For my contribution to Skirt Week 2012, I made this little tutorial for turning an old, rather boring skirt into something a bit more interesting. Sometimes you don’t need to make a new skirt, but you need to liberate one from the back of your closet. I had planned on doing a tutorial for a button placket, but then I saw this picture and could not stop thinking about it:

These pants are from a shop in New York that specializes in super awesome Japanese children’s clothes. The idea is so simple and so effortlessly cool that I had to steal it.

painterly skirt tutorial

materials:

• 1 unloved skirt
• a bit of cardboard or freezer paper
• paint of your choice, fabric or acrylic or even house paint*
• stamps
• very small paint brush

directions:

1. The first thing I did was carve some starts out of an old eraser. If you’ve never done this before it may sound hard, but I assure you it is not. I carved two stamps from a big eraser and two from the tiny erasers on a pair of new pencils. It took me all of 10 minutes. There are many good tutorials for carving stamps from erasers out there (this one and this one for example). The stamp you make should be quite small, so stick to a simple shape–stars work well!

2. Put a piece of cardboard under where you will be stamping, or you can iron a bit of freezer paper to the back. You need something under your design, so the paint doesn’t bleed through to the other side.

3. Start stamping! You can be as fussy or as messy as you want. The look we are going for is paint wiped on the side of your skirt, so there aren’t too many rules you have to follow. It looks nice if the stamps are concentrated a bit in one area and then fade out towards the edges.

3. After you have stamped to your heart’s content, take a very small paintbrush and go over some of the stamps with more paint. This will make some of the stars stand out better and give the design a little more dimension.

4. Let the paint dry and go over it with an iron to set it.  Waalaa! a new skirt! One that will be loved and worn again!

*a note on paint: I don’t paint on my clothes very often, but when I do (like here and here) I like to use a product called fabric meduim. You mix the meduim with any acrylic paint and it makes it into a fabric paint. A good friend of mine turned me on to it. Another good friend told me to get out of the not-so-great craft acrylic paint aisle and go to the actually-an-artist acrylic paint aisle: the colors and the quality are better.

Usually, I hold off posting recipes here until I have the exact measurements and directions for making it, which means I never get around to sharing any recipes with you. Dinnertime is always crazy and often straight up chaos. My cooking style has become a few glugs rather than tablespoons, half a palm full rather than teaspoons, and whatever cup-like thing is in reach rather than a cup, because the actual measuring cups are in the sandbox. But I still want to share some recipes with you. If you keep in mind that my ingredient measurement are estimates and the directions are guidelines, then I think we’ll be okay.

Lamb and Feta Burgers with Tzatiki

for the burgers:

• 1 1/2 – 2 lb ground lamb (I like to make a lot to insure I can have some for lunch the next day)
• 4 or so oz feta
• 1/4 cup (handful) chopped cilantro or parsley (a little mint thrown in there is nice too)
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• zest of one lemon
• salt and pepper

for the tzatziki:

• about 6 inches of a cucumber, peeled
• 1 cup good yogurt
• 1 clove garlic (optional, my children think it’s too spicy, silly children)
• salt and pepper

directions for the burgers:

1. Put the lamb in a big bowl with the garlic, herbs, and lemon zest. Crumble the feta into the bowl as best you can, smallish is better but really if there are big chunks it doesn’t matter. Mix everything up with your hands. Salt and pepper the mixture liberally.

2. Shape the patties. I usually make them on the smaller size: 3 inches, I’d say. Obviously any size is going to work.

3. Fry or grill those suckers until they are done to your liking.  If you end up frying them, use only a bit of oil in the pan because lamb gives off a lot of fat.

for the tzatziki:

1. Grate your cucumber into a bowl

2. Put all of it in your hands and working over the sink squeeze out the excess water–there is a lot. See unsqueezed, squeezed cucumber photo above.

3. Add your yogurt. As a side note, I really love this whole milk yogurt. We used to get the Stoneyfield yogurt, but then they very abruptly stopped making the cream on top kind and now their yogurt just tastes like gelatin to me. Obviously I’m picky and should probably make my own, but until I stop being lazy this Super Natural yogurt is totally delicious.

4. Add chopped garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. That’s it. I’m going to show you this picture because when it’s all mixed up it looks rather boring.

Tzatziki is delicious slathered all over the burgers. The kids use it as a dip. I try to get away with not even putting the damn ketchup on the table for the kids, but one of them usually remembers (the picky one).  We don’t use buns, but you of course could. To round out the meal, I use the rest of the cucumber for a salad and then make some other vegetable. That night it was peas (because I was so freaking busy taking pictures), but sweet potato fries are perfect with this meal.

There you are. This is dinner for two adults, one first grader, one garbage gut of a 5 year old boy, and one very picky toddler. Adjust to the size (and size of appetite) of your family.

I took all the homemade, wonky, gluey hearts down from the wall in my kids’ room and it looked so sad and bare. The room needed some cheering up! First I was thinking I would let the kids go crazy with washi tape, then I thought maybe we could make some paper flowers and tape them up, but then I saw this amazing wall.

My daughter and I headed to the craft store to buy some [faux] flowers. I’m usually not down with fake flowers–or even buying that much plastic at once–but I have to admit some of these flowers are very,very pretty. The weedy looking ones are my favorite. I do believe I’m the only woman in the world buying plastic weeds.

Luckily all the fake flowers were half off, so we went a little crazy picking them out. My daughter fell hard for the bubblegum pink roses covered in fake water droplets. I was not so smitten, but she was so in love. When we got home I was messing with the flowers to see if I could get them to look a bit more natural and when I pulled back the petals on the rose, it turned into this absolutely gorgeous bloom. You can see how the rose looks closed and open above.

To hang all the flowers on the wall, I cut the bunches apart with a wire cutter and trimmed most of the leaves off as well. Then marked five rows on the wall. Working from the top down I simply taped each flower up so it was in line with the one above it. My rows aren’t perfectly spaced or perfectly straight, but the it’s the contrast of orderliness and nature I was going for–that’s what drew me to the first photo of flowers on the wall. Also, it’s just plain awesome to have a field of flowers on your bedroom wall.

For 20 dollars and an hour of our time, we managed to get spring to come a bit earlier in Wisconsin. Not bad, not bad at all.

me hearty eye patch tutorial

I was going to make super hero heart masks for all the kids in my daughter’s class (like this fantastic one), but they were fussy and each one was taking way too long. My daughter and I came up with the eye patch idea together. An hour later I had whipped up 17 of them. Super fast, super easy, good for girls and boys (and grown ups too), and not full of sugar. Eye patches arrrrgh the best!

materials:

• felt, 2 3in squares per patch
• 1/8in wide elastic, 16-18in piece per patch
• straight edge

1. Cut two 3in squares of felt for each eye patch you are making. Then cut a heart from one out of each two squares: if you are making 5 eye patches, you started with 10 squares and now will have 5 hearts and 5 squares.

2. Take a heart and place a straight edge (I used an envelope) across the middle. Then tilt the edge 1/4 inch up on one side and 1/4 inch down on the other. Make a tiny mark on each edge. This is where the elastic will be attached to the patch. Really you only need to mark 2 or 3hearts. After that you can just eyeball it (ha!). No really.

3. Place the marked heart on top of a felt square. Cut a piece of elastic so it’s 16-18 inches, smaller for smaller people bigger for bigger people.  Sew 1/8 inch from the edge all around the heart, inserting the elastic where indicated.

4. Trim away excess felt, holding the elastic as you cut (so it doesn’t get cut, silly).

5. That’s it! No go make 20 more because Valentine’s day is tomorrow! Here are a few awful pirate puns you can use:

Will you be my matey?

You arrrrgh my Valentine!

I want to capture you, Valentine!

Yarrrr the best!

I treasure you!

I’d walk the plank for you!

Ahoy, me hearrrrty

The littlest in the family is crazy for Ernie these days. He calls him oooo-nee, which is unbearably cute. So what the hell, why not make an ernie shirt? Dana even has a tutorial for one. I didn’t print out her pattern, but I did look at her shirt as I cut out all the felt bits.  She adds a little embroidery, which is a nice touch, but I was feeling lazy, so I just top stitched instead. Now that I think about it my kids don’t have any licensed characters on their clothes,  but the baby, well the baby always get what he wants doesn’t he?

ernie doesn’t mind if you pick your nose