On the Way to College We Stopped at Niagara Falls

Thank goodness both kids are light packers, or I don't know how we'd have gotten them both to college at the same time. As it was, we fit four adults, two Frakta bags, four Frakta bag knock-offs (I can't believe IKEA discontinued this college move-in staple!), one duffle bag, and three backpacks into a compact SUV with a canvas car topper.

Oh, and in Cleveland we added a few bags of candy, as well... College kids need their snack hauls!

Geography is weird. Do I understand why the route that looks like it detours so far north is only 20 miles longer than the route that looks like it goes pretty much straight to Massachusetts? 

No. No, I do not. I picked it, though, because it's the road less traveled, AND because it includes one of my favorite overhyped but iconic detours into Americana:

The last time we visited Niagara Falls, we HATED the Canadian side, but parking in Niagara Falls State Park on the US side and walking around Goat Island is always a good time:

It's always SO crowded, though!

It IS kind of the perfect roadside stop, though. For the price of parking you can just wander around and get some fresh air, take photos, maybe buy an ice cream, and also, there's a natural wonder right there!

We did a bit more hiking than the kids technically agreed to (one of my many annoying traits, according to my children, is how I constantly goad everyone into sightseeing beyond the agreed time/geographical range by exclaiming that who knows when we'll ever come here again! We should seize this moment that has been gifted us, because our time here together is precious! These poor kids have been to Niagara Falls three times in their lives so far, and every time I act like it's going to disappear forever the second we drive away)--

--so much so that my older kid and I, having paused to look at a weird bird, looked up to notice these two criminals CUTTING A SWITCHBACK!!!

I guess I can't guarantee that my partner knows any better, but that teenager who's tugging him along is a Girl Scout who has listened at least once, and more likely four times, to my lecture to the troop entitled "Do Not Cut Switchbacks Let Me Tell You a Story about a Boy Scout Who Did That Once and Was Never Seen Again."

The two criminals looked up to notice us gasping and exclaiming and clutching our pearls and thought we were trying to gesture to them to pose for a pic. So... cheese, I guess!

Do you think there's ever an off-season for Niagara Falls? I feel like I would like it so much more if I had it all to myself, ahem. Like, forget taking a book and sitting on a bench and enjoying the view while reading and eating a snack--I had to wait in line in a crowd of tourists just to take these pics!

As beautiful as Niagara Falls is, eventually the groceries back at the car start to loom ever more appealingly in one's mind, so we walked the long way back to our parking spot, and continued our family road trip tradition of making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of the back of the car, balancing paper plates and bread bags precariously on top of Frakta bags and backpacks, then hopped in and noshed our way the long way through New York, because we'll generally be damned if we take a toll road.

Next stop: the East Coast!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Dye Pasta to Make Sensory Materials

Pretty much the last family activity that we did before taking the kids to college was an evening of making sensory materials together.

You know, as you do!

I'd had the idea that my preschool niece might like some of the same homemade sensory materials that my own kids had enjoyed at her age. We made her slime (although my kids actually played with oobleck, not slime, throughout their preschool years, you might remember that my younger kid went through a BIG slime phase as a tween and still has the recipe memorized), play dough, sand dough, cloud dough, dyed Epsom salts, and a couple of colors of this dyed pasta.

Out of all of those options, the pasta is the easiest! It takes just a few minutes of hands-on time, spread out over the course of a full day. Here's how to make it:

Materials

To make this sensory material, you will need:

• dry pasta. The pasta that you use is limited only by your imagination, your budget, and the size of the jar you plan to use. Rotini and elbow macaroni were perennial favorites with my kids, but bowties and shells also turn out exceptionally cute. Star pasta is a splurge but would be adorable, and spaghetti would be cool-looking but unwieldy to dye and delicate when finished.
• liquid food coloring or liquid watercolors. I use the snot out of our liquid watercolors, and used them for this particular project, but before I knew such a thing existed I made many fine and colorful batches of dyed pasta with cheap liquid food coloring. 
• old jars. I've always used glass jars, as in old spaghetti sauce or salsa jars, and never plastic, but I don't see why plastic wouldn't work.
• rubbing alcohol. You need this because it's a non-water-based solvent that can distribute the dye without dissolving the pasta. Some of my hippier friends buy super-high-proof organic vodka to make their own disinfectants, though, so if you like, I bet you can use that!
• newspaper, brown paper bags, cardboard, etc. You want something to spread the pasta out on to dry, ideally something you can toss in the recycling bin when you're done.

How to Dye the Dried Pasta

Pour dried pasta into a jar, filling it no more than halfway. Check out this old photo I found of my adorable older darling completing this step. She looks like she might be five?

Five was a really great age for that kid. Actually, though, twenty is turning out to also be a great year for her!

Add enough rubbing alcohol to just cover the bottom of the jar, then add the dye. Put the lid on and shake it around until the dye is evenly distributed, then add more dye as desired until the pasta looks about as saturated as you want it to be.

Here's the part you have to remember: put the jars on a table or counter you frequently walk by, and then for the rest of the day, every time you pass the jars, agitate them and shake them around for a few seconds to further distribute the dye and unstick any pasta bits.

After a few hours of that, dump out the jas and spread the pasta out in an even layer on your blotting paper:

Leave the pasta to finish drying out at least overnight, or even as long as a full day:

Your blotting paper gets pretty messy, so that's why you want something you can toss!

When the pasta has finished drying, kids can play with it right away, or you can store it in deli containers at room temperature. Look how cute it looks combined with all the other sensory materials in my niece's present stash!

Kids can simply play with this pasta, of course, but it also makes a great addition to a play kitchen or mud kitchen, or to a pretend construction site. Dump trucks love to drive around pink elbow pasta! 

And, of course, you can do art with it, especially making mosaics with different types and colors of pastas. You know you want your own pasta mosaic masterpiece hung on your wall!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

The Bookshelf Quilt is Finished

The glorious day has finally come that the bookshelf quilt is finished!

Its finished size is approximately 65"x95", so more or less within the standard sizing for a twin-sized quilt. I'd made the older kid's dorm room quilt more of a full size, thinking it would serve her better over the years, but with the bed lofted that extra quilt width is really in the way, so it turns out that a twin-sized quilt really IS the best size for a twin-sized bed, ahem.

The grey background fabric is a really nice piece of cotton yardage that I found at Goodwill--our local Goodwills have raised the prices on most items to a shocking degree, but you can still find great deals on fabric cuts.. probably because the staff don't know what they even are.

Most of the books are stash/scrap fabric from my own collection, but about halfway through piecing the blocks I realized that picking through my fabric to dig out the right scraps, then painstakingly cutting around all the other random cut-out bits and old seams and crap to make them the right sizes was taking WAY longer than it did to just sew my jellyroll pieces into books... so I hopped over to Joann's and had the kid pick out a couple more jellyroll sets. I do really like the scraps that I used, though, especially the red/green batik canvas that used to be bedroom curtains in the house before this one, and the Pegasus prints that I sewed a ton of stuff for my horse-loving older kid with, and all the various other bits and pieces of kid clothes and home projects and pretty things long past:

Here's my view from the ladder I'm perched on. My partner is rightfully refusing to help me because I rightfully got mad at him after I'd asked him to help me and then caught him PUTTING DUCT TAPE ON MY QUILT. He thought it would look better if it was photographed hanging, and apparently duct tape is the best way to hang a handmade, heirloom quilt that his wife is barely 12 hours from having completed:

Kind of reminds me of the time that our newborn first-born daughter would not stop screaming so he jokingly screamed back at her, and I flatly informed him that if he EVER screamed at my child again I would divorce him.

And he never screamed at the kids again! Ahem.

I'm the proudest of those blocks with the leaning books. I got the idea from this tutorial, but I think I ended up doing mine a little differently:

The couple of empty blocks were my partner's idea, and it was BRILLIANT. I felt like I could only get away with putting a couple in there, but OMG what a time-saver, and obviously a bookshelf has to have some room for more books!

I still don't love the look of the stacked book blocks, but I do like how they break up the space. They've grown on the kid, too, mostly because she likes to do the same thing on her own bookshelves:

I'm so happy to have this quilt finished, and I'm so pleased that my kid is pleased with it--

--but dang does it make her imminent departure real. I spent most of the summer feeling a lot of anticipatory grief about both kids going away--and pretty far away, too!--but now that we're just about in the moment I'm sort of... I don't know. Kind of in a state of just pushing through and getting stuff done and being sad about it later? I am firmly reminding myself not to get all wrapped up in my own feelings so I can keep the focus on the kids and their experience, but I did also mention to my kid that although I was super happy and excited for her I would probably cry, and when I cried it didn't mean I wasn't happy and excited for her. She was all, "Yeah, I HAVE met you before. Remember that time that you randomly burst into tears, oh, let's see... THREE HOURS AGO?" And my other kid accused me of not letting her out of my sight, which is completely untrue, but yes, I likely have been staring creepily at her because I want to memorize her face before she sails literally halfway across the world.

So, I dunno, you guys. I am freaking out but also feeling like I'm too busy to freak out and if I just hold off on freaking out now I'll have plenty of time to freak out later. But my kids are going to very exciting places to do very exciting things, and they both have handmade quilts to accompany them.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Finishing the Bookshelf Quilt

I think this is the biggest quilting project I've ever completed! My rainbow Sierpinski Triangle quilt was more challenging--all those matching points!!!--but a lot smaller. My king-sized denim log cabin quilt was bigger, but also a lot less challenging. This bookshelf quilt, with a finished size of about 65"x90", was just the perfect storm of lots of piecing, lots of picky cutting to size and lining things up nicely, and more quilting than I've ever done before on what is probably the maximum quilt size I could ever make work on my home machine.

But first, I laid out all the blocks into their nice bookshelf rows, fussed around and rearranged them and organized them just so--

--called the kid (and the cat, apparently) to come in and approve my work--

--and then sat to the side and watched with amusement as she changed the location of every. Single. Block:

I love how Jones is equally invested in the process:

When the kid was finally satisfied, I spent the evening sewing the blocks together to make their rows, and then the next day, during a brief lull in my mending group's monthly volunteer session at the public library (I sewed a button on a pair of pants, mended a hole in the armpit of a T-shirt, taught two people how to sew on their own buttons and mend their own holes, and helped bind a quilt), I laid out all the rows and got the group to help me figure out how wide the bookshelf sashing should be:

It turns out, as we discovered by walking around the library with our sewing rulers and measuring the shelves, that the average bookshelf is about 1.5" wide. So that's what my shelves will be, too!

I had kind of thought that I'd make the outer edges of the bookshelf wider than the shelves, but honestly, they looked pretty much fine the same width, and if I stopped thinking about it and left them alone I could then immediately move onto this step:

Laying out a quilt is the only time that I miss my grody old disgusting previous family room floor, which was so old and beaten up that I had no problem laying out quilt dimensions in masking tape directly on the floor... and then leaving it like that for several years. It was SO handy to have a sizing template right there waiting for me! I sewed SO many quilts that way!

My floors are much cuter now, but it's definitely an additional challenge to no longer be able to stick masking tape all over them...

Oh, well. I got the job done regardless!

Ignore how one of the quilt edges is completely misaligned in that above photo. Binding hides all crimes!

At this point I think I got summit fever, because the next SEVERAL hours are a blur. I know I crawled around on the floor for quite a while trimming and pinning, etc. As soon as I picked up the entire quilt sandwich I realized that there was no way it would fit in my sewing space in the study, so I cleaned off the family room table and moved my sewing machine there. And then I realized the quilt wouldn't really fit on that table, either, so I got my partner to not only move the giant table from my studio to the family room, as well, but also go out to the garage and bring in another folding table to add to my setup.

I set up my laptop with Chicago Med streaming episode after episode, and there I hunched like a goblin for untold hours. It got so that whenever anyone walked by I would, without even looking up from my sewing, rant at them about the latest plot developments and my own opinions about such, something along the lines of, "I know doctor/patient confidentiality is A Thing, but OMG if Dr. Charles doesn't tell Sarah that her father is a serial killer right this minute I'm going to serial kill him myself," or, "Sure, Will has been through all that trauma from accidentally getting involved with the mob and then having to be an FBI informant and the mob guys almost killed him and he had to go into Witness Protection on their wedding day, but HE HAS GOT TO STOP LYING TO NATALIE ABOUT EVERY DAMN THING! I swear to god if he doesn't tell her about that gun and her toddler finds it and shoots himself I will be so mad!" 

Sorry if that's spoilers, but it's from, like, way back in Season 4, so it's practically a historical document at this point.

Somewhere inside that Chicago Med fever dream, I decided to quilt the shelves stitch in the ditch, then also stitch in the ditch between every couple of books within each shelf.

This is the quilt spread across two entire tables:

I was sort of wedged in between one table and my real-life bookshelf, so every time it slipped off the tables I'd have to whimper at a passing family member to reset it for me. They'd do it, ask if maybe I didn't want to take a little break, I'd tell them I'd welcome death first and then monologue about how boring Connor's every interaction with Dr. Bekker is and I hate all his B plots and I wish he'd just gone to the Mayo Clinic like he said he would a hybrid OR is a stupid idea anyway, and they'd back away slowly until I got distracted by my bobbin running out of thread and they could escape.

You're going to be shocked, but after eight hours of sewing while wedged between a table and a bookshelf, hunched over like a goblin and constantly muscling 15 pounds of fabric, I woke up the next morning with my back absolutely killing me. 

But wait until you see what I had to show for it!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to random little towns, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

How to Make Quilted Greeting Cards

I originally published this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.

Quilted greeting cards are a great way to show off your cutest mini quilt blocks!

When I made quilted postcards, we all knew that I was just one small step away from making quilted greeting cards, right? I mean sure, there was a chance that I’d get bored with mini quilt blocks and move onto the bookshelf quilt that I promised my younger daughter, but you and I both know that when I start down a rabbit trail, I generally follow that trail to the absolute end.

It turns out that the end of the mini quilt block rabbit trail is a set of quilt-as-you-go rainbow quilted greeting cards!

These quilted greeting cards have a whopping two additional steps over my quilted postcards, so they’re still a terrifically quick and easy way to do some scrap-busting of your sewing stash. You should also already either have a mini quilt block in mind OR know how to do the quilt-as-you-go method.

Here’s everything that you’ll need to make quilted greeting cards:

• fabric for quilting as you go or mini quilt block. Fabrics that are approximately all the same weight work best for this project, but otherwise, feel free to play with whatever fun fabrics you’ve got on hand. Those white suns on my mini rainbow quilts are pieces of my old wedding dress!
• double-sided fusible interfacing. This will allow you to adhere your mini quilts to your greeting cards without stitching onto the card. You can do without it, but I think it makes the final product look the nicest.
• heavyweight cardstock. Regular cardstock doesn’t feel hefty enough in the finished product, considering how much weight the mini quilt adds to the front of the card. I actually really like this Strathmore watercolor paper for this project, and I think you could even go as heavy as bristol board or cardboard food packaging.
• measuring, cutting, folding, and sewing materials. I used a guillotine paper cutter, a spoon instead of a bone folder, and regular sewing supplies.

Step 1: Measure, cut, and fold the greeting cards.

To make a standard 5″x7″ greeting card, you’ll want your paper sized to 7″x10″. I actually folded my watercolor paper in half first, then cut it to size with my paper cutter. I’ve got some nice scraps leftover for making bookmarks and gift tags!

No matter whether you fold first or cut first, the most important part of making a homemade greeting card look really nice is getting a really nice fold. With paper as thick as this, you pretty much have to use some kind of tool to smooth down that fold. The concept of the bone folder grosses me out even though I know most of them are just plastic, so fortunately the back of a spoon works just as well!

Step 2: Sew a mini quilt block sized to your greeting card.

I had the idea for this quilt-as-you-go rainbow and sun block, so in these photos that’s what I’m sewing, using that ‘Merica fabric as my base. I generally snap up 100% quilting cotton whenever I’m out thrifting, even if I hate the print, just for projects like this. I’ll also take all your old 100% cotton blue jeans!

By the time I finished my rainbow, you can’t see ‘Merica at all!

Edge-stitch around your completed quilt block, even though fraying isn’t going to be a problem. Your block also doesn’t need to be quilted, strictly speaking, so quilt it or not as you like. I quilted some of mine and left others alone, and I still can’t figure out which I like better.

Your appliques are another place where you can play fast and loose. I just zigzagged my suns onto the quilt blocks and called it good!

Step 3: Attach the quilt block to the greeting card front.

Cut the interfacing to size, then make a sandwich with the greeting card face-up, the interfacing, and the quilt block face-up.

Iron the snot out of your sandwich! Or, rather, follow the interfacing manufacturer’s instructions for how to iron it, ahem.

I ironed the snot out of it, though…

Trim any bits of the quilt block that are sticking out past the greeting card. If any bits of greeting card are sticking out past the quilt block you’re going to be soooo tempted to trim that, too, but trust me: that way madness lies. You will NEVER get it even, so just set your mind firmly to not noticing any sticky-outy card bits.

In case you’re thinking that now I’m SURELY done with mini quilt blocks, I’ve had the idea that maybe I could figure out a way to only temporarily attach, say, a mini quilt block coaster or mug rug to the front of a greeting card, so that the recipient could pull it off and use it. That would be super cute, right?

Move-in day. I HAVE to have that bookshelf quilt finished by my kid’s college move-in day!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, confrontations with gross men, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!