Smithville News, Just as Riveting Now as it Was 114 Years Ago

 

I went WAAAAY down a rabbit trail last week.

I'm pretty sure this thing I have where I get obsessed with a hobby or a research interest is a positive coping technique for undiagnosed anxiety and/or a negative coping technique for undiagnosed ADD, but regardless, there I was last week, stressed out and anxious, overstimulated and overwhelmed, with the sudden desire to research the history of my property. 

I know the old general store on my land is at least 83 years old, as I have a photo that's dated 1939, showing the general store in business, the owners' bedroom visible through an open door behind the wood-burning stove. It's labeled with the names of the owners, and their surname matches that of the family we bought the house from, so the property was in their family from at least then until they sold it to us.

I'm curious, though, about how old that general store actually is, and how old our house is, and when our land was first cleared for farming, and if it was recorded anywhere who, specifically, the land was originally stolen from, and why it wasn't turned into a quarry like the land just a mile north or the land just a mile east or the land just a few miles south. 

So at some point during a really rough week last week, I was sitting in front of my computer trying to get some work done, and that curiosity all of a sudden became a burning desire. I Googled, and found this website about how to research your historic home, then bypassed all their other useful advice to zone straight in on the "look through historic newspapers" bit. 

So I Googled THAT, and found a run of a very tiny, VERY local newspaper that ran from 1908 to 1914 and served a very small radius of population in this exact area. 

Like, a VERY small radius. We're talking *maybe* five miles in any direction. Little areas that are now just a couple of minutes away by car are referred to in this newspaper as being entirely different towns, and the actual city that I live just south of is referred to as a place you take the train to, and if you want to send your kids to high school they have to board there and only come back on the weekends to visit the "home folks."

It's a miracle that a small newspaper like this even survived to be scanned and preserved, because it's always the unimportant-seeming ephemera like this that's lost. Nobody thinks to preserve it, it's great for starting a fire, it's printed on cheap paper that deteriorates quickly, etc., and most of the time, you'll never know it even existed.

But somebody saved many of these papers--not even close to a complete run, alas, but many of them--and they're scanned into my state's digital archives for me to look at...

...and grow completely obsessed with.

I have never in my life read such a gossipy rag! From what I can tell, the editor just let anyone submit whatever they wanted as news, so along with the occasional murder or theft or buggy accident, every week you get a full accounting of who visited whom and who threw a party and who went shopping in the city and how everyone's crops are doing. And if you thought that today's digital social media inspires FOMO, how would you feel if an acquaintance's recent party was in the newspaper, with a full account of every single person who attended, the entire menu, and who was asked to sing and did so reluctantly and charmed everyone with their beautiful singing voice and organ playing?

And then the next week, you got it all again!

People even subtweeted at each other, right in the pages of the newspaper!

So I started reading this newspaper, and felt like I had fallen into a period novel. Every week all the people were up to something new, and there was gossip and scandal and elopements and fights. And, like, if you lived here in 1908, no part of you was safe. Can you imagine if you went to a party, and at the party you were literally voted "Ugliest Boy?" And then it was IN THE NEWSPAPER that you went to a party and were the ugliest boy there?!?

I horrified Syd by showing her the article at the end of the school year (which was April 16, I'm assuming because after that date everyone needed to go plant corn), which gave the full name of all the eighth-grade graduates of the local schools, as well as EVERY SINGLE KID'S GPA. Including the kid who only earned a 76, poor thing!

Everyone more or less had to get used to me saying, "So, you want to hear the news of 1908?", and then telling them about some local scandal or crime. There were, for instance, a lot of elopements:

There was another one where a 38-year-old guy ran off with a 16-year-old girl. They hired a buggy and fled from the city down to the little town five or so miles south of me, where they'd hoped to catch the train down to Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl's dad had wired every train station around and then gotten on his own horse, and he actually managed to catch them at the Harrodsburg depot. But when the couple saw him, they ran off into the woods and didn't come back out again until the next day. The dad then dragged his daughter back home with him, but she told the reporter that she'd run away again as soon as she could.

They'd also put it into the paper whenever someone left their spouse, including this chance encounter of a spouse who probably thought he'd gotten clean away:

Also in the newspaper was plenty of good advice, stuff like gentleman shouldn't spit on the sidewalks, and ladies should try to dress up a little more and iron their ribbons when going to town, and how to talk on the telephone:

But there were also plenty of actual crimes. Syd and I reckon that there was a serial killer running around 1908-1909 Smithville. Over about 18 months, I saw THREE reports of men found lying on the train tracks, decapitated. One guy wasn't immediately identified, so they took him to the mortuary and invited the public to come look at him to see if anyone could identify him. He was eventually identified as a guy from Alabama, and although he was found on the train tracks, the coroner said that it looked like someone had tried to decapitate him with a pocketknife, but stopped at his spine and left him on the tracks for the train wheels to finish the job. The murder was blamed on "Italians," and left at that.

Two more times, then, in 18 months, there was a report of somebody found decapitated on the train tracks, but each of those times, the report said that they'd probably been walking home at night intoxicated. One guy, it said, looked like he had lain down to go to sleep on the train tracks, which... okay? And the other guy, it said, looked like he'd fallen and hit his head on the tracks. 

You know what I think, though? I think that a serial killer was murdering people and then leaving them on the train tracks to get decapitated by the train. Because how likely is it that THREE people would just happen to land on the train tracks just exactly the right way to get decapitated in this one small area in 18 months?

And then there was the time that people went to the Christian church one morning and found a dead dog on the pulpit, its head on the Bible and a handwritten note next to it that read, "I'm trying to get to dog heaven." A couple of weeks later, the paper said that a guy had accused his son of putting the dead dog in church and his son had shot at him and then ran away.

And THEN there was the time that they were having an ice cream social at the Mt. Ebal Church and some young men rolled up in their buggy. One of them, the Sipes boy (the newspaper then paused for a long reminiscence about the time that the Sipes boy's mother had died in the middle of winter and his father had piggybacked the boy to a neighboring farm in a snowstorm and gotten frostbite on his feet), took out a revolver and started shooting at the sky. This scared the horses, so one guy told the Sipes boy to put his revolver back in his pocket, and the Sipes boy shot him three times point blank.

The newspaper ran regular reports on the guy's eventual full recovery, and the Sipes boy's continued stay in the county jail. 

Okay, and THEN there is the whole saga of the Angora cat. There was an article in the paper about how Harold Allen lost his Angora cat, and was offering the unheard-of sum of $25 as a reward for her recovery. I don't even know how someone would even have gotten an Angora cat into the backwoods of Indiana back then, but I guess the train did run everywhere. So we don't hear anything else for a few months, and then one day there's an article in the newspaper about how Dillon Deckard caught a long-haired white cat the other day, and he thought about skinning it but decided instead that he was going to keep it.

I was all, "HEY! That's Harold Allen's cat!!!!" But, you know, I'm the only one over here binging two years of Smithville News in a weekend. For everyone else, several months have passed. Mary Travers turned down her teaching post so she wouldn't leave her father without a housekeeper. Charlie Delgar grew a pumpkinvine up his apple tree and now it's dangling giant pumpkins down like apples. Judah Harden had to shoot his dog after it savaged the postman. Bloomington took down the hitch rack outside the courthouse and all the farmers are big mad about it and say they'll just mail order from Indianapolis if Bloomington doesn't give them anywhere to tie up their horses. So maybe Harold's cat is just old news, and Dillon Deckard can keep her.

But don't worry--people did remember Harold's cat.

This was basically all I talked about all weekend, so much so that Syd and I now talk about them as if they're real--and on Tiktok:

"She's a 10, but she earned the lowest grade in her class."

"She's a 6."

"He's a 9, but he found Harold's Angora cat and he's keeping it."

"He's a 2."

"She's a 4, but she turned down a teaching job so she could stay home and 'be the housekeeper' for her father."

"I think she's still a 4?"

"He's a 10, but he put a dead dog in the church and then shot at his father."

"He's a -1."

But in all of Smithville, for all of the two years' worth of weekly gossip news that I read, this news was what made me feel the most feels:

To be honest, I was pretty offended on Grandma Woodward's account. Like, the nerve of calling some old woman pathetic when all she's doing is minding her own business sitting on her porch?

A few months later, though, the newspaper reported that she'd died, and then it called her a "good woman who was always doing good deeds for others." Awww! And then the NEXT week's newspaper had about twenty different notices of all the people who'd traveled to her funeral at Mt. Ebal church, including one guy who'd closed down his entire school for the day so he could attend. 

It was Grandma Woodward, then, who inspired me to my next great idea and the next step in my great obsession.

This, Friends, is Mt. Ebal church, about five miles from my house as the crow flies:

It is now an Airbnb, and was the source of its own run of news in the currently gossipy local newspaper of today. I guess it had been unsold for a VERY long time before the current owners bought it, and people were accustomed to parking in its lot when they visited the cemetery across the street, and also for funerals. But the new owners were not allowing this anymore, and people were so mad that they held a bunch of public meetings to try to get the owners to let them keep parking there. The restaurant a block down the street even said that people were welcome to park in their lot and walk over, but nope, people were all, "I can't walk a block! I can only walk across the street!"

We parked at the back of the cemetery, and walked around looking for Susan Woodward and my other newspaper friends. 

I found lots of familiar names:

It was Syd who found my prize for me:

You'll be pleased to know that not only was Grandma Woodward much beloved in life, but in death she had PRIME placement front and center in the cemetery. Check out how close she is to the church!

I haven't quite worked up the nerve to mention to the rest of the family that I also now very much need to visit the Clear Creek Christian Cemetery, Knights of Pythias Cemetery (which is also in the middle of a field now, sooo...), and several now abandoned limestone quarries...

Work Plans for the Week of May 1, 2017: Ballet, a Birthday, and Britain

I rearranged our priorities last week. The kids are fondest of doing their schoolwork off and on all day--there's no push to complete their work by a specific time each day, except that I don't allow them their hour of screen time until their schoolwork is finished. They're content with this system and it works well for them, but it doesn't really always work well for ME. There's often a kid asking me for a lesson or to help with a project long after I'm longing to turn my brain off for the day--sometimes as late as 9 pm, or later, when I'm already hanging out on my bed with a glass of wine and a Captain America graphic novel.

Last week, then, to start to get a handle on the problem, I asked the kids to meet me at the school table at 10:00 (yes, they're late starters--they like to veg out until 9:00, then do animal chores and have breakfast, then Will has to make herself a cup of tea and veg out some more while she drinks it), and then to work with their best effort for three full hours, with no slacking and no breaks, and we would finish school for the day promptly at 1:00, no matter if we'd completed work plans or not. There was still some slacking and some breaks, which means that Syd didn't always finish, and realistically, I want Will to work for more like 4 hours, not 3, so she didn't always finish, either, but since my goals were to get them accustomed to working for an extended period of time and to remind them of how lovely it is to finish school and have a whole afternoon and evening of freedom, the schedule suited my purposes.

I've also had some difficulty with the kids protesting at our lessons, and inconsistently, as well. First they love food-related projects, and then they don't. First they want to study such-and-such, and then they fuss at the actual assignment. So over the weekend, as I made our lesson plans for this week, I called each kid in individually, showed her every single thing that she didn't complete last week, and asked her if she wanted to complete it this week. If she didn't, I dropped it from the schedule, because it's not worth the fight. Then I went through every single assignment that I had planned for this week, and got their buy-in on every single thing. Will, most particularly, had to be made to understand that for every lesson, I have to see some sort of output from her; she cannot simply read a text and move on with her life. This got her buy-in for some of this week's hands-on projects, when I asked her what she'd rather provide me for output and she drew a blank. It's for sure time, though, to start thinking of more self-directed studies to give her for eighth grade.

After all that, then, it was more fun than I had anticipated to drop all of our responsibilities and head out to an overnight trip that our Girl Scout council put on as a Girl Scout Leader/Daughter Appreciation Event. Staff hosted us at one of the Girl Scout camps and provided fun activities--





--and a catered dinner--



--and prizes--



--and then let us enjoy having the camp all to ourselves for the rest of the day and night:

Camp Dellwood has an amazing wildflower hike, interspersed with exercise equipment. The kids LOVED it!

It was the perfect relaxing weekend before we start a week that will end in maybe a little more relaxing, but will also contain a birthday party and a ballet recital.

Whew!

Daily work is the same this week, with both kids' buy-in: ten minutes of journaling or writing to a prompt; practice on Typing.com; reading from their MENSA reading lists; Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd; a Hoffman Academy lesson or keyboard practice; and SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will. Syd will also be expected to help me with party prep every day this week, whether it's putting together the games and crafts or preparing the food or cleaning the house, AND she has hours of ballet rehearsal every night for her upcoming recital. She's going to be a busy girl!

Books of the Day consist of a couple of selections from the MENSA reading list that I have to be a little more encouraging about, a couple of non-fiction books on Ancient Greece, and a couple of things that I just thought they'd enjoy--a much more in-depth book on backyard chickens for Will, and the complete collection of Madeleine stories for Syd.

I'm not adding anything new to Memory Work this week, so it's still reviews of Platonic Solids, helping verbs, and Sonnet 116; and common prepositions, Pythagorean triples, the first eleven lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, and the apostles of Jesus.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Syd is getting close to the end of Junior Analytical Grammar, which she's pretty thrilled about, as it's not a curriculum that she's loving. Too bad for her, as it's also a curriculum that is for sure teaching her the grammar concepts that I want her to have. When she's finished Junior Analytical Grammar, I'll likely give her a month or two off, and then it's on to Analytical Grammar! Will had a mind bender on this day--she's making such short work of them that I might skip to the middle of the book for her next one.

For now, we're moving very slowly through the Middle Ages, partly because there's so much more to explore than is there in Story of the World volume 2, which I'm using as a spine mostly for the chronology, and partly because we have so much more to do than Medieval history. There's no rush, though, and the kids are loving the study, so crawling away we go! This week, we're still in chapter two of Story of the World, because the kids remain interested in the Anglo-Saxon period and there's a lot more that we can cover. On this day, we're going to learn more about the Sutton Hoo ship burial. You can request free high-resolution images of artifacts held in the British Museum, but for efficiency's sake, they've also prepared a Powerpoint slide of Sutton Hoo artifacts, and that's what I'll be showing the children. Sutton Hoo isn't the first ship burial that we've encountered (there's also one in Beowulf), so we'll be discussing ship burial and burning in a little more depth, as well, using this dissertation as my resource. The kids then have the opportunity to make their own Viking longship, if they'd like, using either this tutorial or this printable, and we can either bury it or fill a Rubbermaid bin with water and burn it--gee, I wonder which they'll choose?

The kids really like completing Junior Ranger badges by mail, so even though it's a bit of work on the weekends, finding a badge program that 1) accepts badge books by mail and 2) has badge books that can be downloaded and can be well completed using internet research, it's worth it. For this week, I found that the Juan Batista de Anza National Trail has a badge program that can be completed online--score!

After loads of research, I finally bought the Level One curriculum in modern Greek from Greek123. If you're interested, I can tell you another time how I figured out which curriculum would be best, but for now I'll just tell you that the philosophy is to learn to read and write the language the way that a native child would; you can move more quickly, of course, using the same texts and workbooks,  and once you have around a third-grade reading knowledge, you can begin to read children's books written in the language, which will improve your skills even more. To make it more fun, and because you can't take a vacation unless you've studied for it, we're doing our Greek lessons nightly as a family, all four of us squeezed around the textbook, all four of us coloring the picture of μαμὰ in our workbooks. The curriculum includes access to an online tutor, so that's what the children will be practicing with every day as part of their work plans. and as it's also very important to expose ourselves to Greek daily (remember how many words a young child needs to hear before kindergarten? That's us!), right now we're listening to a lot of Greek pop hits on Spotify, although I'm hoping to also find some good Greek programming on Youtube.

I'm hoping that Will can finish up her Budgeting badge this week--starting a badge is always the most fun, but if Girl Scouts had their way, they'd do the funnest three activities from each badge, then drop it and start the fun activities for another badge. You've always got to encourage them to finish a badge by giving them more attention for the last couple of activities and making them more fun. For Step 4 of the Budgeting badge, then, I'm encouraging Will to complete the first activity, which is to make a list of her interests, then look for non-profits that are related to that interest. This will also open her up to more possibilities for a Take Action Project for the Breathe Journey that she's working through.

Will didn't do the temperature project last week, but says that she does want to do it this week. Since she's doing that, I won't move forward with our weather unit this week.

TUESDAY: Using the decanomial square to explore binomial squares was an activity that we didn't get to last week, but both children said that they did want to do it this week... we'll see. Syd also didn't interview her friends at playgroup last week, because most of them weren't there--the end of spring semester is a busy time for everyone, even homeschoolers! Rather than try a different activity to meet the badge's requirements, Syd said that she really wanted to try again this week... we'll see. Will could possibly finish her Budgeting badge on this day, by creating a workable budget and savings plan for our upcoming vacation to Greece. At first, I thought that I'd just have her plan for her own spending money, but now I'm thinking that it would be a more valuable experience to ask her to plan a family-wide budget and savings plan. We saved a lot to be able to pay for the vacation before we booked it (we don't carry credit card balances, which is a whole other discussion for a whole other day), but we could certainly do with more money for the trip itself!

Since Will is between seasons of Analytical Grammar, she has a worksheet in her Review and Reinforcement book on Tuesday and Thursday.

WEDNESDAY: Since I want to emphasize Greece even more in our applicable studies, I've decided to pause our Story of Science unit just before our chapter on Ptolemy and use Story of the World volume 1 to cover Greek history to that point. This week, we're covering Ancient Crete, Minos, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Daedalus and Icarus. On this day, the kids will read/listen to the chapter, answer the quiz questions, and we'll do the mapwork directly on our travel map of Greece--when we take this map with us to Greece, the kids will have an easy reference for what happened where! I also have some Youtube videos to show them of bull jumping, the Palace at Knossos, and Crete, etc.

The kids have been oddly reluctant to complete their current Your Kids: Cooking lesson, but they both insist that they don't want to skip it. Maybe this week we'll have quiche for dinner? Normally, Syd also has a separate baking assignment just for her, and she LOVES it, but this week her baking assignment is wrapped into party prep--she's going to bake all of the components for her castle cake herself.

THURSDAY: The National Mythology Exam didn't cover Theseus, although I'm sure the kids read that chapter for fun. Nevertheless, they'll read it again on this day, and make a trading card for Theseus.

Will didn't do her Beowulf translation yesterday, but I got out some of my Old English and Middle Welsh texts this weekend to show her, and she was enthusiastic about looking at them, and claims that she does want to try the translation this week. I hope she does, as I'm really looking forward to what she comes up with!

FRIDAY: We'll probably spend a majority of the day in party prep for the next day's fairy tale-themed birthday party, but we'll set aside some time for a lesson on the futhorc, the runic language of Anglo-Saxon Britain. We'll have a lesson and look at some examples, and then the children can create a moveable alphabet of runes, if they wish. When I showed this activity to Will, she claimed that she'd be willing to do it (despite grousing about every single activity that we did last week), but Syd is more likely my sure thing.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Birthday presents. Ballet recital dress rehearsal. Birthday lunch. Party prep. Fairy tale birthday party. Sleep. Wake up. Ballet recital. Frozen yogurt afterwards, perhaps, if we're not already too sugared out from the birthday party.

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Rainbow Party Project #2: Rainbow Party Invitations, and a Wet-on-Wet Watercolor Tutorial

The rainbow party projects are going to start showing up fast and furious, with one week to go--and pouring rain coming down, which Matt says means that it DEFINITELY won't rain NEXT Saturday. Okay, sweetie...

So while the rain poured down, the kiddos and I sat down at the big wooden table in the living room and painted ourselves a summer's full of rainbows. Last night, I even dreamed about rainbows, we painted so many rainbows. I cut one huuuuuge piece of Strathmore watercolor paper into 14 4"x5" postcards, although I don't think we'll actually end up having to mail any invitations this year. Still, postcard size is a good size for an invitation.

Wet-on-wet watercolor is just a different way to watercolor, and I don't even necessarily think that the results are that better--just a little different. With wet-on-wet watercolor, the watercolor paper is also wet, and so the paint spreads more, and saturates the paper more easily, and you get that spread, saturated look that always screams "Waldorf!" to me--wet-on-wet watercolor is one of the trademarks of Steiner education.

There are different methods to achieve wet-on-wet, but when we do wet-on-wet watercolor, I give the kids a thick pad of newspaper to work on, which will absorb all the excess water produced during the activity, and then I soak the watercolor paper in a big bowl of water for several minutes, until it's completely saturated:

If you're doing this with larger pieces of watercolor paper, you'll likely need a tub, or the sink, to soak the paper in, and I can't even imagine that you'd want to do this at all with the largest pieces of paper--unless you got several people to crouch around the same piece of paper and all paint at once, a really large piece of paper would dry out before you were done with it. You can also see why you need professional artist's paper for this. It takes a nice paper to still be usable after you drown it.

After the paper is totally saturated, lift it out of the water and, depending on how big the piece is, either just shake the excess water off, like I did with these postcards, or blot the excess water off with a clean towel. The paper will still be wet, of course, but you don't want big drops of water on the surface, because that will dilute the paint.

Then, you paint...

And since these are invitations, I glued the actual invitation that Matt designed onto the back of each one, and there you have it:

A rainbow invitation to a rainbow party.

I can't wait for you to see the ridiculous dress that I'm sewing for the birthday kid to wear.

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Secondhand Sand

This weekend was all about the thrifting. Of course, we did also go to the zoo this weekend and have Father's Day and watch Toy Story 3 at the drive-in, and last weekend we had the Monroe County History Center garage sale, so that was thrifting, too...

Just go with me, here. This weekend was all about the thrifting.

First, of course, are the Friday morning garage sales. We don't often hit these, but we were on our way over to the Community Garden, anyway, and I did just happen to have a little cash money in my pocket, and that's how we ended up with a Belgian waffle maker, a Ziplock baggie full of little plastic cowboys 'n Indians, and Sydney's new best friend:

For four dollars.

But of course, we all know that there is no thrifting like the thrifting that is the Goodwill 50%-off Storewide Sale. I bought T-shirts to remake into baby bags, a sorely-needed new pair of blue jeans, subtraction flash cards for Willow + road trip, several pounds of that colored sand that you layer into jars to make shelf pretties, two dinosaur books, etc.

Sydney's mania for all things pretty has nearly driven me out of my gourd. I am SO tired of the child's refusal to wear anything but dresses and skirts and tights and leggings and hairbows and barrettes. I have to braid her hair into two pigtails and put a bow barrette at the bottom of each pigtail every morning. Every morning! All the people who are reading this and who knew me as a child--I'm talking to you, Aunt Pam!--are laughing their asses off right now. I didn't even wear make-up to my own wedding, and here I am with a house full of pigtail braids and bow barrettes.

Anyway...this was the last storewide sale until September, which means that it's time to look into the fall wardrobe. I thought about buying Sydney some practical long pants and long-sleeved shirts, and then I thought, "Aw, screw it," and ended up buying her a big stack of party dresses:

Yep, party dresses. Lace and tulle and smocking and petticoats and  puffs and velvet and ribbons:

The child now has party dresses for play clothes. Whatever, she can wear leggings and tights with them when it gets cold.

Willow has her own methods for driving me nuts, but thankfully clothing is not one of them. A while ago now she tried for a couple of months to insist on "pretty" clothes, as well, but she couldn't stick it. She basically pulls her clothing from the top of her clothing drawers, and as long as she can climb trees in it and get it muddy, she's good to go.

I actually do take pleasure in choosing the children's clothes--even digging through acres of party dresses was fun when I anticipated Sydney's joy in being presented with them, and even though Will doesn't much care about what she wears, I take a lot of pleasure in choosing clothing that is centered on what she does like--dinosaurs, horses, farms, outer space--and clothing that is centered on what I like. That's why my kid is occasionally seen wearing an AC/DC T-shirt.

Usually, however, my clothing choices look more like this:

Or perhaps this:

Five years isn't too early for a kid to dress a little skater punk, is it?

Pavophobia and Trampoline Punk: A Senior Year Trashion/Refashion Show

Once upon a time, there was a four-year-old who was super into drawing pictures of pretty outfits she'd thought up. She also like to take her mom's fabric scraps and cut and tape them into fancy clothes for her Barbies. 

One day her mom, who still got the local newspaper because it hadn't yet been sold to a conglomerate whose sole goal was to bleed its assets, saw a call for entries for the town's second annual Trashion/Refashion Show. It invited people to design their own outfits from trash and repurposed materials, and if they were accepted they'd get to model them in a runway show benefiting the local sustainable living center. It seemed like a good project for a homeschooling preschooler and her crafty mom, so the mom asked her kid if she wanted to design an outfit and help sew it and be in a real fashion show.

The kid did.

This was her design:

This is what her mom sewed:

And this is the kid getting her photo taken right before she walked the runway:

That was fourteen years ago, y'all. I don't even know how this didn't go the way of gymnastics and aerial silks and Animal Jam and horseback riding and My Little Pony and Girl Scout summer camp. But every year, leaving the theatre at the end of the Trashion/Refashion Show, the kid would be talking about what she wanted to design the next year, and then every next year when the call for entries came out, there she'd be drawing her design for me, and after the age of nine helping me sew it, and after the age of eleven sewing the whole thing, and after the age of thirteen taking over writing out and submitting her entry, too.

So somehow the years have passed until now, along with her Spring ballet recital and our Girl Scout troop's Bridging/Graduation party, this show has become another last thing for her Senior year of high school.

It's a weird feeling to be a secondary character in someone else's good old days. 

As the kids are getting properly grown up now, I've realized that these kid years are my good old days, too. So because this is also MY last Trashion/Refashion Show, or at least the last one that I'll experience this way, I asked the kid if I could go back to our roots and design and sew an outfit for her to model. She said yes, and I immediately set about discovering for myself how inadvisable it is to sew a garment for a human to wear out of a broken trampoline. 

Like, that webbing is SHARP!

This is what it looks like when the kid and I are both working on our entries on the same weekend, because we both procrastinated until the very last minute.

I ended up cutting it with the kitchen shears because I was too afraid to let any of my proper scissors near it, and tbh now I probably need a new pair of kitchen shears. The plastic threads in the cut ends of the webbing cut ME the entire time I was working with it, and they poked through all the seams and cut the kid until I covered every single inside seam with duct tape.

And there was only a certain amount of sewing I could possibly do by machine--

--before I had to just get out the hand-sewing needle and embroidery floss and resign myself to hand-stitching all the fussy parts while cutting myself up even more thoroughly.

The dog looks perturbed in the below photo, but even with all that I was happy as a clam, making a big mess in the family room in parallel with the kid making her own big mess. These ARE the good old days!

Remember that skull quilt block from November? I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with it, but I did happen to sew it from a thrifted blouse and my old wedding dress--

--which made it a refashioned item, which means that I could applique it onto the back of the trampoline webbing dress jacket. And then I cut the bodice off the wedding dress, turned it backwards so the cool fake buttons went down the front, added some spaghetti straps, and that became the dress shirt for the garment:

The trampoline webbing pants were a nightmare to sew (and a nightmare to wear, ahem, if you happen to enjoy being able to bend at the hips and knees) and I kept them super simple, but I did cut the triangle rings out of the webbing and hook them together to make a chain to add a little detail to the otherwise plain black:

And here's my Trampoline Punk!

Trampoline Punk image via Bloomington Trashion

Here's the kid's own design, Pavophobia:

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

Pavophobia image via Bloomington Trashion

And then one last walk down the runway together for old times' sake:

Model/Designer Walk image via Bloomington Trashion

Some of the kid's friends always come to watch her show, and afterwards I always take them all out for ice cream. Because this was also the Eclipse Weekend, though, every place was paaaaacked even at 9:30 pm on a Sunday. It was bananas! But finally we found a spot where the line at least wasn't out the door, and although they were out of waffle cones they still had one last waffle bowl left, and then a giant group left and we were all able to wedge ourselves around a little table in the back corner behind a bunch of local college students whose friends had all come to town for the eclipse:

The kids mostly talked amongst themselves but because they're nice kids and they've all known me since they were seven, they kindly included me in their conversation, as well. A year from now I'm definitely going to have to find my own friends to eat rainbow sherbet with on a certain Sunday night in mid-April, but this one last year I just enjoyed the heck out of it, like you're supposed to do in the good old days.

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!