WIP: I Finished Piecing the Road Map Quilt Top

 Matt refers to this as "mission creep."

My original objective was to make my baby niece, who likes cars, a simple little roll-up road play mat. 

Then I got left at home alone for too long, started a five-hour podcast about a school group that got stranded on Mount Hood, and things... got out of hand.

This is the Fishing Net quilt pattern. I'm not proud of my visual design sense (although I do think it's improved over the years), so thank goodness that one of my kids has a GREAT visual design sense and the patience to hold my hands and reassure me as I continually disturb her to ask things like, "Would it be weird to have some black roads and some grey roads?" or (holding up several coloring pages of this quilt pattern that I have filled in with crayon) "Do you like the way I colored it here better, or do you like this one better? Or this one?"

She liked the alternating grey and black roads better, so that's the way I started planning it!

I DID iron all my fabric, but animals kept lying down on my layout and then the robot vacuum got into it, as well.

Syd was also required to look at every piece of flannel that I own and help me come up with believable prints and colors for a road map, then lay them where they ought to go:

Here we have a park, two neighborhoods, two construction zones for the epic mini Tonka trucks I bought her, and a ginger cat without a thought in his head:

Now I've added a couple of rivers, a couple of parking lots, a dino dig site, and an ocean:

And now I've got everything!

I was actually just finishing cutting out the pieces for this quilt as Matt and Will pulled into the driveway, home from Peru. Neither of them are big communicators, especially when they travel, so imagine my surprise when instead of coming straight in for hugs and celebrations and snuggling on the couch, Matt backed away from me when I met them on the driveway and asked for a COVID test.

And then imagine how I felt when both their COVID tests were so chock-full of COVID that they pulled up that dreaded second line right away. By the time the fifteen-minute timer actually went off, I'd already partitioned off part of the house, fetched the air mattress and extra sheets and towels, and was busy sobbing quietly to myself in the bathroom.

Friends, let's follow Grandma's on the Roof rules with your loved ones: if you're traveling and wearing your mask like a baller but have to take a six-hour bus ride with some maskless stranger wetly coughing behind you the entire time, maybe just, you know, go ahead and tell your loved one at home that. And then a couple of days later, when you're finally heading home and you arrive at the Chicago airport and you've got just a four-hour drive ahead of you and you start thinking, "Huh, I'm starting to feel kind of crappy," maybe just shoot your loved one a quick text along the lines of "Hey, feel like shit, COVID tests on the driveway before hugs!" That way your loved one, who's barely seen two sentences in a row out of you for the past two weeks and misses you a LOT, can, you know, modulate her excitement with some fair warning.

I mean, hypothetically.

ANYWAY, you know what spending the entire next day after a huge disappointment disassociating from your sadness does for you?

It makes you SUPER PRODUCTIVE!

The instructions had me piece big triangles as if they were log cabin quilt blocks. It was a little tricky to wrap my head around, but I only had to pull out the seam ripper once, so yay for me!

So then the quilt actually comes together as four big triangles, with that one road that runs corner to corner pieced last as a sash:

Especially considering that I wasn't really able to picture how it would look pieced, even with all the pieces laid out (darn my visual-spatial thinking deficits!), I am SO happy with how this road map quilt top turned out!

My next visual-spatial reasoning challenge is to add just enough applique road map embellishments to give a hint as to the purpose of each different part of the map, without having the embellishments look tacky or ugly or overwhelming or too restrictive.

Decoupaged Pressed Flower Greeting Cards, and a Real-World Practicum in First Aid

My Girl Scout troop's Folk Arts IPP meeting is a wrap!

Alas, for I did not meet my goal. At one point I asked the troop to start cleaning up after soapmaking while I went to see if the beeswax and coconut oil were completely melted for candlemaking. I swear I was gone for approximately fifteen seconds, but I came back into the room to the following:

KID #1: "[Name Redacted] hurt herself."
KID #2: "I see blood."
NAME REDACTED (bleeding profusely from the head and dripping blood onto the floor) begins to fall over.
KID #3: "I don't feel well."

And scene!

I also can't say that my first aid administration went perfectly, because how do you situate a kid when her head is bleeding so needs to be elevated, but she's also losing consciousness so her feet need to be elevated? Do you just prop her up like a little pretzel with her butt on the ground and her head and feet jacked up? Keeping her conscious felt pretty important so my co-leader and I put her feet up high and her head just on a pillow, but I'll clearly have to ask more scenario-specific questions at my next re-certification.

 But the good news is that the injury was actually just a side quest, and nobody actually got injured during either the cold-process soapmaking (during which the kids wore long sleeves, gloves, and face shields) or the poured container candlemaking (which, tbh, was pretty chaotic, so I think we just got lucky).

We did get a chance to press flowers in the microwave, but our first aid practicum used the time previously intended for decoupaging our flowers, so we'll save that for another meeting.

But until then, I was left with SO MANY flowers that I'd already pressed to give the kids plenty to work with, and since I'm uninterested in figuring out how to safely keep pressed flowers in my already overburdened craft supplies storage, later that week I snookered my own kids into helping me decoupage them, in the process further refining my almost perfect technique.

And now that technique IS perfect!!!

My old method for making pressed flower bookmarks came from this tutorial, which came from a magazine article, which came from a vintage Boy Scout manual. All of them called for decoupaging the flowers first onto waxed paper, and then using the method of your choice to adhere the waxed paper to a more structured paper.

My incredible innovation is just to... ditch the waxed paper. Decoupage the pressed flowers directly to the material of your choice, saving yourself a step and, I think, improving the overall look of the finished product. I also changed out the glue to one that dries stiffer, which I think makes the work sturdier and requires fewer top coats.

To test out this innovation, the kids and I made SOOOO many greeting cards! Will has a ton of thank-you notes to write and we're out of nice cards, so this was a good chance to replenish our stash.

To decoupage your own pressed flower greeting cards, you will need the following:

• pressed flowers. I do have a new and improved microwave pressed flowers tutorial coming up, but until then, my original microwave pressed flowers tutorial does work well. 
• backing material of your choice, ideally one with structure. I used this hemp watercolor paper and this Strathmore watercolor paper, and of the two I preferred the hemp paper. I really liked how the off-white color and visible fibers add to the overall look.
• single ply of the cheapest disposable tissues you can find. If your tissues are multi-ply, separate them into the individual sheets. 
• clear school glue. I used Elmer's clear school glue leftover from Syd's slime-making phase. 
• paintbrush. A stiff paintbrush works better than a soft one. 
• matte medium. I use this Liquitex matte medium. It's weirdly expensive, so I think you could play around with cheaper sealants, too.

1. Cut and fold paper to make greeting cards.

Will and I did this with a guillotine paper cutter, but you could do it by hand. If you've got 8"x12" pages, you can make two 4"x6" cards from each page. We made some that hinged at the top, and some that hinged on the side, mostly because we weren't paying attention to what we were doing.

2. Arrange pressed flowers on the greeting card front.

Queen Anne's Lace

This part is really fun! It was definitely assisted by the huge stash of flowers I'd already collected and pressed. Seriously, I took trips to the local parks to take little snippy-snips of the wildflowers growing there, waded around vacant lots next to strip malls, and sacrificed many of the lovelies from my garden.

Rose of Sharon

But having such a large selection of flowers to choose from made that completely worth it!

3. Use clear school glue to paint a single ply of tissue paper over the entire card front.

Gently set the tissue over the card front. Use your non-dominant hand to gently hold the tissue and the flowers in place, and with your dominant hand dip the paintbrush into clear school glue, allowing a generous coat of glue to remain on the brush.

Start with the center of one flower, and gently paint glue onto the tissue paper covering it. The glue will seep through the tissue paper onto the flower, rendering the tissue paper translucent:

Use the stiffness of the brush to coax the tissue paper into all the little nooks and creases of the pressed flower, aiming for maximum adhesion of the tissue paper to the flower and card. 

Rose of Sharon and fern

The tissue paper will make lots of wrinkles when you glue it to the card, which is fine. What you don't want are air pockets between the flowers and tissue paper, because those will stay visible in the final product.

Queen Anne's Lace

Work your way across the surface until the entire card front is covered. Leave the excess tissue paper in place until the whole thing is dry, which should take about a day.

Rose of Sharon

4. Trim the tissue paper and add embellishments.

Trim the excess tissue paper from the greeting card fronts. If possible, it is highly desirable to have the assistance of both a teenager and a cat for this step:

You can do anything that you want regarding embellishments, but I entertained myself by finding fun phrases and conversations from this vintage Spanish textbook that I found in a Little Free Library once upon a time:

Although some is random--

--some, I think, is quite apt!

Dab a little more clear school glue onto the back of each embellishment to place it, then use the pad of your finger to thickly coat the entire greeting card front in matte medium.

Chamomile

Let dry. 

You can add additional coats of matte medium, which I did for a couple of cards but ultimately decided that it's unnecessary, especially because matte medium is so expensive!

And here are some of our finished cards!

It's that Queen Anne's Lace from Step 2!

Chamomile from Step 4

Fern

Rose of Sharon from Step 2

I still need to make matching envelopes for these cards, but then they'll be ready for thank-yous!

The Goal is No Girls Injured: Prepping To Lead the Girl Scout Retired Girl Scout Folk Arts IP

 

I DO know what I'm doing. I didn't volunteer willy-nilly to teach seven teenagers how to pour lye into distilled water and molten wax into teacups without a firm base of knowledge.

But dang, there's nothing to make you question your skill set when doing a risky project than volunteering to do that project with seven teenagers! 

There are a couple of reasons why I'm engaging in SO much prep work before I lead this Girl Scout retired Folk Arts IPP that my Girl Scout troop planned. 

1) Left to my own manic devices, I'm not as safe as I ought to be. I run Dremel cut-off wheels centimeters from my radial artery, remove the tips of fingers with craft knives, and I definitely pour both lye into distilled water and molten wax into teacups bare-armed, bare-legged, and barefoot. 

2) Left to my own manic devices, I also veer from the script more often than not and muscle through several iterations of a project to get the desired result. Candle that I poured tunneling? Eh, melt it down, pour it again, and try a different wick. Soap didn't cure properly? Shovel it all in the crockpot to hot-process. 

That's fine for me, because I've got nothing but time and an endless capacity for frustration. But I want these teenagers' projects to work, and work well. They are going to learn the GLORIES of soapmaking, by God, and the ECSTASY that is a properly-wicked, burning-just-to-the-edges-but-no-farther tea cup candle!

So that was my weekend project!

First up, I had Matt (who tested negative for COVID after six days in isolation, so I set him free, which I *think* is okay to do? I guess I'll know when I take my own COVID rapid test in a couple of days!) make his very first batch of cold-process soap, with no information at his disposal other than my verbal instruction. This was great, because I could make note of the tricky parts of the process and the places where I'll need to give specific warnings to the kids (for Pete's sake, don't stick your head OVER the solution of lye and water!!! Why would you even do that?!? It's literally steaming, and I just told you that it's giving off toxic fumes!!!), and I could time about how long the recipe takes to trace. Twenty-five minutes, which is a bit of a yikes, but the kids are all great chit-chatters so I think it will be okay.

Making this batch ahead of time was also good because I can unmold it in front of the kids and show them how to tell if it's cured enough to cut, since they'll be doing that part at home.

On to the flower pressing! I toyed with the idea of having the kids make mini flower presses to carry in their backpacks, something that I, personally, would love the snot out of, but I dunno. Kids' attention spans aren't real long these days, so I kind of doubt that they'd all take to the six-week wait for their pressed flowers. Instead, I hit up the ReStore, found 12 unglazed ceramic tiles for three dollars, and decided to teach the kids how to press flowers in the microwave and send each of them (except for my own kids, who can share) away with their own set of tiles for microwave flower pressing at home. Even a modern teenager has enough attention span to spend one minute microwaving flowers!

And then we can make pretty things with them!

My kids and I loved making these pressed flower bookmarks, and I think my Girl Scout troop would, as well, but a multi-day, multi-step process isn't going to work. These are teenagers--they're going to dump whatever they come home from their Girl Scout troop meeting with on the floor of their bedrooms and not look at it again for three months. If I'm super lucky, they'll be willing to do maybe one more step after that, but definitely not fourteen more steps, some of which require yet more wait time.

So I figured out how to simplify the process!

The grated cheese is not related to the microwave flower pressing...

I'll have to write new tutorials for both the flower pressing and the pressed flower bookmarks, because I feel like I streamlined the process for each of them by quite a bit:

And now I'll have some samples to show the kids!

They will still need to seal them 24 hours after our meeting, but I think I can get away with pouring a tablespoon or so of matte medium into wee zip baggies for them to take home. That should keep the matte medium fresh enough to still be painted on when the bookmarks are discovered on bedroom floors in three months.

The poured candles in teacups was the trickiest project to figure out for kids. Kids will be bringing teacups in different sizes and shapes, and I want them to be able to pour candles that will burn correctly for whatever container they bring.

I got a tip from a candlemaking book once upon a time that the best way to test wick sizing in a non-standard container is to pour the candle into the container without a wick, let it cure, then drill a hole to insert a wick. If the size doesn't work, pull the wick out, re-drill the hole if necessary, and try another wick!

I'm glad that I tried this, because this wick that I tested is a hard nope:

I tried a larger wick size, got another hard nope, and finally decided that I'd never be able to burn a candle the width of a teacup with straight beeswax, so I poured a new candle with a beeswax and coconut oil combination:

Better, but ultimately still a nope! Grr!

Syd had the idea to just multi-wick it, which... success!

The above photo is from about half an hour into the candle's first burn. At an hour's burn time it had reached its maximum melt and made it almost completely to the edges of the cup all around. Normally, you'd want a container candle to burn all the way to the edge, but with the way that a teacup narrows to the bottom, I think this wick size and placement is perfect. I don't want the candle to burn too hot towards the bottom.

Add in a lecture on the biology of honeybees and the chemistry of triglyceride hydrolysis, and that's this Folk Arts meeting all prepped!

Now let's just hope that COVID rapid test comes out the way I want...

Podcasts I've Listened To and Liked Lately: Serial Documentaries

Matt and Will came back from Will's graduation trip to Peru last week, and they brought home with them some artisanal pottery, coca candy, a copy of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief translated into Spanish, two stuffed llamas, several bars of chocolate, a T-shirt with an unlicensed Game of Thrones reference, a 60-dollar bottle of pisco, and COVID.

The good news is that they took their rapid COVID tests out on the driveway as soon as they pulled in, so they went straight from the car to isolation in a separate part of the house (here's a chance to be grateful for our house's super weird layout!) without exposing me or Syd. And they both feel fine now, although they both definitely felt puny for the first couple of days.

The bad news is that now it's been SOOOOO long since I've gotten to hug half my family! We've been spending a ton of time hanging out in camp chairs in the front yard, gossiping from six feet apart. I dragged over a six-foot picnic table so Will could bring her LEGOs out and I could do fun stuff like edit Syd's final paper for her Intro to Serial Killers class (do YOU think that Gilles de Rais is guilty?). We managed to all eat ice cream together, with the help of bleach wipes and tossing things to each other from a distance. But it's not the family reunion I'd been looking forwards to, so instead of hanging out on the couch with my kids and husband, I've been continuing to entertain myself with all the projects and all the podcasts.

Like seriously, ALL the projects. Will's quilt top and my niece's quilt top and substitute teacher certification and organizing the bathroom closet and Pumpkin+Bear orders and lessons plans for teaching Girl Scouts how to make cold-process soap and poured container candles and then making my own cold-process soap and poured container candle to make sure I didn't miss anything and creating a slide deck for a workshop proposal and mowing the scary steep hill with the riding lawnmower and baking two different kinds of cobbler to decide which is more delicious but actually they're both equally delicious because, you know, it's cobbler.

And podcasts for all of that, interspersed with the entire Arctic Monkeys' discography and the occasional run-through of the Neil Patrick Harris Hedwig and the Angry Inch cast recording. 

I listen to all kinds of podcasts, but I really love serial documentaries when I'm doing these kinds of long projects. A five-hour podcast about the school group that got lost at the top of Mount Hood makes the five hours that I spend basting a dragon quilt top absolutely fly by! Here are some of my favorites of the serial documentaries I've been listening to.

This season of 30 for 30, Heavy Medals, is pretty intense, and all the trigger warnings because it does include the sexual assault scandal in USA gymnastics, but if you are approximately my age and you, too, watched the Olympics during the Bela Karolyi years, then you, too, might be as interested as I was to listen to this in-depth history of the Karolyi duo:

I also recommend Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which covers the related topic of body image and abuses in the training of child gymnasts and figure skaters:

Caving disasters is one of my Special Interests, and I think I've read and watched just about everything available concerning the soccer team that got trapped in that cave in Thailand a few years ago. If you don't want to read and watch EVERYTHING about it, I thought that this season of Against the Odds, Thai Cave Rescue, is a really good consolidation of several sources. It feels very thorough, while also staying interesting and exciting:

If you want to read more about the cave rescue, I really liked Miracle in the Cave, written by a journalist who was on-site during the rescue:

Reading along in the textbook for Syd's Intro to Serial Killers class has *almost* broke me of my love of true crime... almost... but I actually listened to this season of Cold, about Susan Powell, quite a while ago, and it has really stuck with me:

Like, I bring it up in conversation a LOT. It's not terribly graphic, so it doesn't feel as exploitative as some true crime documentaries can, and the Susan Powell case has the added interest that all of the main characters--Susan Powell, her husband, and her father-in-law--were avid journalers! As in, audio and video journals! So there is SO MUCH evidence that's in their own words and voices, which is by turns sad and terrifying, but absolutely makes the experience of listening to the documentary feel so much more engaging and true.

I also bring up that 911 operator a lot as an example about what the hell is wrong with people. 

I've listened to a few different seasons of Even the Rich. It's really good for getting, say, a medium dive into a celebrity or scandal that you'd be interested to know more about than you've picked up via random news tidbits, but that you're not necessarily interested in knowing every obsessive detail about. This season on Britney Spears really was a revelation to me, and got me firmly on the #FreeBritney bandwagon:

After you listen to that season, I highly recommend listening to the Celebrity Memoir Book Club episode covering Jamie Spears' memoir:

Britney's mother also has a memoir that they also discuss on this podcast, and they're both so interesting because they're literally telling you in their own words how they abused Britney and took advantage of her for their own gain and they 100% do not see anything wrong with it at all. Yikes!

If you love a serial documentary podcast that I don't know about yet, please let me know. I still have Will's quilt to bind and quilt, and my baby niece's quilt to applique and back and bind and quilt, and the rest of that slide deck to create, and I think I need to figure out how to teach seven teenagers how to press flowers in the microwave in the same kitchen in which I'm teaching them how to make cold-process soap...

My Latest over at Pumpkin+Bear: The Cutest Custom-Color Doll Masks

Even after I stopped selling real-person fabric masks in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop (I switched the kids and I over to these, and Matt prefers this style in whatever brand is cheapest), I keep making and selling doll masks, because:

1. People still want to buy them from me, and I do enjoy exchanging my goods and services for currency.
2. Even though I think a lot of people have also switched to high-quality manufactured masks, if you want a mask for your doll, you're still going to need someone to make it for you by hand. 
3. They're ADORABLE.

Number 3, of course, is the most important reason. 

Here's a cute matching set that I made a few weeks ago:

And here's my latest order of custom-color doll masks! My favorite part of making these masks is seeing what color combinations people choose. This particular customer, for instance, chose these fabrics--

--along with these ties:

And when I sewed them together in the requested combinations, I got these adorable doll masks!

That watermelon mask is the cutest mask that currently exists in the world. 

And here's how I package my masks to go out and about into that world!

If you are a sewer, yourself, I do have the entire doll mask tutorial for free on my blog. It's the responsibility of all of us to keep our dolls healthy!

I've gotten out of the habit of sewing matching items for my own kids' American Girl dolls, since I'm the only one who plays with them these days (ahem), but I'm pretty sure that I DO need to make another couple of watermelon doll masks.

And obviously, if I'm going to make watermelon doll masks, I clearly have to make both dolls entire watermelon outfits to match!

The Fantasy Quilts I'm Working On because Everyone Has Left Me Home Alone

Syd and I have pretty big plans while Matt and Will are taking a graduation trip to Peru. They may be going to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca and tasting chocolate and pisco, but Syd and I bought a month of Disney+ and checked Stardew Valley out of the library. So. We're pretty well set.

We've also been keeping the house really, really clean, because we are not the messy ones, and it's really, really quiet, because Syd doesn't get up until noon and sometimes works in the evenings and other times has sleepovers with friends. 

So. I've been pretty much going stir-crazy.

I've gotten way too invested in this history of salt that I'm reading, and I've gotten WAY ahead on my freelance writing schedule (synchronized with getting WAY behind on getting paid, so that's fun), and dang, has it turned out to be a week for quilting!

Above is the quilt that I'm sewing Will for her dorm room bed. She's not going off to college until January, so I've got plenty of time (and it's actually going to be one of her Christmas presents, so don't tell!), but it's also fiddly as hell, involves a couple of new-to-me techniques, Will's not here to get a peek at it and spoil the surprise, and I'm bored.

I started off trying to directly copy this Lily the Dragon quilt, and you can see that I'm using that exact template, too, but then I got way into the weeds and it looks super different entirely because I do not know that ticker tape technique the author references and could not figure it out. 

Fortunately, I think that what I did end up doing, which was just ironing fabric scraps willy-nilly to interfacing, looks fine and probably better suited to my kid's grown-up nerd girl aesthetic than the look in the original blog post. Also, Syd helped me with the color arrangement of the wings, because I never mastered my preschool Montessori sensory work. 

I bought the grey Kona cotton background fabric and the black flannel backing fabric, but the entire dragon is made from scraps and stash. I tried to stick mostly to quilting cottons, but the white spikes (and yes, each spike is a completely novel shape so each one had to be numbered, traced, numbered again, cut out, traced again, numbered again, and cut out again ugh) are some kind of dimensional bottomweight leftover from a pair of pants Syd cut up for some Trashion/Refashion Show garment once upon a time. And hiding there in the blue wings are pieces of a flannel shirt and a skirt that my tiny youngling child once wore. 

I did the same thing for this quilt below:

That black flannel is what I didn't need for Will's quilt backing, that grey flannel was in my stash but uncut so I KNOW I must have bought it for something specific (oops!), but all the rest of the flannel is scraps, including my greatest triumph, that brown that I had exactly enough left of for just those half-square triangles. 

Most of that other flannel is leftover from the Great Jammy Pants Craze of 2014. 

I don't know if you can even tell what this quilt is supposed to be, but basically, it's me deciding that my baby niece might like one of those road play mats for her upcoming birthday. 

And then I got left alone in the house for too long and I went overboard. 

Like, why a felt play mat, when a quilted cotton play mat would be so much more versatile and sturdier? 

And if I'm doing what's essentially a quilt, I might as well make it an actual quilt size so it's even more versatile. 

I love this one, so I'll just buy the pattern and copy it. 

And now I'll spend the entire day going through my flannel scraps and figuring out which ones look vaguely road play mat-themed. 

Syd had to come to my rescue with her design sense superpower again, but I think I got it nailed down. Green is going to be a park, green plaid is going to be neighborhoods, brown is for construction zones (and maybe a dinosaur dig site), black plaid is parking lots, and blue is water. I picked out some interesting scraps that I can use as applique fabrics to add trees and houses and whales and dino bones.

I think I made it WAY too big, though. It's only a throw, but a throw size seems really dramatic for a road play mat. 

Oh, well. You don't want the world's largest play mat, then don't leave me to my own devices for this long! 

We Finally Finished the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail (and It Only Took 2 Years...)

Indiana murals are always SO weird.

The Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail was one of our first Pandemic Projects, and just might be the last of the original 2020 projects that we were still working on this summer. 

Like, we completely finished our collective obsessions with charcuterie boards, paint-by-numbers--

--and recreating TikTok recipes. I visited every Girl Scout camp in the state, and the kids ate every kind of Little Debbie that there is. Matt made every one of the 100 Famous Cocktails. One of my kids earned a YouTube Silver Play Award. The other kid grew a lot of strawberries.

But in between all of that and afterwards, ice cream remained part of the family dream. 

We're just barely in Southern Indiana, so almost every ice cream place involved quite a long trek. And for most of them, we also found something scenic to do, whether it was visiting a water wheel, a German cemetery, and a locally famous geologic feature, or uncovering the Masonic roots of historic downtown:

In Salem, we also happened upon an interesting piece of local history. This raid is one of the "lands" of Conner Prairie, a local living history park, and the kids and I have visited 1863 Civil War Journey numerous times (including that one time that led to both kids unconscious on the ground and a security escort out of the park), but it had never occurred to me to check out any of the REAL raid sites!

This ice cream trail was a really great way to spend time together during a pandemic. We got to get out of the house and do a little sightseeing, but it was easy to stay in the fresh air and away from strangers. We got to bring Luna along--

--and the long car rides recreated some of the things I best love about travel, that isolated space for conversations and audiobooks and sibling quarrels, as well as siblings having fun and acting adorable:

The only sad thing about the ice cream trail is that way back in 2020, when we first started it, the prize for completing every stop on the trail was a T-shirt. So OMG you would not even have wanted to see Matt's face when we finally made our final stop a few weeks ago (The Happy Hive in Marengo, although alas, we didn't have time to also go to Marengo Cave like I'd planned, because the younger kid had to work that night. I'm hoping to snooker everyone into visiting the cave with me later this summer), and then Matt finished filling in the forms with our address and T-shirt sizes, sent them in, waited by the mailbox for several more weeks, and then got a package with pictures of ice cream cones all over it in the mail, and...

Sometime in the past two years, the prize switched from T-shirts to caps. Matt is SO sad!

If you see Matt doing errands around town wearing his Discover Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail cap, can you please tell him that it looks really cool and wow, visiting every stop on the ice cream trail must have been a major accomplishment to earn such an awesome cap? Because I have tried telling him that the real treasure was the friendships we made along the way, but he is not buying it and would way rather have had a T-shirt.

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