Congratulations to every high school graduate in the Class of 2024!
And even bigger congratulations to every Girl Scout vest that's been hanging on by an invisible thread since its owner first Bridged to Cadette way back in the sixth grade! You've got cat hair all over you, you haven't been washed in at least five years (because god forbid the dye in those crappy fun patches bleeds!!!), you've been camping and you've been to Mexico, you've fallen into the mud and into the fire, you once got lost for three months but it turned out you were just in the garage that whole time, and one of your badges is sewn on upside-down, but you made it.
You're finally graduating, too!
Who knows what memories and stories this Girl Scout vest will bring to my kid's mind in future years, but I love looking at it and remembering all the adventures that inspired these messily-sewn, overlapping awards. I remember how the kid wrote her first full French-language essay as part of earning that Anne Frank fun patch, and how we spent that first pandemic summer visiting all the Girl Scout camps in our council to earn that Camp Adventure series:
The troop trip to St. Louis! The family trip along the Garfield trail! The overnight at the Newport Aquarium! The Girl Scout camp where the kids all played pirates for a week and couldn't wait to tell me about their midnight raid on the director's cabin and how she'd chased them across camp in the dark in her golf cart!
My personal favorite awards are the pins that you can only receive by visiting a site significant to the Girl Scouts. The kid will always have an official reminder that she's pilgrimaged to Juliette Gordon Low's home and to Pax Lodge:
And she'll always be able to remind herself how many cookies she sold each year!
I love the older badges and IPPs that she's earned. I'm pretty sure I had to ebay that Cadette Trees badge, and it's easily the oldest thing on her vest:
I also really love the Make Your Own badge that she invented and designed and painted herself. She wanted to learn how to play the keyboard, so she made it into a Girl Scout badge and she did it!
No longer being a "Girl Scout Mom" is one of the transitions that I'm working to come to terms with this summer. Yes, I can still volunteer with my Girl Scout troop, and yes, I can continue to volunteer with the Service Unit and the council, and yes, I'm a Lifetime Member so I'll always be a Girl Scout, but you know what I mean. Beth is the second-worst character in Little Women (Amy is the worst, obv), but I really get that part where she gripes about why does everybody have to grow up anyway and why can't they all stay home like her and keep putting on plays in the attic and publishing the family newspaper, etc.
Instead, my brave young Jo is going to march out into the world (see what I did there?) soon, leaving her old mum behind. Thankfully, I taught her all the important Girl Scout life skills already: she can make a kick-ass fire from scratch, she knows three different ways to emergency evacuate a fellow human (I didn't tell the kids at the time, of course, but one of the ways will be particularly useful for moving ambulatory but extremely drunk friends...), she knows what to do if she's lost in the woods, she can upsell you out of every dollar in your wallet, she knows at least four different methods of tie-dye, and she knows that the whole point of learning a new skill is to use that skill in service to others.
So into retirement this seven-year-old Girl Scout vest goes, and off its girl goes to make the world a better place!
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!
I swear that I do not know what these guys would do with themselves if I wasn't around to always be suggesting fun family activities. It's definitely an insidious form of emotional labor, constantly finding and planning stuff to do and cajoling people out of the house to do it when they'd apparently be happy enough just holding the couch down all weekend, but the secret is that it's all for ME. *I'M* the one who likes to do family stuff, and stuff outside of the house, and I'd be bummed to go out alone.
To be fair, I knew from the beginning that my excellent idea of hitting up the Monroe County History Center on a Sunday afternoon was only going to be a "fun" family activity for me. But hey, there's an exhibit on local barns! AND an exhibit on the local punk scene! And there's lots of bonding to be done in shared misery, but fine, we'll add in a walk afterwards over to the bakery that has delicious milk tea and crepe cakes by the slice.
See? Family fun for all!
Alas, the teenagers were completely unimpressed by barns and immediately wandered off to gaze at John Mellencamp's guitar and such:
So they missed out on the excellent visual explanation of the difference between hand-hewn and milled timbers. This one is hand-hewn:
The milled one is in the background:
I thought this illustration of immigrants and where they settled was interesting, not just for what it shows about the spread of barn architecture, but also because it perfectly reflects my own ancestors' path from Ireland to Virginia to Ohio:
One of those early 1800s ancestors changed his last name in adulthood and moved far away from his entire extended family and down to Arkansas (of all places), and if you think I am not burning with curiosity about what brought that on then you have seriously underestimated my capacity for gossip.
Anyway, this was a really cool exhibit because it took all the old barns around the county that you always notice when you drive by and it wrote up a whole museum display about each of them:
My favorite part in each blurb is learning what each barn is up to these days. 4-H is POPULAR around here!
I like the Vernacular style best. That style is essentially just something along the lines of, "I need to build me a barn. A plan, you say? Who needs a plan to build a barn?"
I see this barn the most, because it's over by the post office that's open the latest:
I'd mostly wanted to go to this museum to see the exhibit on the local punk scene. I feel like the punk scene was kind of on the wane by the time I got to Bloomington (although I swear I remember Pretty Pony), but, perhaps thanks to having a stellar music school here, there have always been plenty of indie musicians. My best memory is the time I used part of my grad school scholarship to sign up for a recreational yoga class, then halfway through the first class suddenly thought, "Huh, is my yoga teacher one of the Blake Babies?"
Why yes, she was! And if you think that I did not come to the next class with my Blake Babies CDs (Innocence and Experience is my favorite!) for her to sign... then you would be right, because I have always been and will always be way too bashful for that.
I'm equally impressed that the museum has such a substantial list of the punk groups that performed in Bloomington. That type of info is more ephemeral than their promo flyers, and yet the exhibit had five lines' worth of band names extending across the entire wall:
I VERY much wish they could have also had listening stations or some kind of way that we could hear the archival music, but I guess that would be a copyright nightmare.
I've got a couple more to look for now, thanks to this wall map:
This map says that there's another cemetery across the street from the Mt. Salem Cemetery--that's the one that has the 116-year-old guy--but on Google Maps all there is there is forest and an old quarry. Ten bucks says I get arrested this year for trespassing (wearing my high-visibility safety vest, of course, because hunters) in old limestone quarries!
After all that learning, crepe cake and milk tea really hit the spot:
It was the younger kid who first convinced us to try this place; she'd been wanting to try crepe cake FOREVER, and she was so stoked! Joke's on her, though, I guess, because it turns out that she doesn't super like crepe cake, and the first milk tea she got here was kind of weird, too (for the love of all that's good, keep your picky kids away from taro!), so now she's not into it anymore but the older kid and I love it so we keep dragging her here endlessly.
Thai milk tea and matcha crepe cake is the perfect taste combo!
And what's this week's (Enforced) Fun Family Activity, you ask? Well, last night three of us went out to a local theater production, then we met up with the fourth one for late-night tacos downtown. And tonight there's supposed to be a cabaret-style performance of a selection of songs from Sondheim's Assassins in a downtown bar that claims to be open to 18+ for the show. I have no idea how to act in a bar--do you get to order a cocktail, or are you supposed to stick to beer? If the latter, what beer do you get?--so that will be a fun adventure.
P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
Did I tell you that we have construction people in the house AGAIN?!?
We're rounding in on the one-year anniversary of that time that a tree fell on our house, but considering that the roof people didn't even finish that job until well into winter, and that thanks to that nightmare we have not had a single year without a construction project since 2020, I feel like I should probably replace the disused menu board in my kitchen with a sign that reads, "It's been [#] Days Since We've Last Had Construction People in the House."
This current construction project actually stems from the 2022 project of replacing the hideous floors in the kids' bedrooms. When the workers ripped out the floor in the older kid's room, they saw a ton of water damage on one exterior wall and they theorized that the old concrete porch out there might be funneling water towards the house. Sometimes this company will add on another project to the one we already hired them to do--that's how we got the kids' bathroom floor retiled!--but we had to get back in line for this one. It was a LONG line, I guess, since our turn has just come up again, but it's for the best, probably, since, you know, it took us half of 2023 to get a roof back on our house!
I was sort of afraid this porch project would result in them having to rip out and remake all the exterior walls facing the porch, since that's generally how our luck has run, but this time we were lucky! None of the water damage needed anything that extensive, none of the termite damage(!!!) turned out to be current, and the porch didn't even need to be repoured. Instead, we've got some brand-new watertight sealing on the exterior walls around the porch, and all-new termite- and water-free wood inside. And the guy putting on the siding only got stung by wasps twice.
And because you never want to let these guys leave when you've got them here (remember that long line!), my partner got them to agree to fix a shockingly janky wall in the older kid's bedroom, so to circle back around to my first sentence, THAT'S why we've got workers in the house right now.
And the whole point of that story is that I'm too bashful to sew in the room that the wall guy has to pass through 40,000 times per day, so instead of doing this project leisurely over the course of a week, as I'd envisioned, I instead panic-sewed most of it during the day he got called to a different site, thoroughly warping my personality by listening to my fairy smut on headphones the entire time.
My idea was that I would quilt each graduate a set of postcards and stamp them, but 1) the price of postcard stamps is now so high that you might as well just buy regular Forever stamps, and 2) my partner and older kid both thought that my quilted postcards, while they really are a thing that can be mailed, were so nice that the recipients would fret at tossing them willy-nilly in the mail as-is. So although I kept the postcard format, my older kid helped me make envelopes for them out of our stash scrapbook paper ("Are we EVER going to use up all this paper?!?" she groused, but to be fair, this single pad of 12"x12" paper *has* seemed to pop up in every paper project we've done since about 2010 or so!), and I pre-stamped them for college student mailing convenience.
My favorite thing about these postcards is how they serve as a sort of sampler for all the patchwork techniques I currently know. Here are some triangle hexies:
That batik canvas is from the first curtains I ever sewed!
These are actually all postage square quilt blocks I made over a decade ago... before I learned how to sew a straight seam and properly square things, ahem:
And these are new postage stamp quilt blocks made from stash, because I'm still in the habit of cutting and saving 1.5" pieces from my last bits of scraps whenever I sew:
Inside this quilt block is the very last square inch of the purple striped fabric that used to be the ring sling that was my very first sewing project ever. I wore both my babies in it!
And because my NEWEST newest-to-me technique isn't quilting but gif-making, here's a gif of all my quilted postcards--I've learned how to slow down the frame rate, so it's not quite as obnoxious as my quilted coasters gif:
And here's all the envelopes ready to be stuffed!
I sewed zippered pouches to hold the stationery sets, a nice pen, and a glue stick since my homemade envelopes aren't self-sealing, ahem.
Most of these stationery sets are now with their recipients, ready to have records of college adventures written on them and sent off to loved ones. I kind of want to see what it would look like to put a quilted patchwork front onto a single-fold greeting card, though, and I also want to make a few more of these postcards for myself, because in my experience, college students like to receive mail even more than they like to send it!
P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
A mini quilt block coaster is a useful–and beautiful!–way to destash some of your prettiest quilting cottons.
I do not know what happens to all of my coasters! Over the years I’ve made tile coasters, chalkboard coasters, and endless quilt block coasters, and nearly all of those are simply… gone! To be honest, I probably don’t want to know why they go missing so regularly in the house I share with my partner and two teenagers, but just between us, I suspect foul play.
It’s fine, though. I do LOVE the hexagonal rainbow quilt block coasters that I sewed four years ago–rather, I love the single one of those that still exists in my family room!–but change is fun. Anyway, a new set of coasters is a great way to destash a bit of my quilting cotton!
For this project, I was specifically excited about destashing the last bit of a super cute honeybee print that I’ve had for quite a while and was down to its very last 1/16 or so of a yard. There wasn’t a panel of it wide enough to do much of anything with, but there were just enough bees left on it, at just the right size, for me to fussy cut the center piece of a set of bright, summery quilt block coasters.
So that’s what I did!
Turning a mini quilt block into a coaster is an easy project–all the hard work is in sewing that quilt block, after all! Here’s how to do it!
Materials
You will need:
mini quilt block. Any quilt block that’s approximately coaster-sized, say between 4 and 6 inches wide, will work for this project. If you want something bigger, just call it a mug rug! For mini quilt block ideas, check out my mini log cabin quilt block tutorial.
cotton batting or equivalent. Coasters are actually a great way to use up the last scraps of cotton batting leftover from a quilt project. I also like to use recycled polyester felt; if the felt is on the thin side, like craft felt often is, you can double it up for this project.
backing fabric. This back-to-front binding piece should be 1″ larger than the quilt block on all sides.
measuring, cutting, and sewing supplies.
Step 1: Cut the batting.
Iron and square the mini quilt block, then set it directly on the felt or batting and use it as a template to cut the piece to size.
One of the nice things about both felt and batting is that they’re a bit grippy, so if you’re moving straight to the next step you don’t even really need to pin this. But a few clips around the edges are also fine!
Step 2: Measure and cut the backing fabric to size.
Prep your backing fabric by washing, ironing, etc., then lay it right side down onto your work surface. I like to set my quilt block + batting stack right side up directly on top of the backing fabric, then use a clear, gridded quilting ruler to cut the backing fabric 1″ wider than the quilt block on all sides.
You’ll need to trim the corners of the backing fabric to reduce bulk in the binding. I always just eyeball this by first ironing the corners down, as in the above photo, then hand-cutting them off about halfway between that fold and the corner of the quilt block.
Step 3: Sew the binding.
Fold each side in to touch the edge of the quilt block, then iron to crease. Then, fold each side in again at the edge of the quilt block, bringing that first folded edge over the quilt block to create the binding. Adjust the corners by hand until they look tidy; you can make them look mitered or leave them as-is, as long as there are no raw fabric edges showing.
Stitch the edge of the binding down to the coaster. On my sewing machine, a basic Singer Heavy Duty, I use a zigzag stitch with a width of 3 and a length of 2.
That’s the entire process to make a coaster! I made six coasters, some with hearts and some with bees, and I’ve already thrown a couple in the wash because apparently we’re all messy coffee drinkers in this family. I LOVE that these coasters are as easily washable as our quilts and clothes!
Because these coasters are so summery, AND because I’ve got so much fabric, ahem, I’m already thinking about the idea of using these seasonally and sewing some different coasters that we can use in the autumn and winter. Little skull centers with orange, black, and purple frames would be perfect for October, don’t you think? And perhaps little hearts with pink, purple, and white frames for Valentine’s Day?
P.S. Want to know more about our adventures in learning, and the resources that we use to accomplish them? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
It's nifty, but a little of that gif goes a loooooong way--please feel free to scroll down until you can't see it! I'll wait!
That's more soothing, right? Now, let's begin.
As of today, I think I've finally broken out of my months-long obsession with mini quilt blocks--nothing like a seven-hour session sewing mini quilt blocks to finish up gifts for my two favorite members of the Class of 2024 to break me... I mean, break me OUT. Ahem.
I also might have damaged my mind by listening to A Court of Mist and Fury pretty much that entire time. At one point I walked through the family room, where both kids have so far spent their summer doing their darndest to keep the couch from flying away (and it makes my heart sing with joy to see it!), and I was all, "Kids! I am so worried about Feyre's plan to steal the Book of Breathings! I know she's the only person who can stop the King of Hyburn from using the magic cauldron, but you can't winnow into the building where it's hidden! It's too dangerous!"
The kids gave each other that look that I don't understand since I'm an only child, but I think it means something along the lines of "What are we going to do about Mom?", and then one of them carefully said, "Um, are you still reading that fairy smut?"
Y'all. This one is barely smutty at all! And it turns out that it's very good! It even provides some fixes for stuff from the first book that makes it less stupid!
Anyway... the grad gifts I sewed are sooooo darling, and as a bonus I was able to use up several practice mini quilt blocks I'd made without knowing what I wanted to do with them. Y'all KNOW how much I love using up stuff!
Or not, because for this project I cut a ton of fabric 1.5" wide, and whenever I wanted to vary the finished width of a piece I played with varying my seam allowance. It only kind of worked, because for some reason I couldn't figure out how to make the log cabin pieces around the bee .5" wide after sewing a .25" seam on the other side to preserve my fussy cut bee--
But whatever. It still keeps my coffee from dripping onto the table:
My newest innovation comes from splurging on some gridded mylar stencil sheets, because I cut a template for the 1.5" square that let me fussy cut my pieces, perfectly centering the element I wanted to feature. That and these plastic sewing clips that I'm still delighted by have transformed my sewing for the better!
I've got a proper tutorial for sewing these coasters scheduled for Wednesday, and then I'll show off the patchwork quilted grad gifts that I'm SUUUUPER excited about.
And then I should probably get started learning how to Foundation Paper Piece, because I can't send my baby off to college without a bookshelf quilt!
P.S. Want to know more about my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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