Some New Festive Pegasus Festival Flags

 I've been thinking spring lately! 

I've been thinking about gardening, and sitting outside with Matt drinking cocktails and working crossword puzzles. Hanging out on a quilt, reading and eating snacks. Minding my own business inside while the kids have actual human friends over outside, keeping their distance and keeping their masks on.

Maybe even backpack camping, just my family and our dog way out in the woods, far away from all the fretful things!

Thinking about gardening and camping got me in the mood to sew cute things for gardening and camping. A little earlier, I'd also gone down a random rabbit trail of looking at festival flags online (I miss going to concerts!), so there I found myself, making miniature festival flags that will be easy to mount in my garden, on the kids' treehouse, or to mark my tent stakes. 

Fortunately, since it's pouring outside today, they also look particularly nice popped into a painted soda bottle!

Since I have plenty of this fabric, I've got a few of these pennant flags listed in my Pumpkin+Bear shop. I think it would be really fun to do a whole set of mythological beasts, fitting right in with my current Rick Riordan-inspired mythology obsession.

If I ever do it, I'll post it on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Make a Chalkboard Easter Egg

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World back in 2017.

 This is one of the easiest Easter egg crafts that you can make, and one of the longest-lasting, too! You'll love the ability to decorate your chalkboard Easter eggs in a different way every year. 

Heck, if you have kids, they'll enjoy decorating these chalkboard Easter eggs in a different way every day! 

 To make the chalkboard Easter eggs, all you need are: 

  wooden or papier mache egg. These are commonly found at craft stores now. I like to avoid buying plastic eggs, but if you already have some on hand, you can use many kinds of chalkboard paint on plastic--check out the instructions on your paint for details. 

  chalkboard paint. Eco-friendly chalkboard paint does exist, but I haven't personally tried it, as I'm still working through the 32-ounce can of Disney chalkboard paint that I bought years ago--that stuff really lasts! I've also not tried tinted or homemade chalkboard paints, but again, they do exist.

 Chalkboard paint is super easy to apply. Yes, you can apply primer first, especially if you have primer tinted toward the color of chalkboard paint that you're using, but for the particular wooden eggs in this project, some were unfinished new wood and some were previously painted white, so I didn't bother with primer. 

 You're also meant to use a foam brush or foam roller to apply your chalkboard paint, but with these small surfaces, I used a regular bristle paintbrush that I had on hand. I might have had to apply an extra coat or two over what I would have had to do with a foam brush, especially on that white egg, where my brush strokes showed up exceptionally well, but after four coats, even the white egg was covered cleanly, and the paint on such small surfaces dried quickly enough that the two extra coats weren't a huge waste of time. 

 There are a lot of tutorials that tell you that you have to condition your chalkboard before you can really draw on it, but unless the instructions on the container of chalkboard paint call for this step, I don't do it, and personally, my projects have never suffered from "ghosting" or any other of the ills said to be caused by lack of seasoning. 

 I love these chalkboard Easter eggs because you can decorate them as elaborately as the Easter eggs that you see in children's picture books. And if you used white or light brown chalkboard paint, the effect would be even more realistic!

P.S. Need even more ways to get festive for Easter? Check out ALL my Easter crafts here!

It Only Took Me Two Years to Make This Diagonal Denim Strip Quilt

 Because I get distracted...

I get so habitually distracted that one of my New Year tasks is to look through last year's planner and transfer all of my WIPs from the previous year to a new list in the front of my new planner. This year's WIP list holds 21 items, which... that's a lot of projects to have started and not finished...

But but BUT that list actually used to have TWENTY-THREE items, but I did finally update the kids' Girl Scout vests with their new badges and patches AND I finally made the broken dish pendant I'd been wanting.

Of course, the big kid's Girl Scout vest already needs another new badge sewn onto it, but whatever. Instead, let's focus on THIS awesome project that I knocked off my list this month!

Not gonna lie: I started this quilt for the younger kid, and this quilt for the older kid, AND a still-unfinished quilt for my bed two years ago, thinking that I'd give myself just loads and loads and loads of time to piddle my way through them by Christmas. I like to give everyone a cozy present on Christmas Eve, and homemade denim quilts would fit the bill just fine!

Yeah... no. I gave everyone giant fuzzy slippers instead. And THIS Christmas Eve I gave them all STORE-BOUGHT fuzzy blankets, gasp! I even had the big kid's quilt already completed by that time, but the little kid's was still a pile of denim and flannel. 

Finally I decided that the quilts would make a cozy Valentine's Day present for the kids, so I buckled down and spent most of a day basically making the little kid's quilt from start to finish:

For the big kid's quilt, I'd done horizontal rows, and I'd tried for an ombre effect, but I don't really love it. For the little kid's quilt, I tried diagonal rows, and I love it so much that I feel a little guilty that the big kid's quilt isn't so good, yikes:

In case you ever come over to my house and wonder why I have literal masking tape on my literal family room floor, it's so that I can lay out a quilt whenever I want. I am literally just that classy!

And as always, back-to-front binding is THE way to go:

I am so pleased with how this quilt came out!

It's super cozy and warm, it's comfortingly heavy, it was dead easy to make because it doesn't even require batting, and because the entire top is upcycled jeans, the only costs were for the flannel backing, the thread, and the approximately one zillion jeans needles I broke sewing over those one zillion seams:

I'd say that diagonal rows are now my go-to denim quilt design, but the quilt that I'm planning for my bed is going to be a square, and I'm currently obsessed with the idea of sewing it in a log cabin design.

Maybe I'll even have it finished in time to show it to you within the next couple of years!

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!

Easy DIY Envelope: One Piece of Paper, Four Folds, and Three Swipes with a Glue Stick!

The other day, I was expecting a few members of my Girl Scout troop to drop by (for a safe and socially distant outdoor transfer of Girl Scout cookies, because 'tis the season!), and I randomly realized that it was also the Lunar New Year. 

Thanks, Facebook!

Obviously, any children encountered on the Lunar New Year are children who must be gifted red envelopes with money inside, because I do not fool around when it comes to holidays. 

Because I also have the Depression-era hoarding skills of my Nana, I have an equally random little stash of two-dollar bills. In my opinion, two-dollar bills aren't even literal money--they exist solely as Tooth Fairy and birthday card currency. The sole difference is that Tooth Fairy bills have glitter on them, birthday card bills are folded into some cute origami shape, and red envelope bills are ironed until they're nice and crisp.

So now I've got a two-dollar bill for each kid, they're all nice and crisp, and all I need is the red envelope! 

You can download free red envelope printables, but my printer already runs on gold dust and angel hair and I already have to beg it for half an hour before it will print out so much as a math worksheet; I ain't begging it to print a bunch of red envelope templates and then having it go belly-up halfway through until I run out to buy it another forty-dollar ink cartridge. Instead, here's a dead-easy way to DIY an envelope from one square piece of paper and a little glue:

Notice that this first fold isn't even perfectly even, and it doesn't even matter!

It also doesn't matter if you want these side flaps to end up on top of or underneath the bottom flap.

If you want the envelope to look a little tidier, you can round all of your points before you glue everything down.

And that's totally it! You can of course make any size envelope simply by changing the size of the square, and use any paper simply by trimming it to be square. I will be sad at you if you ever buy another envelope!

Woodburned Easter Eggs with Watercolor Stain

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

 A great way to avoid buying plastic Easter eggs is to make your own stash of eco-friendly Easter eggs that you can re-use year after year, or embellish store-bought Easter eggs made with natural materials, such as wood, ceramic, or papier mache. 

 We've done all of the above, including making DIY papier mache Easter eggs and wool felted Easter eggs, but I enjoy adding to our stash every year--for one thing, I've got two kids to whom I'm hoping to pass down our beautiful handmade eggs, so I need a good stash, and for another, I'm never quite sure that we get *every* single egg back from every single Easter egg hunt... 

 One of the easiest ways to have a beautiful stash of heirloom Easter eggs is to buy wooden eggs and then embellish them. To wood burn and stain them, you'll need just the following: 

  wooden Easter eggs. I'm a HUGE fan of Casey's Wood Products, and I've purchased a ridiculous number of wooden objects from them over the past several years, including pretty much every size of wooden egg. I look for the items made in Maine, and of second-quality. 

  wood burner. I own this one, and although I don't love it, the price was certainly right, and it's worked for me for probably six years by now, so I certainly don't have much to complain about. I really want these alphabet brands that you can use with a wood burner, and if they fit mine, then that would certainly raise my opinion of it! 

  watercolors. Use liquid watercolors if you're wanting to stain the wood, and any watercolors if you're wanting to paint on details. The method itself is super easy, and a great family activity. 

1. Draw your design in pencil. This is something the the whole family can do while sitting around the table together. Add in some music or an audiobook and you've got the perfect hour before bedtime in my family! 

My kids prefer to draw scenes onto their eggs (I have one kid who draws dragons on everything, including every holiday decoration for the past three years), but I think these eggs look really interesting with little designs and patterns,  zentangle-style, done all over them. I especially like it because it's something that you simply can't do with most eggs, so it adds to their interest and appeal.

 You might want to watch against penciling in too many tiny details, as you'll soon be wood burning them, but I've actually found that my wood burner can get quite a bit of detail if I use a light touch. 

 2. Wood burn your design into the egg. If you're wood burning noobs, you can designate a "practice egg" for yourself so that you can play around with the wood burner and get a feel for it. It doesn't really work to use any old scrap of wood for practice, because the wood burner will burn each type of wood differently. 

 My kids have been using the wood burner since they were both pretty small; they still don't totally have the hand for it--they tend to press too hard and have a lot of stop-and-starts--but they're quite capable of doing it, and they love it. 

  3. Embellish with watercolor. If you're looking to stain your egg all over, you can do it with any color of liquid watercolor--my tutorial for that is here. 

If you want to paint details onto your egg, you can do that with any watercolors and a small paintbrush. Manage your expectations by realizing that the watercolor will flow along the grain of the wood, often unexpectedly, so don't expect rigid lines demarcations except where you've wood burned. 

  Optional: Seal the completed Easter egg. Oh, my gosh, y'all, I get so many questions about this! People really, really, REALLY want a non-toxic, eco-friendly, food-grade wood sealant that will stand up to a kid putting a stained and sealed toy into her mouth. 

I am sitting right here and killing that dream for you. Your sealant can be non-toxic, eco-friendly, and food-grade, OR it can stand up to a kid putting it into her mouth. If your kid is still putting her toys in her mouth, just... don't stain it those beautiful watercolor colors until she's older. If a kid mouthing your Easter eggs is not a concern for you--and if you're head-scratching right now, I promise you that it's such a concern for SO many people that I had to write it first--then check out the following options for sealing your wooden Easter egg. 

  1. Don't seal it. It doesn't really need it if it's just coming out to play around Easter time. 

  2. Use this homemade beeswax wood polish. Test it on your practice egg first. I, personally, don't love sealing stuff with beeswax polish, but a lot of people do, so there you go. 

  3. Use a polyurethane alternative. Here are a few to play with. 

  4. Use a non-eco-friendly product. I know, I know, but it's my personal philosophy that if we use eco-friendly products whenever possible, then we have the wiggle room to use something not eco-friendly whenever it's legitimately the best solution. Sealant and aerosol spray mount are two products that I do own and use, simply because I haven't yet found acceptable, eco-friendly alternatives. If YOU know of great, eco-friendly alternatives, let me know right this second! 

 I store our stash of Easter eggs year-round with our other holiday decorations, and bring them out sometime after St. Patrick's Day every year, when they once again strike us as new and colorful and festive and fun. Sometime after Easter, I might buy a few more plain wooden eggs to have on hand, because the next year, we're for sure going to want to decorate some more!

P.S. Need even more Easter crafts? Here are all my Easter tutorials right there in one place!

A Quick and Easy Carnival Unit Study

 

Check out the glory that is homemade king cake on this Fat Tuesday that features a full foot of snow on the ground! Earlier today, I was outside attempting to shovel the porch, then the steps from the porch to the driveway, then the godforsakenly long driveway from the garage down to the street. I've been shoveling it practically daily this month, it feels like, when there was, you know, an inch or less of snow on the ground, and it always takes me something like an hour and it sucks.

But whoa. Shoveling a foot of snow is a whole other beast! I was all, "OMG this is hard. This is totally why I've heard that people have heart attacks shoveling snow every winter. OMG AM I HAVING A HEART ATTACK?!?"

Just when I was about to, I don't know... just, like, sit down in the snow and give up, pretty much, a totally random neighbor that I have never seen before in my life literally rolled up my snow-covered driveway in his tractor with an honest-to-god SNOWPLOW attachment on the front and was all, "How about I get your driveway for you?"

Friends, I cannot even tell you how thrilling it was to finish shoveling my porch steps while watching this guy plow my whole driveway for me. Like, right before he showed up it had become clear to me that I was NEVER going to get this driveway shoveled, it just was not in the realm of my possibility, and then BOOM! Half an hour later and I'm tucked back inside the house all warm and comfy and with a skid-free driving surface.

Also, I just need you to know how embarrassing I am. The guy introduced himself, told me who his wife is, and I have just now realized that not only do I not remember his name (I remember his wife's name, though?), but I distinctly remember that I definitely, absolutely did not introduce myself in turn. Just... WTF, ME?!? Peopling with other people is so hard!

ANYWAY, now that I've gotten you to join me in cringing in embarrassment (I'm definitely going to be remembering this in 40 years when I have 2:00 am insomnia...), check out this super fun, super easy, and pretty quick unit study that I pulled together to do with Will yesterday and today. We can pretend like it's part of her AP  Human Geography study, since it's a comparison/contrast of the traditions that surround the same religious holiday around the world, but it's also just really fun, and a chance to admire the spectacle of some beautiful performance art, and an excuse to listen to beautiful music, eat delicious food, and, if you're feeling wild, even dress up a little!

WORLD CARNIVAL BADGE ACTIVITIES

I found this fun Girl Scout badge to award Will after our carnival study. Depending on how strict your local uniform police are, it's appropriate for the front or back of a Girl Scout's uniform (it's going on the front of Will's uniform, because that's how we roll). Or it could just be a cute little patch for a kid's jacket or bookbag!

• New Orleans, Louisiana, holds the largest Mardi Gras celebrations each year.

• This year, even though the parades are cancelled, New Orleans is still doing a lot of fun activities. Check out their website here:

• https://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/

• Watch videos of parades from prior years:

• https://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/videos

• Definitely look at the Yardi Gras photos!

• https://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/news/parade-of-homes-2021-style

• Here’s a really good article about house floats from NPR:

• https://www.npr.org/2021/02/16/967761058/in-a-year-without-parades-mardi-gras-in-new-orleans-is-all-about-house-floats

• The king cake is a beloved Mardi Gras tradition. Read about it here:

• https://www.mardigrasneworleans.com/history/king-cakes

• Make sure you learn the following information:

• When/where they were invented

• What’s the secret inside them, and what it means

• The traditional colors, and what they represent

• Do an Instagram or Google Image search to find examples of king cakes.

• Make a homemade king cake using one of these authentic recipes:

• https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/eat-drink/article_075cd21c-55b3-56e5-b62e-c514de40b4f0.html

• If you’ve got Spotify, here’s a playlist of festive New Orleans music:

• https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1Z8rT8bVkHdD78TIs19Mee?si=g6JKTjvmRcGUn9n3SGDrdg

• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, holds the largest Carnival celebrations each year.

• Read this webpage to explore the various traditions of the Rio Carnival

• https://www.riocarnaval.org/rio-carnival/what-is

• Samba schools are about more than just dancing! Read about them here:

• https://www.riocarnaval.org/rio-samba-school/rio-samba-schools

• Search YouTube for streams of previous years’ parades entering the Sambadrome.

• Read here to see what you should search for, such as the children’s parade and the winners’ parade:

• https://www.riocarnaval.org/samba-parade/samba-parade

• Be aware: topless nudity is very common in the adult parades. 

• YouTube is also a good place to search for a beginner samba lesson. Can you figure out how to do a part of the dance?

• If you’ve got Spotify, here’s playlist of festive Brazilian music:

• https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Ulu7CI97mVnnvil3yBAhO?si=Lced7e7XT5etxlvcvJmTQQ

• Venice, Italy, holds one of the oldest Carnival celebrations each year.

• Read more about its history here:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_of_Venice

• Masks are a very important tradition in the Venice Carnival. You can try making your own mask, or just read these tutorials to explore the process:

• Here’s a bauta mask made from cardboard, aluminum foil, and papier mache:

• https://www.instructables.com/Make-a-Bauta-Mask/

• Here’s a plague doctor mask made by sewing, although you could trace the pattern pieces onto cardboard and use tape, hot glue, and paint:

• https://totallythebomb.com/heres-a-free-pattern-to-make-your-own-quilted-plague-doctor-mask

• If you have Spotify, here’s a Putumayo playlist of Italian music:

• https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4sIMtfPQMRtWedyb8F83dt?si=ahRQ_kupSqym1XgboH7W5g

• Check out this website of other Carnival celebrations across the world:

• https://seeker.io/carnival-2021/

Since I really only wanted to do this unit as a fun study on what would otherwise mostly have been a school-free day for Will (mwa-ha-ha!), we didn't put in the time to make either of the Venice-style Carnival masks--although I am reserving the right to make myself that quilted plague doctor mask at a later time! 

Also, that king cake took plenty of time to make! I showed Will how to dye white sugar, but otherwise she baked the whole masterpiece from scratch completely by herself, and it is DELICIOUS.

Although, when I asked her if she'd put a prize inside the cake she said no, because she didn't want anyone to get it and then feel like they had to host a whole party themselves and make another whole king cake, since it's so much work.

Sweet, thoughtful, literal kid!

January Favorites: Zombies, Racists, and Gay Achilles

Syd and I read "Romeo and Juliet" this month. She had to read on a school-sponsored website with reading comprehension questions embedded in it (blech!), while I got to read from this second-hand Complete Works of Shakespeare with all the important parts already underlined for me and the relevant notes already written. 

January is always such an oddly busy month! You'd think it would be a respite from the chaos of Christmas, but I feel like January is always when Will's high school courses start ramping up in intensity for their final push, and then just when you realize you can now spend a weekend not doing any Christmas crap, Girl Scout cookie season starts! 

Will's also doing another class at our local university this semester, so the kid is swamped! Nevertheless, here are her favorites from what she read in her precious free time in January:

And here's the rest of what she read!

I got a little more reading time in, because I'm not prepping for AP exams or taking a college class, yay! A couple of non-fiction books that I've been in the hold queue for SUCH a long time waiting for both came in last month, so even though they were both heavy and depressing, I tackled them right away so that I could pass them on to the rest of the city:

The New Jim Crow has, and I am not exaggerating, changed my worldview. I definitely knew that there were flaws in the criminal justice system, and I of course knew that there was a lot of unfairness targeted explicitly at BIPOC individuals, but... wow. The criminal justice system is deeply, deliberately flawed, in ways so intrinsic that it's hard for me to wrap my head around what a solution could even possibly look like. It turns out that the criminal justice system is essentially just a really efficient method to continue denying civil rights and social services to BIPOC individuals by the simple method of getting as many as possible labeled as felons and then just denying civil rights and social services to felons. BIPOC individuals are policed far more heavily and given far harsher penalties than white people, and then additional legislation is piled on that does things like denying convicted felons the right to vote, or denying them subsidized housing or automatically barring them from the majority of jobs. 

And then there's the whole business with the War on Drugs, the propaganda for which has buoyed up all kinds of legislation to erode our 14th Amendment rights. I would like to keep ALL of my 14th Amendment rights, thank you very much!

And THEN there's the whole business of turning the prison system into a literal business, so that there is a literal, tangible incentive to jail as many people as possible as cheaply as possible. 

As I was reading, it occurred to me that the kinds of peaceful protests that made up the Civil Rights era would never work today. John Lewis and his fellow protestors knew that they'd be arrested for their sit-ins and marches, but they also knew that when they were, the town would have to pay to house them and feed them and in the meantime, more peaceful protestors would arrive who'd have to be arrested and housed and maintained, all on the town's dime. Eventually, the majority of the communities would have to release their protestors for lack of other options, and when that happened the only way to stop the protests would be to work with the protestors to make their requested changes.  

Now... well, you've seen as well as I have how the BLM protests have gone. The police have plenty of military-grade weaponry to beat the snot out of peaceful protestors, and they'd be just as happy as clams to lock everyone up indefinitely and earn scads of money while doing it. The only exception is if you're white, because in that case you can invade the nation's capitol and poop on the floor and try super hard to murder elected legislators and people will fall all over themselves to pretend like you're antifa in disguise instead of a terrorist.

The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland is a more niche title, because it's really only about the rise and fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana in the 1920s, but it really hit on my interest in the secret white supremacists who live among us. The stupid thing is that the Ku Klux Klan didn't even focus on racism in Indiana, because there weren't enough BIPOC individuals to get the white supremacists all riled up over; instead, they focused on CATHOLICS. And IMMIGRANTS. And, like, everyone joined! When they wanted to recruit in a town, first they'd put on their Klan robes and walk into all the Protestant churches in the middle of their sermons and hand them a bunch of cash. And then they'd have a giant festival with a parade, and some speechifying, and a big picnic dinner prepared by all those church ladies they'd just buttered up, and then a concert, and then when it was nice and dark they'd have a festive cross burning and sign up all their new recruits. And in advance of the 1924 elections, they mobilized to promote pro-Klan candidates for every local election, and then mobilized even more to get them elected. Like, two Klan women would drive to some homemaker's house, and one woman would stay there to babysit the kids while the other drove the housewife to go vote. That is MOBILIZED!

Fortunately-ish, it all went to hell starting in 1925 because it turns out that legislators elected entirely on a platform of hating Catholics and immigrants don't necessarily have any of the actual skill set required to govern, and the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, the guy who was the governor's right-hand man and everyone knew it... yeah, he was also a sex criminal and was directly responsible for the death of a woman he'd horrifically injured. So after his trial it wasn't so much cool anymore to be in the Klan.

The author makes very brief mention of our local scandal of the white supremacists vending at our farmer's market, and I would be so interested to read a further history that connects those two points in time, the early 1920s when apparently being in the Klan was the cool thing to do, and two years ago when it turned out that there were a bunch of people who still thought like that and had just kept their white robes hiding in the closet. I mean, did the Klan really die out, or did people just stop talking about it publicly?

Okay, here's what else I read in January that DIDN'T cause me to spiral into a deep despair about the state of the world (although not gonna lie: I cried at The Song of Achilles):

Here's what else made me cry: you guys, the hyperpop artist that I super like, SOPHIE, died! The artist was so young and talented and the music is so fun! This video is one of my all-time favorite music videos, full stop:

I've read a bunch more cool stuff already this month, and I already can't wait to give you my February update and wander on and on for fifteen paragraphs about the Trials of Apollo series that I just finished and that I now can't stop thinking about. Syd is right: I AM going to have to circle back around and start again with The Lightning Thief!