Girls Love Dinosaurs

As a sort of last-minute idea, I've decided to sell at a local craft fair on March 29. It's supposed to be a showcase of female artists and businesswomen, and my booth rental fee benefits, in part, a local support system serving women and children who are the victims of violence.

I'd almost decided against selling at local, smaller markets, partly because I think my work is pretty weird and not to the general taste, partly based on a very silly couple of tiny craft fairs I did around Christmastime, including one for Girls Inc. at which it turned out I was the only vendor (I still pulled a profit, but being the only vendor...just embarrassing), and partly based on this book I've been reading, Crafts and Craft Shows: How to Make Money, by Philip Kadubec. 

Kadubec isn't really my scene, since he describes his work as "country traditional," highlights booths that look like little general stores or post picket fences at their entrances, and might possibly think that the Internet is a fad, but he was a very successful crafter before retirement and is very insightful about the business of crafts. He prefers larger shows that are precisely targeted toward your particular craft, even though they have scary-large booth rental fees, over teeny-tiny little local fairs that are really cheap to enter. Teeny-tiny little local fairs, he argues, can also be pretty ticky-tacky, don't necessarily attract anyone who wants or can buy your stuff, and waste time better spent more professionally marketing your business or even just making stuff.

I think Kadubec is right on track with this, based on my small experience, and he's voiced the reasoning that will allow me to no longer waste my time at, say, the Christmas craft fair at Matt's office. I think this Luna Arts Festival is going to be awesome, though. From what I gather, it's an established fair with a history, which is a pro for selling at it. It's a craft fair/expo with nothing else distracting, like a chili cook-off or auction or something, tacked on, but with local musicians playing and drawing in their fan bases. It's woman-centered, which I'm always on board with, and I can use it as a dry-run for building a booth that actually looks really professional, before jumping into applying to any big shows.

That being said, I'm still not going to show my regular Pumpkin+Bear stuff. Kadubec also speaks about the possibility of saturating your local market, especially if you don't sell stuff you can use up, like soap, but stuff that sits around and stays stuff for the rest of your life, like record bowls and T-shirt quilts. So I think it is important that if I sell a lot locally, I do provide some significant variety in my work. And therefore, I've decided that for this fair, Pumpkin+Bear will be selling under the alias Girls Love Dinosaurs.

My concept is stuff, primarily recycled but not necessarily, that is thematically centered on dinosaurs--primarily for kids but not necessarily. I worked hard the whole weekend, took the kid out for a photo shoot this morning before it started snowing (something else Kadubec suggests--awesome photos of your stuff or your creation process displayed in your booth or in an album in your booth. It humanizes your creation and highlights its uniqueness and the handicraft aspect), and here's what I've got so far (I can't fix the dismal winter lighting on any of the photos, because my 8-year-old bootleg copy of Photoshop 6.0 finally crapped out on me, and my legitimate purchase of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is currently still winging its way to my door):

These are the Fatty Stegasauruses, made from recycled wool sweaters and polyester batting (I like the fact that I can upgrade the stuffing to make them really eco-friendly, and they're a possibility for selling in a local store or two here). If I have time to make another batch before the fair, I might make a different size or type...say, apatasaurus?

These are the dinosaur-themed "summer quilts," meaning they don't have any batting, per se, just either a fleece back and binding or a fleece middle and a flannel back and binding. I still machine-quilted them, though, which is awesome fun. I'm thinking three sizes--a "play" size, for doll blankets or what-have you, a "baby," size, which is a crib quilt, and a "kid" size, which is a twin.

And these are my soldered glass pendants, made from dinosaur stamps that I bought from Western Mountain Stamp and Coin, which sells packages of stamps sorted by theme--I also have the cats-themed one and the space-themed one, and I really want the maps one and the elephants one, too, only I'm already swimming in stamps. I'm particularly pleased with my soldering work since I bought grozing pliers that permit me to smash the little uneven bits off the edges of the glass that I can hardly ever cut evenly, and the joy of this has given me good-enough glass-cutting karma to actual make some pretty accurate cuts now, as well.

So I'm thinking this might be a sweet product line, because people tend to like dinosaurs. My kids are obsessed with them, as are a lot of kids, and they're also quirky enough to perhaps draw in the quirky crowd. If they're the next stuffed chicken or not, I don't know.

Little Art

My little girls have always been artists:

Goodwill

The Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale is awesome. I look forward to it with such joy in my heart. I mark it on my calendar and gaze at it happily whenever I happen by. I memorize the date, so that I can say things like, "No, we can't go to Indy next Saturday. That's the Goodwill 50%-off storewide sale." I plan the night before so as to get to Goodwill as soon as it opens at 9 am on the day of the sale (this Saturday, we were 9 minutes late. As Matt dropped me off on his way to the hardware store with the girls, he said, "Nine minutes late? Oh, please." And yet? I had to wait by the cash registers for a cart, and then follow the person with the cart out to her car, and then help her load into her car the 5,000 deoderants she had bought---which weren't even 50% off, because they were NEW!). I follow a strict hierarchy of departments to visit, based on what I want most, how crowded an aisle is, and if my arm is tired from pushing through overcrowded T-shirt racks.

I adore the storewide sale for numerous reasons: for one, I don't do a lot of shopping, so going on an actual shopping spree once in a while is fun. I also buy all our clothes, all our books and toys, and most of our household items used, so, for instance, Matt actually needed work pants, and Willow needed shorts for the summer. And I buy a lot of the materials I use in my handiwork used, so I'm always looking for wool sweaters to felt and T-shirts to quilt. Here's what I bought this Saturday:

• dinosaur matching game, because the girls love dinosaurs



• dinosaur pop-up book, same rationale



• wading pool that must be tested and may or may not be returned, based on how massive it is and whether or not I decide it's actually an extravagance



• 6 pairs of shorts for Willow for the summer, one of which is identical to a pair of Matt's cargo shorts--awesome. I need now to make her some ribbon belts to hold them up, since they're a little roomy.



• flowery dress for Willow, unnecessary but very pretty



• 2 pairs of work pants for Matt



• one pair of jeans for me, one pair of brown pants, and one pair of brown pinstripe trousers--awesome. Only the jeans need to be hemmed, even.



• Sewing for Dummies--awesome.



• 3 wool sweaters for felting into stuffed animals or quilt blocks for some crib quilts I'm thinking about making



• one stripey shirt, two peasant tops for me.

• two hoodies for me, both brown, yet both different
• two ringer tees, for me and Matt


• half-dozen or so tie-dyed T-shirts for a quilt I'm making for us, to match one I donated to Willow's Montessori for an auction and really liked



• three dinosaur T-shirts for a quilt I'm making for the girls



• one Superman T-shirt for Matt



• three Star Wars T-shirts for a quilt



• one Captain America T-shirt for a quilt



• four or five pillowcases for summer dresses for the girls, including a couple that match--awesome



• one burgandy fleece blanket for a quilt backing



• one Christmas-themed T-shirt for a quilt



• one World's Best Mom T-shirt for a quilt



• The Mouse and the Motorcycle, a chapter book to read to Willow at bedtime

Whew. And for way less than a hundred bucks.

Remaking Vintage Jewelry

I solder myself and the girls a lot of butch jewelry out of microscope glass and postage stamps, but I haven't yet gotten into beadwork. I read how-to books and arts and crafts books regardless of whether or not I practice that particular craft, however, and so I was pleasantly surprised to find, while reading by Lindsay Cain, a short how-to on remaking vintage jewelry. The most I've ever done with this was to replace a set of my Mama's handpainted yellow beads that Papa bought her in Italy during the war with fishing line instead of rotting thread, but the possibilities here seem pretty sweet. I've seen a lot of recycled jewelry on etsy, for instance, that uses other objects--pop tabs, dominoes, paperclips, keys, etc.--to make beautiful jewelry, but I think it's the same ethic as remaking clothing to take tacky jewelry and make it awesome.

Buzz Buzz Designs is one Web shop that does exactly this--the artist's work seems to be specifically informed by the recycling ethic, and utilizes vintage costume jewelry to make fine new things. I'm especially fond of this vintage Lucite sphere on a vintage aluminum chain.

I also like pequitobun's shop on etsy: this artist's stuff is partially vintage and can be pretty punk rock.

Femmegems itself also offers this really cool jewelry makeover service: you can ship your own vintage jewelry to them and they'll remake it for you into something awesome. Awesome.

Curtains to Tutu

Willow has started attending a dance class with the Windfall Dancers, a modern dance collective in our town. For her first class, she wore sweatpants and a comfy shirt, but all the other girls wore leotards and pink tutus and pink onesie-things. I was embarrased and told the instructor I didn't realize there was a dress code or I'd have dressed Willow appropriately (or rather, not have signed her up), but the instructor replied that there actually wasn't a dress code but that all the little girls (except for Willow) always seemed to just show up like that. Now, I've tried very hard all of Willow's life to avoid gendering her in a stereotypically feminine fashion, and I'm quite proud that she remains unconscious of things like princesses and tiaras and Barbie dolls, and there's no way in hell that I'm going to dress her like a pink ballerina for her creative movements for 3-5-year-olds dance class, but I also don't want her to feel deprived if she notices all the floaty little fairies in their frilly little tutus in her midst and wants a girly dance outfit herself. My solution? As follows:

Take the curtains that used to hang in the girls' room but do not anymore:

Add to them some hot pink and black tulle bought on sale at Joann's:

Visit this forum on Craftster for inspiration, spend some time with scissors on the rug with the girls, some more time tying knots in front of DVDs of season 7 of Little Tragedy on the Prairie Seasons 1 - 9 (9 Pack), and end up with...

...two awesomely happy little punk rock tutu girls.

Starry Pants and Who and Grrr Panties

If you don't want to buy new stuff all the time, it's really important to be able to turn clothes you don't want to wear anymore, for whatever reason, into clothes that you do want to wear. One of the problems that our family has is that we never dress appropriately for messy activities--as a result of our on-again, off-again home improvement activities (which will result, I think, primarily in lowering the future selling value of our house), we have purple paint (yes, an actual room of our house is actually painted purple) on not one, but two pairs of gym pants and one work shirt, and blue paint on one ringer tee. Now, the work shirt will need to be turned into a floaty summer dress for one of the girls, but the other clothing items are going to benefit from handmade fleece appliques. And by handmade, I mean stars that I unevenly sketch onto fleece and then cut out and sew over permanent stains with a zigzag stitch. Fleece is a nice choice, I think, because it won't ravel even if you don't stitch it well, and I like the way it stretches a little as you sew it--you know how I hate for things to look precise. So here are my favorite pair of comfy red pants, confined to the to-be-mended shelf for too many months because of its stupid purple paint stains, finally mended and made happy again:

I think it turned out pretty great. The grey sweat pants, appliqued with an X, still need some work since, as Matt pointed out, the X is placed so as to seemingly mark a spot located directly between my butt cheeks...

Thin cotton T-shirts make good panties, and here's an example from Goodwill that is now Willow's favorite pair of panties, although she wears them backwards because she likes to look at the owl, not have it on her butt:

Here's a shirt from Matt's closet, a Christmas present from his mother, which was a little too fancy for a guy who wears only soccer or comic book shirts outside of work, and is now a pair of panties for me:

Grrr!

More New Findings

Here's what I've been looking at this week while nursing Sydney, sitting in the back of the room during storytime at the library, or hiding in the bedroom during my 20-minute off-duty time when Matt gets home from work:

Threads is pretty much entirely over my head, but since I'm only really just becoming interested in sewing or altering clothes for myself--I sew quilts, things for the house, and clothes for the girls all the time, but subsist, myself, in thrift store clothes in which fit isn't always my main priority--I read it anyway, in search of a place to begin. A peasant top, perhaps?

I have a button machine that makes 1" buttons--I bought it because there's a terrific profit in buttons, since they're quick and easy to make and popular to sell--but I just as often make buttons to give as gifts or for Willow to wear or to put on my own backpack. I use a 1" hole punch to take button graphics out of magazines, picturebooks, or vintage papers, but being inspired by badbuttons.com, I'm trying to convince my partner, who is a grapic designer, to make me some awesome original designs.

by Tsia Carson, is a terrific DIY book that introduced a load of new projects to my to-do list: Kool Aid Yarn, Recycled Yarn, Bag o' Bags, Knit Hammock, Shrink Plastic Necklace, Button Cuff, Embroidered Screen Door, Rice Table, whew! Her pattern for T-shirt panties could very well be the trick I need to improve my own pattern, which for some reason results in panties that keep getting more granny-like every time I make them. She also has this terrific Web site, SuperNaturale, which has tutorials and showcases of designers and projects focused around a frugal and sustainable craft ethic. A lot of this stuff, obviously then, makes use of recycled materials.

Another encyclopedia-like book, and this one is vast, is The Crafter Culture Handbookby Amy Spencer. It has about a billion projects, many of them made from repurposed materials, and not just the obligatory refashioned T-shirts and button jewelry but also Chinese lanterns from colanders, brooches made from teeny fabric scraps, the pillowcase dress, and so on.

Know more? Share!

Better and Worse

I've been a busy little bee lately, through better and worse. Better--I've discovered that the Instant Play feature of the Netflix membership Aunt Pam gave me for Christmas is awesome! I've spent all my free time the past few days cutting out postage stamp squares for my swap and pasting clippings of my comic strip, Still Life with Grad Student, into my scrapbooks while watching The Office seasons one and two and Dead Like Me season two, all on the comfort of my Internet connection.

Worse--this afternoon, with Willow at school and Sydney just down for a nap, I managed to step on a broken sewing machine needle and embed it into my heel, nothing sticking out but a sliver of silver and some thread. I tried to pull it out myself, just could not do it, called my partner and got his voicemail, fantasized about waking Sydney up and driving us over the the walk-in clinic but just could not imagine how that would work, and so limped, barefoot, in the 35-degree freezing rain, over to my next door neighbor's house. Her mother-in-law, visiting from India, took one look and left the room, but all Marianne herself said was "Oh, my God," before sitting me down on the floor and deftly extracting the needle, although she did not tell me exactly when she was going to do it, as I specifically instructed her to. The mother-in-law re-entered to give me a tissue, as I was bleeding onto their carpet, but she wouldn't let me apply pressure to the wound, instead insisting that I squeeze it "to let the toxins out." It may fly in the face of conventional US medicine, but that actually makes a lot of sense to me. I also got a special disinfectant imported from India, and a special poofy bandage Marianne got at the hospital while giving birth, so all in all, it was still pretty awesome.

Easy Peasy Quilt Binding

I'm a fan of work that is unfussy, simple, and even a little rough. I like handmade things to look handmade, and sometimes I'm actually reluctant to learn proper techniques, because I'd rather figure it out for myself. Even though I'm growing much more skilled, I still like to think of myself as an outsider artist.

Quilt binding is something that I figured out for myself, and I think my work looks very nice while being unfussy and simple, although I'm sure there's no way I'm doing it the "right" way. I don't use batting because I like, instead, for one of my other elements--the pieced front, or the back--to be really thick. With a denim quilt, the denim is really thick and warm, and with a T-shirt quilt, I back it with a thick blanket, preferably fleece. I also don't quilt, because I tend to find even the most subtle quilting distracting from what I've sewn--I just haven't incorporated quilting into my designs, yet. I've tried several ways of binding my quilts--sewing it right sides together and turning it, using commercial or constructed quilt binding, etc.--but my very favorite way is to fold the quilt backing over to the front to bind the edges. I also really like to use non-ravel fabrics, like fleece, so that I don't have to fold over.

So here's my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles quilt laying on top of the orange fleece blanket I'm going to back and bind it with. For a really precise fit, you'd tape the blanket to the floor or pin it to the carpet, and pin the quilt to the blanket, but I don't tend to use slippery fabrics, and I find that just laying it and smoothing it still keeps it well-fitted.

And then I go around with my rotary cutter and my cutting mat and I trim the fleece pretty narrow--I fold over some of the quilt front with the back if there are any uneven spots.

The thing to really take the time on is to pin everything nice and stable. I pin about every five inches or so--it's kind of tedious, and it takes forever, but Willow likes to hand me the pins, and when I used to not even pin very much, the front and back really wouldn't turn out even.

I'm mostly working on other sewing projects--I've got my postage stamp quilt squares swap, and lots of clothes to mend--but the next quilts I'm making are for us. I plan to make a queen-sized and a full-sized denim quilt for our two family beds, and a dinosaur quilt, partly from T-shirts and partly from printed fabric, for the girls.

Postage Stamps are Tiny

I just signed up for a terrific swap on Craftster. It all began with this forum about postage stamp quilts, which are quilts made from 1.5" blocks. One-and-a-half inches! So it takes 144 blocks to make one square foot of quilt, and you can just go ahead and multiply that by the size of quilt you want. I suggest that you choose your smallest bed. I think it sounds awesome, mostly because I like to quilt using squares, because I like how they all line up so nicely, but there are only a certain number of things one can do with a square. And this is another thing.

So I signed up for this swap, the Postage Stamp Quilt Squares swap. I'll be in a group with, say, 9 or 10 other people, and we'll each make up a set of, say 60 quilt squares for each of the people in our group, so maybe 600 squares in all, which is a lot, but in turn, each of those people will be sending me a set of 60 quilt squares, so I'll have 600 new squares in the end, and I can actually start sewing my quilt.

I requested a book from the Monroe County Public Library entitled Quilts A to Z: 26 Techniques Every Quilter Should Know. I haven't read it yet, but apparently P is for Postage Stamp Quilts, and the author uses fusible webbing to line up all the quilt blocks military-style so that everything comes out nice and straight upon sewing. It's definitely a technique I'm into trying out, because even with my 10.5" quilt blocks, I occasionally get a little off-line, and I imagine that the saving grace that offsets the chaotic colors and patterns of a postage stamp quilt is the precision with which the blocks are lined up.

Postage stamp quilts are really popular on Crafster, with its DIY no-matter-what ethic, but they're not as popular on etsy, maybe because they take so damn long that there can only be so much profit in it. There is at least one really beautiful example up right now, though: isewisew writes that her postage stamp quilt is entirely hand-pieced and hand-quilted. All I can say? Wow.

Indie Craft Fairs

Sporting the strawberry hat I bought her at Renegade Fair!

I'm a really big fan of indie craft fairs. I find the modern DIY practice really fresh and appealing, and the vibe so different from your typical craft fair. So far I've enjoyed attending them and buying lots and lots of awesome stuff, and one of my goals for this year is to apply to some of the fairs in driving distance in order to test how my work might sell in a market that's really suited to it.

Here is a list of my favorite indie craft fairs:

I attended the Renegade Craft Fair in Chicago this year, and it was quite a good outlet for some retail therapy. I bought loads of things, including a vinyl wrist cuff in orange and grey, knitted strawberry-top hats for both my kids, postcards, pins, and soap, and I studied the kinds of displays and marketing that the successful booths employed. It was where I figured out that my own displays need to look way more put-together.

The Bazaar Bizarre (I wish it was the Bizarre Bazaar, but I'm not in charge of all aspects of the world at large) is a winter event that I've never attended, but there's one in Cleveland, which is in driving distance, so I'm so there this year. Even though they're obviously not updated for the upcoming year yet, their sight is very valuable if you like to sell because they have lots of photos of past events. I flip through the vendor photos and gaze jealously at their awesome displays, and wish I, too, could make their awesome products.

Craftin' Outlaws also looks really cool, and is in good old Columbus, a driveable distance, but it seems like it might be really close in time to Chicago's Renegade Fair, which would be unfortunate. I can't spend the year tooling around in my RV from indie craft fair to indie craft fair until Matt and I retire. Or if we worked independently. Which would be great.

The No Coast Craft-O-Rama is too far away for me to attend, but it's another winter event. This is the thing I didn't get last year--I chose to sell at a sci-fi convention last Thanksgiving weekend instead of at the local craft fair's holiday fair, and I did well at the convention, but I might have done better at the holiday fair, because people love themselves some Christmas. I was opposed to the idea of making "Christmas" crafts because I generally only make things that I'm really into myself, and I'm not so into Christmas, but I was thinking I might try it this year. Christmas-themed stuff, anyway, if it doesn't sell, would also make good Christmas presents that would fit in with my handmade holiday ethic without the last-minute stress of actually making the handmade holiday. I noticed on etsy, too, that everybody but me made Valentine's Day stuff and it all sold like mad, so another one of my goals for the year is to figure out a schedule for creating for the big holidays.

Finally, the Urban Craft Uprising is also much too far away for me to attend, but I'm also a really big fan of the Web sites for indie craft fairs because they always provide links to the Web sites of their vendors, and I love indie craft Web shops as much as I love indie craft fairs.

Know more? Share!

Fangirling at a Comic Book Show

I sold in the dealer room of a comic book show this Sunday--the ASH Comics Show up in Indianapolis. I got a lot of love there but didn't sell anything big. My neighbors were Mike, who moonlights at Wal-mart when he's not selling toys at the fairs, and Bell, Book and Comic from Dayton, Ohio. They were terrific neighbors. Mike gave me trail mix--with candy!

There is a difference between a convention, which is usually a multi-day event for fans of something, and a show, which is usually a one-day event for collectors of something. I do pretty well selling at conventions, for a couple of reasons, I think. First, fans are more likely than collectors to buy things that are more homages to a particular theme than collector's items. Second, the multi-day factor allows people to visit an item several times over a couple of days, getting attached to it, and then they all buy on the morning of the last day.

The comic book show was okay, however, because the table price was pretty cheap, and for a cheap price, marketing is a worthy goal. I gave out a lot of business cards to people who liked my stuff--Mike said he'd put a couple by the time clock at his Wal-mart--and pointed people to my Web shop and blog. It's very fun, too, to have the geeky conversations you can only have at a place like this. I'm a big nerd, but I'm not out-nerding anyone at a comic book show.

I'm in the process now of putting my fangirl quilts up on etsy. Here's my first one:

The rest will hopefully be up in the next couple of days.

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

New Findings

Like a superhero, I'm a stay-at-home mom by day, and an Indiana University composition instructor by night. Now, many parents think it's a point of pride that they haven't had time to crack a book since their kids were born, or at least that's what aquaintances often tell me when I talk about what I've been reading or doing. I'd go nuts, though, if I didn't have some mental breaks throughout the day, and I think it's good for the girls to see me engaged in my own interesting, mentally healthy activities while they do the same, especially since they know that they are always welcome to join me in anything I'm doing, and I'll find a way for them to legitimately help. It's funny that if they see me making anything, from using the sewing machine to cutting out photos at my desk, they want to help, and they're always coming at me with picture books to read to them, but they never ask me to read to them from what I, myself, am reading. And some of my stuff has pictures!

Anyway, here are some great resources I've found this week:

I checked out some back issues of Sew Newsfrom the Monroe County Public Library, and while much of it is way above my head, some isn't. I generally like the stuff I sew to look casual (sloppy), but this magazine encourages me to take more care with my cutting, pinning, and matching of thread colors. I might actually do real buttonholes now, for instance, or maybe do zippers the right way. Their web site is difficult to navigate, I think, but the Sew News Library page includes some articles from the print magazine, and some patterns and tutorials. I read through the tutorial on making your own bra, even though it's way too complicated for me, with happy fantasies of someday sewing my own bras out of recycled awesome clothes. How much would I love a bra made out of a Darth Vader T-shirt, for instance, and I bet nothing really gives as much support for my huge bosoms as denim!

By Hand: The Use of Craft in Contemporary Art showcases the work of several artists for whom handicraft is a crucial part of their work--knitting, embroidery, hand-sketching, sewing, etc. I found it especially interesting that the book showcases so many artists who do this, implying that this is a trend today. The artists' work seems to show a backlash against modernization and mass consumerism in their personal, often imperfect, handiwork, but they at the same time show a reliance on such modern technologies as Photoshop, computer drafting, and Kinkos that rewrites the traditional handicraft experience.

Letterghost over at Craftster reconstructed some beautiful dresses and a Spiderman T-shirt for herself, and when I asked her how she always got her reconstructed sleeves to look so normal, she pointed me over to WhatTheCraft.com, which has excellent tutorials for sewing your own stuff, pattern-free, when you otherwise don't totally know how to, you know, sew so much. My ultimate favorite is her tutorial for figuring out your own baseball sleeves, which I absolutely love, and are apparently called raglan sleeves. Who knew?

A Fair of the Arts Application

So I've been working lately on my application to A Fair of the Arts, the local craft fair that runs the second Saturday of every month from May to October at the farmer's market here. While I can't quite get on board with the name, it was more or less a rockin' good time last year, and my first-ever experience at a craft fair.

Here's my application, only partly cribbed from last year's:

Media (description of art/craft and the process by which it is made):

All products are made primarily from recycled, vintage, or otherwise pre-loved materials, re-imagined and put together in new and creative ways to craft beautiful quilts, housewares, jewelry, and art objects. The reuse of old materials into new is an environmentally-friendly way to create art and fine crafts. The specific product lines as of this writing are listed below:

Quilts from Clothes: Pre-loved denim, T-shirt, and blanket materials are pieced together into soft, comfy, and quirky patchwork quilts. Quilt sizes range from crib/toddler bed to a generous queen. Some quilts are also elaborated with cross stitch or hand embroidery decorations.
Price range: $40-$175.

Soldered Glass Pendants: Vintage stamps and wallpapers, magazine clippings, and other unique paper artifacts are sandwiched between microscope glass and soldered with lead-free solder and acid-free flux to create pendants for necklaces, earrings, holiday ornaments, and hanging art.
Price range: $20

Re-imagined Records: Pre-loved vinyl records are heated and formed into a variety of dishes, platters, and bowls, while their former cardboard covers find a new lease on life as gift boxes in a trio of sizes.
Price range: $5.

Reclaimed Crayons: Pre-loved crayon bits are melted and molded into colorful new creations perfect for the young artist’s hand.
Price range: $1-$3.

Titles of Digital Images:
Denim Patchwork Quilt with Soldered Glass Pendant Record Bowl Reclaimed Crayon Hearts Display at A Fair of the Arts 2007

I'm unhappy with my display photo, because I think my displays always look like junk and nobody else's displays ever look like junk. Huh, my house also looks like junk right now. And so do our cars. And our yard. What a weird coincidence...

Hemming My Jeans

How to hem your jeans while being a stay-at-home mom to a three-year-old and a one-year-old on a snow day:

1. Getting ready to go teach freshman comp while repeatedly telling your three-year-old to go put on some pants and reassuring your one-year-old, who is following you and whining, that you will read the dinosaur book as soon as you're done, notice that the jeans you bought at Goodwill yesterday and are planning to wear to school look like this:
2. Look for the chalk, but remember that it's outside under a few inches of snow after the girls used it to draw pictures on the sidewalk. Find the vanishing ink pen on the kitchen counter. Mark pants. Take off pants only to discover that the marking pen--white--doesn't show up. Tell one daughter to stop throwing raspberries on the floor. Tell the other one, again, to put on some pants. Look in the study for a children's marker, but find only crayons on the floor. Get a Sharpie from the coffee mug above your desk and mark the pants, then get distracted when three-year-old pours juice for herself and misses the sippy long enough for one-year-old to swipe marker and draw all over the computer keyboard.



3. Lay the pants out in the study on the floor. One-year-old proceeds to dance on pants; lay out pants again. Look for scissors. Find, out of the eight pairs of scissors you own, the pair that used to be sharp, since you bought it a month ago, until somebody else cut...something, and nicked the blade a bit. Laboriously cut out pants.

4. Take pants to the sewing machine, which is set up in the living room since the guys installing drywall in the basement last month blew the fuse in the study where you keep the sewing machine and not only did they not fix it, but your partner took apart the outlet for some reason. Turn on "Rhinocerous Tap" for the girls. Admire three-year-old's dancing, which is awesome. Debate matching your thread, but ultimately decide that it's too much work. Debate changing the sewing machine needle, but get distracted when three-year-old keeps grabbing for thread spools from one side and one-year-old grabs for sewing scissors from the other. Suggest that they go stand behind the couch.

4. Hem pants. Admire. Take "after" photo, attempting to stand in exact same spot as "before" photo, but while climbing behind the couch, girls have removed clean, folded laundry stacked on couch and thrown it on the floor, thus obscuring the unvacuumed rug completely. Notice you are wearing your partner's socks, but decide not to bother changing.

A Few Good Books

The girls and I go to the Monroe County Public Library at least twice a week. On Tuesdays there is storytime with the guy who juggles and has puppets, on Thursdays there is Spanish language playgroup with Miss Nancy, who can play the guitar and breastfeed baby Mateo at the same time, and there are always thirty or so books and a computer game and a DVD to check out. Some of my favorite things to get are books and magazines about making stuff. Not much is specifically geared to what I like to make, although some is, but nearly everything has something to appreciate, however chintzy. Here are some of my favorites:

, by Melanie Graham, is a little-known book on remaking clothes for children. Graham has you take all your kids' measurements and then apply some of them to these templates she has in the back--armpit, sleeve, crotch and hips--basically all the curves. So, you stick the curve templates the right distance apart based on what you measured, and there you go, couture kids' clothes. Even better than that, though, is that she shows you how to get the kids clothes from adult clothes--you know, set the pattern out just like this to get jumpers or overalls from pants, set it out like this to get shirts or dresses or rompers from shirts, set it out like this to get pants from sleeves. Some of her styles are pretty outdated, but I like her techniques. It took two tries to get the templates right, and then I went and lost Willow's, and I've only set two sets of sleeves correctly, but my jumpers and dresses and pants work, and I think it's just really smart.

by Lisa Bluhm is what finally taught me how to solder, that and the hot pink soldering iron I also bought from Simply Swank. Mind you, I was suffering from psychosis brought on by studying for qualifying exams, and the resulting lack of sleep and surplus of caffeine, but I managed to break more than one soldering gun, including one that my Papa had given me that he'd probably had, successfully, for 30 years, before I finally broke down and just bought quality equipment. Imagine! Anyway, Bluhm has well-explained instructions and clear illustrations, a welcome change after trying to figure out how to do everything by reading Craftster forums. I wish she'd break down and give some actual product suggestions, because I still need to buy a decent glass cutter, and I probably won't ever do any of her actual projects she includes, but the techniques alone are well worth it, as is my "Solder Your Art Out!" inscription.

by Kathy Cano-Murillo is notable for reassuring me that my taste for the gaudy in decorating is not demented, but ethnic.

by Hannah Rogge and Adrian Buckmaster and T-Shirt Makeovers: 20 Transformations for Fabulous Fashionsby Sistahs of Harlem are inspiring in that I might even, sometime soon, or, well, sometime, cut down my whole huge stash of men's T-shirts into something vaguely feminine and flattering.

I have a million more books I love. Know more? Share!

What I made today: stuffed panther cut out from the image on a T-shirt depicting the local high school's mascot

Pumpkinbear.etsy.com

Pumpkinbear.etsy.com is my etsy store. It's a modest undertaking so far--I'm only a beginner in online business. I don't have a bio up and my only feedback is as a buyer, but I do have some stuff for sale, all highly beloved, all quilts and the ubiquitous record bowl:

One of my favorites is this fangeek Powerpuff girls quilt. I like it so much because the week after I found this Powerpuff Girls bed ruffle at the Recycling Center, I found a pair of purple jeans there in the exact same spot. The exact same spot! I like to imagine the person who was just now giving up all hope of purple jeans ever coming back into style--those clown-colored jeans were hot in my junior high (or at least I thought they were hot--hmm, sigh). I had a pair of turquoise ones, and as I've always been a nice, big girl, the look probably wasn't so much awesome, especially paired with my white/pink Barbie high tops and the huge spiral perm Mama talked my Cousin Kimberly, fresh out of beauty school, into giving me. If I still had those beautiful turquoise babies, I'd pop 'em right into a Superman quilt, and they'd live happily ever after.

What I made today: with the girls, beaded wire "rain" to hang from painted clouds on the ceiling of their bedroom; T-shirt panties for myself

A Few of My Favorite Blogs

There are a few other blogs I know about that also explore the DIY culture, also from the perspective primarily of re-use and recycling. When I find a blog I really love, I tend to treat it like a must-read novel, starting at the beginning and reading it all the way up to the present, often in a great big glut over the course of a couple of days. Here are some glut-worthy:


Crafting the Web has a really great combination: some projects with tutorials, some product reviews, and the best of all--thoughtful advice about various topics involved in running an online craft business. Her suggestions for advertising an etsy shop are really useful, and it was a terrific post about the possibilities of starting an online crafting information resource supported by ad revenue versus an online retail store that inspired me to start this blog as the first step towards my own online business someday. Her projects aren't necessarily recycled, but since they're mostly paper-based, they tend to support well the re-use of papers.


Some of the projects at the Craftzine blog are too elaborate for me, and some utilize skills I haven't yet learned, but they're beautiful to look at. Many of the projects with tutorials use repurposed materials, and this site also often explores the art along with the craft, with posts about exhibitions and innovative designers.


Dynamite.com has project tutorials, often using repurposed goods, in nearly every post, and they also include workable recipes. They do a lot of fabric, paper, and yarn art, and they also just look really friendly, I think.


Perpetualplum's Weblog also showcases her recycled work, and she works at a level of skill and craftsmanship that I hope I can someday obtain. Her jewelry is intricate and beautiful and vibrant--and often made of buttons! She works with game pieces a lot, too, but her projects are just in a whole different world.


I really ought to submit my stuff to the Re-craft blog, which is dedicated to highlighting those etsy wares that are made of recycled materials. It's useful and inspirational to see what others make and sell, especially since I'm relatively new at online business and all it entails.


The Craftgossip Blog Network also posts primarily recycled products and artwork, but if something links to Craftster, you'll generally find an awesome tutorial and discussion there, and some DIY project books give me more incentives to annoy the aquisitions department at the Monroe County Public Library.

Rostitchery is the most beautiful, most perfect blog ever. I love it--she has a daughter, too, maybe a year older than Willow, and she's a brilliant seamstress, so she keeps me flush with dress patterns. I made a pillowcase dress for Sydney roughly based on one of her tutorials, only where she uses the sweetest, most flowery, and precious pillowcases, I sort of used an old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles one. Sydney rocks it, of course. And it was her post about making her daughter some Max and Ruby stuffed "babies" that gave me the idea to try soon making my girls some stuffed dinosaurs (not like the ones I'd like to sell at the craft fairs this summer, but simpler and more satisfying to little ones, most likely).

Know more? Share!

Just Us...Squids? Kitties? Pigs?

Last year at the craft fair I sold at every month, this one month in the space next to me, instead of the hippie couple who sold hand-painted light switches, a couple of grumpy elderly ladies set up a little round table with an umbrella on top. I call them grumpy because pretty much the only interaction I had with them was when they stopped the director in charge of the craft fair to complain about the ladders I use to display my T-shirt quilts (to the right in the photo). I'm totally on top of the fact that it's not the most professional looking display, and I plan to look much more put together at my comic book convention table in a couple of weeks, but still.

So call it sour grapes that I am still so completely messed up by their success. I am messed up not so much that they had crowds three deep around their little table calling out orders while I had my usual trail of nice people who admire my stuff but do not so much of the "buy." Nor am I really that messed up that they sold completely out of their stuff by 11:00 am, clearing at least a thousand dollars, and then didn't stick around in the hot sun like they're supposed to so that the fair doesn't have holes in its display and look crappy, but called one of their middle-aged sons to come and get them and take them home. No, what I am really messed up about is the fact that they did all this, had all this success, were the hit of the fair that day, by selling...little stuffed chickens. Two colors of fabric, stitched in a triangle with a little beak and comb stitched on. Stuffed chickens!

It made me doubt my place in my local craft community--I spend quite a lot of my free time making funky, ironic, kitschy jewelry and household goods, with very modest success, but these ladies, Just Us Chickens (of course), had people absolutely hysterical over them. One grandma wouldn't let her two grandsons have any of my marble-ized reclaimed crayon hearts at $1 each, snapping at them to put them down, but next door at the chicken table she bought them each a $7.50 stuffed chicken and had them pick out one for their mother. Another older woman, out with her daughter, refused to pay $7.50 for a stuffed chicken with a strawberry-printed fabric, but as she and her daughter walked away, the older woman saying, "Maybe I'll come back later and buy it," the middle-aged daughter responded, "If it's still there," and the woman stopped right in front of my booth, actually blocking access to it, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and instructed her daughter, "Go buy me that strawberry chicken." While the daughter did so the woman stayed right there, blocking my booth, staring vaguely off into the distance.

And the chickens brought people such happiness! Sometimes somebody gets really tickled at my stuff, like if they find a record bowl made out of their favorite record, or when they see a cool T-shirt quilt, or a bumblebee necklace, but it always seems really personal when they do, as if I've made something just exactly for them. But everybody loves chickens, it seems. One woman delightedly announced (I'm a shameless eavesdropper) that she'd set the chicken on her computer monitor at work, and every time she looked at it she'd smile. Another woman said that she'd give the chicken to her mother to put on the table next to her recliner, and every time her mother looked at it she bet she would just chuckle. I'm telling you, this chicken business was off the hook, and I had just no idea.

So I'm toying with the idea--this coming craft season, should I have my own stuffed animal? Made with recycled T-shirts or felted wool sweaters, of course. And what animal? These ladies used a pretty common pattern for theirs (sour grapes requires me to inform you that creating an object from a pattern you did not create is technically not allowed at many craft fairs), but to spend the time to create a pattern, I'd need to be pretty passionate about the animal in question. But if selling is the goal, perhaps I shouldn't trust my own pretty "unique" tastes.

Here's what other people have. BuyOlympia.com has these gorgeous reclaimed sweater owls, selling for $22 each. So that idea is taken. But aren't they beautiful, and so well put together? UncommonGoods.com has these elephants and lions for $26--a little too elaborate for me, and I'm not in love with the realistic coloring. But that's two other animals out.

Hmm. Willow and Sydney are both big into dinosaurs, and Willow is a big fan of buying a toy dino at Goodwill, taking it home, poring over her research tomes to match a picture with the toy, and then spelling out the name for me to label the bottom of her toy dinosaur with its actual real dino name--ah, we love learnin' around here. Stuffed dinosaurs might be pretty sweet. A diplodocus first, then maybe a triceratops, and perhaps a saltasaurus--if I can get some rhinestones...

Show-and-Tell: What I Make

I dabble in a lot of projects, although for craft fairs I try to specialize--the first season that I did a craft fair every month, I tried to introduce a couple of new types of crafts each time, but I think my quality suffered. It takes a LOT of practice and consistency to produce professional-looking objects, and that's sometimes something that I need to force myself to do, rather than flit around from project to project, leaving a wash of half-used materials in my wake and ending up with a lot of not-that-awesome end results. So this season, I've decided to keep most of the experiments at home, and only display a few selected types of crafts. Here's some of what I think I do well:

Record bowls are my bread-and-butter. The records are cheap and plentiful (I specialize in show tunes and children's recordings), the process is quick and easy, I can do it with the girls hanging out on the floor of the kitchen with me, the profit margin is high, and people like to buy them.

Okay, I love to make denim quilts, and they're soft and comfy and sturdy and warm, but I have to admit that I do have to literally give them away--they make happy presents for family and friends, but I haven't yet sold a single one at a craft fair or the farmer's market. It's such a super project, though, because blue jeans are one of the things you can always get for free--my best sources are the sidewalk exchange at the Recycling Center here and friends who blow out the butts or knees of their otherwise fine pants--and the colors, when pieced and sewn together, are subtle yet always complementary and, I think, really beautiful.

T-shirt quilts are pretty popular, though, and they're also somewhat pricey, which is good when I need to get paid. They're also some of the more satisfying things I make because there's a lot of scope there--for instance, I like to collect T-shirts around fan-geek themes, like Superman or video games or 80s cartoons, and make a quilt that's an homage to some nerdy joy. I do sci-fi and comic book conventions with these, which is a nice change of pace from the regular craft fair crowd sometimes, since I'm pretty much just a fan-geek myself.

Like everyone else, it seems, I also make soldered glass pendants and 1" buttons, but Matt, my partner, is getting antsy to get out of the house today, and I owe him for teaching how to post images on my blog and only yelling at me twice while doing so, so the lovely odes to paper and the melting of metals will have to wait.

What I made today: panties for Willow from a soft old T-shirt; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pillowcase dress for Sydney.

The Recycled Craft Ethic (A Manifesto)

I've thought a lot about this: why I create, and what I create with. I create to be powerful, to make for myself in my own way what companies would want me to purchase. I create to have beauty in my life, to make my environment and that of my partner and our daughters beautiful. I create to show love, to share my creativity and give my time to friends and family. I create to calm myself, to be with myself or with my daughters in relaxation and enjoyment. I create to challenge my intellect, to work out problems very different from my academic and home lives. Or really, I just create because I like to.

What I create with, however, is also very important. I'm unwilling to buy new materials with which to work, because my family doesn't have the money to spend for them and because we have a practice in which we do not buy new goods unless necessary. I'm also concerned about consumerism, commercialism, wastefulness, and the environment, and I want to teach my daughters to also be careful and wise here.

And so I create with things that others before me have used. I create with ephemera, such as board game pieces, or trash, such as plastic grocery bags, or damaged goods, such as holey T-shirts and felted wool sweaters. I find it rewarding to create and to live up to an ethic that is useful and good.

So serious! This doesn't reveal at all that what I really do is make dinosaur T-shirt quilts for my daughters, and Ozzy Osbourne T-shirt panties for myself, and necklaces out of Scrabble tiles; that I flit from project to project, the infinite variety of second-hand goods enabling my attention deficit; that my house is utterly filthy because I'd rather string beads with the girls than pick up the stepped-on jelly sandwich, that when my eldest daughter, Willow, asked why we were going to Joann's and I replied, "To buy a zipper," she chided, "No, Momma. We need to make that."

How would one go about making a zipper by hand?