Orangette Makes REALLY Good Banana Bread

I've been feeling a little lonely lately. The girls have hit a sweet spot in their ages and temperaments, in which every day together is like a playdate. They start in the morning, directly after breakfast, engaging together in one imaginative game after another, leaving a wake of unholy mess behind them, and they continue thus for the entire day. Dress-up moves to dinosaurs moves to stuffed animals moves to hanging out with the tadpoles and moves from there to something else. Heck, they even fix their own lunches--peanut butter sandwiches, YoBaby yogurt, and carrots. I don't eat that well.

I'm very lucky, obviously. I spend the entire day in my own business, now, writing and crafting and making lesson plans, etc. Except that when I'm not fixing lunch for the kidlets, I forget to eat, and when neither kid comes to me bored and they both forget to fight, I forget to suggest taking a trip anywhere, and when neither kid needs a book read or a board game partner I forget to look up from what I'm doing for six hours and then I tend to come to myself at 3:30 pm each day, unshowered and unfed and with a headache and staring at that unholy mess. Yikes.

I would never dare take the children from their happily engaged play to drag them to whatever activities I'd tentatively planned for them, but I have been working, the past couple of days, to regulate my own schedule in a more healthy way without the moods of my girls directing me from my own work to book reading to house cleaning to my own work to lunch making to game playing.

It's funny, but the girls can run by while I'm mopping or blogging or sewing and completely ignore me, but when I'm getting ready to bake, there they are, step stools and ponytail rings at hand, and suddenly I'm the most popular girl in the house again. And that is maybe why I've made this banana bread recipe, adapted from A Homemade Life, twice in the past three days. Or it could also be because it's delicious, and it looks just as good:
A Homemade Life is the book written from the Orangette blog, and the banana bread recipe from the book is a modified version of this banana bread recipe--my favorite improvement, I think, is Orangettte's use of whole milk yogurt instead of milk, or her decision to up the banana count and down the butter amount.

So I actually put in the correct amount of butter and sugar in this recipe, but I used whole wheat flour and dumped in blueberries, slivered almonds, carob chips, and chopped candied ginger.

So freakin' good. And good with my coffee and newspaper again this morning, because if nobody's going to play with you, you might as spoil yourself a little.

And thus we bring ourselves to 9:00 am. The girls are in the other room, talking animatedly over a shared carton of strawberry yogurt. I plan to clean the house, do some laundry, request some books from the library, and make record bowls, pinback buttons, and crayon rolls for my farmer's market craft fair tomorrow--come by if you're local, cause my booth is looking pretty fly these days.

I will also, and don't let me forget, feed myself, take a shower, speak to other adults, and leave my property today. Probably.

Butterfly Butts

Those who have heard me rant about the inappropriateness of words and slogans on the butts of girls' pants might find the following evening shot incongruous:
The butterfly, however, turns out to be the perfect shape for reinforcing the backs of pants--look how the wings add extra strength to the often-abraded seat and upper thigh area, and the butterfly's body covers a seam that can commonly split through stress.

And also? The girls came in the study while I was ironing upholstery fabric to vinyl records (don't ask) and wanted stuff ironed to their stuff, too.

That being said, I'm still not in love with fusible webbing. If these pants weren't already on their death beds (I stuck a few more appliques and reverse appliques over the worst of the stains and holes on the fronts of the pants as well, just leaving the, you know, less worse alone), I probably wouldn't try the experiment, because I'm not positive that, over time, the appliques will be able to handle the stress of living on the butts of two very active little girls.

I do, however, recommend fusible webbing for projects that won't get a lot of wear, such as home dec stuff or the fronts of T-shirts, or projects with fiddly little designs, such as my butterfly, or even projects where you can't make your machine sewing accessible, such as a child's shirt sleeve. And here's how to do it (it's really easy):

1. Read the directions on your package of no-sew heat bond adhesive. I use , and Chasing Cheerios, who does a lot of fusible applique, uses Steam a Seam. If you're using a very thick fabric you may have to extend your ironing time by a few seconds, so the directions are something to think about ahead of time.

2. Lay your fabric face-down on your ironing surface, iron it so that it's wrinkle-free, and let it cool.

3. Lay your adhesive paper-side up, so that the adhesive side is facing the wrong side of your fabric.

4. Following the directions on the adhesive package, bond the adhesive to the fabric, bonding an area just bigger than your stencil or pattern (if I'm using a paper pattern, I'll sometimes lay it on top of the paper while I'm ironing so that I bond only the correct area.

5. Cut the bonded fabric away from the rest of the roll of adhesive.

6. Lay your stencil or pattern on top of the paper backing to the adhesive and trace your applique directly onto the paper.

7. Cut out your applique, using nail or thread scissors for those fiddly little corners.

8. Lay your item of clothing or whatever out on your ironing surface, iron the area to be appliqued, and let it cool.

9. Peel the paper off of your applique and place it on your material exactly where you want it to be.

10. Following the directions on the package, bond the applique to the material. If you go under the correct amount of ironing time your applique won't bond, but you can try again after it's cool. If you go over the correct amount of ironing time, however, the adhesive can melt into your applique fabric and then it won't bond at all.

To applique onto non-fabric, which is trickier, check out my post at Crafting a Green World.

Our New Babies

Blueberry picking was hot work this morning:
At the u-pick blueberry patch, this one lady fainted and they actually had to call out the volunteer ambulance service. Unless I am just about dead, I NEVER give you permission to call the ambulance for me--Matt once paid something like $2,000 for a ten-minute ambulance ride across town to go get his forehead stitched up after he fainted and whacked his head on a table one time. And they didn't even run the siren for him.

We only ended up with about five pounds of blueberries this time (it only seems like a trifle when compared to the 13+ pounds of berries we left with last week), but the girls did leave the berry patch with a few other very precious things in tow:Tadpoles! Or, as Sydney refers to them, our new baby froggies. Notice their state-of-the-art habitat, please. Also notice that we'll be eating solely out of the pantry and freezer this coming week (thank goodness it's stocked with blueberries!), since I walked into the pet store thinking I'd need a little glass bowl and some fish food, and walked out with a 2.5 gallon aquarium, a set of four aquatic plants, two different colors of aquarium gravel (I have two little girls, you know), and a package of actual tadpole food. Seriously, there are tadpoles right on the front of the package.

So the babies are swimming in style right now, with their $26.14 worth of merchandise and their chlorine-free creek water from the creek a couple of blocks over.

But just look at their little faces: Aren't they adorable?

If It Stands Still Long Enough, Stick a Dinosaur on It

With the house being immeasurably more clean and organized after this three-day weekend (during which it rained too hard to do any of the usual fun three-day-weekend stuff), this was the view outside the study today:
It's the painting of the half-finished and recently-rediscovered Pretend Mailbox--we're going to start the Pretend Mailbox tomorrow, I think, so I'll tell you about that next time.

And this was the view inside the study:

I have now reached the state of vinyl record crafting, upholstery remnant crafting, and dinosaur crafting that may just be located somewhere in Crazy Land: I have been appliquing dinosaur appliques, done in upholstery remnant fabric, onto old vinyl record albums.

I. LOVE. Them.

P.S. My post about Etsy ripping me off, over at Crafting a Green World, actually earned itself an editor's note that perhaps was intended either to cover CAGW's butt in case I get sued, or as a prequel to firing my crazy ass. In other news, however, Etsy gave me my money back! Phew. It's so much nicer to feel like the right thing happened in the world, just as you expected it to, than it is to feel like some faceless business stole from you, so add a couple of points to my mental health level tonight.

Rain on My Parade (Again)

I can't believe it's pouring down rain on the Fourth of July AGAIN! I mean, sure, it's like 8,000 degrees in my hometown in Arkansas right now, but at least Papa and Aunt Pam and everyone down there can barbecue! And shoot off fireworks! Here in Indiana, it's in the mid-60s. But the grill is standing cold and empty out in the deluge. And the fireworks, they are cancelled. I swear, I am very out sorts. Very out of sorts indeed.

Fortunately, it was only drizzling during the Fourth of July parade this year, unlike last year's utter downpour. We found the BEST spot to sit and watch the parade this year, and no, I'm not going to tell you where it is, because I don't want you to sit there instead of me next year. I do hope that nice man who sat on my other side comes back next year, because he talked trash with me about the very odd lady who encouraged her 13 (I'm not kidding) children to run out into the street, during Taps, to pick up the hot shell casings after the twenty-one gun salute. They also came thisclose to getting hit by every single parade float in the parade due to their focused determination to GET CANDY. And also? I had to crop the entire brood out of every single photo.

Even in the drizzle, all my favorite parade groups were present:

The Bleeding Heartland Rollergirls

We're going to miss their next double-header, but will be back rooting them on in August (My top three fantasy aspirations: 1--Run a farm of my own 2--Be in a stage production of Hair 3--Be a rollergirl).

The Lotus Festival The Dark Carnival Film Festival (I get to go to this one by myself, because the rest of my family are wusses)

And, of course, Beanpole:

The monkeys watched the parade and its goings-on solemnly--happily, I suppose, but solemnly, with deep, focused concentration. I'm big on ceremony, so after standing still with hand on heart listening to Momma belt out the national anthem (why don't more people sing along? It's fun), and standing still for the twenty-one gun salute, and standing still for Taps, and standing still for the passing of the flag, I was sort of afraid I'd sucked all the life and fun out of them, but I think they were just concentrating really, REALLY hard on the parade.

Because right afterwards, they shook themselves awake and immediately looked like this:

And then we went home and made popcorn.

In other news, I've been on an unwilling crafting hiatus due to the total chaos of the house, but this three-day weekend (especially since we don't have to take off any time to barbecue or do fireworks) is spelling change for that, my friends.

And my fingers are just itching to get back to business next week.

When Etsy Turns Evil

So I bought a Showcase spot in the Supplies category of etsy yesterday, to promote my digital alphabet collection and to ideally burn through some of the supplies backlog in my pumpkinbear etsy shop (I have a bad little habit of rescuing craft items, especially vintage stuff, that I have no plan for using myself). A showcase spot costs seven dollars and puts one of your items at the top of the page of whatever category you've paid for, in a photo bigger than the photos of the items in the lists below. When I bought a showcase spot in the Children category last month, I got a lot of hits and a lot of hearts and some modest sales, including one wholesale order, which was nice.

Who knows who could have found me through my showcase yesterday, because on etsy yesterday, the showcases were all broken.

Seriously.

If you were using Internet Explorer as your Internet browser, you could not click on an item that you saw in a Showcase, nor could you scroll through the Showcase items to see them all. And this was the case from midnight to approximately 6:00 pm.

So yeah, maybe it's not the most sophisticated or imaginative choice out there, but it is the one that comes with the box, and I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of web browsers use Internet Explorer. And midnight to 6:00 pm does contain, I'm pretty sure, some mighty popular times for internet use. So I sent an email, first thing in the morning, actually, to customer care at etsy, telling them that I'd be wanting a refund or a transfer to a different showcase date, since my showcase spot wasn't working as it was supposed to.

Here's my awesome reply, which didn't come until after the Showcases were fixed, about 10 hours after my email:

Hello Julie,

Thanks for your email. This bug is fixed and all of the items listed in the Showcase can now be viewed. Etsy shoppers who visit the site use various browsers so the amount of people not able to scroll was very limited.

Thanks for being a member of the Etsy community.

All the best,
Joe
Etsy Support

So not only are the people at Etsy browser snobs, but now they're shafting me out of my hard-earned seven bucks? A terser restatement of my request ensued, but now Joe's ignoring me, of course, so we'll have to see what happens with that.

Want to see what would have been in my Showcase, if you could have clicked on it and bought all my stuff all day yesterday?

Digital 8x10 Prints of my Handmade Alphabet

4.15 oz of Superwash Merino in Rainbow Colors (because you can't felt superwash)
Vintage Brown Owl Needlepoint Greeting Card Kit

E-Z Bow Maker

You totally want that E-Z Bow Maker in particular, I know. You dream at night about making honking big swag bows to put on the ends of church pews.

Ooh, or maybe your front door!

For the Girl Who Has Everything: An Etsy Birthday Wish List

Around this time of summer, I always get a flurry of queries about what Willow might like for her birthday. The subtext is, I suppose, "I know how picky you are. What can I give your kid that you'll actually let her keep?"

This subtext is valid. I am really picky. I don't do battery-operated toys (exceptions: one Leapfrog phonics thing, three walking/roaring dinosaurs), any DVDs unless they're documentaries, anything with a cartoon or other media character on it (unless it's fangeek), any article of clothing that refers to the physical characteristics of my child (no "cutie-pie" tees, etc.), any pants or shorts from Wal-mart (they hang off my girls' butts to show their plumbers' cracks and make me afraid that my girls have oddly-shaped butts), any bath products with synthetic chemicals in them, or anything plastic (a lot of exceptions here, of course, because EVERYTHING is plastic).

I could give you an entire dissertation for my reasons behind denying each of the above offenders, but would you really want to hear it?

Things that are always okay by me: experiences (Chuck E Cheese? Sure. Walking with Dinosaurs the Live Show? Hell, yeah!), handmade items, toys made from natural materials (wood, cotton, etc.), art supplies, books (unless they don't meet my strict moral/ethical/gender awareness/cultural tolerance guidelines--I can also be picky about books).

Anyway, I've been dipping around on etsy a lot these past few hours (I have a spot for my pumpkinbear etsy shop in the Supplies Showcase, but the Showcase section is BROKEN in Internet Explorer today! Will it get fixed before the day is over? Will I get my money back? Stay tuned...), so here's a roundup of some cool handmade stuff Will might like for her birthday:

sandpaper letters by polliwog77

nerdy rainbow print by electricboogaloo
blue monster hat by littlebearscrochet

graffiti alphabet blocks by beebles

child's multicolor broom by palumba

Batman and Robin wooden dollhouse dolls by nakedpeggies

Okay, maybe that last thing is for me.