In college I had a brief fascination with Rorschach and fell in love with his earnestly scientific, but mostly artistic ink blots.  After I graduated, I took them down from my wall and promptly forgot about them.  Until I saw Martha’s gorgeous take on them in her beautiful line of homewares. I would have liked to pull out my prints and put them back on the wall but I seemed to have randomly dispersed my possessions all over the country after college, so instead I just made some shirts with my kids.

I used this tutorial on instructables for guidance, but did a few things differently:  I taped my shirt around the cardboard instead of tacking it on; he says to not press hard when you fold the shirt over, but I found I had to; and you can see that I fiddled with the image–adding more paint after I already printed it and then folding it again, which will make the image shift a bit, but I sort of like how that looks.  The ones the kids did are more crisp and clear because they just did it once and they were done.

This would be a great project just on paper and it’s  a fun what shapes do you see game–without all the psychological baggage of course.

All my kids have odd size beds. Our bedrooms are quite small, so to fit all the kids in them we got two extendable beds from Ikea. My son has the leksvik and my daughter has the super cute minnen.  They start out about toddler size and then you can make them longer as the children get, well, longer.  The baby has a wooden travel crib, sort of like this, that I got off craigslist for next to nothing. He is just about to outgrow it, which sucks because it fits perfectly in the corner of our room.

The Ikea beds are kind of awesome and kind of annoying (that pretty much describes everything at Ikea, doesn’t it?).  The only sheets that fit them are of course at Ikea and they are uncharacteristically boring: I think the options were red or blue. This past week I finally got around to making some fitted sheets for everyone. I made them out of vintage sheets I picked up at the thrift store:  sheet from sheets–not my most creative moment.

There are a bunch of tutorials out there on how to make fitted sheets, so I won’t bore you with how I did it (though, if there are a lot of you out there with these Ikea beds I could rustle up the measurements I used).  Between these sheets and the thousand pairs of elastic waist pants I’ve made, I am done with the whole pushing the safety pin through the casing crap. I know there is a tool out there that makes this bearable, isn’t there? When I find it I’m going to retire my extra large, sad, bent up safety pin.

After kids clothes week ended, there were a bunch of you who asked if we could do it again in the fall. Well, now fall is quickly approaching and I’m wondering if you still want to do it.  And if so when?  If we do it soon, then it could be a back to school thing, but if we do it later–say in September–then the kids would be at school and we would actually have some time to sew for them!  Tell me what you think in the comments and we’ll make a decision soon.

Little Mr. freshly squeezed up there won’t be in school, but will kindly wear anything thing I make for him. Or buy: the awesome shirt he’s wearing was made by my friend Mo and you and your littles can have one too.

I was so taken with this mud pie kitchen that I found on the crafty crow, that we went right outside and made one of our own.  I moved some little tables around and the kids wondered around the yard gathering decorations, then we dug up some dirt from the garden and went to work. The kids insisted on wearing aprons and washing their hands before they started.

There go the cupcake into the oven. They were very serious about the whole affair–my son even made me set the timer.

When they were done with their cakes they went on to other things, but I might do a little rearranging in the new kitchen and keep it up for the rest of the summer.

The baker showing off her wares.

I crocheted this sweet little stone for a friend’s birthday this weekend.  Margie Oomen makes beautiful covered stones and kindly wrote up a pattern for this one: little urchin crochet covered sea stone.  It was my first time using crochet thread and it was a little difficult, but very satisfying–I see many doilies in my future. This was a great first project because it doesn’t have to be perfect and in fact it looks better when it’s not.

(I think I might even like the back better than the front) The rock came from schoolhouse beach on Washington Island in Wisconsin: a beautiful beach covered in stones, that we found out later you aren’t supposed to remove from the beach. oops.