Upon the Occasion of the Murderbrat's First Birthday

And just like that, our wee Ginger Prince--

--is one year old! 

Obviously, this calls for a party. Alas for the pandemic the guest list was quite limited, but nevertheless Syd baked the birthday boy a birthday cake--

--and we served it on doll dishes with one handmade candle and a sprig of catnip:

Syd even made enough for him to share with his frenemies!

We love our glorious murderbrat, while fully admitting that he's also kind of awful. He never fails to speak his mind, and isn't afraid to holler at us when we're not doing his bidding quickly enough. He chases Gracie, who puts up with his garbage, and takes running leaps directly over Spots, the better to piss her off. He spends much of his time lying on my desk next to me, on a cushion that Syd made for him so that he can look out the window or nap in equal comfort. He loves and comforts and entertains our Syd, and is probably her greatest source of joy in this challenging year. 

It's never made me happier to fail at something than it has to be this cat's foster failure.

It would be awesome if he would stop sharpening his claws on my chair, though!

the day they met

on the occasion of his first birthday

How to Make a DIY Weighted Blanket

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Weighted blankets are a high-ticket item, and that's for good reason: they're touted as somewhat of a miracle cure for problems like sleeplessness and anxiety, and you know that if you suffer from sleeplessness and/or anxiety, you're willing to do a lot to find some relief!

Unfortunately, as pricey as weighted blankets are, they're still not always made with great ingredients. Polyester fabrics and plastic pellets are crummy for the environment--seriously, we do not need more plastic (especially plastic pellets!) in our waste stream--and I'm not gonna blame you if you don't feel like sleeping every night with that nonsense draped all over your skin, either.

Supplies & Tools

It takes some fiddly work and some sewing prowess, but it's completely possible to DIY your own weighted blanket, and to do so using natural and/or sustainably-sourced materials. Here's how:

• Instead of buying new fabric, upcycle flat sheets. For my weighted blanket, I'm using two cotton twin-sized flat sheets. Nope, they're not even the same color, and I don't care! If you care, you can buy organic cotton flat sheets or upcycle something cuter to DIY a duvet cover.
• Instead of buying plastic pellets, use glass pellets. They're hypoallergenic and don't contain anything harmful that can leach out over time, although I do recommend sewing yourself a duvet cover, as I would with any filled bedding to give yourself an extra layer in case of rips.

In addition, you're going to need some good measuring tools and sewing tools. Spring for an excellent-quality universal sewing needle for this project, because it's shocking the amount of straight-line sewing you're going to be doing. I switched out needles midway through sewing the first series of channels for the filling and then spent longer than I care to admit trying to troubleshoot why the thread tension was suddenly shot before finally realizing that the problem was, of COURSE, the needle.

Fun fact: when in doubt, change the needle. It's nearly always the problem.

So now that you have a brand-new, excellent-quality needle installed the correct way in your sewing machine, a couple of sheets, and several pounds of glass pellets, here's how to turn all of that into a future of sound sleep!

Directions

1. Wash, Dry, And Iron Your Fabric

It's crucial for both brand-new and upcycled fabrics alike! Pro tip: sheets can come out of the dryer ridiculously wrinkly, no matter how much care you take. Instead of tumble drying them, use a clothesline. Smooth them absolutely flat, pin them well, and when they're dry you'll have an easier time ironing out the remaining wrinkles!

2. Measure Out A Grid

 

You can tell I worked so hard at getting out all those wrinkles, lol! Eh, whatever.

First, re-measure your flat sheets. Even though they're supposed to be a standard size, I learned the hard way (via a bunch of unhappy comments!) that most/many/all flat sheets, perhaps particularly after washing and drying, do not match these measurements.

Divide each measurement into a reasonable number of divisions to make a grid. You'll be sewing long columns of stitching parallel to the short sides of your blanket, filling a row with filling, then sewing parallels to the long sides of your blanket to close each row until your entire blanket is a grid with each module containing an equal amount of filling. It takes a little bit of math and a little bit of eyeballing to figure out what will be practical for your blanket.

My twin flat sheets measure approximately 66" x 96", so I decided on a grid of 16 columns by 8 rows, for 128 total modules.

Use a marking pen or masking tape to mark out the columns on one of the flat sheets. I like to do this even before I sew the two sheets together, although you can certainly complete the next step and then come back to this.

3. Sew The Flat Sheets Together

Pin the flat sheets right sides together, then hem together around three sides, leaving one long side open. You'll be using this open side to fill the columns, and will close it in the last step.

If you preferred to sew the sheets together before measuring and marking the columns, then measure and mark them now.

4. Sew The Channels

 If you look closely, you can see that I've got all of the columns sewn to make channels for the filling, and I've taped out the rows. I'll stitch down each row after I fill it.

Using a very short stitch length, stitch all of the column divisions, using your markings as the guide. You can stitch each of these twice if you want to make sure that the sewing line is very, very sturdy.

5. Measure And Mark The Row Guidelines

Lay your blanket flat again, and mark all the row gridlines the same way that you marked the column lines. Do this before you start to fill your blanket because you'll be sewing each row gridline down after you fill the modules below it.

6. Calculate The Amount Of Filling For Each Module

Remember that the total weight of your blanket should be about 10% of your body weight and that the total number of modules that you have to fill is represented by the number of columns multiplied by the number of rows.

For instance, I have a 16x8 grid making up my blanket, so I have 128 modules to fill. I'd like my blanket to weigh approximately 18 pounds, which is 288 ounces (fun fact: there are 16 ounces in a pound!). Dividing 288 by 128, I find that I should fill each module with 2.25 ounces of glass pellets.

That's too fiddly for me, so I estimated and let myself fill each module with between 2 and 2.5 ounces of glass pellets. Feel free to fudge your own numbers a bit, too!

7. Fill The Blanket

Tare a kitchen scale to a small cup, and weigh out the appropriate amount of filling for one module. Pour that filling into the first channel, shake it down, then repeat until you've done all of the channels. Lift the blanket up by the open end, shake all the filling down again, and sew along the first row marker so that you lock the filling into the modules along the bottom row of the blanket.

Repeat for each of the remaining rows. It helps to push your sewing machine back towards the middle of the table so that you've got room for the entire weighted blanket up there.

When you've reached the last row, you can double-fold and sew the blanket's opening closed, sealing that row and hemming that edge.

As you might be able to tell from the iamge below, my entire family loves my weighted blanket! On the day I completed it, in fact, I showed it off to my partner as soon as he came home from work, he lay down on the bed to test it out, and within a couple of minutes was sound asleep in his work clothes, out like a light for an unexpected 7pm nap. My teen likes to veg out under it while listening to music, and I really only get it back at night, where it's added to my arsenal of anti-insomnia remedies.

Full disclosure: I don't know if it's super helped my insomnia, but I already suspected that I was a hard case, and it IS very, very, very comfy. Totally worth the time and effort!

The Bunny and the Bee

Back when the kids were very small, there was a photography studio in a nearby mall that used to periodically send out the most EPIC coupons--one free photo session with one free 8"x10", no purchase required!

We never bought a single photo, but we have so many 8"x10" portraits from those years!

TBH, most of them weren't that great, so even if we hadn't been dirt-poor our money was pretty safe there, but there were a couple of gems from those years, and that above photo, of the kids in their Halloween costumes the year that Will was two and Syd was still my baby, was one of them.

I vaguely remember that we sent a copy of this photo out to all our family, and that one of them had it made into a present for us, but it wasn't until Matt was sent to work from home during the pandemic, bringing all his work stuff with him, that I saw this again:

And that's how his Father's Day present practically thought of itself this year!

I bought the onesies--

--the kids posed for a zillion shots, some of them super cute--

--some of them super weird--

--some of them that were supposed to be poses but actually turned out to be fights--

--some with friends--

--and some that were made of weariness at having to take a zillion photos while wearing onesies in the quite-seasonably-appropriate warm weather:

--and yet, finally, we got the shot, Syd removed my tacky bedroom background, and we were left with a true Father's Day masterpiece:

Here's my little bunny and bee! 

 

They haven't changed a bit in 13 years, have they?

P.S. Here's Syd wearing that bunny costume at age two!

Homeschool Art: The Kids Carved Rubber Stamps

This has certainly been the summer for handicrafts!

In a summer that has lasted both a billion years and one infinite day, we've had the time, the disposable income (thanks to all those canceled vacations, sigh...), and the boredom to indulge in handicrafts both old and new. Will created a hand-cut applique masterpiece. I've been turning corrugated cardboard, comic books, and SO MUCH GLUE into trays to put on on every surface in hopes that people will contain their crap there (spoiler alert: they won't). Syd has most of the school table taken up with the various supplies she needs to paint an elaborate portrait of Jones on the back of her denim jacket. We've been embroidering, and Will has friendship bracelets aplenty ready for a future when we'll see other non-family humans again.

But here's another handicraft that we've been doing, and you can see it in the background there, at the end of our table covered with crap, past Will in the process of making another friendship bracelet:

It's rubber stamp carving!

We still had some stash supplies for this project leftover from back when Syd was a Girl Scout Brownie earning her Letterboxer badge, but even if you don't hoard craft supplies for multiple years, here's all you really need to get started:

To go less fancy, substitute big pink school erasers for the rubber blocks, and to go fancier, substitute paint and a brayer for the ink pads. That's what we're working our way up to, as this particular project is one of the steps towards the retired Cadette Graphic Arts badge that Syd is trying to earn. 

We're also working our way up to real linoleum carving, screenprinting, and lithography. You can see why my handicrafts budget is so bloated this summer!

That linoleum cutter is wicked sharp, but here's photographic evidence from 2013 that even a seven-year-old CAN carve a simple rubber stamp:

And look at what a fourteen-year-old can carve!

Will had a lot of fun with this, too. Check out her zebra!

Seriously, how cute is that?!?

The kids' interest this summer in activities like wood carving, this stamp carving, and other tactile crafts remind me that even big kids--even teenagers!--can still benefit from sensory exploration, especially when their worlds are otherwise limited in many ways. I should make time this summer to get out the polymer clay, and the Perler beads, and the paracord, perhaps entice the kids into the garden with me, perhaps take them to the local lake if I can find a time when it's not overrun by racists...

But not today, because our brand-new paint-by-number kits arrived last night, and so after school today, we're going to try them out!

How to Make an Upcycled Playing Card and Upholstery Sample Bunting

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

There's nothing like a bunting to make a festive occasion just that much more special. That's why my daughter wanted a bunting as part of the decorations for her recent Alice in Wonderland birthday party--and also, of course, she IS my daughter. It's possible that a love for buntings is expressed at the genetic level...

Knowing what I wanted to make, I sorted through my stash of potential crafting supplies that surely will be useful someday (this is also known as my "stash of trash") and hit the jackpot when I came across a partial deck of souvenir playing cards. You can't play a lot of games with a partial deck of playing cards, and you also can't recycle them--and if you're me, you apparently also can't bear the thought of simply tossing them into the waste stream, not when you might want to make a bunting out of them six years later!

The faces of the playing cards would work as-is in the bunting because playing cards are on-theme for Alice in Wonderland, but as for the backs... well, my daughter for some reason didn't want scenes from Yellowstone National Park in the 1980s decorating her party. Silly girl!

Instead, I turned to another super useful piece of trash, a giant book full of tacky old upholstery samples. These sample books are notorious for being snapped up at thrift stores by avid crafters with stars in their eyes, who then take them home and never, ever figure out a way to separate the samples from their glued-on paper backings.

There isn't a way, Friends. Stop breaking your hearts on the effort.

So you can't sew those upholstery samples into anything, because they have thick paper backings glued onto them (you'll never get that glue off! Stop trying!). What you CAN do, however, is cut and glue them, stencil and paint on them, and embellish the snot out of them. That's what my daughter and I did to make her upcycled playing card and upholstery sample bunting, and here's how we did it!

Directions

1. Cut Bunting Pieces Out Of The Upholstery Samples

Use a playing card as a template to trace the bunting pieces directly onto the back of each upholstery sample.

Cutting these pieces out is sort of a nightmare, at least for my own set of upholstery samples, because the glued-on paper backing doesn't cover the entire piece. I obviously can't use my fabric scissors to cut paper, and my paper scissors are too dull to cut fabric, so I had to use two different pairs of scissors for every piece, ugh.

2. Embellish as desired

The possibilities for embellishing buntings are practically infinite, but for this bunting, I wanted to spell out a welcoming message.

Stencils and paint to the rescue!

I have a very old-school Cricut on which I can cut letter stencils, but happily, a set of store-bought cardboard stencils that I already had on hand turned out to be perfectly sized for this bunting--yay! I traced each letter onto the front of an upholstery sample piece with black Sharpie.

Because this bunting isn't washable, you can use any kind of paint on it. My fabric paint is getting a little old, though, so I've been using it on any even remotely fabric-adjacent project lately so I can use it up and have an excuse to buy more.

3. Adhere The Upholstery Pieces And The Hanging Cord To The Playing Cards

You can use any type of hanging cord that you'd like for a bunting, from a kid-made yarn cord created on a knitting spool to store-bought bias tape. Bias tape actually would have looked really cute with this particular bunting, except that I filled nearly all of the available space with my letters, and bias tape would definitely have cut the tops off of some of them. Instead, I decided on simple brown twine, to be sandwiched between the upholstery fabric and the playing card.

You can also attach the two sides of the bunting pieces together in a number of ways. I seriously considered machine-sewing them together with a wide zig-zag stitch, but then my daughter happened by and got involved, and her solution to every problem is to hot glue it. So she hot glued it!

I wouldn't use a bunting that was hot glued outside in all weather, but it was perfect for a beautiful, mild birthday party day. Afterward, we hung the bunting in her bedroom, so that every time she looks at it she can remember what a wonderful time she had at her Alice in Wonderland birthday party!

P.S. Do you also have a book of wallpaper samples that you're wondering what to do with? You can make a bunting with those, too!