Kelee: Perforating Tags

I don't want to get too religious in a crafty blog, but this is something that has been weighing heavy on my heart. Ben and I are some of those rare devout people who remember our New Year's Resolutions and keep them holy. Usually we make fun and productive Resies, mostly about art. Finish that album. Make myself a new hat. Buy more yarn. Learn to use that new pedal. Find the perfect homemade Twinkies recipe.

One of mine for this year is to keep up with my crafty sales. Don't get your 1040s in a wad. I record my sales through our store and pay all the proper sales and income taxes on them, like the sweet law-abiding lady that I am. However, they just melt right into the cauldron o' sales with the used copies of Dr. Mario for Gameboy Color and Bell Biv Devoe on LP. It was very hard to keep up with, however, since Ben works at the store way more often than I do. 

We have conversations like this:

Ben: You sold a hat today.

Kelee: Yahooo! Which one?

Ben: I think it might have been green. Or perhaps red. Or, did you have a blue one?

Kelee: Well, who bought it?

Ben: I don't know their name. You would know them, but it would take me too long to try to describe them.

I don't really blame him, though, because we work a lot of hours, see a lot of people, and I make a lot of hats. He can't be expected to love them all as much as I do. I love them most when I bump into them in public. I have to restrain myself from patting people's heads.

Anyway.

I came up with about 437 different complicated options for a system of keeping track of what sells – each one more difficult and elaborate than the previous. One involved pulleys. One was so expensive that we'd have to remortgage our son to pay for it. Then I discovered the Tonic Studios 806 Mini Rotary Perforator, which I purchased for under $10 from Amazon.com (I'm not sure if you've heard of them, but they are on online shop that sells pretty much every item in existence. They aren't very well-known, though, so I am sure they will appreciate this plug from me). Then I found these super fancy little tiny tags with strings already attached to them at our local Stationer's shop, AKA Staples. And some Sharpies of color and a new pen.

Remarkably, the Tonic Studios 806 Mini Rotary Perforator actually works. I've perforated nearly every perforatable surface in my house. Including my tags.

Let's pretend that the crooked nature of the perforated portion is an aesthetic choice. 

I just tied those fancy little things onto a hat and hung them up for sale.

Now all we have to do, is trick some unsuspecting sucker into buying a hat, rip the perforated portion off the tag and promptly lose it.

In theory, we will save the ripped off part long enough that I can delete the hat from my etsy shop, record the sale in my sale-recording spot, and mark the hat as sold in my Hats For Sale database.

I even added a secret super special code on each tag that will correspond with a number in the Hats For Sale database. Only, in real life, my etsy shop has been unattended for so long that the squatters have built-in shelving and this Hat For Sale database does not yet exist.

Still, the code looks fancy.

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Kelee: Valentine's Day Hat

My little girl is all about pink and hearts and love and glitter, so Valentine's Day is right up her alley. Of course, so is Thanksgiving because she always gets the two confused and has been thankful "for passing out hearts" for the past three Thanksgivings. She's a pretty rocking little girl so when I made her a new hat with the pink yarn she picked out, she also asked for me to make a mohawk on it. Or a fauxhawk. Or a yarnhawk.

If you haven't made these before, it is easy enough. You just make tassels pointing up. She's been wearing the hat contentedly for a while now, but with Valentine's Day coming up, I got tempted to heart it up. It turned out to be easier and cuter than I'd expected. First I cut out a heart from some felt.

I put a few drops of some fabric glue on it and stuck it to the hat then embroidered on it. I would recommend, however, that you skip the glue and do the decorative embroidering before you attach it to the hat. I had to sew through the glue in some parts and it was really hard to do.

Apple couldn't help but to be lured into the embroidering of her own heart. In the traditional reclined position of an expert embroiderer. 

I ended up with the all my thread ends and stranding on the inside of the hat. If you embroidered the heart first and then attached it with some decorative yet functional outlining of the hat, that would be enough to secure the heart onto the hat and it look better on the inside of the hat. If you are concerned with that sort of thing.

It looks great on her giant head and is the perfect mix of sweetness and rocking - just like my little girl.

 I embroidered the word "love" in cursive because I love writing in cursive. That's not really why. I was hoping it would look tattooey. The girlchild embroidered "love" and "mama" on her own purple felt heart. Sniff. Sniff.

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Kelee: Making and Selling Crochet Hats

I love making hats. It is the perfect marriage between relaxing and being productive. Like weeding a garden, playing solitaire, or picking up pecans. Although, I supposed playing solitaire isn't really productive, but it feels like it satisfies the same portion of the brain. Mindless mindful work. Mindful mindless work. Where concentrating meets zoning out. And at the end of it, you end up with a hat. Plus, I get to watch tv while I work. Or I crochet while I'm at work at my "real job."

I mostly sell the hats that I make in our coffee shop (hence the quotation marks around the phrase "real job"). Since we sell a little bit of everything and we live in Vermont where hat season stretches out over eleven months, it does not seem too odd. Either that or our customers are just as odd as our store is. Because my small town is so small and there are just so many heads in need of hats, I'd like to sell hats online, but I find the whole process to be rather daunting. The sizing of hats seems so personal. I've seen adults buy hats that fit snugly on my six-year-old, and that was back when she was three. She says her head is so big because she can remember everything. Plus, all the photographing and editing and uploading and describing and whatnot. I'd rather be crocheting.

I bought a big batch of yarn from Knit Picks recently. I got all the colors of Wool of the Andes in Bulky that were available at the time, and I used it all up just making hats. It was super fun. I did lots of stripes, some solids, and a few pompoms. Then I made my family sit still for hat portraits.

Now I'm going to sell them at the Harvest Festival on September 12th or so in Lincoln Park in Enosburg Falls. Does that sound too optimistic? Let's try again. These hats and many more will be for sale at the Harvest Festival on September 12th or so in Lincoln Park. After that, the remainders be at The Flying Disc. If I can undaunt the selling of them online, I'll put them in my etsy shop, too.

Also, I've tried for longer than I care to admit to get the pictures on this blog to line up nicely in a row. I give up. Check out more of them on our flickr page where they line up in an orderly fashion.

Kelee: Make Jewelry, Not War

This has not been my favorite week ever.

Starting with those horrible tornadoes in my old stomping grounds.

Now there's massive flooding in Vermont and in Mississippi and everywhere in betwixt.

I watched that horribly terrible movie Bounty Hunter, which made me question the existence of integrity. How did that movie get made? More importantly, why did I watch the whole thing?

All this rain has stirred up an undeniable crochet-caused ache in my fingers.

Nothing reminds you how motherless you are more than Mother's Day. (Unless it's having a baby.)

I have a birthday coming up.

I have a Journey song stuck in my head thanks to Glee.

When I switched from winter-wear to spring wear, I realized I put on a molehillish gut over the winter so I had to start exercising. Now I'm sore.

My kids (aged 4 and 5) have decided my music is not rocking enough for them, which makes me feel old and all “back in my day”ish. The good part of this is that they only want to listen to the White Stripes, which I am pretty psyched about because

1. It's the White Stripes, and they are awesome
2. I was concerned when the girl really liked that “Who Let the Dogs Out” song
   
3. I've been enjoying all the erratic, spazmatic dancing we've been doing.

I made two loaves of banana bread, and after they'd been baking for ten minutes, I found the butter sitting on the counter, softened.

I gave my kids a bath and forgot to plug the drain so the water flowed in and just ran right on out until it was no longer hot and there still wasn't any water in the bathtub. This was right after I read an article about water consumption and preservation. I felt so guilty about wasting all that water, my kids were bummed about the loserness of their bath, and we were all concerned about my brain.

Plus, the Osama bin Laden death – facebook debacle. The excitement, the anger, the patriotism, the misquotes, the conspiracies, the mounds and mounds of politics mixed in. I kept thinking of the wisdom of the 20^th century scholar and leader Elvira, mistress of the night, who said, “Listen sister, if I want your opinion, I'll beat it out of you.”

You probably want to gently remind me that I don't have to read stuff just because it's there, and I want to agree with you and say that I just turned it off when I realized it was making me angry. Then we can both take a sip of coffee, look out the window, and one of us will change the subject. Like this:

Oh! Did I tell you about the new yarn I found right next door at the Enosburg Pharmacy? I went on a hat-making spree! Until I bought up all the psychedelic yarn and had to switch to ninja yarn and then I used it all up, too. Gorgey.

The yarn is Bernat's Mosaic Yarn. The hat that is right above these pointers ^^^^^^ is what happens when you just use the yarn in the order that it's made, which is pretty awesome. After the yellow at the bottom, it starts back over with green. For the one on the left, I got two skeins of yarn and merged them together at the yellow to go back through the colors of the greens and blue variety. And I did the same with the one on the top left but with the other colors. Then I added a tiny little black yarn to one of the hats because I liked the way it made the colors look more separate and the stitches stand out. I definitely want to try more of this yarn. Although I bought up all the ninja yarn, I don't have any photographic proof of the gorgeousness that pursued.

There were some seriously good parts of the week, too. Like when my Girlchild said, “I can't believe how incest with Barbie he is.” She says “incest” instead of “obsessed.” Or when she called her chipped tooth a “chimped tooth.”

And when we nearly doubled our garden size.

There was the gallery reception last night that was fun. I got to gossip with my favorite British nurse who uses the best British slang.

I watched Easy A, which restored my belief in the existence of integrity. At least in Hollywood.

My birthday is coming up.

I've gotten to listen to nonstop White Stripes.

So while lots of people discussed important events of national security or insecurity, I kept my head low and made all of these lovely treats. Fresh from my oven...

Kelee: Electric Kool-Aid Yarn Flashback

Our local grocery store has probably been curious about the substantial spike in Kool-Aid sales because I've been dying like a mad woman! Here are the results - both successes and failures.

Here's the girlchild in her Velma-inspired orange and red cloche.
I was going for Velma as a flapper.
The colors are really nice and lined up well on the hat.
This is a success.

Here's the boy in an overly-intense green and blue and dusty purple mistake.
I also tried placing the colors on the yarn in a more random pattern.
The randomness did not make sense in the end product.
This is a failure.

This hat is orange, yellow, and purple.
I tried putting the colors on the yarn in big blocks.
Putting the colors like this was okay-ish. It wasn't exciting, though
and didn't make too much sense when crocheted up.
This is a failure.
It made me realize that I don't like the purple Kool-Aid yarn results,
which is especially odd since it's my favorite flavored Kool-Aid.
The boy and the dog are just there for cuteness.

Collection of hats.
Three shade of green.
Orange and Red.
Blue and Yellow with green overlaps.
Gritty Kitty

Kelee: Electric Kool-Aid Yarn Test

Last weekend was Maple Open House Weekend. We went to the Howrigan Family Farms in Fairfield where they still gather sap with horses. No, not those Howrigans in Fairfield who also gather sap with horses. These. Seriously, there are at least two sets of Howrigans in Fairfield who gather sap with horses. Is that only weird to me?

Not only did we eat sugar on snow (Note: please learn from our friend Ruby here and tie your hair back before you attempt to eat something super sticky like sugar on snow on a windy day), drink warm syrup from shot glasses, eat tons of baked goods, but they also fed us cheeseburgers just for being there watching them work. They were ridiculously nice, warm, and welcoming. We bought some Grade B syrup for our coffee shop for maple lattes and maple smoothies.

We went home with an incredible sugar high. Since nothing says sugar high like Kool-Aid, we decided to try dying yarn with Kool-Aid.

I have worked very hard not to become interested in dying or spinning yarn during the past. So while this venture was a step-forward for Craftiness, it was definitely a step back for Self-Control.

The whole process was so incredibly fun and easy and low-impact, that I can no longer remember why I resisted for so long. I followed a tutorial at Knit Pick. I used Lion Brand Fisherman's Wool which is a naturally off-whitish undyed yarn. It might have even been the Oatmeal one. This was all that I had on hand and I knew I wasn't safe to drive with the sugar high I was sporting.

It really is this easy. I circled the yarn around some chairs and made it into one long loop. This was probably the most difficult step because my evil and loved cat Gritty Kitty got completely tangled in the yarn, and I was afraid I was going to lose an arm trying to untangle her.

I got the yarn wet in not-too-hot water. I mixed up the Kool-Aid with water in emptied salsa jars. I didn't measure anything. I lightly squeezed out the water from the yarn and put the two ends into the jars.

I microwaved them for two minutes. Looked at them for a while. Let them sit for a while. And repeated it two more times. Seriously, could my microwave BE any higher?

When I lifted some of the yarn out of the Kool-Aid at this point, I could tell that the Kool-Aid was more clear than colored and declared it done.

I rinsed the yarn in the sink and washed it with a little dishwashing detergent because that's what I had sitting right there. I let it dry hanging elegantly from the shower rod. By the next morning it was dry.

I immediately made a hat. I couldn't resist. It did a really cool striping of the two colors after a while for a while. My little guy claimed it for his own and has been wearing it ever since.

The next day after my sugar hangover had been cured by a heavy dose of bacon and a super hot latte laced with hair of the dog (mmmm...maple latte), I tried Kool-Aid dying some cotton yarn. Not only did the cotton yarn smell like it was seconds away from combusting and the Kool-Aid explode all over my microwave, but it did not look like a lovely purposefully dyed yarn. It looked like someone spilled Kool-Aid all over some string. I did not photograph the episode so you'll just have to trust me that I am telling you the truth. I read afterward that cotton yarn needs a little more umph than the flavorful gentleness of Kool-Aid. Dying this yarn was so terribly satisfying and quick and easy and I cannot wait to try it again. Luckily, Alison errand-upped us some white wool so we can give it another whirl.

As a side note, thank you to Kyla Hartigan and Ben Maddox for the pictures as I was too busy downing maple syrup by the cupful to take any myself.