Door Shelves! From Doors! Now They're Shelves!

At the Habitat for Humanity's Restore a miraculous discovery was made--old closet doors, $5 a pop, were exactly the perfect size to fit into the playroom nook in which we'd wanted a bank of sturdy shelves. So, down came the rickety plywood shelves that Matt slaved over making and that I constantly griped about hating (on account of they sucked!), and after an entire afternoon of this--

--we now have, awesomely, this: Finally, space for beads (Perler beads for mosaics and regular ones for stringing and collaging and decorating and embellishing...)Finally, space for toys you need space to spread out with, board games and floor puzzles and Legos and blocks:
Finally, space for the art supplies that I insist on buying in bulk, because frankly, I'd rather run out of food than art supplies:Finally, space for the kind of good non-fiction books that you really need to lie down on your belly on the floor, maybe with a big pillow or two, to explore:Finally, space!!!!
What with life, natural disasters, and everything, I haven't had too much time to throw all the stuff on them that I want to, and I won't be doing it tonight, either. On Tuesday nights, I feed the girls an early dinner before my office hours and their dance class, and after office hours I put them to bed while Matt goes to get grown-up take-out from a real restaurant, and then we sit down, at a table, just the two of us, and eat and talk like adults. What do we talk about?

The kids. Duh.

Back on the Grid, Free Stuff Included

We're just now recovering from our 23-hour power outage here (I want to be one of those mothers who looks at a power outage as a chance to reconnect with her family without the intrusions of technology, but I am most definitively not one of them), which blew all our big Sunday plans--Matt was going to do all the household laundry, and fold it AND put it away, which is a BIG DEAL, while watching football, and the rest of us were basically just going to craft and play and stuff, but with, you know, a light to pee by--and so instead of the photos of the brand-new awesome door shelves in the playroom, which I didn't get to take, or the photos of all the awesome craft fair stuff I made, which I didn't get to make, I'll show you what we got today from the public library's book sale FREE DAY!!!!!

Wait, that's the cat. MOVE!!!Ah, here we go! The girls' shopping cart (which they took into the sale because they are just that awesome) and the stack next to it are all romance novels for my students--I'll make them take one and read it and write a paper analyzing it when we study the romance genre later this semester (right now we're on Star Wars--I just tonight had to break it to them that Luke Skywalker was a member of a terrorist organization attempting to overthrow a ruling government. Yes, friends, blowing up the Death Star was an act of terrorism). The romance novels range from the 1940s old-school Harlequins with the duchess who falls in love with the brutal yet passionate czar to the contemporary ones that all seem to revolve around a single woman looking for a father figure for her adorable yet troubled child. Weird.

The girls picked clean the children's area (they got all the awesome geography picture books that nobody wanted to pay for--Tasmania, and Eastern Bloc, and My Mommy was Born in Germany) and then ransacked the young adult shelves for all kinds of inappropriate titles, but I bribed them into letting me sort through their collection and take out the teen heartbreakers by offering them a set of animal encyclopedias, so now we're flush on good animal pictures to cut out and do stuff with.

I got a couple of books to read for real, but mediating my kiddos requires so much energy that I really didn't have time to give the sale a good go-through just for me, so mostly I just grabbed all the halfway-decent crafting books that I saw. I got Needlepoint: The Art of Canvas Embroidery, which I'm not that excited about except that it does have some construction patterns for canvas containers; Better Homes and Gardens Gifts to Make Yourself, which has instructions for making those big cardboard puzzles that little kids like; Sewing The New Classics: Clothes With Easy Style, whose clothes are mostly baggy and ugly but from which I think I can figure out how to make jammy pants; Have a Natural Christmas 1980, from which I am totally going to make some pomanders; and , which has a pattern for bell bottoms(!).

Yep, it took me three trips to the car to drop all this stuff off, while the girls sat on a bench on the sidewalk and spilled chocolate soymilk on themselves (from Bloomington Bagels--don't get me started on how much I hate taking my kids to a restaurant by ourselves, but we were off the grid, and we had to eat!), and then I got yelled at by some guy who'd apparently been waiting on me to leave in my car so he could take my space, but I'm sorry, it's not my job to watch my kids and where I'm going and figure out what the people in other cars are doing, too, and then we went back into the playroom and the girls played while I utilized the library's electricity and wi-fi to write my lesson plans and grade my online homework submissions, and then we left the library, and I was yelled at AGAIN by some woman who got out of her car to come over and ask me if I was leaving my spot because I put one kid in her carseat, then the other kid in her carseat, then got in the car, then got each kid a book, then a different book, then got one kid a snack, then called Matt on the cellphone to see if he knew if the power was back on at home or if I should drive the kids to a restaurant--again, not my job to leave a parking spot as quickly as possible so someone else can have it. Have I ever mentioned that I LOOOOOVE to bike to the library with the girls? Weather willing, that's what we'll be doing again tomorrow morning, because come rain or come shine, storytime comes every Tuesday morning.

When is your storytime?

Not a Renegade This Year

I'm so bummed!

is this weekend, and I am not there! I am here, and I am seriously, seriously bummed. Nevermind the fact that we were just out of town last weekend, and that I have my own biggie craft fair--

--in TWO weeks, for which I am furiously crafting, and that it has apparently been hurricaning down rain in Chicago all day. I don't care! I'm mourning my Renegade!

We all went to Renegade last year the weekend after I failed my PhD qualifying exams (it felt political from the start, since the administration had been weirdly unwilling to give me any maternity accommodations and I had been unwilling to take my exams while tending to a newborn. They did eventually give me a few extra months, but then my committee was just never available to meet to help me prep, and never mentored me the way that all my grad student colleagues said that they were being mentored, and then all of their exam questions seemed to come completely out of left field and I was apparently super unprepared. After I failed, I emailed the chair of my committee and said that I was thinking about not trying again, and she just never emailed me back!), and so Renegade's obvious awesomeness is paired in my mind, I think, with relief that at least the months-long constant cramming was over, and the whole fun and relaxing weekend served as a balm for my very wounded ego. I bought Syd this hat and ordered a matching one for Will----and Syd, who really hadn't been able to walk for more than a couple of months (hence the bare feet even in the slight chill--bare feet=better balance, don'cha know?), followed her big sister along like a true devotee--

--and not just for the snow cone that a big sister will graciously share:

  

I also have lots and lots of photos of this lady--

--which tells me that my kiddo's obsession with dinosaurs goes back further than I'd thought.

I would have loved to have gone back this weekend. And, um, this might come as news to you, but I tend to repress unpleasant emotions, so the fact that I was shot through with misery this morning and burst into tears and could not tell you why may have had something to do with the anniversary. Or it may not--who knows?

I did notice, however, that some of the same vendors I visited last year are there again. I'm quite the handmade soap nut, so I bought some Biggs and Featherbelle soap , and I admired the industrial-strength record album coasters that artreco made.

But there were so many other things that I wanted to buy this year! How will I get this spoon ring now? And the British flashcard toddler apparel? And the faux fur cat-eared hat? Okay, that one I'm just going to have to buy anyway, shipping be damned! And yeah, I'm not even going to kid myself that I could ever afford this, but this bookshelf would look so great in the playroom.

Speaking of the playroom...finally tired of hearing me bitch and moan about the rickety shelves he installed (seriously, this morning they were canted at a 30-degree angle, and they just had fingerpaint and board games on them!), Matt took me to the Habitat for Humanity Restore and did not tell me I was nuts when I called him over to where I was and said, "Wouldn't these doors make PERFECT shelves for the playroom?" Okay, he did swear a lot in the ensuing hours, but tomorrow I'll show you the coolest thing ever to be constructed in our house. Not the coolest thing ever conceived, if you get me, but the coolest thing, by far, ever constructed.

Matt did not, however, permit me to buy the church pew. God, it would have ruled!

Paper and Wood and Felt

The kids spent the entire morning together playing, coloring horse pictures, and guzzling yogurt, leaving me with no other excuse than to spend all morning doing some really nasty, disgusting cleaning. I excavated out a few layers of dishes in the sink, organized the basement playroom, did a million loads of laundry, vacuumed, repaired the vacuum cleaner, cleaned out the refrigerator, found the missing library CD, picked up clutter, etc., while the kids just carried on taking turns and sharing and entertaining themselves, cruelly not rescuing me from such misery. Unfortunately, unless you had a "before" photo to compare the house to, it's still so messy that you wouldn't actually be able to tell I'd done anything at all. But I feel all gross and depressed now, so I guess that's something accomplished!

I'm not one to collect a ton of stash--honestly!--but when a craft store does offer a big sale on an item that I know I use a lot, I do like to stock up. Thus, Joann's 40%-off sale on felt-by-the-yard has had me going there TWICE to buy basically a yard in every color. It's not wool felt, but made entirely from recycled plastic bottles, which I think is absolutely terrific. Sure, wool felt is natural, and it does shape a little better, especially with a steam iron, but I'm opposed to factory farming, and organic wool felt is WAY out of my price range. Anyway...felt made from recycled plastic bottles? Awesome!

I've written before about making felt food with the kids, and next week we're going to make our felt board for the big playroom with lots of felt cut-outs for it. I mostly want to make geometrics and math symbols for them, but I've got enough white felt that the kids can draw on it with markers and cut out their own felt pieces, and I'm thinking about experimenting with my Bubble Jet Set to try to run some felt through the printer--I could print scanned characters from their favorite picture books, perhaps...

Another project the kids and I have been into this week is making animals from these old library FormWild CD-Roms. It's a set of 5 CD-Roms with pdf images of animals--you (not the kiddos--this is one of those projects you do out of their sight because it's way too fiddly and exacting) print them onto cardstock, fold and glue them according to the instructions, and you have three-dimensional stand-up full-color realistic-looking animals to play with! The best part is that there is about any animal that your kids would be interested in, from insects to dinosaurs. We're systematically checking the disks out of the library, and so far we've made every single fish stand-up, two of the horse, and the dinosaurs are in the works. I like to use them to tie into whatever subjects the kids are interested in exploring at a certain time, so I haven't shown them the insects, farm animals, or endangered species yet, and we haven't yet checked out the birds or mammals--but we will! The super-coolest thing, though, is that since the images are pdfs, they expand to scale. The web site says you can print these babies up to eight feet wide and they'll still look good and be constructable. It's been years since I've been to Kinko's, but it's got me thinking--how cool would a set of eight-foot dinosaurs made out of foamcore board be? So cool.

Another so-cool thing? This Web shop, Casey's Wood Products--I've seen it mentioned on more than one blog, and yes, it is so, so cool. The whole site just consists of little wood thingies to buy--die-cuts in a million shapes, pegs and spindles and spools and blocks, game pieces, beads, buttons, wooden fruits. Seriously! Unfortunately, the die-cuts are just made from "plywood" (whatever that REALLY is) and most of the turnings just say "wood"--I would have preferred a definitively eco-conscious material--but the options are really awesome. I could possibly splurge on some of these dinosaur die-cuts for the kids for Christmas--they'd love to color and play with them. But how awesome would these game pieces be for making up your own board game? And bowling pins? And these are turnings you can paint as little people!

Finally, here are a couple of Christmas gift ideas that I'm sussing out for the little kid:

• a learning bike like the one I want for her sister


• a non-plastic dollhouse


• enough colored pencils to last two kids for an entire happy childhood


• cool alphabet tiles that also have braille

Or, you know, 90% of the stuff in my Pinboards or my etsy favorites are stuff I really want for my kiddos. It's weird--I don't even remember what kind of stupid junk I wanted before I had kids. Plastic 1980s-era action figures, probably.

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!

A Fight with Fluttershy, or, How to Sneak Interest-Led Preschool Reading, Writing, and Art into Your Small Child's Media Obsession

Somehow, Will has become obsessed with My Little Pony, without any actual exposure to the cartoon.

Well...I do have a couple of old-school My Little Pony figures from my own childhood that the kids play with, but we all refer to these as "baby horses." I dunno--do the ponies whisper into their brains, "We are really called My Little Pony. Ask your mommy to let you watch our cartoon"? At school, the kids spend half the day running around on the playground--do they intersperse soccer and animal doctor and who can slide down the slide the fastest with "Hey, did you catch yesterday's My Little Pony? Awesome!" Was she somehow exposed to My Little Pony radiation at the video rental place that has affected her on a cellular level?

Whatever the societal ills that have led us to this juncture, Will woke up this morning wanting to draw "a My Little Pony with wings." Okay... I sit her down with paper and markers, she draws for about a second, then scribbles in fury all over her page and freaks out in frustration because her picture doesn't look like the picture in her head. I'm not exactly happy with this, because her unhappiness with her own product makes me wonder if she's been too exposed lately to adult versions of drawing, or adult models of how to create a particular art product.

So I sit down with Will and attempt to talk her through what she wants to create--"Okay, start with a head--good. Now draw a body attached to the head." That lasts for maybe two seconds, with hysterical tears to follow. We're moving, now, progressively down my levels of preferences for how I'd like her to do her art.

First preference: the child creates her own art.

Second preference: an adult talks the child through the creation of the art she wants, while keeping the art materials, and thus the control, entirely in the child's hands.

Third preference: the adult provides the child with a model to copy to create the particular image she desires. So we go together to the Internet and do a Google image search for "My Little Pony," printing off a colorful picture of a candy-bright, chunky-hoofed horse-like critter for Willow to copy. This actually gets her through the creation of one entire picture, when then, unfortunately, is scribbled over and torn up and thrown on the floor in a screaming fury that then requires the said four-year-old to sit in my lap, weeping, for nearly ten minutes. Clearly, we're down to the last resort here.

Fourth preference: I print off some coloring pages from the Internet. My derision for coloring books is manifold--there is little scope for imagination in working with someone else's version of a scene, it models "how to do" a piece of art that my kids tend to want to imitate instead of doing their own far more creative visions, its filling-in-the-blanks doesn't reinforce the kind of manual arts skills I think they should be practicing, etc. However, on the plus side, it finally gives Will an acceptable (to her) My Little Pony picture to immerse herself in, and it's an acceptable way, at least, for her to follow her interest in My Little Pony. 

Speaking of high horses:I'm a tricky mama, however, and now my morning is centered around not cooking or cleaning (yay!), but channeling this interest into an activity equally satisfying for Will, but more in tune with my desire that she do something creative and educational. While the kids colored on these ridiculous cartoon Pony pages, I printed off a few horse coloring pages from the Internet and interspersed them in with the others. Here's Syd's horse:

  

I love the red devil eyes and the fiery red hooves Syd graced her horse with.

Then, while the kids were working on a couple of horse coloring pages, I sewed together a couple of blank books (I have got to remember to put aside a sewing machine needle or two just for sewing paper--I can't believe that I was so immersed in my own little mission that I sewed the books together with the nearly new ballpoint needle that was already in the machine). 

I sat down next to Will at the table and, when she was finished with her horse picture, I said, sweet and innocent as candy, "Here's a special blank book I just made for you. Do you want to tell me a horse story for it?" And Will proceeded to dictate a twenty-minute-long narrative about a unicorn named Chicka-dee-dee who gets a pet bird, meets a herd of unicorns, battles two dinosaurs, falls into the ocean, and disappears herself onto an airplane. Then she illustrated it:

 

Here's the dictation Syd gave me for her own book, and her illustration:

 

Does the phrase "Daddy's little girl" have any significance here?

So, yeah, I'm a manipulative parent who will use my so-far greater intelligence as mere deviousness in order to trick my child away from a pleasure she embraces and toward what I want. Well, if you can't manipulate your children, then who can you legally manipulate?

Curious Little Monkey

My third class session isn't even until tonight, and already I've had the following cliched emails from students:

• the long, meandering story about how he missed class because he couldn't find it even though he "wandered around" Ballantine Hall for 25 minutes looking for it--oh, and there was no capitalization of his sentences--???


• the concise email consisting of four bullet-point questions asking about finicky little details in the five-point homework assignment due tonight


• the stupid question that asks about the exact same thing that I said three times in class on Monday--no, there's no forum open for tonight's homework assignment, because you're turning it in during class!

Normally, I'm actually pretty fond of my classes--teaching isn't necessarily my life's dream, but it has purpose, and I consider teaching some of my fellow humans effective written communication skills to be something of a mission of service. This semester, though, I've just started off really twitchy from the beginning. I dread having to get myself and the girls ready for the parent trade-off, I really miss my family during the three evening hours three times a week that I'm gone, and the late-night bike ride home leaves me still exhausted the next morning. I've also been feeling twitchy about Will's preschool lately, too--Bloomington Montessori is such a terrific school, and Willow absolutely adores it, but it's crazy-expensive, and I'm not sure how well a school institution, even a cool one like Montessori, fits with my parenting values. So, yeah, it is completely impossible this year for me to renege on my teaching contract and pull my girlie out of school, but my reactions at the start of this new school year are something to think about...

Know who else likes thinking about stuff? Curious George!

This is the first quilt I've posted on etsy in a while, since I've instead been making a few for the house, but eventually, of course, I ran into my perennial problem when I find that I really like making something--um, how many T-shirt quilted wall hangings do we need?

With these little guys, though, and unlike with the bigger quilts, I loooove quilting. Can you tell?

I don't normally do a lot of quilting to my full-size T-shirt quilts because they're already so busy that I think more pattern is distracting, but with these single-image quilts it's much easier to quilt a really creative, elaborate design that only enhances the primary image. Yay.

Oh, and yes, the Star Wars quilt is off of my etsy shop--it's happily wending its way over to its new home right now. And no, I don't know when I'll make another. I can only make a full-size quilt after I collect several T-shirts, and that depends on Goodwill and the dumpster diving.

Christmas in July is FINALLY Over

Well, at least it was a happy ending to possibly the longest Craftster swap in history, on account of I got ditched by my regular swap partner AFTER sending her all the stuff I spent weeks making her (don't worry--she has a myspace page and regularly updates it, so, as the swap organizer said, whatever happened to her, she's at the least alive and with internet access), and my swap organizer hooked me up with not one, but TWO swap angels. You can witness the awesomeness of my first angel package to arrive here, but yesterday even more awesomeness arrived.

I had asked for either stocking stuffers for the girls or non-religious holiday decorations, so when the big padded envelope arrived in our mailbox and the girls began to squeal for it ("It's MY present!" "No, MY!"), I lost my head a little and made the mistake of telling the girls that they could NOT look at Momma's special package because it might be Christmas presents. For Christ's sake, you'd think I'd have learned something about parenting in the past four years. Seriously, it was a rookie move, but in my defense, this will be the first year that we're "really," as in not in a half-assed way, celebrating the holiday.

Obviously, then, after I'd actually opened the package while holding it over their heads and peeping inside, when I announced, "Yay, ornaments! You CAN have these now!", Willow immediately snatched everything she could reach and looked like this--

--and Sydney, of course, retaliated by snatching some sweeties of her own: So you can sort of see in my daughters' avaricious grasps the so-cute crocheted ornaments that JennyBear made for us. I don't know if she knows any kiddos, but she somehow knew dead-on that anthropomorphism=awesome. The ornaments have faces!!!I love the birdie the best. I vaguely remember this pattern--perhaps in ?--and it makes me want to make a thousand more for our tree, but I don't think I can come close to imitating this cool embroidery. Have you ever noticed that I'm full of a lot of embroidery talk--Sublime Stitching patterns I want to buy, how-to books I've already bought, clothing I'm going to embellish--but I haven't yet ever stitched a single stitch of embroidery? I am an embroidery poser! I'm the closest I've ever come, though, having recently used my Hobby Lobby birthday gift card to purchase some tear-away interfacing for embroidering on T-shirts.

Anyway... I spent half an hour trying to get some good shots of all this goodness to post in the Craftster swap gallery; meanwhile, the conflict escalated:

(I love how Will is sneaking the bird out of Sydney's hand while she's looking at something else)"No!!! Bird mine!!!"And Willow's main offense is to pretend to be a dinosaur--"Raawr!!!"--and Sydney's main defense is a good offense, and she lunges forward and bites Willow on the chest. Photo shoot ended, double time-out.