Some readers might remember my post on fort cozies that I wrote in 2009. Our fort cozies got a new life with the addition of Makedo components from Australia.

I stumbled upon them at our local toy store Geppetto’s Toy Box. They are wonderful little components that provide ways to attach, for example cardboard boxes together or attach a hinge to a piece of cardboard.

Our daughter and a friend built this impressive structure out of Makedo parts, cardboard boxes, garden stakes, clothespins and our fort cozy.

They spent the afternoon in it in our backyard playing cards and games. The even thought to make a peephole and cover it with black fabric so they could be on the lookout should they hear any suspicious activity in the vicinity.

When her friend had to go home Sophie asked if she could spend the night with Bill in it. Our yard is frequented by a family of five possums and three raccoons so she thought that Daddy would be best equipped to keep the wildlife at bay during the night. World’s Greatest Daddy put Ridgerests in the bottom of the fort to ensure comfy sleeping and Sophie filled it with sleeping bags and her favorite stuffed animals. The fort withstood some evening breezes and even a light misty rain that landed a few drops of water on their heads as they slept but not enough to make them want to come inside.

Morning came and Bill took some hot chocolate and the iPad out to the fort so Sophie could listen to an audiobook while we made breakfast.

Our cat Mies beat me to the fort and made himself at home when I arrived with two plates of waffles. We ate our waffles, listened to Ella Enchanted on the iPad in our pajamas in the backyard until 9:30. It was the perfect way to say goodbye to summer.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I had to wait a long time to become a mom. I think a lot about how to introduce our daughter to as many wonderful experiences as I can while she’s young. I’ve got this narrow window of childhood during which to get her interested and excited about things to learn and make and do so were you to come to our house, you’d see lots of parent-child projects in various stages of completion.

You can tell from the first pages of Whipup.net’s Action Pack eMag that Kathreen Ricketson must feel the same way. Issue 4 [June and July 2011] is the Great Outdoors Big Bumper Issue. This issue is the perfect idea book for every parent who has a school-aged child at home on summer vacation. There’s no advertising, just 60 pages of great ideas, clear instructions and charming images. The photography and design of Action Pack are so beautiful that we’re going to actually print out the issue to keep with us on for future road trips and camping. The activities in Action Pack remind kids and parents alike that you don’t need a lot of expensive electronics to have fun and learn a thing or two. Oh, and by the way, there’s a big, beautiful world out there waiting for you as soon as you are done playing Angry Birds.

Kathreen shows readers how they can explore the world in a very holistic way. It’s not just fun craft ideas, she’s included activities for the brain as well as the senses. There are directions for making a homemade anemometer to measure the speed of wind, great instructions for learning to tie useful knots or make a fishing pole, some fun family card games, suggestions on how to make ephemeral sculptures and recipes to try around a campfire. As a parent, this is a really motivating issue because it reminds me that summer, like childhood, is fleeting and that no one should ever spend a moment of it bored.

My beloved late mother-in-law set the bar really high for motherhood. Bill, his sister and Bill’s childhood friends all remember a creative ease that seems to have been around the kitchen table on a regular basis. It never sounded as though it was a big production or anything. She just seemed to always have a the perfect materials within reach so even non-artsy kids wouldn’t hesitate to jump in. “She always made it look so easy,” is a phrase I’ve heard from so many of her admirers. No pressure, right?

For the past few years Bill has always managed to say “We’ve got to get Sophie started making potato prints. We always made potato prints when I was a kid. It’s such a great activity for kids, making potato prints,” right about the time I’d just cut up the last potato for vegetable soup. Unlike other craft supplies that last I never seemed to get the timing/potato availability combo right. I’ve heard doctors talk about the stress that causes heart attacks is not usually the stress from deaths and crises but rather the constant stress of small things like the broken hinge on the back door that you never get around to fixing. For some bizarre reason, my inability to make the potato print activity happen was starting to cause me to stress out every time I saw a potato!

So in the midst of a ton of totally stressful deadlines a couple of weeks ago, I went to make lunch on a Sunday and noticed that there were two potatoes that had sprouted under the sink. I swear that sirens went off in my head. Oh my gosh! I have to do potato prints! Right this moment! Because I can’t have this on my Mommy To Do List for another day! I made the long-awaited family proclamation that I would be gathering all of the supplies for making potato prints after lunch. Surprisingly no trumpets sounded and no one rang the doorbell to notify me that I had finally been promoted from Associate Mom to Full Mom.

As expected, it was Sophie’s favorite new activity and within days she asked to make them again. We used some simple carving tools Bill had for printmaking as well as an x-acto knife. We used inexpensive acrylic paints and made note cards and patterns that we may recolor in Photoshop for fabric designs. Sophie didn’t want to stop and I am now putting her in charge of reminding me to get potatoes when the mood strikes. I no longer need to shoulder that heavy burden.

I should be fine until Bill remembers that his mom’s old pasta machine is in the basement and that we should show Sophie how much fun it is to make polymer clay projects with it.

As I mentioned in my last post. It’s Birthday Week around here. I should actually say that it’s Birthday Week: Part 1. Birthday Week: Part 2 resumes in late August when Bill and I celebrate our birthdays, which are two days apart.

Following on the success of the gift bags that we’ve been making for Christmas each year, I decided that we needed some eco-friendly birthday bags for all of these celebrations. There are fabrics lying around the studio that I love but that don’t work well with some of our furnishings, so I decided that they would be the perfect fabrics for birthday bags.

I wanted to make an embroidered tag for each bag but wanted to finish it quickly because we are in the middle of yet another book and our clients never got the memo (happily) that we’re in a recession. So I decided to play around with some machine embroidery options.

At first I tried to trace something with machine stitching but didn’t like the result. I wanted a more freehand look. So I programmed a narrow zigzag and shortened the stitch length. The photo below is the setting that I used on my Bernina.

I kept the feed dogs engaged but swapped out the regular foot for the embroidery foot. The embroidery foot doesn’t press against the feed dogs so I was able to both see the stitching and slide it around under the foot to simulate writing.

I went back after I did the script to cross the T and dot the I. Although I wouldn’t normally have used variegated thread for an embroidery project, it was the right color and I thought, “What the heck? Let’s give it a try!” I have to say that I prefer the look of this so much more than pristine embroidery done on many sewing machines. It still has the hand quality to it, which I like. I was surprised when the Birthday Girl actually saw it and commented, “Wow! You made that? It’s beautiful.” I instantly dreamed of all of the fun birthdays we’ll celebrate with these bags and maybe a few more in other sizes.

I wouldn’t be able to do it at a really small scale, but I’m going to think about other uses for this kind of embroidery. Maybe a birthday placemat?

Our daughter is enrolled in a theater camp this summer and the parents were asked to volunteer for some tasks. Given that I think of myself as a somewhat competent seamstress I volunteered to do costume construction and alterations rather than sell tickets or plan the cast party. The camp is performing Jungle Book, Cinderella and Fame Jr. I was thinking that someone would give me a pattern and a pile of fabric and I’d be making something from scratch. Wrong.

They needed the most help with the Cinderella costumes. The woman in charge handed me a plus-size polyester blouse and a size 6 prom dress and asked me to put the sleeves from the blouse onto the prom dress. At first it seemed so weird because the size of the sleeves were so much bigger that the armholes of the prom dress, but then I remembered that it wasn’t a quilt. The seams didn’t have to be flat. What a concept. Poofy sleeves. Cinderella. Got it.

I did find my knowledge of insetting circles really paid off as I tried to figure out how to do this. My first step was to cut the sleeves off the blouse and mark with chalk the top of the sleeve when placed flat with the seam at the bottom and the fabric distributed evenly from the seam.

Next I used a basting stitch around the circumference of the sleeve and pulled the bobbin thread to gather the ends until they looked as though they were about the same size as the arm holes on the prom dress.

I then matched that chalked mark on the top of the sleeve to the seam on the top of the arm hole on the prom dress and distributed the extra fabric as evenly around the armhole as possible. I pinned like crazy.

Next I overlocked the sleeve to the armhole because I was worried about the polyester raveling over time. I also think that costumes and stuff kids wear should be constructed with the durability of a military uniform so my #2 Bernina overlocking foot is always nearby when I do this kind of sewing. The last step was to remove the basting. I think it turned out great and looks very appropriate for the costume for the queen.

I was also asked to hem up by 6″ a floor-length flared skirt without cutting it at all. And of course it was lined. I had to sew tucks into the hem but by following the seams straight up the skirt and by distributing the flare evenly across the skirt, it looked fine on the outside. Both were really good tutorials of sorts for me and I feel like every time I do a project like this, I learn something new.

Note:

One reader asked after my tunic post about whether I had a sewing background and what resources I might know of for tailoring clothing. I took Home Ec sewing in 7th grade and that is my sum total background for formal sewing education. What I have learned has been through the experience of following patterns when I make clothes for myself and trying to alter ready-made clothes. I don’t know of any good books for learning how to alter clothing. If any readers do, please share!

What I do know is that I’ve learned a lot by paying attention to the way that garments are constructed. I know that my curvy body looks best with princess seams or darts around the bust and a drape or cut that accommodates an hour-glass figure. I know that clothes that hang flat on the hanger look best on bodies that don’t have a lot of curves. I will never own a piece of clothing with spaghetti straps, a babydoll dress or a pair of Levi’s straight leg jeans with a waistline that goes straight up from the hips. Never gonna happen. Shapely bodies need shapely clothes. I will never buy a pair of pants with a zipper that is more than 4″ long because you just can’t fix a rise that is too long and waistlines at or above the navel are uncomfortable to me.

When I do need to alter clothes I try to figure out how to integrate the alterations into the garment so they look intentional. If a skirt is too long, I look at how it was originally hemmed. I try to ease waist darts in carefully so they look as though they were always there. If I’m adapting the neckline, I find a neckline I like on another garment I have and trace it over the garment I’m adapting.

Perhaps the best advice I can offer regarding alterations is that if you have to do too many, it may be better to try on something else. I guess I’d also say that trying to retrofit a Goodwill garment is a $3-5 experiment and you’re guaranteed to learn a lot. A few episodes of Project Runway should help you dive in. Happy sewing!

A few years ago a grapevine crept over our fence in our backyard. It has grown with gusto and we now have massive amounts of grapevines that climb over our fence weekly threatening to swallow up our entire terrace.

In years past I have cut them and composted them but then I decided to make something, say some wreaths, with them in my never-ending quest to show our daughter how “art supplies” don’t necessarily have to come from stores. I also suggested to our daughter that she might be able to sell some of the wreaths to help her raise money for her choir trip next spring. You can file that under “I really, really, really want my child to have an understanding that money comes from work not from credit cards or ATMs.”

Last year I figured out the hard way that the grapevine wreaths that you see in stores were made while the vines were green and pliable. In other words, you can’t cut the vines down, leave them in a heap for a few weeks and expect to be able to weave them. This year, I vowed to really get my act together and make the most of the grapevines.

So we figured out a good set-up: drinks, music, sun umbrella and assigned tasks. Bill and I took turns pulling the longest possible vines off of the fence and laying them on some chairs. Then the other began clipping the leaves off of the vines so they would be ready for weaving. We took turns getting wreaths started and discussed how thick they needed to be to be attractive.

Our daughter Sophie had a particular interest in the small bunches of grapes that appeared here and there on the vines. While I suggested weaving them in improvisationally, she wanted to place them strategically. So I suggested that she get some wire and attach them so when the vines dried, they wouldn’t fall off.

At one point I enthusiastically suggested that I might like to experiment with basketweaving. I have no expertise in basketweaving but thought that with all of these grapevines, I could surely figure it out.

Now see, I should know better by now. At our rehearsal dinner 14 years ago today, one of Bill’s friend’s recounted how when Bill lived in a mud hut in a village of 54 people in Kenya in the 80s, he made a chair out of discarded chicken bones he collected from around the village.

The first time I visited his mother’s house I noticed this beautiful, necklace with hammered, graduated links made out of copper. I asked where it came from and Bill said that he got bored one night after dinner and made it from some leftover copper wire that was sitting around the house. No plan. No pattern. Just literally banged it out. That’s my man. It’s scary how he can make something beautiful out of anything. All I have to do is to think of an idea and before I’ve even uttered it, Bill has gone and completed the task in a far more elegant way than I was even contemplating. I’m sometimes faster to figure out the ideas but he’s always beats me in getting around to doing it. And I look and him and he gives me that “is there a problem?” look.

Not that I’m competitive but seriously, there are just a few things in the world left that I have more ability or knowledge of than he. My goal is to keep him so busy that he can’t learn them because I’d like to cling on to my last bit of feeling competent at a few things. So if you ever see him in an airport knitting, reading a book on garden design or studying Japanese, I really need you to convince him that none of those are worthwhile pursuits. I’ll owe you one. “Mommy’s better at ponytails,” our daughter sometimes reassures me.

Anyway, back to the grapevines. So while I’m weaving plain circular wreaths, I turn around and Bill is doing this:

Nice, huh? It’s already beautiful isn’t it? Within a few minutes, it turns into this:

Is that not one beautiful birdhouse?

And then just for the challenge, he makes this and manages to convince our daughter that it’s either a fairy nest or a piece needed for a game that requires a ping-pong ball:

I’m still on the wreaths for crying out loud.

So if you hear a little rustling in the backyard in the middle of the night, it’s just me working quietly on a little basket with no one around…

In the spring, summer and fall I am lucky enough to live in a town where I can go most of the places I need to go on a bike. I have skorts and some skirts or dresses that I can wear on my bike without worrying about my skirt getting tangled in the spokes of the rear wheel or in the chain but most of the time I like to ride with capris or Bermuda shorts. I don’t have any chain worries with either of these and I don’t have to worry about the Marilyn Monroe look when that Chicago wind finds it’s way up my skirt while crossing a busy street.

As an aside, don’t you love all of those women’s style dictators on TV who do these makeovers of women in shorts or jeans and put them in cocktail dresses and stiletto heels instead as if the woman being made-over could just wear the cocktail dress down the slide at the park or to be the line judge at the soccer game? I don’t have many occasions to wear cocktail dresses. I need the look that can go from studio to client meeting to grocery store to sports camp pick-up to salsa dancing class. Suggesting that we can just wear cocktail dresses has a “let them eat cake” ring to them if you ask me. Not that you did but…

Anyway, I’ve been on the lookout for a black and white tunic because I love the timeless, graphic look of black and white in the summer. Not having much luck I decided to see if I could convert a dress to a tunic and BINGO –there was the perfect candidate for $3.99 at the local Goodwill.

I will also add that we are lucky to have Jane, a student intern at FunQuilts this summer, who happens to be a fashion design/graphic design double major. Jane agreed to give me a second opinion on the right length for the tunic and help me figure out how to detail the all-important side vents. The original vents for the dress were almost 5″ long because the dress itself is supposed to hit mid-calf.

The only complication was that the zipper runs down the side of the dress so I couldn’t make the vents as long as I wanted but in the end they’re fine. Neither Jane nor I liked the top-stitching at the hem of the original dress so we agreed that I’d need to hand-stitch the hem.

First Jane and I figured that the tunic should be just a little below the crotch, not much more because I’m petite and don’t have any leg length to spare. I then measured up the side seam allowances and figured how much length I could get for the vents given the side zipper. I marked the point on both sides and made a stabilizing bar tack with the sewing machine across the seams at that point.

I rolled over the raw edges and hand sewed the edges of the vents and the hem. [Note: I told Bill, who took the picture above, that he was not allowed to use the wide-angle lens to photograph my hips.]

I love the length of this tunic and that it gives me a shirt that’s dressier than a t-shirt but still bike friendly. I’m heading back to Goodwill to see if there are more dresses that could be converted in the same way. Maybe I’ll convert a cocktail dress!

A few summers ago Uncle Andy came to visit. Uncle Andy’s daughters are all grown up but he has a wonderful ability to connect with kids of any age. During his visit we decided to take the croquet set over to the local park and play a round or two with our daughter Sophie, who had just turned seven.

As we were setting up the course, Sophie noticed a tree that had a little hollow place at its base. “What’s in there?” she asked. Before I could answer Uncle Andy piped up, “Why that’s a fairy house of course.” Then Sophie noticed the broken end of a fishing rod lying near the base of the tree and wondered aloud what it was. “Everybody knows that’s the flag pole for the fairy house,” answered Uncle Andy without missing a beat. Then he took the broken end of the fishing pole and stuck it in the ground right next to the hollow spot of the tree and stuck a leaf on the end of it to serve as the flag!

“I cannot lose this magical idea,” I thought. I could see our daughter’s imagination as well as my own taking off the second he stuck that fishing pole in the ground. That was the only prop I needed to imagine a whole little fairy village around the flagpole.

So when had some empty matchboxes lying around, I decided to remind Sophie of the fairy houses. I told her that I was going to make a portable beach house for the fairies.

Sophie is currently in an amazing summer theater camp working on set design and construction so she took immediately to this idea.

She decided immediately to deconstruct her matchbox and attach tiny strips of velcro to it so she could attach and disassemble the walls of her fairy house.

I went for detail. My fairies have their beach towels out (scraps left over from the summer hand-washing washcloth I cut up) and their umbrella up for a little shade.

I cut down a tropical drink umbrella so it would fit back in the matchbox at the end of the season and used the scrap toothpick ends for the drinks on the tray. There’s a Moon Pie next to the drinks and one of the fairies is reading the new Steig Larsson book. (I have to wait for 46 people at our library to finish it before it makes its way to me. There’s no waiting list at the Fairy Library–wait–that’s yet another matchbox isn’t it?)

As an aside, my friend Linda is my co-leader in teaching catechesis at our church.

She made a little matchbox gift for me at the end of the year that is a beautiful reminder of some of the topics we covered in our atrium.

It’s all about the possibilities of an empty box.

I know that there are really important issues out there facing the world such as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the economic collapse of Greece, volatility in the stock market and the oil slick the size of Puerto Rico in the Gulf of Mexico that BP can’t seem to stop, but frankly I don’t feel qualified to solve any of them. I have, however, solved two not-very-important issues. I realize that by even bringing this up I risk being thought if as someone who really needs to get a life but sometimes small improvements in our routine can make all of those big, serious problems just an eensy bit easier to face.

Are you ready for my big achievement? I have developed a better, more frugal, greener way to wash really dirty hands. It involves changing the triangular relationship between the dirt on your hands, the soap and the towel.

We’ll start with the soap: Soap seems so simple enough but it becomes really annoying over time. Some of it cracks and develops these yucky black streaks, others develop yellow stains in certain places, some develop these erosion-looking streaks on the end and that’s even before it gets down to that too-small-to-use-easily-yet-too-big-to-want-to-throw-away phase. Some crack in half prematurely and others just become too cumbersome to use. Big bars of soap are awkward for kids’ and my small hands, but little bars don’t last very long and can be equally awkward to use. In the lifespan of a bar of soap, I figure that there’s about two good weeks when it fits well in your hand and is still usable. I know that I could use liquid soap but I don’t want one plastic dispenser in my life and liquid soap is wash-for-wash much more expensive than bar soap, although I will fork out the money for our gigantic container of Dr. Bronner’s that we decant into a smaller squeeze bottle in the shower. This idea is for grimy hand-washing, which doesn’t work as well with slippery liquid soap.

Then there’s the towel: I have this vivid memory of feeling betrayed by the fancy hand towel in our family’s powder room growing up. Heeding the advice to wash my hands with soap and water after playing outside, I couldn’t understand why even when I did that I ended up getting in trouble for getting the towel dirty. So when I found myself reminding my own child about not trashing the hand towels I confessed to her that I understood how hard it is to get all of the dirt off before you wipe you hands on the towel.

Here’s my theory: we’re doing the whole hand-washing thing all wrong. We’ve got dirt on our hands, right? We need gentle abrasion to get the dirt off right? We use smooth soap, which doesn’t do the job so then when we use a slightly textured terry-cloth towel to wipe our hands dry, the remaining dirt comes off on the towel.

So here’s my solution: I’ve taken an old, thin terry-cloth washcloth (an old dishcloth would also work I bet) and sewn a little hand-sized pouch. I wouldn’t try this with a thick washcloth: poor abrasion to soap ratio. In it I’ve put all the pitiful shards of soap from around the house. Finally I used a simple zigzag stitch to sew it closed. I’ve put this contraption in the soap dish that’s most frequently used for washing grimy hands (after gardening, soccer games, etc). When we’ve used up all of the soap in the pouch, I’ll cut off the end, add more soap and sew it up again. I considered a small zipper, Velcro or button but I don’t think I’d want that rubbing against my wet hands. I don’t think this solution would work if we didn’t have soap dishes that drain but we do so I don’t think that we’ll end up with any mildewing problems. I even made an identical pouch for the deodorant soap we use in the summer in the shower for what I will euphemistically refer to as “sandal feet.”

Now all I have to do is wait for the Nobel Peace Prize Committee to call.

Until I moved to Japan after college, I had never carried a handkerchief. The handkerchief was a throwback to my grandmother’s generation I thought and was something one waived in the air while waiting for smelling salts before you were about to faint. The hankies I knew were white and lacy. Definitely old fashioned I thought.

When I moved to Japan though, I was startled to see in the department stores shelf upon shelf of beautiful and sometimes whimsical handkerchiefs. There were even handkerchiefs for kids with cartoon characters on them.

For Japanese women, carrying a handkerchief is essential. Not all public bathrooms have paper towels so having a lovely handkerchief with which to dry your hands is helpful. The handkerchief is also useful during humid summers to dab you brow or neck on a crowded train. I never saw anyone blow his or her nose into a handkerchief the way Americans do. It’s more for discreet dabbing the way you would when you walk inside after walking a few blocks on a snowy day and your nose drips a tiny bit. Tissues are used for dealing with runny noses and serious nasal congestion while handkerchiefs are a more multipurpose cloth kept either in the pocket or purse. Japanese hankies are made of very lightweight cotton so they dry extremely quickly and are not bulky in pockets.

I soon found the handkerchief habit both charming and civilized, not to mention eco-friendly. Choosing which handkerchief I would carry each day became part of getting dressed in the morning. I have a watermelon hankie with Sara Midda illustrations on it and another blue and white one with little French sailors that I carry only in the summer. There’s one sweet one made from Liberty of London fabric. I even have one with the Tokyo subway system printed on it.

When I met Bill I learned that he carried a handkerchief daily even before he went to live in Japan. One night after our first fabric line had been delivered I found him in the studio late at night making himself handkerchiefs out of the sample fabrics we had received. He regularly gets asked where he gets his colorful handkerchiefs and often sends them to one friend who lives in Morocco who requests them. This year I made him a new one because those from the first line have begun to fade after six years of weekly washings.

Although quilting cotton is thicker than those diaphanous ones I bought in Japan, it still makes a fine handkerchief. To make your own, cut a square of cotton the size you desire. I tend to make mine about 8″x8″. Bill likes his bigger so he makes his 14″x14″.

Making the hankies is the same as making a cloth napkin. Turn under and press a 1/4″ strip on all sides. Roll the edges again 1/4″ and press. Topstitch all sides taking care to backstitch the corners.

Although they don’t have to be pressed when they come out of the dryer I prefer to press them so they’re neat and crisp when folded. Unlike shirts that require a lot of manipulation to get right, handkerchiefs iron flat in seconds. Then when you’re in the movie theater and the weepy part comes, you reach into your purse and there’s a beautiful little hankie in there with which to dab the corner of your eye.