Red-Tail Designs

Cooling their heels: Moccasins dry on fence posts, readying for another day of dancing.

Is it really Friday already? Nearly 11 p.m.? Where did this week go?

Fancy shawl dancers.

I’ve been meaning to post photos from last weekend’s Powwow all week and this is the first moment I had. I’ll keep it short on words, long on photos.

I will say it was a gorgeous weekend. Usually during the August Festival we’re sweating our feathers off but it was sunny, breezy and downright September-like on a wonderful August day.

Susan from Heart to Hearth explains the Roasting Corn Festival traditions.

Dennis scraps a deer hide, readying it for brain tanning.

I just returned from vacation on an island.

I just like to say that because it sounds like I went somewhere very exotic.

It is an exotic place in its own special way. Not exotic in the floating pool-side drinks and cabana boys style, but the opposite extreme of exotic where the cabin didn’t have electricity or indoor plumbing.

There I am on the island’s rocky beach bordering Lake Champlain sewing birds.

After mentioning my vacation to many different people, I realized this type of experience really is “exotic,” foreign to many. I’m surprised at the number of people who have never “showered” in a basin or carried their water supply somewhere.

When you have to carry your water from a lake, then boil it before you can make coffee, do the dishes or bath, it really makes you consider energy consumption and waste in a whole new way. My dear friends who invited us to their cabin are considering different solar options for powering their cabin. I highly recommend this kind of vacation as a crash course for anyone who wants to reduce their energy consumption, go green, reduce their carbon footprint, or whatever you want to call it. Try this lifestyle for a few days, and it will make you rethink your whole household.

Surprisingly, my 5-year-old didn’t complain once that she had to put shoes on and walk with a flashlight to the toilet in the middle of the night. The lack of conveniences didn’t phase her when she had snakes to watch and water to splash in.

Truth be told, we did have cell phone service, which was helpful when we sent the men out a huntin’ to the mainland for ice and pizza to go (it was a vacation, after all). And the kids had battery operated toys to keep them entertained while we made dinner. The whole vacation was such a blast!

Before setting out to the island with–dear me!– no internet service, we did more traditional vacationing by visiting family.

My nephew was baptized and I made him this bird mobile for a gift. Shall we say they’re doves to go with the baptism theme?

No matter what kind of birds they are, they are so cute, and they’re my latest crafting obsession. I downloaded the pattern from Spool Sewing blog.

So cute, so simple and a great 3-D project for beginners. Getting them to balance is tricky, but the eye hooks are key.

I’ve become so enamored with these birds, I want to make them for everyone. My nephew got the first flock, although I think his mother may have claimed them because she loves birds.

The cabin on the island got the second set. (This photo is not the best!)

Through 6 hours of driving, daytime kiddie naps and lakeside resting, I stuffed and sewed birds. I even got to take my sister-in-law’s Janome sewing machine for a spin stitching them up. Sweeeeet machine!

On the island I found odd-shaped driftwood for the mobile.

These birds look like they’re talking to each other.

I used awning fabrics and regular cotton for those birds, but was thinking of spraying them with Camp Dry so I can hang them outside.

Next I’m hoping to make a flock or two for home…one for my porch and one for my 2-year-olds’ room. I’ve got all the time in the world right now because mentally, I’m still on vacation.

Strawberries are in!

And so are the daisies and rhubarb. This is our pull from a morning’s work…2 buckets of strawberries, a bundle of rhubarb and a bucket of wildflowers all for $10. Can it get any better?

The kids and I packed up enough snacks for 3 days and headed to the strawberry patch for an hour and a half.

The snacks and the tractors on the farm kept my youngest occupied and off the strawberry plants. The camera–and photos below–plus the myriad weeds/wildflowers kept my oldest occupied.

The farm where we pick doesn’t spray any chemicals. So that field of weeds with the farm in the distance is actually the strawberry patch. It’s fun hunting for the berries among daisies and wheat. Plus, when the kids get bored of picking strawberries, they pick the flowers.

Conicindentally we read Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey this week, a sweet little storybook about a girl who puts more blueberries in her mouth than in the bucket. That was our theme, too. But we did come away with enough for eating and freezing, and I have big plans to return so I can get more for jam and strawberry cordial (more on that to come in later days).

Enough procrastinating on the dish-washing and strawberry-hulling. And if you hear an explosion, that’s my making-rhubarb-sauce-in-the-pressure-cooker experiment gone awry. Wish me luck!

I just had the best Mother’s Day ever.

No flowers or candy involved. No breakfast in bed (even though a little one said she was going to). No gifts at all. Okay, so I did get a little bag my wee one made a preschool, filled with very fragrant potpourri and a badge. But nothing store bought.

And yet, it was the best mother’s day…

Reason #1: The WHOLE family slept til 9 a.m. That’s right, we ALL slept through the night and until 9 a.m. If you have kids, you know what an accomplishment this is. If you don’t have kids…well…I won’t hold it against you that you can sleep ’til 9 a.m. every Sunday.

Reason #2: Laid back friends. Yes we awoke at 9, but we had friends coming at 10 a.m. to go canoeing. One hour to: dress four of us, make breakfast for four, get “I fell into the water clothes,” find paddles and life vests, put canoe on car. Sure.

We got most of it done, except for the canoe on car. My canoe hasn’t seen water in many years (last permit expired in 2002) so I couldn’t even remember how to get it on the car.

Luckily my friends and their boys roll with the punches. We got canoe on car with not damage to our car, no damage to any neighbors cars (we live VERY close to other people) and hopefully no embarrassing video on YouTube (very close to people with video cameras to tape their schmo neighbors doing something stupid).

Reason #3: Goofing on the river. Nets, buckets, canoe. Throwing rocks. Watching ducks. Trying to catch fish smaller than my fingernail with a butterfly net. Shuttling kids up and down the river on their first-ever canoe rides.

Reason #4: Leaving the vestiages of society behind. I was so excited to go canoeing I forgot my mongo bag with wallet, cell phone, day planner, etc. All I had in my pocket was my keys, 2 clothespins and a twist tie.

Reason #5: Lunch on the fly. I scrounged up a credit card between us adults and headed to a local store to pick up lunch. No planning or cooking. No thinking about nutritional balance and who likes what. Just hoagies and macaroni salad. Yum!

Reason #6: Coming home to a clean house. My husband’s gift to me was cleaning the whole house on Saturday. So when I returned to the homestead after a rough day on the water, I had nothing to do but relax and put up my raisin-wrinkled toes.

Best Mother’s Day ever.

Good ol’ Earth Day is coming up next week (April 22, same day as the PA primaries, but we won’t go there). I still occasionally wear a ratty old sweatshirt from college that says “Earth Day every day.” Fraying sleeves and practically see-through fabric…it’s finally worn to perfection! Wouldn’t throwing it out be a real slam in the face of its message?

What strikes me this year, though, is how prevalent Earth Day and its message are among the mass media and major retailers. Everywhere I turn there’s a mention of Earth Day. Has Earth Day made it beyond a celebration in school where kids turn garbage into an art project?

Part of me is happy the message is getting out there. Part of me thinks they’re missing the point. Take for, example, the T-shirts made from recycled soda bottles: The ad says “If every shopper purchased one recycled T-shirt, we could keep 21,000 tons of plastic waste out of landfills.” Great, except rampant consumerism–buying a T-shirt just to say you have a T-shirt made of soda bottles–doesn’t reduce anything. If you go to the store in search of T-shirts because your summer wardrobe is lacking, then shell out those pennies (especially for the one that says, “I recycled a soda bottle and all I got was this T-shirt.” I think it’s funny).

I will now leave my little soapbox and show you some things I’ve done around here in the spirit of the “re-”s:

Reuse: I finally got around to using my “new” sewing machine. This 1941 Singer is a family heirloom, coming from my husband’s grandparents some 5 years ago. It’s like a dream they way it moves across the fabric. I can see why people seek out old belt-driven machines.

In front of the machine are my fish. I used the bib pattern from Bend the Rules Sewing and realized the cutout for the neck looked like a fish. Some are stuff with polyfill. Melody suggested I stuff some with flax seed and lavender, then put them in the freezer at the ready ice injuries.

Reduce: Baby towels into plate covers. How annoying is it do work twice? Such was the way of using serving platters in my house: wash them after I use them, then wash them before the next turkey/hors devours/fancy dessert because they collected a lot of dust atop the fridge. I contemplated buying pillow cases for them. But, since my babies have outgrown the towels (so sad), I sewed the towels to fit the plates. Cost to me: $0.

Recycle: Electric toothbrush into toy scrubber. When a kid multiple times asks for a My Little Pony electric toothbrush for Christmas, can you really say no? Even when the heads on the toothbrushes are not replaceable? No cavities won out over environmental conscience and Santa delivered. Now that the bristles have gone their separate ways, I put the toothbrush into service outside, where my super-teeth-brusher can use it on to clean her toys when they get dirty. She loves it.

Revive: On Saturday, April 19, my family helped clean up the Bushkill Creek as part of the “Great PA Cleanup.” This initiative runs April 19 through May 3. Other states are holding Earth Day activities through the week, too.

Repurpose: Gardening bag is now an enjoy-my-summer bag. Yes, my kitchen is only 10 steps from the patio, where we practically live all summer. But after running in and out 50 times for sunscreen, the ringing phone, a water bottle, etc., I got smart. I stock the bag with water bottles for all each morning and take the whole kit and caboodle 10 steps outside so I can actually sit and enjoy the magazine in the bag. New addition to my bag this year: ID guides for my little explorers who want to know what kind of bug that is.

Reinvent: Chandelier to ???? I thought this chandelier too pretty to live out the rest of its life in a landfill and carted it home, where it has been on my patio all winter. I think the little knobs and tubes may have at one time shuttled gas through it, but it’s been fitted with electrical wiring and bulb sockets. Check out that fringe. It’s all metal.

Four of the six stained glass panels are missing, but the two that are intact are a swirly golden color and curve along the chandelier.

The only use I’ve come up for this lost soul: flip it upside down, stick it in the ground, place a wide, shallow pan on top and make it a rather elegant bird feed or bird bath.

Any ideas what you would recycle/reuse/reinvent the chandelier?

Oh, and Happy Earth Day.

As I type this, I am sitting outside, precariously balancing my laptop upon my knees with the sun shining in my face. I love spring. And it has finally come to eastern Pennsylvania.

Today will mark the third day in a row I’ve spent all day digging in the dirt. I love spring. And I love digging in the dirt.

Something about it renews me, makes me feel better after a long winter of being cold and shut in without only grays and whites outside. My husband begs for these days to come by mid-February, because apparently I’m much easier to deal with after I’ve had my hands in the dirt.

True, indeed. Everything is okay in the spring. It doesn’t matter than my 5-year-old just dumped my coffee all over the table because we’re outside and I love spring. It doesn’t matter that my 1-year-old had jelly all down the front of his shirt after wrestling a PB&J sandwich. He went on to play in the yard until he covered the jelly with dirt. That’s okay because it’s spring and you’re supposed to get dirty.

As kids we used to measure a day by how much dirt we got in the folds of our necks. A good day equaled lots of dirt in creases you didn’t even know you had.

I’ll be digging my new veggie patch today and planting some lettuce, spinach and Swiss chard. Nothing is as beautiful as a patch of freshly dug and then raked soil. It’s so even and perfect. Okay, so maybe the little curly heads of peas popping through the soil are even better, but I won’t see that loveliness for another 7 to 10 days, weather permitting, according to package directions.

Off I go to dig in the dirt like a happy little mole, but I leave you with these pictures of the artist book gifts I made for last weekend’s birthday parties. The little artists loved the books and I think they turned out well.

The owner of the green and orange book with cat pockets likes the Lyra Ferby pencils, which are short and fat, so I made two rows of pencil pockets. The are great colored pencils, by the way, if you haven’t tried them.

The outside of this book.

I never located any Red Sox or Phillies fabric for the pockets on the baseball artist book, but I like the way the ticking looks like an old-time baseball uniform. I’m sure that’s lost of its 5-year-old owner.

Of course, an hour before I left for the party I realized it really needed a baseball team patch on the front. A thought for the next project, and the project after, that I’ll be pondering as I dig in the dirt.

I love spring.

Is it a smushed iris or Rorschach Inkblot test?

This smushed iris turned into a Rorschach test as my 4-year-old told me that it looked like a bug. Yet another Valentine’s day craft I did with the kids to create sachets for the cousins. This craft is great because it’s so simple:

arrange flowers on muslin and tape with masking tape

flip over and smash with hammer

The flower pigments bleed through the muslin in neat patterns. I then outlined the flower pigments with a permanent marker.

Any craft that involves smashing rather than precision is fun for adults and kids alike!

The flower pounding idea comes from an HGTV quilting show I saw a few years ago. These directions explain how to prepare the fabric for dying, which I honestly didn’t do, so I’ll be interested to see if the flowers fade much.

After we made the flower prints, I cut and sewed them into heart-shape pillows before filling them with fresh-smelling herbs like parsley, rosemary, lavender and peppermint.

The local health food store has a wall o’ herbs and spices in jars so you can smell them before you buy them, and then purchase a pinch or a pound. I could spend all day opening the jars and smelling the herbs. We went through a lot of mustard seed. It doesn’t have much of a scent by my little person loved the way it looked I guess, so she wanted lots. I set her up with jars and bowls and spoons and she made a huge mess mixing herbs.

After we stuffed them with the herbs, I sewed them up and hot glued some ribbons to them. I made one for my nephew…not really a boy gift but I was at a loss. My friend Melody suggested I rename it a “stinky pillow” so boys would like it.

Finding easy-to-make crafts for boys is hard. Most books target girls and suggest you use boy-ish fabrics or colors to transform it, but they really aren’t intended for boys. Anyone know of good books out there where there is more than one craft to make for the male set?