momentum that I've got so far, and good luck that the whole damn thing doesn't get put away again for another year. Thank gawd the kid still loves dinosaurs!

Why We Brush Our Teeth

The littler little spent Saturday in bed, feverishly watching television, unhappily missing her Spring Ice Show rehearsal, and barfing every now and then for good measure, which left me and the bigger little to our own devices for most of the day.

Poor Will doesn't know what to do with herself without a sister-in-crime, so she got to have a LOT of Momma time (a little more Momma time than the Momma who's not used to having a bored kid hanging around her feet might necessarily prefer, ahem, but what's a Momma to do?). A LOT of board games:
A LOT of helping Momma sew:
A LITTLE bit of sewing on my own:And a LOT of time for long-lived science projects:Yep, it's your typical Egg in Vinegar project, but it's super-cool and was a huge hit in our family's five-and-a-half population bracket. Along with a couple of other projects that I haven't introduced yet, I used this project to demonstrate why we brush our teeth twice a day.

An eggshell has calcium in it, just like our bones and teeth do (Technically, an eggshell contains calcium carbonate--CaCo3 instead of Ca--but since calcium carbonate is used as a calcium dietary supplement I'm treating it as "calcium" for the sake of the kindergartner). Calcium is what makes our bones and teeth hard, and it's what makes the eggshell hard, too. Vinegar is an acid. Acids are also in juices and lots of foods. The vinegar's effect on the eggshell is a demonstration of the effect that acids also have on our teeth, if we don't brush those acids away very often.

You will need:

• egg
• glass cup or jar
• plenty of vinegar

1. Put an egg in a glass container.
2. Fill the rest of the container with vinegar.
3. Let the egg sit for several hours in the vinegar. We ended up letting the egg sit for about 18 hours, total, although Willow took the egg out periodically to play with it.
4. Pour out the vinegar--

--and notice how the acid in the vinegar has dissolved the calcium eggshell. Sure, the egg is bouncy, but Will didn't really make that much of this. She was mostly interested in handling the egg and looking at the mostly dissolved eggshell, and then she accidentally dropped it down the sink there and it's gone now, and I hope it doesn't clog the drain.

Willow LOVED this experiment. I let her repeat it again immediately, and she was able to set it up entirely by herself, and this time she set up TWO eggs in TWO glass jars, so I suppose that if one drops down the sink again, we'll still have a spare for bouncing.

Jersey Cotton Bias Tape is Even Easier than Regular Cotton Bias Tape

On account of it doesn't technically have to be bias tape. Bias tape is cut "on the bias," at a 45 degree angle in the fabric, for two reasons:

1. Cutting on the bias makes the tape stretchy, so that it can smoothly bend around curves and over corners.
2. Cutting on the bias makes the tape sturdy. Even if it wears down in a spot, at an angle it can't then split across the entire grain of the fabric, because it hasn't followed the grain.

But jersey cotton fabric is already stretchy enough to smoothly follow curves, so if you want to use it in a place where it won't get a ton of wear--NOT, for instance, as the bottom hem of a pair of pants, but YES, for instance, as the neckline hem of a gown intended for tiny babies who can't even roll over yet-- --then you can just cut your tape straight across the grain, allowing you to use up short widths of fabric that would otherwise be wasted.

Even though I own bias tape makers in a bounty of widths, if you're only making a short-ish length of tape--say, to hem the necklines and sleeves of two sock monkey baby bags--I, personally, think it's easiest just to make the tape by hand.

To make your own bias tape from scratch:

1. Figure out how wide you want the finished tape to be on the project. Multiply by four.
2. Cut your length of bias tape at that width multiplied by four. A large gridded cutting mat and a clear plastic ruler are very useful for this.
3. Fold the tape in half across its entire length and iron. Do this just a couple of inches at a time--it actually goes very quickly.
4. Open up the tape, making sure that you can see the crease down the middle, then fold each side of the tape in to that crease and iron. Again, do this just a couple of inches at a time, and do one side, then the other.

Does your tape look like this?Use it immediately, because the jersey cotton won't hold the crease for very long. But it is very forgiving to sew (and to wear!), which makes it one of my favorite fabrics.

Two More Babies in a Bag

These are the last two baby bags that I'll ever make from that awesome (and THRIFTED!!!) sock monkey jersey cotton sheet:
I can't believe it, but I have used nearly every inch of that fabric. Sydney has her sock monkeys skirt, and the last bit of it I must stow away to make something for Will. She's not so much a skirt kid, but I was thinking that if I waited until later this spring (which will come this year, right? Um, right?), I could sew her a very cute set of shorts or capris. Definitely bottoms, because otherwise how could she and her sister continue to match?

I tried a new technique with the hems for these particular baby bags. For the last batch, I blanket-stitched all the hems, which looks good, but I have to say that I may be even happier with these bound hems, made from the same fabric and zig-zagged:This kind of hem wouldn't be appropriate for the bags that are made entirely from T-shirts, as there likely wouldn't be enough leftover fabric to make the bias tape, but I'll do it again if I make another baby bag from plain jersey cotton fabric.

When I went into Barefoot Kids yesterday to drop off these bags, the owner, Scott, and I stood around and gossiped for a while like old women, as we are wont to do, while my girls sat on the floor and watched Sesame Street podcasts on my ipod (That ipod nano? Lifesaver!). I had drizzled sesame oil on my last three meals, at that point (at this point it's more like five, although not consecutively), and I kept being concerned that I somehow smelled like sesame. "Does it come out your pores like curry is said to?", I wondered to myself. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore and I blurted out to Scott, "Do I smell like sesame?"

He replied, "You smell really good, actually."

I joyfully exlaimed, "It's sesame!"

That is not really how I would recommend that YOU respond to a compliment, my friends.

Oobleck is Our Favorite Non-Newtonian Fluid

After spending a goodly amount of time exploring common, everyday non-Newtonian fluids, the next step is CLEARLY to make oobleck.

Oobleck is THE non-Newtonian fluid of all non-Newtonian fluids. It's solid and liquid, hard and soft, gross and awesome. To make your own solid/liquid, hard/soft, gross/awesome fluid, you will need water and cornstarch. And food coloring, if you're feeling fancy.

I wanted to revisit the spectrum of non-Newtonian fluids that we fiddled with the other day, so we started with a very thin solution of oobleck--two cups of water dyed green with 1/2 cup of cornstarch poured in----and worked our way to a thicker solution by increasing the amount of cornstarch by 1/2 cup:
The little kid was not, overall, a fan of the texture of the oobleck. She actually gagged a couple of times while feeling the thin solution, and though she played a little with the thick solution, she mostly enjoyed just spectating:

The big kid and I, however, had no problem digging right in:

For some reason (very scientific, I know), the cornstarch and water come together in exceptionally large chains of molecules. And so even though oobleck is a liquid, it's harder for the molecule chains to move around each other than it is for small molecule chains--it's crowded on that elevator, ya know? That's why if you move the oobleck slowly or let it rest, the molecule chains have more time to negotiate each other and thus they flow, but if you apply sudden force to the oobleck, the molecule chains just can't get out of your way fast enough, and so the oobleck behaves like a solid.

It makes for a wild sensory experience, let me tell you. You can actually feel the oobleck go from solid to liquid in your hands. You can grab a chunk of it from the bowl, and it's actually an object in your hands, but as you lift it into the air, it relaxes back into a liquid and flows through your fingers back into the bowl:

If you smack the oobleck with your hand, it's solid to the touch, but if you rest your hand gently on top of the oobleck, it will gently sink to the bottom of the bowl. Then you try to snatch your hand away--
--and you practically fling the oobleck bowl across the room.

Playing with the oobleck reminded me of when the kids were babies, and just the simple act of scooping water and letting it pour through their fingers was absolutely engrossing. Water was new then, and figuring it out was THRILLING. I really understood that as I, myself, spent close to an hour scooping oobleck and letting it pour through my fingers, absolutely engrossed, absolutely thrilled.

P.S. Interested in more hands-on science? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!