A few weeks ago, one of my teenagers asked me, "Hey, what Halloween projects are we doing this month?"
OMG I was thrilled. Stockholm Syndrome has set in, y'all!
Also, you guys. My family has TRADITIONS. Good ones, too! Ones that the teenagers like and happily anticipate! I messed up on a lot of parenting stuff, but traditions I figured out all by myself from scratch.
So, since Halloween projects are clearly a tradition (that I didn't know until now was actually a tradition, but okay!), every weekend this month a kid or two and I have been doing a Halloween project together. A couple of weekends ago Syd, Matt, and I did this--
--which, more on that later, but I'll just say that 1) a Jack-o-lantern is actually quite painful to wear on your head and 2) it was TOTALLY WORTH IT.
And last weekend, Will and I took a couple of pairs of Syd's old ballet tights and made cement pumpkins!
Coincidentally, these were also a little painful, but also totally worth it!
To make cement pumpkins, you need:
legs from old tights. The parts that you use shouldn't have holes or runs.
Cut a section of leg anywhere from six inches to a foot long, and knot one end.
Add a cupful of Portland cement mix to a bucket, then add some water and stir. You want the cement to be about the consistency of cake batter, so play around with adding more cement mix and water until it feels right.
2. Fill the tights with cement.
Scoop cement into the tights and shake it down to the bottom. Add cement until you have the size of pumpkin you want, although remember to leave enough room in the tights to knot the top:
3. Add rubber bands.
Thump the cement-filled tights on the tabletop a couple of times to settle the cement, then adjust it so that the bottom knot is tucked into the middle bottom of the cement package and the top knot is centered at the top.
Begin wrapping rubber bands around the cement package:
Through trial and error, Will and I discovered that if the rubber bands are tight and cut really tight grooves into the cement, the tights and rubber band will be nearly impossible to remove from those grooves later. We highly recommend rubber bands that are wrapped more like the blue one that runs vertically in the photo below, NOT the pink one that runs horizontally:
4. Let cure, then remove the rubber bands and tights.
Allow the cement to cure for at least 24 hours, after which it should look something like this:
Loosen the tights by grasping the knots on each end and pulling them away from the cement:
Then, tear away the rubber bands and peel off the tights and discard:
They're quite dusty afterwards, so rinse them with the garden hose.
You can embellish these pumpkins in all kinds of ways, from shiny sealant to paint or decoupage, adding corks or twine or braided cord for a vine, felt or leather or book page leaves, etc. Will and I found, though, that all our pumpkins happened to look cute in a single stack on the coffee table, so that's what we did!
But to be fair, it was never created to be cute. It was created to be somewhere to sit whilst putting on one's shoes, and to host plenty of storage for annoying cold weather accessories during the annoying cold weather.
And it works great at both those jobs!
It didn't even need a cushion added to make it comfortable, because it was fine. It was just your bog-standard bench, you know? Anyway, you only sit there for a couple of minutes at a time, and then off you go to sit somewhere more interesting.
HOWEVER, Matt made the bench seat from 2x4s, arranged as slats with just the smallest bit of spacing between them. The spacing is just wide enough for every spec of crud in the known universe to wedge itself between them, and just narrow enough that I could never for the life of me figure out how to clean it all out.
Therefore, in true Southern Gothic style, I figured that if one can't fix something, one should instead simply cover it up and just pretend like the rot doesn't exist.
Enter this equally disgusting piece of high-density foam that I have been hoarding for several years!
I don't really know why it's this gross--it's literally just a surplus piece from a giant piece of foam that I bought once upon a time to remake the cushions on our old dorm sofa.
Okay, wait. I actually might have a bit of an idea...
I am a pandemic cliche, because March 2020 is when I and all the other depressed teenagers fell in love with Mother Mother, a 15-year-old Canadian alt-rock band.
To be fair, though, I didn't discover them on TikTok the way all the other depressed teenagers did; instead, my own personal resident depressed teenager, with whom I share a Spotify Premium account, started playing them on heavy rotation, and they just sort of absorbed into my subconscious.
So in this newly post-pandemic world that I'm trying to live hard in, I was ecstatic to pack an overnight bag, shove my husband in the car, grab our kid from her Color Theory class (the other kid stayed home to walk the dog, feed the chickens, and go to her Chemistry class. Also, she's not into music), and drive four hours--
Okay, we stopped for gas, sandwiches, and autumn-themed Little Debbies. If you make an autumn-, Halloween-, or Christmas-themed snack food, I WILL BUY IT.
--straight to The Pageant in St. Louis, where this marvelous, miraculous, magical event was occurring:
Here's my best memory of the night: after standing in line for an hour, getting wanded by security (who did not blink when I told him it was my steel-toed boots setting off the metal detector, because, you know, all the other depressed teenagers were wearing them, too!), and getting our hands stamped, we finally entered the venue, where my teenager stopped dead.
"Are they playing tonight?" she asked, gesturing to the Vundabar backdrop that was already in place.
"Uh, yeah," I said, distracted by looking for the best spot to hold our ground for the next five hours. "Sly Stone had to pull out, so Vundabar's the other opening act."
The teenager, who was already happy about seeing Mother Mother live, proceeded to be very much more happy, because apparently I had not known that Vundabar is one of her favorite bands. It was a piece of lucky concert magic!
Here's my favorite song from the first opening act, Transviolet:
And here's that lucky concert magic in action!
Happy teenager spotted in the wild:
Here's my favorite Vundabar song:
And here's the most exciting moment of my life to date:
They played all of my favorite songs. Like, ALL of my favorite songs. All of them!
I rewrite my list of favorite Mother Mother songs constantly, but here's my current favorite, and part of that is because of how beautiful its live performance was:
I love everything about watching a favorite band perform live, but I love most the experience of the entire venue, cell phone flashlights on, singing along with a beloved song. It's what I remember sitting in a church pew and singing a hymn along with the church choir and the rest of the congregation to be like when I was very small.
I was beside myself with glee, and my teenager was sweet enough to record that glee for posterity:
I didn't mask, and even though I'm double-vaxxed and double boosted, I fully expected to get Covid here. But I did not! Another piece of lucky concert magic!
That teenager behind me HATED me, and kept putting her giant phone right over my head and speaking really loudly during songs. Everybody else in front of me had really giant phones, too, though, and the view through all of their screens was so sharp and saturated that at one point I leaned over and screamed in my teenager's ear, "How come everyone else's cell phone photos look better than ours?"
My teenager screamed back, "They've all got fancy iPhones!"
We've got the cheapest Samsungs that AT&T will sell us, so that solves that!
However, my teenager took all these photos on my crappy Samsung Galaxy (Girl Scout Ambassador Photographer badge, here she comes!), and I think they are marvelous:
It was the BEST show. I was SO happy:
Hobbling back to the car on sore feet after midnight Central time wasn't quite as fun, and the entire post-midnight staff at the 24-hour McDonald's coincidentally also hated us, but still. It was the best.
The next morning, we had exactly enough time to walk to this creperie, eat a delicious crepe each (is this my first crepe ever? Perhaps!)--
Nutella, strawberries, and bananas!
--and walk back to the hotel before we had to check out and drive the four hours back home to get the teenager to her ballet studio in time for class.
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
My family is SO hard on our stuff. We are the illustrated definition of not deserving nice things, because at any given time we are either muddy, actively painting, hosting five foster kittens from the local animal shelter, hosting thirteen teenagers from our Girl Scout troop, or just, you know, not paying attention to what we're doing. I'm the one who put a scorch mark in our (to be fair, at least 40-year-old) carpet by... well, I carried a pot of freshly popped popcorn directly from the stovetop and put it on the floor. Apparently that's very different from carrying a pan of piping hot Pizza Rolls directly from the oven and putting it on the floor. Who knew?
So you might notice that here on CAGW I post a lot of tutorials for washable covers for furniture. I've got couch covers, chair covers, tablecloths and cozies of all kinds to attempt to save my stuff from the negligence of me and everyone around me.
And the latest on the list? Cushion covers for my benches! It's easy to see why the hallway bench needs a cushion cover, because that's where everybody takes off their muddy boots and clay-covered sneakers and grimy yard Crocs.
No matter what cushion you've got that needs a washable, reusable cover, I'm not going to judge you. Instead, I'm going to show you how to make that cover from any handy blanket that you've got in your stash.
Here's what you'll need!
old blanket, quilt, bedspread, or similar piece of fabric. These thicker fabrics mimic upholstery weight fabric, so do a similar job holding up under wear and keeping spills from soaking through to the cushion below. They also tend to most often mimic the look of upholstery weight fabric, although there is no shame in covering a cushion in a vintage novelty He-Man bedspread, either! I had to work hard to convince myself to use this wool blanket that I thrifted (for $2.50!!!!!!!) instead of a vintage Sesame Street bed cover, and the only reason I decided against the Sesame Street cover is that the wool blanket is sturdier.
patternmaking and cutting and sewing supplies. You'll need large-format paper to draw the cushion cover pattern, and all the usual suspects for measuring, cutting, and sewing.
bias tape (optional). With this wool blanket, I don't need it, but fabric that's prone to raveling will require it.
Step 1: Make a cushion cover pattern and use it to cut your fabric.
To make your cushion cover pattern, measure your cushion's length, width, and height.
To the length and width measurement, add .5", depending on the thickness of your fabric. My wool blanket is moderately thick, but if I was using one of those vintage 1980s bedspreads with lots of batting, I'd probably add more like 1".
Add a flap to each side of the cover pattern. Each flap should be the height of the cushion plus .5".
Lay out the pattern on your fabric and cut it out.
Step 2: Sew the cushion cover and add elastic.
With right sides together, sew the adjacent short sides of each of the flaps to each other, using a .25" seam allowance. Finger press the seams open.
Measure approximately 6" of elastic for each corner of the cushion cover. Mark the center of each piece of elastic, then pin the center to the corner seam.
Set your sewing machine to its widest zigzag and longest stitch length. Stretch the elastic, then zigzag it to the raw edge of the cushion cover, keeping it centered on the corner seam. This is exactly the way that you sew a fitted sheet!
Repeat for each corner of the cushion cover.
Step 3 (optional): Add bias tape.
If the raw edges of the cushion cover will tend to fray, encase them in double-fold bias tape.
I like to have a spare of these types of home items, and to save space and time, I like to go ahead and put the spare on, as well. So although you can't see it (mwa-ha-ha!), underneath this wool blanket cushion cover is a second cushion cover, this time sewn from an unfinished vintage quilt top. It's a lot cuter but a lot less sturdy, which is why it's only the backup cover.
However, whenever I'm emergency cleaning the house for imminent company, that nicer cover hiding underneath the plain, serviceable cover makes it super easy to whip off the plain cover, toss it in the dirty laundry, and have a cuter cover ready for company. It gets to show off for just as long as it takes to wash my workhorse cushion cover, then that cover goes back on top.
So if you ever come visit me and you find yourself sitting on top of a sweet vintage quilt-covered bench cushion while you take off your filthy barn boots, then you know that you're VERY special!
P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
Bless our school librarian for making sure we had high-interest schlock to read, because I remember that it took me SO LONG to be able to check the book out for myself, it was so popular. Kids who hadn't ever read for pleasure before checked Go Ask Alice out and tore through it, delighted, I'm sure, by all the discussion--IN WRITING!!--of sex and drugs and more sex and more drugs.
I vividly remember discussing the book with all of my equally naive junior high friends, firmly taking everything that we read at face value. Yep, that's definitely what LSD feels like! Wow, what vivid and accurate depictions of sex!
And of course we all believed that it was true. I mean, obviously we did! Because here was the book cover!
I've actually thought about Go Ask Alice off and on over the years, it was that vivid in my mind, and I've re-read it at least a couple of times. The first time I read it as an adult, I realized what crap it was, of course--inaccurate AND poorly written, with apologies to poor little tween me who loved it so. It's okay to read schlock, small Julie!
And then my turn for Unmask Alice finally came, and I read it in one day during a delightfully dull Sunday, and now I realize that 1) Go Ask Alice, and its popular companion book (that I never read) Jay's Journal, were crucial to lots of other stupid stuff that I experienced in junior high, and 2) the author of these books, Beatrice Sparks, was a monster. Just... a terrible person. Probably a sociopath. Perhaps a psychopath. Or maybe just a really, really, really shit human being.
Tangent: around the beginning of the pandemic (how has it been over 2 years since March 2020!?!? Have I seriously been consistently this stressed out for 29 months?), I became OBSESSED with the podcast You're Wrong About. Eventually I listened to it so much that I got sick of it, so now I only listen to the episodes that are of particular interest to me, but man, for a while I could hear Michael's and Sarah's voices in my head whenever I closed my eyes. My favorite episodes are the Wayfair one, Koko the Gorilla (apologies to the mom friends who then had to listen to me tell them, in turn, that Koko was a lie, Tonya Harding, and stranger danger. Other than Wayfair, their sweet spot for me was their revisiting and debunking some half-remembered and misunderstood something or other from my childhood.
This episode on D.A.R.E., then, is perfect:
D.A.R.E. was SUCH a big deal in my junior high! The school used up so much of our valuable instruction time with D.A.R.E. pep rallies and motivational speakers and "Don't Do Drugs" campaigns. Some kids wore their D.A.R.E T-shirts around school, looking like absolute tools, and they would sometimes perform anti-drug skits during lunch, because god forbid the eighth-graders be permitted to eat their Lunchables in peace.
You'll probably be unsurprised to learn that D.A.R.E. was a low-key scam, and it did not have a discernible effect on teenage drug use. How fitting, then, to learn from Unmask Alice that Go Ask Alice, itself a low-key scam, was largely used to justify all of those 1980s misguided War on Drugs tactics. I mean, I guess Beatrice Sparks isn't solely responsible for Black men jailed for life for possessing marijuana, but she's absolutely partly responsible! After all, she pretended to be a teen psychologist and pretended this diary full of absolutely bonkers drug usage hijinks was 100% real and could happen to any teenager.
I want all those hours I spent being forced to sit in the basketball bleachers and chant "Just Say No" back, Beatrice!
I did NOT read Jay's Journal as a kid, which is a blessing because the animal torture would have upset me. I did check it out at the same time as Unmask Alice, though. I flipped through it instead of reading it, because it's both terribly written and loathsome.
The book purports to be another "true" teenager's journal. Jay's mother gave Sparks this journal so she could do for it what she did for Go Ask Alice. Jay was a typical teenager who got tangled up in Satanism and witchcraft, became possessed by a demon, and committed suicide. The journal chronicles his descent into darkness, and includes details about mind control, levitation, Satanic rituals, and other activities that I seriously cannot believe people actually bought into, except that this book, according to Unmask Alice, was at the forefront of the Satanic Panic.
Here then, happily enough, is a You're Wrong About episode on the Satanic Panic!
My family wasn't terribly devout, so the Satanic Panic only screwed up my life in a few small ways. The Southern Baptist kids kept trying to trick me into going to their churches with them to hear their various youth pastors lecture on Hell and Satan and the Apocalypse. I usually tried to get out of going, but I got Saved SO MANY times because once you were there, letting them Save you was really the most expedient route into getting to leave again. Truly. The whole fucking church would be singing and a bunch of people would be weeping at the altar and your friend, the youth pastor, and usually some other random people would be standing over you giving you the hard sell to offer up your soul to Christ or whatever. Ugh, it was so awkward! I blame my current social anxiety solely on being forcibly Saved inside every Southern Baptist and Pentecostal church in town when I was a child.
The other main way that the Satanic Panic screwed up my youth is that my high school D&D games were irrevocably made worse after my high school boyfriend's uncle came to visit one weekend, saw my boyfriend's epic and enviable collection of Dungeon Master Guides and various other D&D supplements, and convinced his dad to set them on fire in the backyard because they were "Satanic." We had to work from just the one basic Dungeon Master Guide after that, until finally another friend switched us to Star Wars roleplay instead.
Okay, last weird thing: did anyone else spend hours laying on their stomachs on the living room carpet and watching Do You Know the Muffin Man?
Um, did those young actors' parents know that their children were going to be topless on TV, staging a faux Satanic ritual? How on earth were those kids not traumatized while spitting out their lines in the courtroom scenes? How on earth was *I* not traumatized watching this crap all by myself on a random Saturday afternoon? Seriously, why was nobody supervising me and engaging me in enriching socio-emotional learning or academic activities?
Okay, so playing into the War on Drugs AND the Satanic Panic caused minor annoyances in my childhood, but that's not why Beatrice Sparks was a bad person. She was a bad person because, according to Unmask Alice, she plagiarized Jay's Journal from the real journal of a child who struggled with mental illness and who died by suicide. That child's mother really did give her son's journal to Sparks so she could do with it what she did with Go Ask Alice, mainly raise awareness of childhood mental illness. And Beatrice Sparks turned that child's diary into a sensationalist, violent, disgusting narrative in which the poor kid becomes a Satanist and does terrible things. In her worst move, she took an entry in which the kid wrote about one of his very few genuinely sweet and happy experiences, pretend marrying his girlfriend in front of a statue in the park after a school dance, and she turned it into a Black Marriage scene, in which the couple's friends pour animal blood over the couple's naked bodies and they have sex in front of everyone. Then someone murders a kitten.
It would be hard to think of a way to further profane that poor kid's precious memory of a time when he felt truly happy and loved. Sparks was a monster.
And to make it worse, Sparks plagiarized so closely that she barely changed any of the names and places in the diary, so much so that everyone from around there who read the book immediately figured out who it was about. And just like me and everyone else in Kimmons Junior High did with Go Ask Alice, everyone from this kid's area believed Jay's Journal completely. They believed that this kid, who'd died only three or four years ago, had been a Satanist. They bullied his siblings. People desecrated his grave. Kids claimed that his ghost was haunting various sites. Check out the saddest Amazon review I've ever seen.
I read Unmask Alice weeks ago, and I still can't get over how specifically cruel that was. I've told everyone I know about it--twice in some cases! But here's the weird part. Today is October 13, for me. I'm standing writing this at my kitchen counter, finishing up baking the last of a quadruple batch of pumpkin cookies that my teenager and I started this afternoon, low-key watching out the window for my partner to pull up with the teenager coming home from Nutcracker rehearsal (Go, Team Mouse!), because as she hops out of the car, I'm gonna hop in and my partner and I are going to hit the gym while the teenager makes dinner. It's back day AND sheet pan quesadilla night!
So I'm standing here, and I Googled Alden Barrett's name to see if there are any updates now that everyone in his community should know perfectly well that it doesn't make any sense to burn black candles on top of his nice headstone and that obviously nobody ever saw him and Goody Proctor with the devil. I found his Find a Grave listing, which is just heartbreaking because indeed, his headstone is STILL broken, but intriguingly, the blurb also talks about a rock opera that a local Utah band, Grain, had written about him.
Well, you know how I feel about musicals, so now I'm off Googling and Spotifying and YouTubing to see if I can find a recording of this opera. And you are not going to believe what I found. Grain has revamped this rock opera, renamed it Pleasant Grove Rock Opera, and is holding its world premiere tonight.
Right now, in fact! Such a strange coincidence!
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!
Syd is studying and practicing creative writing more intensely this year, and we are having a LOT of fun with it. Creative writing with a high school student is now officially one of my Top Five subjects from our entire homeschool history together.
In keeping with my tradition of using one textbook as a spine, supplemented heavily, this is our Creative Writing spine:
Syd completes the daily 10-minute freewrite taught in this book each school day, although she likes to use it for different purposes than the "automatic writing" that Gertrude Stein devised. Currently, I think she's writing a serialized story in her daily 10-minute bursts, a high-interest, low-stakes challenge that's perfect for this study.
Weekly, Syd reads, records, and writes a few sentences of review of at least one novel, one short story, and one poem. I'd originally had high hopes that I could steer her towards some canonical works of my own choosing (will I never have a child who finishes a MENSA reading list?!?), but Syd prefers to make her own choices, which is, of course, better since her choices can fit her interests and aid her engagement and interest. Since she happily completes these assignments every week, I will not protest!
Syd is also working her way through Wordly Wise Book 12 this year, because an extensive vocabulary is the best tool you can have in your creative writing toolbox. This is the last book in the Wordly Wise series, gasp!, so I'll have to think of something new for spelling/vocabulary next year, because I simply cannot have a homeschool that does not include spelling/vocabulary acquisition.
My favorite parts of this Creative Writing study, though, are when we come together to write, play, and make creative connections. While I don't do formal, "school"-style lessons, I like each of our meet-ups to have a warm-up activity, a writing activity that we do together, and a writing activity, ideally inspired by our lesson, that Syd can work on in her own time and turn in later.
Six Degrees of Wikipedia is an uninspired title for a super-fun game that we sometimes play for a warm-up activity. It comes from Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, which Matt and I like to play, and of course from Six Degrees of Separation.
To play Six Degrees of Wikipedia, you pick your starting point and your ending point, both as random as possible. The other day, Syd and I started with "Walt Disney," and wanted to end with "apricot." So we both went to the Wikipedia page for Walt Disney, then using only the blue links, we tried to get to "apricot." As we went, we wrote down every link we clicked on so we could follow our path later.
We both got from Walt Disney to apricots, but the path that each of us took was completely different. I went from the link to California, then through California's produce exports, then through types of fruit. Syd went through some animation links to get to colors to apricot the color to apricot the fruit.
The lesson, of course, is that there is more than one path from A to B, and the practice is in opening your mind to making creative connections to get you down that path.
Another creative thinking warm-up activity that we like is Dictionary Definitions (titling is not my strong suit). We each take a dictionary (every home needs multiple dictionaries!), and put five or so abstract terms on index cards, one term per card. Next, we lay them all face-up so we can both see them, and we spend a few minutes writing vividly imagined non-definitions for some of the terms. The "definition" should be a vivid image that defines the term without literally defining the term--think along the lines of "tell me the definition without telling me the definition."
When we've both got a few definitions, we trade cards, and the other person has to try to match our definitions to the correct terms. It's almost always possible! Here are some of my recent favorites:
Syd's definitions are always the funniest.
Our "lesson" the first day we did the Dictionary Definitions warm-up was actually a comparison/contrast of vivid imagery vs. concrete details. We traded these picture books that have vivid imagery back and forth (pro tip: picture books are SO GREAT for illustrating key literary terms and writing concepts without having to devote a ton of time to reading!):
In each of these books, the author uses vivid imagery in place of concrete details. The Black Book of Colors is particularly interesting because it actually does use concrete details, but it uses them AS vivid imagery to explain an abstract concept.
Next, we read Dreamers, which uses vivid imagery to tell a story. The imagery works well to signal sensory overwhelm and to make scenarios that might ordinarily feel familiar instead feel abstract and foreign.
The special thing about Dreamers, however, is that there's an author's note afterwards in which the author tells the same story plainly, with concrete details. She couldn't have created a better contrast if she was writing this book solely to my specifications for this lesson!
The activity lent itself perfectly to an assignment asking Syd to write a story two ways, one with primarily vivid, abstract imagery rather than concrete details, and one with primarily concrete details rather than vivid, abstract imagery.
On another day, we talked about writing prompts and how to use them creatively. There are tons of books whose primary purpose is to provide writing prompts and creative writing exercises. Good academic choices are 59 Reasons to Write and What If?, but there are so many highly accessible, open-and-go choices, as well:
Of these, Syd and I have had the most fun using the Amazing Story Generator for timed writing exercises. We each generate a story prompt, then spend ten or so minutes just riffing on it. Then we trade and read each other's brilliant pieces!
Inspired by the Amazing Story Generator, Syd made her own writing prompt creator. Here are a couple of my favorite randomly-generated prompts:
I mean, don't you want to read both of those stories?!?
So far, we're happily invested in all kinds of short story writing, but my goal is to drop everything for NaNoWriMo, and then perhaps try our hands at some poetry. Syd doesn't like either of these ideas nearly as much as I do, though, so if I can't convince her, there's nothing wrong with a full year of short stories!
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