Here are our activities, in no particular order, mostly. I still have to print them out and package them with chocolate and a Bible verse for each day (thank you Daily Thread Katie for that one!).

The importance here is not on rushing to complete an activity or to tick something off a list (remember this, me, please, and don’t make yourself crazy). The importance is to spend time celebrating the season with the people in your life who matter most. If you don’t need to entertain and delight children, entertain yourself and decorate (or don’t!) to your heart’s content.

1. celebrate the season with friends (we have friends with kids coming over tomorrow night to play and create and just enjoy each other’s company)

2. bring in the tree and put lights on that sucker

3. paint fingernails and toenails red and green (we like to alternate and add white dots for decoration–this is a swell nightly activity for when we have a sitter and are out for a holiday party)

4. make it snow in the house (my husband hates this. He thinks it looks creepy. The kids adore it, and so do I.)

5. sew ornaments (if you know me already, you’ll recall that I’m very partial to doves and birds–all of our Christmas decorations are in storage right now as we attempt to sell our house, so we may just make all our ornaments this year)

6. make a paper chain

7. make a wreath (I’m thinking paper)

8. make the house smell like Christmas (we simmer cinnamon sticks and spices in water on the stove–honestly, this one doesn’t much impress the kids anymore)

9. make salt dough ornaments (if you have small children, salt dough hand and footprints make the best grandparent gift tags ever; if you have bigger children, be prepared to cut out dinosaur shapes with exacto knives!)

10. hot chocolate stirred with candy canes (we like Williams Sonoma peppermint hot chocolate)

11. family pictures with antlers and elf hats (or some such silliness)

12. watch Christmas movies (another good babysitter activity)

13. write a letter to Santa

14. stitch a hankie (or a set of ‘em) for a gift (I am thinking pima gingham homemade hankies for manpeople we like)

15. make our own wrapping paper (we have a never-ending roll of white butcher paper from the school supply store; potato stamps, etc., are great, but so is just scribble scrabble or fine art from kids–everyone loves this)

16. make and mail cards for our friends (cards specifically from the kids, not our main cards)

17. make and decorate sugar cookies (will link you to a great-looking recipe when the internet is not so incredibly slow)

18. Callaway Gardens for the lights! (a weekend activity, I suppose, and the only one we might not be able to squeeze in)

19. Local lights tour (we love this)

20. wrap/label/deliver teacher gifts (my children LOVE handing out their teacher gifts)

21. decorate our doors (we use the big roll of white butcher paper to make huge Christmas trees and add cut out ornaments)

22. call grandparents and sing Christmas songs (a big hit)

23. put out gifts for our wonderful mail lady (she prefers chocolate)

24. Christmas Eve services, read the Christmas story

For comparison, here’s my Advent post from long ago. I am too lazy to figure out how to convert the pictures right now. Some of the old activities are better than the ones here, especially if you have really small kids.

Honestly, keeping up with some of this drives me nuts. I make sure to carefully consult the calendar to work around obligatory parties–the last 10 weeks of the calendar year sort themselves into madness starting in about September and I resent the intrusion on my family time. At the same time, I like people to visit us when we ask them, so I try to do the same when they ask for my time and sparkling, witty company (hah).

Happy holidays. Be well. All that matters is that you spend time with those you love (or can tolerate).

Pear pincushion? Check here! UK lass in the U.S. has a great site. Two thumbs up. It involves a simple shape repeat and it’s not one of the patterns you should have to buy.

Learn how to carve a stamp from one of my favorite internet artists, Gennine. She’s talented and her blog is gorgeous.

Best play mat ever (fond of the superlatives, you know) for your children, right here. Made out of a plastic shower curtain! Love this.

Make some coloring books for your children! Chez Beeper Bebe is one of my new favorite blogs. Check out her napkin project. (We are an all-cloth-napkin-all-the-time people, too.)

Finally, a jingle mouse ornament.

More to come! Getting blog updated some way (not sure what must be done, but getting updated so I can blog from my phone) soon, so…

I get the most google hits on three subjects:

taggy or taggie blanket patterns
pillowcase dress patterns

and

corn starch cravings/why do I crave Argo corn starch

I wrote about the blankets and pillowcase dresses in this entry long ago.

I noticed on my sitemeter referral page that someone was looking for no-sew fleece taggy or taggie blanket patterns and I was thinking, I don’t know if you could secure ribbons or tags in a no-sew blanket. You can make no-sew fleece blankets in a few different ways (you can snip the ends and tie them all around or you can snip the edge of the blanket all around and do bunny ears by pulling the snipped part through a little hole at the bottom of each snip), but the ribbons need to be sewn down so your wascally wabbit wily kid can’t pull them out. Also, I like fleece just fine, but I really like that obnoxious minky/minkee fabric for a soft baby blanket. The Crabcake does, too.

My son demands to be covered up with his taggy blanket every night now–he asks for the soft blanket and then he requests a “soft one” for each hand. I alternated between grosgrain and satin ribbons all around the border of the blanket, but he likes the soft ribbons much, much better.

If you are going to make a blanket with tags, don’t make the mistake that I did: many of the tags on the boychild’s blanket are long enough for him to fit his hand inside, so he will sometimes wake up in the night with a tag stuck around his wrist, which makes for a crabby crabby Crabcake.

Regarding the pillowcase dress, you can still find the free pattern at the website I linked in my original post about it (see above), but seriously, do you even need a pattern? I promise, you do not, unless you have a matched set of pillowcases and you’re going to make your wee girlchild a pillowcase dress or nightgown out of one case and a pair of matching bloomers out of the other (lop off the closed end of the pillowcase, cut and sew up the legs and add elastic to the legs and waist).

All you need to do is cut off the tippy top closed end of the pillowcase and cut even armholes. I fold the pillowcase lengthwise and cut both corners at the top at the same time so they’re even. See:

(When you make yours, be sure to use a pillowcase and not a sheet of 8 1/2 x 14″ paper that you happen to have in your office.)

Two even armholes. The freebie pillowcase pattern recommends saving the lopped-off closed end of the pillowcase to use for binding the armholes, which is a swell idea, honestly, but I prefer binding the armholes with the same double-faced satin ribbon I use to make the straps.

When you bind the armholes with satin ribbon, you have to be careful making the front and back “tunnels” for the ribbon ties to slide through because the layers of satin ribbon binding can get messy right at the armholes. Fold down the center front and back (between the armholes, if you will) and blind stitch in place. You need enough space in the folded tunnel to slide through the ribbon that will tie at the shoulders. I make two folds: one small one for a neat hem, and one slightly wider than the ribbon that will go through the space.

Slip one ribbon straight across the front and a matching ribbon straight across the back. Voila.

Be smarter than me and buy extra ribbon before you start the project or else you’ll have to go back to the ribbon store that may or may not be owned and run by a horrible bitchy woman who doesn’t care about being rude to people because she owns (a) the only ribbon store in town and (b) sells the best ribbon in town at (c) insanely cheap prices.

A year or two ago, I discovered linocutting and stamp carving on the internets and bought the requisite tools, only to hoard them in my crafty guest bedroom. Last week, I got out my speedball set and took it to the art store for Mr. Melodious Voice to put together because I have been unable to get even that far, which makes me feel especially brilliant. He was kind and did not laugh at me at all.

I came home and spent an hour carving a birdie I doodled* and was sorely disappointed when the edges of the stamp were shaggy (raggy?) and not smooth and neat, but I gave it a second go one night this week while watching Clive Owen and Jennifer Aniston not quite get to have an affair because a con got in the way in the movie Derailed. It turns out that you cannot just gouge out your shape with the v-gouge and that you must use the knife edge all around the edges of your shape (while paying extremely close attention to what you are doing because as tiny as it is, that knife edge seems lethal) and then neatly gouge out the rubber in the way. Presto-chango, smooth-edged lamp stamp that took me over an hour to carve out. Ignore the nicked place at the bottom, please.

You can see that I did not cut away enough of the outside of the lamp stamp area and need to do that. You can also see that I did not rinse off the pencil marks before test-driving the stamp with a red ink pad that I managed to leave sitting open overnight afterwards.

I have a couple of fabric ink stamp pads (turquoise and brown) and I will be testing the lamp on muslin sometime soon. What I will then do with lamp-stamped muslin is anyone’s guess, but it’s fair to say that I will probably leave it sitting around somewhere for a very long time before doing anything at all with it.

I think the perfect thing to do, now that I’ve carved two very small things (the lamp is less than three inches tall), one of which turned out horribly, is to carve something huge. There will probably be tears involved.

* Doodle with a pencil and make your doodle very dark and thick-lined before turning the paper over and using the pencil to rub over the image, thereby transferring it to your carving block. Mr. Melodious Voice agreed that the ez carve stuff is, indeed, the easiest to use. While I try to support the local art place, Dick Blick is far and away the cheapest art supply source I’ve ever found.

Uhh, finally, because I forgot to include this earlier, on the off chance that you were in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, last night and dined at the world famous Dixie Stampede, yeah, that was my kid who got pulled from the audience to chase chickens on “stage” and be interviewed in front of a bazillion people. I’m not entirely sure how the inlaws arranged that and I haven’t seen pictures yet, but World-Famous International Chicken-Chasing Superstar McPantses is having the time of her life and has added Cherokee, North Carolina (where they went sometime yesterday before the horse show dinner theater and where McP got her face painted like an Indian), to her travel repertoire now, too.

Because she loved yesterday’s breakfast at the original (they are all original, I think) Pancake Pantry, so very much, the trio opted to have lunch there, too. You may recall that when I was in the hospital when the boychild was born, McP and her grandparents managed to eat pancakes for nearly every meal (except for the ones they ate at Chick-Fil-A where she got to play on the indoor play structure that grosses me out and which I refuse to play on anywhere ever at fast food restaurants, which makes me a terribly mean mommy, although really this isn’t an issue because we do not ever ever ever indulge in such food trash, especially not once a week or sometimes more) and reprogramming was necessary at the end of their visit.

In addition to pancakes, go karts have figured largely into this vacation time and after going with her grandfather to race go karts on Monday (must. not. think. about potential safety issues and concentrate on wonderfulness of entire adventure and the fact that I am not there and can absolutely not concentrate on the realization that she has no health insurance card or medical power of attorney with her oh holy crapus the anxiety of it all augh), McP told her grandparents yesterday that if she could only do that again, she would never, ever make another request of them. She was taken go-kart racing not once, but twice, yesterday, befitting a Chicken-Chasing Famous Person entirely.

Chicken-chasing is sort of the exact opposite of being a spangly rhinestone pink barbiedisneynightmare princess, anyway, right? And, it’s extra special great fun because someone else is treating her to it and I do not have to be there.

But I mostly sorta wish I was there, too. Except for all the pancakes. And the chickens.

Taggy Blanket Pattern

I get search engine hits every day from people looking for taggy blanket patterns (taggie blanket patterns?) and I wanted to post that you don’t really need a pattern to make one, in my opinion.

I’m a novice machine sewer and made one easily. First, I cut two pieces of fabric in the size I wanted the blanket to be (see picture here) and selected ribbons from my stash.

I pinned right sides of the fabric together (so the wrong side showed on the outside, if that makes sense).

I cut the ribbons about 6 inches long, ironed the wrinkled ones, folded the ribbons in half and pinned them in place all along the inside of the blanket border so that the cut ends of the folded ribbons stuck out and the folded ends were in the middle of the fabric sandwich. I alternated between grosgrain and satin out of personal preference, and varied ribbon widths, but I can tell you that the boychild seems to really like the wider satin ribbons best.

I sewed around the border with a straight stitch and left a five to six inch gap in the middle of one side. Before I turned the whole blanket right side out, I stitched the two ribbons in the gap down to one side of the blanket so they’d stay in place when I turned the blanket out. If you use less ribbons than I did, you might not need to do that, and honestly, you could get away with using a lot fewer ribbons. I might have gotten a bit carried away with the pretty, pretty colors…

Before turning the blanket right side out, I snipped the corners so they’d turn out nicely and then I pulled the blanket through the gap, poked the corners with a butter knife and stitched the gap shut. If a goofus like me can make this blanket, any idiot with a needle and thread can do it!

Pillowcase Dress Pattern

I was shocked to see a $12 pattern for pillowcase dresses when I visited a local quilt shop this weekend. In my mind, all a sewer would do is snip off the top corners (from the closed end of the pillowcase) for armholes, clip across that closed end and turn it down, leaving a space for a ribbon to go through and tie at the shoulders and finish off the armholes. Easy as pie, right?

Here’s a free pattern for a pillowcase dress. I can’t believe someone would charge money for something so simple. Hmmm, check this pattern–she recommends cutting a strip across the top of the pillowcase to use as binding for the armholes and I think that’s brilliant.

Let’s agree that I am not a great photographer and go from there.

The one on the left will be the baby gift. I decided that orange thread goes well with the light, minty sort of turquoise and I’m using ecru thread, too. The one in the middle is McPantses’ bunny. I made a new pattern for the baby gift bunny–I wanted the arms and legs to be a bit larger and the body to be more substantial. I also made the ears a bit bigger and longer and rounded the top of the head. The bunny on the right will be the Crabcake’s.

Why, of course, I’d be thrilled to show you a close-up of the embroidery on the nose! I only wish it was a better picture. I love that fabric. It’s one that I’ve xeroxed on 11 x 17 paper at Kinko’s on the color printer and used to cover notebooks. Great way to spend $4 ($2 for the copy and $1 for the black marbley compositon book and another $1 for a glue stick. I use a big sheet of white paper underneath the color copy so the marbley notebook doesn’t show through. Learned that the hard way. I tell you all this because it’s on my mind today–I think all my new fabrics need to be ironed and spirited off for copying.)

Can you see the herringbone pattern on the bunny ear? I love it. I wish you could see Bunny Sally’s face, but the flowers are so bright and the nose is light pink and I’ve already erased a doezn horrible pictures.

Hey–the sniffy quilt store people were very nice when I went in for cotton batting today. They said I do not have to quilt with miniscule needles if I’m a good embroiderer (not that I necessarily am, but I like to think I can take tiny, even stitches. The bunnies aren’t an example of that–I was going for several strands of thread and bold stitches so they’d show up.) and didn’t sneer at me at all. They also wrote down “Heather Ross” and “Denyse Schmidt” and promised to check on the fabric lines. Huzzah!

Alternative Title: Tiffany owes me some copper polish.*

Yesterday afternoon, I set out to create a summer “advent” calendar for kiddies like the one I made for last December with McPantses, where she pulled a decorated, numbered matchbox out of a glass pitcher and opened it to reveal a chocolate and a special holiday activity for each day.

Summer is ten weeks long, though, and my feeble, dessicated brain cannot come up with fitty (I was thinking one activity for each weekday) separate small, fun activities for kids, so I am suggesting, instead that you choose from among the ones I’m going to list and make your own summer activity jar/calendar/list. I’d love to hear your additions, too, and maybe between our collective feeble brains, we can devise a grandmaster list to make us all proud and to delight, amuse and wear out our kids.

Week One
1. Fruits and cookie cutters: cantaloupe tastes better when it’s shaped like a flower.

2. Make yarn pom poms with your hands. Tutorial? Thank you, Bella Dia! You can make lots of pom poms and use them for #17, too.

3. Paint your face like a ______. (Cat is popular at my house, but lots of skinny swirlies around the outside of the eyes is adorable.)

4. Frame your handprint and footprint. You’ll need a ready-made frame w/matte for this one. Do a hand and footprint on nice paper (use craft paint) and decorate the matte to match. A child’s signature is a must for this one! This would make a swell Father’s Day gift or a treat for a grandparent. It’d also be a swell start of a collection, maybe lining a hallway.

5. Learn about your state. (online, library, encyclopedia, etc.)

Week Two
6. Brave Taster! Blindfold a kiddie with a tea towel or two tied together and put out marshmallows, sliced kiwi or strawberries, a green or red bell pepper, and a few other tasty things with neat textures and go from there. I used to babysit a fun group of kids and we’d taste all sorts of weird things, from jalapenos in chocolate sauce to raw potatoes. I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t go over well with every kid, though.

7. Stitch a towel. You’ll need a flour sack towel (Tarjay sells them for $3.99 or $4.99 for a set of 4) and some DMC floss and either an air-soluable marker (craft or fabric store) or regular sharpened pencil. Have your child draw something simple on the towel and assist with a needle-threading, supervise closely and be quick to untangle threads. Even mistakes will come out looking beautiful.

8. Grow a plant from an avocado seed. Did you put toothpicks in an avocado seed and dangle it over water as a kid? I did.

9. Write an autobiography. Don’t forget to illustrate it!

10. Button bracelet: DMC floss and a handful of buttons! You could tie knots between buttons to make them stay in place. Other button fun? Check this Kiddley entry, and consider a button bouquet.

Week Three
11. Make a Plate. The big pack is cheaper than the small one.

12. Messy: 2 liter Diet Coke, a tube of Mentos, outdoors. Beware! My science teacher sis says diet really is better to use. I think bathing suits for the experiment followed by a run through the sprinklers would be ideal.

13. Dishtowel totebag. Apparently K-Mart has tons of great lineny tea towel-style dishtowels. One folded in half and stitched up the sides makes a great tote bag for a kid. Help your child attach ribbon for straps and don’t load the bag too full and you’re set!

14. Draw characters to write a story.

15. Old shirt smock: thanks Dad or thrift store! Cut off the sleeves anywhere you want and you’ve got little kid full body protection from arts and crafts mess. Decorate as you wish.

Week Four
16. Sock puppet. Socks of your choice (love the bright stripes and argyles at Tarjay, orjust grab a clean, not-too-grubby sock from the drawer), glued or stitched felt for tongue and eyes.

17. Garland. Triangles of fabric or fun papers attached to string look great strung up around the house. Bits of ribbon just tied around a bright strand of embroidery floss would be fun, too. Hang anywhere! If you want yarn pom pom garlands, you will probably need to thread a needle and string them onto the thread with the needle pushed through the center of the pom pom.

18. Using your character from last week (see day 14), write a story. Use separate pages so it can be turned into a book next week!

19. Mold chocolates out of ganache and a mini-muffin pan (heart-shaped would be great, but I can never force myself to buy a heart-shaped mini-muffin pan, for some reason). Melted chocolate chips and a bit of heavy cream makes swell ganache and sets up semi-firmly. I might just make a very few, because no one needs 24 chocolate temptations around the house.

20. Family Pictures Memory Game. Sift through old pictures and grab doubles you can bear to part with. Trim edges until they’re the size you’d like them to be and either start your memory game or back the pics with fun paper to make them a little sturdier. Very neat and motivated crafty folks might laminate the pics, too.

Week Five
21. Indoor tent: quilts or blanets and chairs galore. Perfect for a rainy day. Serve lunch under the big top, too.

22. “Bind” the book of your story from the past two weeks by punching holes along the edge of the paper and stringing yarn through them.

23. Send letters to your friends. You could make copies of your book and mail those, too.

24. Pasta necklaces: yarn, crafty acrylic paint and pasta. You’ll need something to go with the button bracelet, right?

25. Head to the toymaker dot com, whisper a silent prayer of thanks to the amazingly talented Marilyn Scott-Waters and dazzle your kiddos with your color printer, cardstock and inkjet magnet paper (do the paper doll otters on magnet paper and put them and their clothes on your fridge).

Other random activities you could add or substitute for the above:

* Learn about your city.

* Shop at Dover. Time stands still for minutes when we find a new kid catalogue in the mail.

* Make crayons out of all your broken crayons and the mini-muffin tin. Peel crayons first.

* Kid stationery: kid art, a scanner, cardstock. Your child will be so proud and recipient grandparents will plotz at the courtesy and the creativity and the oh-so-sweety sweet sweetness of it all.

* Make your family tree! Send copies to everone on it.

* Make a No Sew fleece blanket! This is a cheap project that a kid could do with minimal help from a parent and while it’s too hot to use a fleece blanket (in the size of your choice) during the summer, it has to be really satisfying to do a big sort of project like this as a kid.

* Freezer paper. Fabric paint. Stencils of your choice. Amazing crafts. Thank the craftay bloggers, y’all. They’re goooood.

* Make a U.S. map out of the substance of your choice. Watercolors would be good to use.

* Be a detective or a spy! Get a kit together (magnifying glass, flashlight, notebook, etc.) and take notes. This would work well with the learn about your state/city suggestions, somehow. You could also read aloud Harriet the Spy or The Westing Game or some other spy/detective kid book.

* Make gak, oobleck, glorax (flubber) or silly putty! (Messy, surely.)

I tried to include at least one food thing and one coloring/writing thing per week, but I’m not entirely sure I succeeded. I enjoyed making this list and I am certainly big on the kiddie crafts, but frankly, right now I am plum tuckered out and wouldn’t turn down a tumbler of Maker’s Mark over ice with the smallest lime chunk in it.

* I can’t resist.

With a nod to loobylu’s recent post on matchboxes and Advent, I present to you the Heels household parental joint effort of this evening:

The matchboxes are covered with images that I cut out from Anthropologie and Land of Nod catalogues from this season, as well as a cover from a recent Land’s End or LL Bean. (I forget which one.)

I printed out the round stickers and as I glue-sticked the covers on the matchboxes, the Husband stuck the numbers in place on each box. We then went back and filled each box with a piece of chocolate:

Note also the shrinky ornaments that McPantses and I made over the weekend. It’s always more fun when you let the kid cut things out, right? Note the glare from the lights and the flash, too. I’m quite new to capturing life via a camera. Work with me, people, and forgive the ineptitude.

While making the shrinky ornaments, I made a 2005 tag and tonight I attached it to a big green glass pitcher that we put all the matchboxes in, after we wrapped each chocolate with a cutout slip of paper listing the big activity for the particular day.

I’ll list our 24 days of activities tomorrow. In a minute, I have a date with a Medela PIS.*

Think McPantses will love this much?

* Can you hear me sighing all the way from here?

Edited to add our list, which was really hard to make because we have to allow for harried, hurried nights after working all day and three or four Christmas parties, two of which are mandatory and on nights after work (I hate going out sans kids after work–it’s too much for the kids and for me):

1. Put up Christmas flag.

2. Stamp, sign and mail church postcards. (The Mothers in Prayer group sends cards to all the children in the church for Christmas and Easter. Each member takes an age group. McP loves anything mail related, so this will be fun for her. For me, it’s a task that must be done.)

3. Get wreath (from local curb market–it’s a neat tradition and you have to get there at the asscrack of dawn to get decent greenery in December).

4. Color picture for Christmas card. (McP is doing the artwork for our card–she draws a mean version of the Heels family, complete with me holding Charlie Crabcake and herself taller than anyone else.)

5. Make house smell like Christmas. (Where you toss cinnamon sticks, cloves, anise seeds, etc., in an old saucepan and warm the crap up every once in a while.)

6. Polish toenails in Christmas colors. (I am thinking light metallic green with tiny red dots.)

7. Hang candy canes on tree.

8. Call the inlaws and sing a Christmas carol.

9. Give present to fave daycare teacher while she babysits this night.

10. Hang paper snowflakes from ceiling. (Some gorgeous crafty blog has a pic of this.)

11. Make peanut butter pinecones to feed birds.

12. Wrap school present. (McPantses’ class draws names.)

13. Call my parents and sing a Christmas carol.

14. Drink hot chocolate and stir with candy canes.

15. Paint face like Rudolph. (The Husband and I will be at a Christmas party, so we figured fave daycare teacher/babysitter could handle this one well.)

16. Color Christmas pictures.

17. Eat reindeer food. (We are driving to TN this day and coming home on the 18th, so we had to go simple simple simple. I think reindeer food will be a ziploc with popcorn and m&ms and peanuts.)

18. Watch Christmas movies.

19. Make a paper chain.

20. Wrap present for favorite friend.

21. Look at all our Christmas cards!

22. Make salt dough ornaments. (I like to do baby handprints and footprints and use them as gift tags. These are very popular with grandparents.)

23. Drive around and look at lights.

24. Read the Christmas story and leave out milk and cookies for Santa.

If I have time and motivation, I will try to link stuff where appropriate. I tried to make things simple and brief and I wanted to be sure that McPantses would enjoy everything we did. I didn’t do a lot of tree decoration or baking because I’m not sure when that’ll get done and I wanted to keep obligatory stuff separate, if that makes any sense at all.

I can’t wait to see what McP thinks of all this. It’s the first year we’ve done a daily activity.