glittergoods

running for the bus

There was a whole scene this morning involving me dashing out into the street to flag down the (early, but then again we were a little late) schoolbus while my son was running back down the hill to retrieve the Something-or-Other Trooper that had fallen out of his pocket (it's Sharing Day) & then me breathlessly explaining to the busdriver that her weeks-long substitute had always been late & so we must have gotten used to it, sorry, & as I was walking back home I was thinking that the bus scramble is a very apt description of my life lately, then suddenly the neighbor from around the block who also puts her kid on that bus comes flying down the street in her car, honking & frantic, trying to catch the attention of the bus which has stopped at the intersection & which may or may not have noticed her & be waiting for her child, & I think no, THAT'S my life.

Anyway due to life-as-nearly-missed-bus, I've been taking a break from all things internet lately, have you noticed?  I was flipping through my photos, looking to see what I've been doing this whole time, & apparently I have 1. not been up to all that much, & 2. taking a break from the camera, too.

Though there was that too-hot afternoon when we built a fairy porch to my girl's specifications:















(Scrap wood, twigs, white glue)















Complete with hanging lanterns.  I wanted to drape something across from the other two twigs, but she says I haven't thought of anything good enough yet.

We also had another good gocco session when it was time to make her thank you cards.



 











I try to involve my kids in their thank yous as much as possible, & this time around I drew a blank fairy for her to color in (featuring an unfinished head so she can draw whatever hairstyle she wants).  I used a dotted-line font to spell out "thank you," & her job was to trace over the letters as she finished each card.















Things to note in this picture:  she is currently favoring fairies with SERIOUS BANGS, she's got a handy reference book open in the background, & off to the right you can see that my son got in on the gocco action too (my kids LOVE that thing) & we have mighty many blank fairies around now.  For the smaller cards, I put a post-it over the "thank you" to block the ink & then let them go to town printing out a whole stack of fairies for us to add to the art box.

I have also been thinking a lot about sewing, though not to the point where I have been DOING any.  This sundress has been in heavy rotation recently, & it finally fits her perfectly (TWO YEARS LATER), so I think I might see if I still have those pattern pieces around. 

The sewing itch has to wait a minute, though, because the most exciting thing around here is that on Friday I am off for a fancy weekend in San Francisco with my husband/without my kids:  any vegetarian restaurant recommendations or shopping must-sees (including good fabric stores)?

fairy nuts, fairy bolts

As I was making plans & gathering supplies for the fairy party, people kept warning me about my girl's sure-to-increase expectations, ie, the road to Birthday Hell is paved with fairy skirts & tiny cupcakes.  Maybe, but on the other hand, this is probably the last year I'll have the opportunity to fill my house with tiny round-cheeked rowdy fairies, & soon enough she'll be nothing but lanky & sneering & demanding to be dropped off at the mall, so why not?

Also, I am not denying that I do get a little crazy when party time comes around.   But fairy skirts are actually really easy to make, if you do the kind where you tie strips of tulle around an elastic waistband.  I bought armloads of tulle at a Joann's 50% off sale, was great because 1. cheap, & 2. I was able to mix colors with financial abandon.  If not for the sale, though, I would seriously have considered getting the 6" wide spools of tulle instead (best prices I saw were at some of the big online packaging supplies stores) & made things easier on myself.

(Fake flowers were on big sale, too.)

Frankly, the girls were so busy fairying around or patiently waiting to get their faces painted that we weren't desperate for a craft activity, but they did all really like this one.  I had the fairy bodies & heads pre-assembled, & the girls picked out their fairy parts, picked & put on flower skirts, drew the faces on (or asked for help) & then helped glue. (From this Klutz book.)   For this age range (3-5), I think this project only worked because all of the really time-consuming parts were pre-made, but I can see a similar but simpler clothespin doll project being another good option.  The fairy on the left is the one I made for a cake topper, the one on the right is the one my girl made at the party.

My girl requested chocolate cake with strawberry frosting, "a big cake so it will be fancier than cupcakes."  I chose the One-Bowl Chocolate Cake from Martha Stewart, & I have to say that it was a really terrific basic chocolate birthday cake.  I baked two 7-inch layers, then used the leftover batter to make mini cupcakes.  I wanted to fill the cake with whipped cream & strawberries, but wasn't sure how well it would hold up if I made it the night before, so I compromised with a variation on this recipe:  1 c whipped cream, 1 pkg cream cheese, 1 c sugar, 1 t vanilla, 1 c chopped strawberries.  Delicious, definitely way too soft for frosting, but excellent for filling + upcycling into strawberry shortcake a couple of days later.  For frosting, I started with this recipe, but instead of butter used 1/4 c vegan margarine (Earth Balance), 1/4 c vegan shortening (also EB), & 1/4 c vegan cream cheese (Tofutti).  Excellent flavor, plus I was able to use it on my experimental vegan strawberry cupcakes, which did not make it to the party table due to being hideous, but which were very tasty.

So, I am about to talk about fondant, but first I need to point out how the cute green & white striped mini cupcake papers are FALLING OFF the chocolate cupcakes.  This sort of spontaneous paper-shedding has never happened to me before, so of course it was going to happen (1) with expensive cake store papers (2) right before a party.  I ended up stripping half the batch & piping a bit of cake filling on top, then we frosted the few that were (sort of) holding on to their papers.  There didn't seem to be anything wrong or unusual or possessed with the cake, so I'm not sure what happened, but if you try the recipe, watch out.

Ok, the fondant.  Short version:  if you're just going to roll it out 1/8" thick & cut it into shapes with tiny cookie cutters, the hardest part of the project is mixing the exact color you want, except half a shade lighter because the color will deepen as it sits around.  Also, have plenty of cornstarch on hand.  Also, I see a whole new world of tiny-cutter-purchase-rationalization unfolding before me.

I was actually pretty worried that the vegan frosting wouldn't stand up to the butterflies on the side of the cake, leading to the heartbreak of a frosting avalanche, but even though I took the cake out of the fridge about an hour before serving, there was no problem.

We completely failed to get a picture of the front of the cake, but it was quite lovely.  And quite tasty.

And, apparently, full of fairy energy.

fairy factory

Yesterday was my first visit to Home Cake.  I went in for sugar flowers, came out with a plan involving fondant butterflies.  All of the Seattle blogs that marvel at that place are not kidding.  It's like a magical baking junk shop, from back before junk shops became "antique malls."

When I got home, though, I decided to wait on the fondant & make the tiny tortillas instead.  We have a Mexican food tradition at my Cinco de Mayo baby's birthday parties (which also gives us a good excuse to stand around drinking sangria while watching the kids play), but of course this year all the food has to be miniaturized.  For fairies.

And then I had to take a few moments with the last of the light to try a shot through my second TTV camera, which arrived yesterday afternoon.  As soon as I get out from under this party, I am working on my TTV setup so that I can do something besides plant myself & awkward camera situation on the front porch in order to take pictures of the sky across the street.  I do like those wires, though.

Anyway, then I made some fairy heads.  I couldn't resist this Klutz book, but since the girls are too small to manage the fiddly bits, I am pre-assembling the bodies & heads, then we'll put them together & add faces & flower skirts at the party.  I am not even kidding myself about this part:  I hope that the girls will love the project, but it's mostly an excuse for me to set up a satisfyingly tiny & fussy assembly line.

Speaking of tiny & fussy!  Today:  fondant! 

practice fairy

I have been trying to talk my girl into a fairy tea party sort of birthday party for the last couple of years, mostly because of the tiny food, but she has been staunchly disinterested.  Last month, though, her brother was in a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, & she was glued to her seat with wide-eyed fairy love the entire time (2 hours!).  So then there was plenty of fairy talk for the next few days, & one day in the car I said "You know what I think would be fun to do sometime?  Have a fairy party."  And she said "YES!  FOR MY BIRTHDAY!"  And I said "Oh, wow, that's a terrific idea you just had!"

And then, after a triumphant phone call to my husband in which I gloated about having PUT ONE OVER on my four year old, I immediately started plotting.

And practicing. 

We've just discovered the Flower Fairies chapter books, so this skirt is specifically modeled after Wild Cherry Blossom,

with her red bow in back.

She took it for a test run this morning, & it seems to hold up ok.

This one, she says, is "for regular," when she's a "workity fairy," which is different than the fancy birthday party fairy, & which implies that she has BIG PLANS for her fairy wardrobe.  Probably I'm going to need some more tulle.

hey, cowgirl!

After a false start or two (excellent false starts which will eventually end up in my shop, but still), I finished the pillow that accompanies the Reading Rocks bench.

First I was thinking about how I will try not to over-commit myself to auction junk next year, but then I was thinking about how this particular pillow was the tipping point that finally sent me out to buy that serger I've been wanting, so maybe I should go ahead & over-commit next year but just do it in some interesting new area that will require similar sort-of justifiable purchase of expensive equipment.

Anyway, then I had time to turn my attention to a birthday present for my girl's best friend, which was specifically & jealously requested by the friend when my kid showed up at her house in full cowgirl regalia last week.

(Note the totally unnecessary serging around the hem.)

So we were in the cowgirl mood & all, but had no idea there would be real live ponies.  Ever since we saw her brother's elementary school production of Midsummer Night's Dream, we've been planning a fairy birthday party around here, but now there's some small, hopeful talk about whether fairies have ponies.  Fairies with bigger backyards, maybe, I said.

she'd put bells on her toes if she could

Today is a sitting around kind of day, everyone is tired & half sick, plus there is nothing truly pressing that has to get done this instant.  But then my girl found a scrap of pink pipecleaner & turned it into a ring (because she loves nothing so much as adorning herself), & the box of leftover auction project jewels caught my eye, & hello, fastest kid-pleasing project ever.

Obviously, a girl can't stop at just ONE jeweled pipecleaner ring.

Wrap the pipecleaner around the finger, twist a time or two to keep your loop in shape.

Trim the ends to a couple of inches above the loop.

Take a pair of beading pliers (or similar) & make a little loop at each end to get rid of the sharp bits, then smash the loops flat.

Holding the two ends together, twist them around into a circular "nest" that sits perpendicular to the ring loop.  There is no particular trick to this, just twist & tuck until the setting is the shape you want.

Once you've got your nice flat setting, you could put just about anything on top (as I type this, I am suddenly wondering where I put my shrinky dink sheets).  We put on our jewels with Fast Grab Tacky Glue, which is my current favorite kid-craft glue due to it being thick &, well, fast-grabbing. 

After you've made rings for every single finger, don't forget the matching bracelet.

The Auction Quilt, nuts & bolts

The auction quilt (The Auction Quilt!  I will capitalize it!) has left the building.  At least for a week or so, until it comes back to me for binding.  And by "left" I mean "is tidily packaged up waiting for me to drop it off tomorrow for the quilter to pick up, only I have to go buy a spool of thread to send with it first," so obviously my entire metaphor is seriously flawed, but whatever, it is ALMOST DONE.

So now, I can talk about it without hyperventilating. Without hyperventilating, & also at tremendous length.  Ready?

From this:

to this:

has been an interesting process for me. The Auction Quilt is a little bit larger than the other ones I've done (70" x 80" finished top) & it's the first one that has been entirely pieced, plus it's going to be auctioned off, so, you know, no pressure, for sure.

To start, each of our preschool graduates drew a picture representing friendship, which I then scanned & printed out on inkjet fabric.  Washability is important for a quilt like this, so I chose the EQ Printables Regular Inkjet Fabric from Electric Quilt Company (as recommended in the Purl book), & after some struggles with getting printer & monitor colors to match, was very pleased with the printouts (using Epson inks).  Bottom line? I'd use the EQ sheets again.

A few specific comments:

• The fabric initially looks off-white, but after printing, removing the backing & rinsing, is a bright, clear white.
  
• The Regular sheets are very...crispy.  I assume they'll soften some with washing, but I don't know whether that will come at the expense of some color fade.  I am not unhappy with the texture for this project (plus, we were able to gang six 5"x5" images with 1/4" seam allowance on all sides onto one 11"x17" sheet, so the Regular was definitely the most economical choice), but if my design depended on more printed real estate, as it were, I think I'd give the EQ Cotton Lawn a try. 
• I saw some pretty significant color bleed, particularly in the magenta/purple/brown range, as the sheets were drying after rinse.  I got mostly around this by letting the sheets sit longer the recommended 15 mins after printing (up to a couple of hours), then doing an initial room-temp rinse, then a very warm soak with a little Synthrapol, then back to room temp rinsing until clear.
  
• Probably because I used a warmer than recommended water, I saw about 1/2" shrinkage widthwise across the sheets.  Even when sticking to room temp water, though, I was still getting up to 1/4" shrinkage, so I definitely recommend factoring a generous seam allowance with this stuff.

Ok, so, printing aside, the overall plan was 5" art squares, framed with squares of red, blue, or green, then finished out with a linen/cotton blend to make 10" blocks.  We ended up with 37 art squares; I made a series of smaller log cabins to go in the center of the remaining 19 blocks.  Everything was improvisationally pieced, though eventually (& arbitrarily, it just made things go a bit quicker, plus I loved those specific  blocks) I settled on doing sets of 3 when it came to some of the smaller log cabins.

Maybe a quarter of the way into piecing the blocks, I suddenly realized that if I just made the center parts & then chain-pieced the centers onto the linen strips, things would go much much faster.  It was revolutionary!   Also head-slappingly obvious, & I am grateful that I was only about twenty-five percent done when I figured it out.  The way I did it was not particularly thrifty of fabric (though I generally don't worry about this, since all leftovers but the smallest trimmed-off slivers go right into the scrap boxes), but it was an efficient way to get the off-center grid look I was after.

I cut my linen, selvedge to selvedge, into strips of various widths (3", 3.5", 4" mostly, though I did use some 5" strips on the smallest of the non-art centers), & then chain-pieced as many block centers as would fit on one strip.  I made sure to leave some blank linen space between the blocks, so I could follow the existing block angle through the linen strip when it came time to cut them apart.  Trim, rotate, repeat.  I varied the width of linen strips I used based on the size of the log cabin center, so that when it came time to trim the blocks to their final 10.5" square, I had plenty of flexibility in terms of angle & centeredness.

Possibly the most challenging part of the entire project was figuring out the final layout for the blocks.  There are three major color groups (reds, blues, greens), & since I was working improvisationally, choosing border colors based on the colors in each child's drawing, I had no particular layout plan other than:  "Oh, you know, kind of random.  In a cool way."  My friend Kirsten worked on it with me, & eventually we came up with something that had 1. a reasonable color distribution of art blocks; 2. a reasonable color distribution of non-art blocks, with careful attention to scattering the three sets of three far enough away from each other; 3.  no awkward clumping of art vs. non-art; 4. no obvious color diagonals of three blocks or more; 5. no accidental straight lines.  It took us kind of a long time, & Kirsten is very patient, but we got there.  Eventually.

(I made sure that this particular square, made by my particular daughter, is prominently placed.  There has to be some payoff for all this work, right?  Kirsten's son's square got good placement too, but sadly I do not have a picture of his fine, fine, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.)

Here it is, laid out in sandwich form for basting, looking more or less like I first imagined.  You might notice that the top is far less bubbly than in the first picture of it above -- after looking at the first pictures I took of it, I fled back to the ironing board to do some serious further work on pressing my seams out.  You might also be able to imagine my relief upon discovering that it was my ironing, not my sewing, which had caused the problem.

Tomorrow it goes out to the woman who will quilt it (2" diagonal grid, natural colored cotton thread), & I will have a week to breathe work on other auction stuff before binding time.  When it comes back it will be all grown up into a quilt (Quilt!), & I will have no choice but to sit under it for three days, watching DVDs & handstitching the binding.  The sacrifices I make, right?

gocco jr.

I have been meaning to post about progress & process of the auction quilt (latest pictures on flickr), but just today I learned that instead of the four or five final squares I was expecting, I actually have THIRTEEN squares to complete by the end of the week, so I sort of can't say anything articulate about the project right now.

But then, as it turns out, Valentine's Day waits for no fit of pique, so this afternoon I pulled out the gocco & set the kids to work making their valentines.  I was not at all sure that things would go well, but they LOVED it. 

I explained to my girl that we'd be making a fancy kind of stamp out of one of her drawings, & though she was a bit skeptical of the idea that we'd be putting the same picture on every valentine, she was willing to try.  She supervised the ink-mixing,  & then was a little tentative with the first few prints, but by the time her brother got home she'd pushed me out of the way & was busily printing.

Her cards had to be positioned very specifically on the grid (four down, one over), & she took that over too, with great seriousness.

And then very carefully laid the prints out to dry.

This one took to it just as quickly, though I was very amused to see that where my daughter was getting a lot of satisfaction from the creation of each individual print, he clearly saw it as an excellent means of mass-production, i.e. getting to mess around with one of my cool art tools while getting classroom valentines out of the way at the same time.

He liked the squishing part, too, though once the cards were printed he handed them off to me to deal with, assembly-line style.

Ah, efficiency.

December in the rear-view mirror

Wow, a low-grade, all-encompassing seasonal illness plus the secret + scary quilting of a very important project plus the usual holiday mayhem sure takes the will to blog right out of a girl.  Looking back over my shoulder, it doesn't seem like it was SO bad, which is probably the same sort of naturally-occurring blind spot that results in second children.

I made cookies:

{Chewy Chocolate Gingerbread Cookies from Martha.  So, so good.}

We made cookies:

{Thumbs up to Perfect Vegan Sugar Cookies, which are indeed quite perfect, definitely the best of the vegan recipes I've tried.  Thumbs, sadly, down to those cute little squeezy bottles I got for easy & fun cookie decorating with the kids.  There's a reason that pastry bags are tried & true, & that reason, my friends, is air bubbles.  I think I'm going to look into one of those icing caulk gun situations for next year.}

I finished the house pillow:

{For my father, who is a collector of house-shaped things, & I have only not capitalized "collector" because there are no caps LARGE ENOUGH to describe how much of a collector he is, so the pillow was well-received.  I made the house up as I went along, with about a 50% success rate in my attempt to be intuitive about necessary seam allowance additions, but in the end it turned out more or less as I'd planned.  I have some things to learn about piecing triangles, though.}

I also finished, on December 23, the wedding quilt for my sister & brother-in-law, then spent all day December 24 in mild fits about whether it was going to 1. survive the wash, 2. emerge from the wash without any remaining chalk lines, & 3. be dry in time for Christmas presentation.

{The answer is yes on all three counts, I am very proud of myself (also:  phew), but no finished project pictures here because I think I am going to give it a whole post of its own.}

The kids put together an ode to Santa, poster-style (complete with short song at the bottom):

{And Santa did not disappoint.}

Yeah, it wasn't SO bad. 

I'm hoping to whip out a couple pairs of New Year's pajama pants before bedtime tomorrow night, but a certain almost-seven someone who had plenty of time to cool his heels & ogle the wares at craft shows this month has some sort of stuffed monster animal project in mind for tomorrow, so we'll see what gets done.  Either way sounds like a pretty good way to spend tomorrow.  2007 is all but done!  Bring it on, 2008!

bookish

I bet that just about every craft blogger out there has a SouleMama post that sends them sprinting for the worktable, & mine was the one about the tiny books.  My kids are dedicated artists & storytellers (especially my daughter, who loves narrative like nobody I've ever met, except maybe me, which I suspect is sometimes very, very tiring to the men in our household), we have teetering piles of pads & notebooks & story pages & drawings all over the place, & still it had never occurred to me to have a stack of little books around waiting to be filled up instead of waiting to bind the finished product.

I had the cardstock & paper, but no working stapler.  I did, however, have plenty of embroidery floss, a longtime love for the book arts, & an inability to pass up the opportunity to make something just a little bit more complex in the name of aesthetics.  Though, really, simple stitched books like this are barely harder than stapled ones.

Cut a sheet of cardstock in half (to 8.5" wide x 5.5" tall), then cut six sheets of paper to 8.25" wide by 5.5" tall. (Trimming that 1/4" will keep your pages from sticking out from the edges of the cover when the book is done.)

Fold the cardstock in half (to 4.25" x 5.5"), then do the same with the stack of paper.  A bone folder will give a nice crisp crease.

Put the cardstock on top of the stack of pages, matching at the fold line, then clip together on one end.  Punch three holes along the crease.  I happened to have a spring action "anywhere" punch around, so I punched 1/16" holes, but you can use anything that will make a small hole, really.

Using 3 strands of an 11" piece of embroidery floss, take your needle down through the center hole,

up through one end (leave a long enough tail at center to tie a square knot),

down through the other end,

& back up through the center hole.

Use the ends to tie a knot around the long stitch

& you're done.  Barely more time than stapling, right?

My kids spent the entire afternoon with these. 

ENTIRE.  I am not exaggerating.

EDIT:  My punch is the "instant setter" from Making Memories, which I picked up at my local stamping store when I needed to set some Paper Source snaps into wedding programs without ruining the smooth tops.  I like it fine & use the hole-punch tips pretty often, though I don't think it's that much quieter than the old-school individual hit-with-hammer "anywhere" punches I already had (I see Making Memories has a lo-tech punch-only version too).  Keep in mind, though, that you don't need fancy scrapbooking tools for this project:  try an awl, or a hammer & small nail.