preschool banner made with kids

birthday cupcake towers

Our version of Hello, Cupcake's birthday cupcake towers:

dyeing paper

Hey there campers; it's been awhile!

I thought I'd test the waters with a brief post about dyeing paper for special projects like wedding invitations, book binding or Christmas cards.

I dyed this fuchsia paper for wedding invitation inserts this summer.

You can dye any paper; it's made of plant fiber most of the time, like cotton clothing. High cotton-content paper and paper with linen fiber get the best color, but even regular newsprint or drawing paper can be dyed using Rit Dye or Dylon. (Dylon is my preference.) This color is called Flamingo Pink.

I used a 110 lb arches cold press watercolor paper trimmed to A4 size, then pre-soaked it in a bath of hot water with just a dash of dish soap. I use the dish soap as a nod to my method of dyeing clothes; I always pre-soak and wash to achieve even dyeing by saturating the fabric and removing any waxes, oils, or fixatives. With paper, the saturation is key and the soap, while probably not completely necessary, is just a little bonus to help assure that the saturation is allowed to happen.

I dye paper in my stainless steel kitchen sink. It's easy, large, readily available and unlikely to stain. I boil water and pour it into the plugged sink; just until I have 2 or 3 inches of water in the sink. I add 3 or 4 times the recommended amount of salt and stir until dissolved.

I add the dye before I add the paper, and stir till dissolved. A quarter of a package is a good place to start, since I dye paper in batches. Paper into dye, saturating one side and then the other, eight or ten sheets in the bath at a time. Keep track of how many, as you'll be turning and repositioning the sheets in the bath every ten minutes or so for relatively even dyeing. And repeat until the dye cools or you get a color a couple of shades deeper than your desired result (dyed paper and fabric tend to lighten as the dry).

Of course, the idiosyncrasies of hand-dyeing are often desirable. I like to sprinkle a little dye powder in the bath to add speckles sometimes.

Rinse in cool water, then press gently in a towel,  hang with pipe cleaners ("chenille stems") and clips, and let air dry.

Paper will warp a little as it dries, so ironing will be necessary to run dyed paper through a printer or a printing press. Use a press cloth and turn your iron on the cotton setting, no steam.

Thanks for dropping in as I attempt to get my sea legs back! I hope you'll stop by again soon. I aim to.

chocolate truffle bath fizzies

 We've made bath fizzies before (and let me tell you, preschoolers go nuts over them if you bring them for show-and-tell), but we've never made chocolate bath fizzies before. These smell pretty awesome, and chocolate is maybe good for your skin, too. So, you, know, if you needed another excuse to make these, now you have one.

Stir one cup of baking soda with a half cup each of citric acid and cocoa powder until it's all an even color. Spritz with alcohol-based liquid (not gel) hand sanitizer. Stir and avoid adding so much moisture that the powder fizzes. Add a little food coloring if your kiddo insists. Squeeze periodically to see if your mixture will clump together. When it does, pack firmly into little snowballs and set on a towel to dry. Depending on size, you can make up to a dozen fizzies or so.

pendleton blanket bunny

 I worked up a prototype bunny for a little friend's birthday, and I was pretty happy that my tinkering had such sweet results.

This is made with mill scraps from the Pendleton Woolen Mill here in Oregon.

After a couple of small changes, I hope to have a few of these cuties ready for my Etsy shop; I'll update here when that happens, so stay tuned or send me a little message if you'd like to be notified.

Have you been putting bits and pieces together to make anything cool lately? Leave me a link. I'd love to see it!

Thanks for reading.


Linking up to:

The Cottage Market 

My Repurposed Life 

Skip to My Lou 

LouLou Girls

subway tile baby shower quilt

A friend of ours from the preschool had a baby shower for her second kiddo, a girl, a couple of weeks back, and in celebration I made this quick little subway tile-style baby quilt.

The top is made of vintage textiles I've collected at thrift stores and estate sales (poppies + stripes), stuff from my stash (including a pair of Heather Ross prints and some cute owls), and a couple of my own prints from Spoonflower (the measuring tape and cupcake prints are both mine). The kicker is that I also used a crib sheet from the recipient's registry for some of the blocks as well as the quilt backing, which ties it in nicely to the nursery bedding.

 

The subway tile pattern is a pretty simple one to replicate. Just cut 48 rectangular blocks (mine are 4 inches x 10 inches) and stitch into rows of four, pressing seams flat when done.

Every other row, cut a 5-inch section off of one end, and attach it to another end. Then sew the rows together to make your quilt top twelve rows high. Press all seams down.

Instead of quilt batting, I used some organic cotton + organic bamboo sweatshirt fleece in between the layers. I had it on hand and it gives the quilt a nice weight and a sturdiness that will help it last a nice long time.

I stacked and pinned the layers just like I did for my sister's wedding quilt, only on a smaller (and quicker) scale. When quilting the layers together, I stitched along both sides of each horizontal seam and called it good, except for the corners. There, I stitched some simple designs: a fish, a bird, a leaf.

I used the quilt binding technique introduced to me by the Smile and Wave blog; it's taken all the mystery out of quilt binding for me, and lets me coordinate binding to my project, which I love. I'll link to it once her site's back up. Updated 6/7/13: Here's the link.

Basically, cut 3-inch strips, sew together at an angle to avoid bulky seams, then press flat. Fold almost in half along the length (favoring one side by about 1/4 inch), press, then fold edges to the center and press again. The wider side goes on the back of your quilt, so that when you run the quilt through your sewing machine the top and bottom are certain to both get caught in the stitches.

After that, the hand finishing is a cinch.

It was a big hit with the mama-to-be, and I was pretty happy with it, too! A couple of people asked if I sell my quilts; I don't at present, but I really like to give them as gifts.

Thanks for reading! If you make your own subway tile quilt, I'd love to see!

Linking up to:
My Repurposed Life

candy airplane party favors

A big "thank you!" to the blog Sewing Mama Raeanna for inspiring this fast and easy party favor.

Supplies list:

• Wint-o-green Lifesavers 

• rubberbands

• Smarties

• sticks of gum wrapped with scrapbook paper and washi tape (for decoration + sturdiness)

Thread a rubberband through two Lifesavers. If your rubberbands are tiny, you can link two or more together.

Insert a stick of gum through the looped ends sticking out of the Lifesavers.

Insert a roll of Smarties into the space between the gum (wings) and the Lifesavers (wheels). The rubber band will hold everything in place.

Repeat as necessary!

More Flying Machines Party projects:

Hot Air Balloon Pull-String Piñata

Airplane Crayons from Molds

heirloom clothespin dolls & a love story

My paternal grandparents were married in the midwest in the early 1940s, as young college graduates. Grandma's dress was  long and made of ivory silk, and her smile glows and her eyes shine from happiness in the photos I've seen of that day. I think most days with my Grandpa, they probably shone just the same.

She was on the shorter side of our family tree, and birdlike in so many ways (I remember her laugh like birdsong, her light hands and their feathery movements). She was small enough that the seamstress overestimated the length of her gown, and several inches had to be trimmed from the hem. Several inches that she, a saver like me (only with more attic space), stashed away through fifty-six years of life after their wedding day, and which Grandpa, unawares, stashed away for an additional fourteen long years after her death.

And so the trimmings of Grandma's silk wedding gown lay undiscovered until, cleaning out some hidey space after Grandpa followed her into the unknown, my dad and his siblings found them again. The pieces must have been labeled, or they might not have recognized what they were. Or possibly Grandma stored the pieces with her dress, and my dad and aunts and uncles knew them on sight. Somehow it came from my dad to me, to split in some way between my sisters and I.

They came as two oddly shaped pieces, maybe five inches at the widest point and tapering, at the ends, to nothing. I imagine the nervous hands of the person making the alterations, wanting to get it just right in one try. This was someone's wedding dress, after all. No room for error.

Though long, the odd shape of the two pieces made it hard to decide how to use them. I sat on the project for another year, cut a piece to try to make a silk flower, and abandoned the project as too ugly to live.

Thrown off by my craft fail, I stashed the silk away for another six months before inspiration struck in the form of clothespin dolls.

Grandma was crafty like me, too. Really, a number of us (aunts, sisters, cousins) share the affliction. For Grandma, it was mostly knit and crochet. An afghan for each grandchild was our birthright, and I remember very clearly a baby blue sweater she once made for me when I was a kindergartner. It was knit in a checkerboard weave pattern. I loved it. I have exactly one photograph of it. This one. (We were camping with some cousins, one of whom is, in this photo, regretting her offer to share her chair with her stocky five-year-old cousin with the bloody knee.)

I have more photos of my Grandma and Grandpa than I have of this sweater, but not many. After marrying, my grandparents moved to Southern California where my Grandpa made a name for himself as an aerospace electrical engineer. Grandma raised five kids and managed a house using her degree in home economics, and she did a good job on every one. One of them (my dad) married and moved north to pursue a career as a a civil engineer. After that,  they saw him (and later, us) only once a year or so. I don't have as many photos or memories of them as my SoCal cousins do, and I didn't get as much time with them while I was growing up, but oh, there was so much love. We felt it from a distance of hundreds of miles. 

I made the dolls first, carrying their bouquets of buttons from Grandma's button box. It came time to cut the silk for their dresses, and my hands weren't sure I meant them to do it. Seventy years that silk sat untouched. Seventy years since it had been cut from the hem of her wedding dress. Back then, the act of cutting this fabric had kept my grandma from tripping on her hem. Now? I was cutting into her dress again. Her wedding dress. There was no room for error.

I kept my cuts as few as possible, sewing six little wedding dresses (two-layer tubes, really, cinched at the waist) from the remnants. I had painted the dolls' hair and eyes to match Grandma's on her wedding day: dark hair, blue eyes; and now, I dressed them one by one. 

One of my step-sisters got married a month ago, and my younger sister will be getting hitched in a couple of weeks. It's all a cycle, you know. This has happened before, and it will happen again. Seventy years from now, some grandchild will be chopping up some memento of one or the other of them to make into something new. Just in time. 

Thanks for reading.

(p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them.)

Linking up to:

I'm Crafty!

fun with baking (wedding cookies, c. 2003)

In June of 2003, I married my awesome husband at a mostly-handmade wedding a few miles from our home. Friends and family filled first a quonset hut for the ceremony, then the field and wooded area just outside. A couple of years ago, the quonset hut in question was torn down (we happened to be there one day, and salvaged one of the original nails), replaced by a beautiful wedding and reception hall.

But, though buildings come and go, the leftover cookies I made (with help) remained . . . in my freezer . . . for the last eight+ years.




Okay, cards on the table: the leftover cookies actually moved with us from our old house to our current house about six years ago. Yes, it's true; I moved stale, leftover wedding cookies from one house to another.




They held up remarkably well in appearance, but the flavor and texture were horrible. (What, you mean you wouldn't taste eight-year-old wedding cookies from your freezer?)




I snapped these photos before tossing them.




At the time of our wedding, they were delicious; I followed a Martha Stewart recipe for citrus sugar cookies, similar to the one linked here. They're decorated with a royal icing like in that recipe, too. Time consuming, but they looked really nice on the dessert table next to the wedding cake and the groom's cake! These photos show them on a wooden cutting board gifted to us by a co-worker. On the big day, they were arranged on a silver-plated serving tray, one of seven I collected at thrift stores and consignment shops in the months leading up to the wedding.




Now that it's Christmas time and I have an eager baking (tasting) assistant (21 months old), I'm thinking about making up a new batch, but with reindeer and trees instead of wedding cakes, flowers, and moons. Hopefully, there'll be no leftovers this time. My freezer is completely full.


(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)


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wonderland part 8 — summer 2010

In which the blogger adds a glut of photos never-before-shared from the Roving Park Players production of Alice in Wonderland, summer 2010.

I wish I had taken more photos of a bunch of this stuff; in the time crunch leading up to the production, I didn't pause often enough to take photos of completed projects. I'm regretting it now, because some of the props and costumes really did turn out beautifully. Also, it's my policy not to publish photos of other people's children to the blog without permission, and since most of the cast was under age 18, I can't currently show many photos of finished costumes. Here's a link, though, to the Roving Park Players website, where you can see a few more photos of some of the costumes and props we all made, including a turtle shell from a garbage can lid, several nifty pairs of animal ears, the Queen of Hearts' laboriously constructed beauty of a dress, and Alice's dress, stitched from a button down shirt and some white muslin by Stacie W (who actually did a whole lot of really nice sewing on several of the kids' costumes).

Here we have wo different horse heads I made of foam, spray paint, faux fur and plastic animal eyes. These were worn on top of the girls' heads like hats. The foam, purchased in sheet form, has one side with a smooth "skin" on it, which is the side I spray painted.






This next set are images of the Queen of Hearts' deck of cards tabbards. I cut a large stencil from waterproof poster board for the card backs, based on a drawing of the red queen from the original publication of Alice. I applied the stencil to some plain painters' canvas (drop cloths = cheap!) using red spray paint. The fronts are hand-appliqued felt that Lisa S-B painstakingly stitched onto separate sheets of canvas.












The tree in the garden was portrayed by an actor in brown clothing. His canopy is something I made from an old umbrella. Using several shades and coats of spray, I stenciled several different kinds of real leaves onto the umbrella to make an easy-to-transport tree canopy.






These next shots show two pocket watches (one for the Mad Hatter, and one for the White Rabbit) in the early stages. These are Trader Joe's chocolate tins with little plastic windows (still taped off, in these photos). I drilled holes and attached hook-eyes for chain attachment, then spray painted the tins using a hammered metal and antique bronze spray. You can see what a nice texture the hammered metal gives the watches, while nicely hiding text, scratches, and dents. I later filled the tins with all sorts of gears and watch hands and charms, and attached them with some simple hardware chain.






You can see here, across the Mad Hatter's vest near the bottom, the chain of his watch. The coat is the same one I made for Captain Hook in the previous season's production of Peter Pan (and it was used this past summer as the Wizard's coat in The Wizard of Oz. I can't wait to see where it turns up next!).




This is a first sketch of Frog's outfit. The pants ended up being made from a striped thrift store sheet, and the actress portraying the frog stitched up her own vest from some other sheet fabric leftover from the Caterpillar's coat. Oh Rosalie! I wish I had a photo of you in your wonderful costume!




Caterpillar's fez, made of a buckram base I stitched together, then handed off to Lisa S-B, who did an amazing job covering it in felt and trim.




Caterpillar's coat, which the actor really liked. The volunteer who stitched this together for him, Miss Phoebe, hadn't previously tackled such a complicated pattern. I was SO PROUD though, of the way she stuck with it and eventually finished it. It turned out so beautifully, and really does credit to the character of the Caterpillar.




The actress to the left there is not Phoebe; it's actually the beautiful and talented Misty, trying on her costume for the Red Queen. Here's a better shot of her costume during a performance. The dress is one I thrifted, with a skirt I altered to Misty's preference. I also added a sash at the waist and a scarf/capelet thing to the back. Her felt hat was commissioned by the director from an artist whose name I'm afraid I don't know.




Here we have the wire frame for the Queen of Hearts' crown. I made it from twisted floral wire . . .




. . . then covered the wire with one layer of white, then several layers of red and yellow tissue paper soaked in Elmer's glue.





The result is an inexpensive (under $2) lightweight crown that catches light beautifully, though it may be considered a bit fragile for normal wear-and-tear. I admit I was led more by aesthetic and budget than practicality on this project; though it lasted the length of the show's run, the heart ornaments at the top required careful handling. Overworked wire has a tendency to break.




I think I might have shown these before; Phoebe made several pairs of ears for this production from a tutorial over at Threadbanger, and some furry felt (awesomely useful stuff we also used for the animal mitts and various other projects) These ears belonged to the March Hare.




And one of the Tweedle's hats, hand appliqued by Lisa. I loved the way these looked with the boys' striped shirts onstage.




Again, I'm so wishing I had better photographs! Though I'm currently retired from the theater, if I were ever to work another show I'd certainly take more photographs of everything.

Thanks again to the Volunteer Fabrication Department who helped put together a bunch of props and costumes. If you're the parent of one of the child actors from Alice and you'd be okay with me publishing a few photos from the production, please get in touch! And if you're a costumer or props person who'd like a little more info on how we fabricated some of this delightful stuff, I'd be more than happy to give you some info. Shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment below!


(p.s. you can make these photos bigger by clicking on them . . . but you probably knew that!)


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