Etsy Reshoots, or, Welcome to the Light Tent

Instead of doing the etsy work and craft fair work that perhaps I ought to have done this week, I spent it housecleaning, watching movies with the girlies (Ballet Shoes with one, and Ape to Man with the other--want to guess which kid is which?), joining them in all their little projects and fantasies, bicycling around the park, playing on the playground, reading and reading and reading, and planning some plans for the education of October.

However, now I'm beginning to feel the panic that is entitled "I MUST MUST MUST Get My Etsy Holiday Updates Done!".

So of course my Matty took the girlies off for a good long while today to watch football (football must be watched in an empty classroom on campus, on account of we don't have viewable TV here), and the perfect opportunity presented itself to get in a good, long etsy photoshoot.

If only it wasn't rainy and gross and overcast outside.

In other news, did I already tell you about my light tent? I found the plans, years ago, for an excellent DIY light tent to make out of scrap lumber and white ripstop nylon and it just, you know, never got done. Familiar tale. Anyway, at a garage sale this summer what do I see, but the exact same light tent that I was going to make, handmade very well out of scrap lumber and white ripstop nylon! I want to say it cost five dollars, but Matt says that it cost two, and he's the one who holds the money when we go to garage sales, so I guess he would know.

Storing this light tent is an absolute bitch, and yet I love it so.

Back to today--gross day outside, out comes the light tent inside. Want to see what it can make of a shot taken inside my dark living room on a dark day? Here you go:

For shooting pictures inside our house, which has absolutely no natural light to speak of, it's a dream.

The little tree pinback photos are much improved:

I'd tell you that tomorrow I'm going to keep updating my pumpkinbear etsy shop with even more pinback reshoots and list some new pinbacks and the red, white, and blue crayon rocket pops, but...

Tomorrow, we're going to the apple orchard. We're going to play more games and do more projects. We may make pinwheels out of watercolor paintings. We'll go to the park, and Willow might bring her skateboard instead of her bike. We'll make pumpkin bread. Perhaps we'll sponge paint orange pumpkins and black bats on the windows.

In other words, business will happen when it happens.

Willow Teaches Science: We're Lucky Air is Gaseous

Willow's Grandma Janie recently mailed her a copy of Science on a Shoestring, by Herb Strongin. The book contains loads of wonderful experiments that use really cheap and/or really readily available (circa 1970...I mean, mealworms???) materials. Will unwrapped it, flipped through it, picked out an experiment that she wanted to do, and, noticing that she seemed especially intrigued by the teacher's script offered in each lesson, I suggested that she be the teacher and I the student.

Will told me the supplies that she needed, we gathered them, and within ten minutes from the mailman leaving the book at our door, we were ready to roll. Here is Willow's first lesson, which will make you appreciate the wonderment that is a gaseous atmosphere:

I'm a little claustrophobic, so I'm gonna tell you right now that my nightmare tonight is going to be about being trapped in a solid atmosphere in which I cannot move or breathe.

And that's science.

Rikers Island Carrot Cake, to You I Say "Meh"

In our house, you get exactly the kind of cake that you want on your birthday.

This year, Sydney had a rainbow cake. Willow had a candy cake. I had a cookie cake. And our Matt, whose favorite cake is carrot cake, had the Rikers Island carrot cake.

Have you heard this story? It's not really an urban legend, since it was in the New York Times and all, but the story, uncovered by professional journalists, is that Rikers Island has delicious carrot cake.

Now, I don't know if there's something truly special about the Rikers Island carrot cake, or if it's, you know, just really good. I mean, the chocolate chip cookies at my elementary school were REALLY good, but it was nothing to interview the cafeteria ladies on Live at Five about or anything.

Anyway, the other obnoxious thing about this carrot cake is that the recipe, thoughtfully printed by the New York Times, is the exact recipe used in the jail. The EXACT recipe. It calls for 25 pounds of sugar! Unless you've got a contract with SYSCO, you're not making this recipe.

Matt broke the recipe down, dividing it into 1/25 of the original, and he and the babes baked it for his birthday. And then it was lovingly doused in cream cheese frosting by Miss Sous Chef #1--

--and Miss Sous Chef #2:

Unfortunately, we were all sadly disappointed by this cake. I don't know if perhaps it just doesn't divide well, and I am NOT going to make the full recipe to see, but it was eggy, and had a weird flavor, and just generally not nummy-licious like a birthday cake should be.

If I was in jail I bet it'd taste better.

Homeschool Field Trip: Musgrave Orchard

Chocolate Mint Really Smells Like Chocolate Mint



Apple Trees

Bees! (Behind Miss Goofy There)

Time to Think About Stuff

Freedom to Poke Grass Blades into Mysterious Holes

Sampling Cider

The Reddest, Most Delicious Apple Ever Eaten

We are also now experts on the workings of the cider press.

Craft Fair Tutorial: Display on a Stick

Things sell better if you don't just throw a pile of them on a platter on a table.

This has been a huge struggle for me, as I have pretty much zero design sense. It has been a lot of work, and a lot of thinking, and a lot of doing stuff wrong, and a lot of willingness to toss bad displays and make new ones, and a lot more thinking, and a lot more willingness to toss those new displays when they didn't work either, blah, blah, blah, but slowly, like YEARS slowly, my craft fair displays are starting, and I mean just starting, to come together nicely.

My main hindrance has always been a fear of spending money. Every nice craft fair display that I've ever seen seems to have incorporated a lot of purchased elements, and I am not even willing to thrift stuff to use just for a display. A lot of my display mistakes over time have come from me trying to cobble together something from what I already own that ends up looking cobbled together, or me trying to put something together as cheaply as possible that ends up looking cheap.

Ironically, a lot of the stuff that I've done that I've liked the most--the record bowl shopping cart display, the spray-painted EZ-Up, have been cheaper than those cheap-o projects. They tend to use found elements that fit my needs perfectly, and supplies that have other purposes in my art, crafting, or homeschooling, etc.

This stand-up display for any craft on a stick--flags, pinwheels, or my rocket pop crayons--came together just the same way. It utilizes an old cardboard box lid for a base, some of the plaster of Paris that the girls and I do craft and homeschool projects with, more popsicle sticks from our thrifted supply, and our artist's acrylic paints.

The first step is to fill the box lid with plaster of Paris. I wasn't sure how much to make, so I mixed up one batch at a time and poured it on top of the previous batch. Alternately, you could fill the lid with water and pour it off into a measuring cup to ascertain the volume of plaster that you'll want to mix.

As the plaster sets, you'll need to supervise it in order to make the holes that your sticks will fit into. Use exactly the same sticks as you use in your craft, although these sticks will end up with plaster and paint on them, and so they won't be suitable for your crafting afterwards.

Watch the plaster as it hardens (I brought a book, and a four-year-old who wanted to chat), and as soon as it will hold your stick upright, place all your sticks upright in it, exactly where you want the holes to be. I made more holes and closer together than will actually fit my rocket pops, so that I can rearrange my display in a larger variety of ways.

Keep watching the plaster, and when it's relatively stiff, but not fully hard, try to pull one of your sticks out. It should come out cleanly, if a little wet. If it takes a bit of plaster with it as it comes, hurry and get the rest of the sticks out, because that means that you've let the plaster set a little too long, and the last thing you want is a display full of sticks that won't come out.

As soon as the plaster is fully hard, put the sticks back in, because otherwise the holes will shrink as the plaster contracts. Every little while, pull the sticks out and put them back in to keep the holes clean and perfectly sized. Be mindful as you do this to put the sticks in and pull them out perfectly straight--until the plaster is fully cured, you can damage the holes by wiggling the sticks in their holes or pulling them at an angle.

When the plaster is fully cured, you should be able to put the sticks in and out of their holes cleanly and easily, and they should fit snugly. If any holes are imperfect, then cover them up when you paint--customers often want to pick something up and look at it and then put it back, and they'll be frustrated or worried if they can't put your craft back the way it came (if they're the kind that care about that sort of thing, and not the kind that'll just toss it anywhere. Ugh).

After the plaster has cured the amount of time called for in the instructions, put all the sticks back in their holes and grab your acrylic paints for some prettying:

And yes, I'm sorry, you do have to paint in the nude. It's sorta required.

Homeschool Science: Ack! It's Gak!

In other words, we love ourselves some polymers.

I've been wanting to make gak ever since we began having so much fun with oobleck, but even though borax lives in the grocery store, you would not believe how many months of regular shopping trips it took me to finally happen upon it. Don't be stubbon like me--just ask someone. Ask someone old enough not to look at you blankly when you say "borax" to them.

You will need:

• borax. Seriously, just ask.You only need 1/2 teaspoon of borax, but the store will make you buy an entire freaking box of it. Fortunately, borax is an excellent natural cleaner, and I've been using mine for laundry, on the bathtub, etc.
• 4 oz. bottle of Elmer's glue. I bought an absurd number of these glue bottles during the very good back-to-school sales, and they've been serving me well since.
• warm water, like warm from the tap, not warm from the teakettle.
• food coloring. It's fun.

1. Empty the entire 4 oz. bottle of glue into a mixing bowl:

The kiddos had trouble getting every last bit of glue out of the bottle, but the rest of the steps were no problem.

2. Fill the bottle back up with warm water from the tap, screw the lid on, shake it like a Polaroid picture, then take the cap back off and pour the warm glue-water into the bowl with the glue.

3. Find a cup or another small container, pour another 1/4 cup of warm water into it, then pour in 1/2 teaspoon of borax and stir to dissolve it.

4. Dump the borax water into the glue water and stir like mad for the precious few seconds that you'll have until the borax causes the glue molecules to link together in long chains. When that happens, you'll want to start kneading the mixture with your hands until it's an even consistency:

And then you play and play and play:

The gak is vastly less messy than oobleck, but it's still fascinating on a tactile level. The babes squished it and mooshed it and tore it and slammed it and stuffed into containers and unstuffed it and sculpted with it and spelled with it:

And then they put it in a Ziplock bag so that they can do it all again later.

Strange Folk 2010: A Novel in Several Chapters

Set-Up

Because you can't have enough tinsel.

Rocket Pops

This is a newbie craft, developed after I figured out how to do layered melted crayon molds. I was all freaking out before Strange Folk, on account of I ran out of white crayons (still plenty of reds and blues) after making only four true-to-life rocket pop crayons, and you can't just bring FOUR of something to Strange Folk, unless it's four, like, four hundred dollar somethings. Anyway, I finally figured that I'd just make a ton of randomly-colored rocket pops, too, just to fill out the display.

By Sunday tear-down, wanna guess how many rocket pops I had left?

Four. Every one of them was red, white, and blue.

I Bet She'd Also Like a Record Bowl...

So Matt was sitting at the picnic benches over by the World's Largest Sandbox, watching the girls play, and some guy sitting near him commented to some other women that he'd bought the exact same journal that she was holding. The woman replied that she'd bought the journal for her niece, who liked to write songs. The guy told her that he'd bought his journal for his daughter, an anthropologist, because it was "kinda Indiana Jones-looking" (nota bene: Indiana Jones isn't an anthropologist).

The woman said that her niece travels around the country. "She has an album coming out this month," she added.

The guy said, "Oh, wow. That must be exciting for her."

The woman said, "You might have heard of her. Her name is Taylor Swift."

The guy said, "That doesn't sound familiar. I'll look her up tonight."

My own reply would have been: "Oh, yeah? My daughter's name is Temperance Brennan."

Ch-Ch-Ch-Chia!

Or, as one customer squealed upon sighting them, "Look! It's a cup full of happiness!"

Go Away!

Do you know what hay means at an outdoor craft fair? Rain, that's what it means. Standing outside our tents in the rain, chatting (on account of there was nothing else to do, like, you know, wait on customers or anything of that nature), I told the guy who had the tent next to me that it had rained at every single craft fair that I have done this year. Because it has.

"What?!?" He shouted.

I was about to reply, "I know, right?", when he exclaimed, "Me, too!!! I thought it was just me!" And he's full-time--he does WAY more craft fairs than I do.

It used to never rain on me. I used to never even own a tent. And now, in the midwest at least, it only rains when I have a craft fair.

Future One-Car Family?

On the way home in the middle of the night, AGAIN in Effingham, something horrible happened to the van. Matt got us home by driving 45 mph the whole way, the maximum speed at which the car would travel before the horrible things happened, and fortunately the highway's minimum posted speed limit.

We can't afford to have any work done to that car, and I mean ANY work, no new tires, no oil changes, nothing, but fortunately I come from a people who know that a non-working vehicle is just four cinderblocks away from being yard art.

Stuff!

I plan to put all the proceeds from Strange Folk toward making Pumpkin+Bear an official biz, so I couldn't do much shopping there, but I did allow myself one spree, at Circa Ceramics across from my tent:

Say hello to my new most favorite coffee mug ever! It has a typewriter on it! Because I'm a writer! Although I don't use a typewriter! That would suck! I love my new mug!

On the last afternoon of the festival, the awesome folks at Rainbow Swirlz organized a little trade. I gave them a baby bag made from a vintage superheroes T-shirt for this great little four-month-old superhero that they happen to have birthed, and they gave me...

Can you see it? In the middle, next to Miss Island of the Blue Dolphins there? Here's a close-up:

It's my new most favorite bag ever. I love it so much that I was wearing it around yesterday before it even had anything in it. Not only is it super, but it reminds me of my family. Willow is the dinosaur. Sydney is the pink. Matt is the RAR.

Or should that be RAWR?