Special Chocolates

First of all, winner of the giveaway I announced last Thursday is Amanda who said "Holler.  I want to pretend to be a grownup!"  I will be in touch about your prize shortly.  Thanks to UPrinting for sponsoring this giveaway.

Second, congratulations to the cast and crew of The DC Vagina Monologues!!!  You all were friggin' amazing!  We raised over $10,000 for the DC Rape Crisis Center and had a great time doing it!  You can still make donations at www.vdaydc.org if you would like to support our efforts!

One of the ways we raised money was through the sale of fun vagina-related products, including vagina pillows, jewelry made by the cast, and chocolate vaginas.

Yup, chocolate vaginas.

My friend Rachel's awesome parents own a chocolate shop called The Purple Feather in Providencetown, MA.  They donated enough chocolate, lollipop sticks and packaging for us to make 200+ "pussy pops" to sell at the show.  My house once again became a workshop for adult craft-making.

The Purple Feather also sent us the molds we needed to make the pussy pops.

We melted the chocolate and poured it into the molds.

We let the molds cool and then popped the suckers out.

Don't they look tasty?

We bagged them up.

And made them pretty for the sale at the show.

This is Rachel showing off one of her fancy creations.

We sold all 200 of them.  But don't be sad.  The Purple Feather has offered to donated 10% of their internet sales between now and April to the DC Rape Crisis Center.  They sell pussy pops, but also other, less risque things, like fudge and Easter candy.  Check them out at http://www.thepurplefeather.com/ and support a great cause and an awesome small business.

Yum!

How to Make a Vagina Pillow

Two years ago I started making vagina pillows to sell at The DC Vagina Monologues (buy your tickets now for the show this Friday and Saturday!!).  I got my inspiration from this and if you don't mind a less fancy one, they take very little skill to make.  Here's how to do a really basic one:

Get some craft/wrapping paper.  I use the stuff that amazon packs their shipments with.

Fold the paper in half and draw and cut out a half-circle.  When you open it up, it will be a symmetrical circle/oval shape.  I like a big fat vajayjay but a narrow one will work, too.

You will need two colors of fabric.  With the first (I use a darker one), cut out one full circle.

Fold your circle pattern back in half and cut out two half-circles out of the first fabric.

Cut two half-circles out of your second fabric.

Line the fabric1 half-circles up with the fabric1full circle.  Sew all the way around the edges.

Line the flat edges of fabric1 with the flat edges of fabric2, right sides together.  Sew along the straight line.

If you want, you can place lace between the two flat sides of fabric1 and fabric2 before you sew them together.

Line up the two curved edges of fabric2, right sides together, and sew almost all the way across, leaving a small opening.  You will have an inside-out pillow case.  Turn it right-side-out through the remaining opening.  Stuff the pillow.  Sew the opening closed.

Optional: I sewed the fabric2 lining down to look like a vaginal opening.  You could add a clit or whatever else you want at this stage.

You can make different sizes by making your pattern bigger or smaller.

Using different fabrics can give different effects.

The Poonani Projects

I am totally going to regret this post one day when I run for public office/my future children google my name and "poonani" is the first ting to come up, but......

My room is a crazy arts and crafts studio on a good day, but lately has taken on the air of a workshop run by a bunch of vaguely odd, feminist elves who make not Christmas presents but instead yonic trophies for the slightly more courageous gift-giver.

And by elves, I mean the cast and crew of the 2011 Vagina Monologues in DC.  We have been making jewelry, pillows and other items to sell at our show.  All proceeds, as with the ticket sales, go to the DC Rape Crisis Center, a favorite organization of mine.

As the crafters showed up, they were offered the option to make greeting cards, pillows or jewelry.  All were a little timid at first, but after getting used to the idea of making Coochi Crafts, they got real talented real quick.

There were VA earrings.

Peepee, poopalu, and piche pillows

Vajayjay jewelry

Hooha heart necklaces (see how they used my disaster hearts to making something beautiful?!?!)

Labia lapel pins.

And nappy dugout (yea, I said it) greeting cards.

I warn you now: there will be vagina-related goodness all week in honor of our shows happening this weekend (buy your tickets now!!).  There will be a tutorial on how to make the pillows, the vagina pendants, chocolate vaginas (yes, edible, yonic goodness), and more.  You (and my future political opponents) can thank me later.

I'm Bananas For Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!

I've got my red on, my Valentine's delivered and my red food packed and ready for what can only be described as THE BEST HOLIDAY EVER!!!

Granted, the day would be about a thousand times better if we had the day off, but I feel that way about my birthday and St. Patty's Day as well...But to celebrate this illustrious day of red and chocolate, I hosted the 24th Annual Red Meal!  This year was potluck style with competitions for best use of red ingredients and best use of hearts.  My "Have a Heart Pop Tarts" were beaten out for the best use of hearts (they were heart-shaped with strawberry and nutella filling...mmmmm) by Jerry with his "Commie Soup" (so named because it was "red") which had, I kid you not, heart-shaped vegetables floating in it.

I also forced everyone to make "disgruntled Valentines."  My favorite, you ask?

Oh, someecards, how I love you.

The Washington Post is also running a series of "DC Valentines" that I also heart.

See more here

I also appreciated Devon's creation based on these:

These stickers make eating fruit totally worth it (and make my banana look slightly less forlorn).  I have crafty, amazing friends.

Happy Valentine's Day!!!

My Mom Is a Crafty Lady

My mother is quite the crafty lady.  She is the one who taught me to sew after years of having to make my Halloween, dance, and mountain woman (don't ask) costumes for me.  She has made wreaths, baskets, decopage everything, table runners, quilts and pretty much anything else you could name.  My mother is also the keeper of an amazing array of facts about esoteric things.  I chalk that up to the NY Times Crossword Puzzles and a large community of other women with an equally amazing array of esoteric hobbies.

Her current expertise is on aprons.  She was asked by her local AAUW* Michiana Welcome Club chapter to give a presentation about the history of aprons.  She then went on in November to talk on WVPE radio about aprons as well.  Click HERE and go listen to it so that the rest of this post makes sense.

In the piece she talks about the old fashion apron patterns that were all the rage until about the 1960s when women starting burning them along with their fabled singed bras.  Women had around-the-house aprons and fancy aprons (hurriedly switched out as they rushed to the door to let the guests in)

Here are the patterns:

See how cute the old-timey patterns are?  The one on the left was made to look like men's ties.  Go figure...

As she mentions in the radio piece, women went to great effort to make the fancy aprons extremely elaborate, adding miles of rick-rack and hours worth of applique that you had to transfer onto the apron and then could embroider and embellish even more.  An opportunity for artistic expression.

Aren't these appliques just tooooo cute?  Dancing spoons?!?!

When my mom talked to the AAUW  Welcome Club group, she had each of the women bring their own aprons with the stories that go along with them.  And boy are there stories!  My mom modeled some of them:

This was a work-a-day apron found at the South Bend farmers' market* a shop in the Bronx, NYC.  Probably from the 40s, I think.

A woman gave this one to my mom.  She said that this was her mother's fancy apron and that she could remember her leaning on the counter smoking a cigarette while wearing this hot lacy number.

My mom looks pretty hot in it, too!

This is what my mom referred to as a card-party apron as it was made to match a table cloth and napkins for a passel of women that might come over to play cards during the day when the kids were in school.

 Mom made me a cupcake apron last year and she gave her friend one of the complicated 50s patterns I showed above, but hasn't made one for herself yet.  Get on that, mom!  They are adorable.

You can also hear Ms. JoLynn Brown on radio talking about her Christmas Birthday:  http://www.wvpe.org/index.php#/audio-detail.php?a=291


*Had to go back and fix a couple of things.  Sorry, mom.  The downside of oral history....

Weekend Update: Apples of My Eye

What does that phrase mean anyway: apple of my eye?

Anyhoo...Apple Fest 2010.  Went to Larriland Farms this weekend with some lovely people to pick apples.  Got 10 pounds of apples (no, I don't think that is too many.  I had 20 pounds last year....) and a pumpkin.  And a jug of cider.  And some apple fritters and a cup of hot cider that were consumed immediately.

I made five of those pounds of apples into applesauce almost immediately (let me tell you how annoying that was without the apple peeler this year.  Ebeth: get yourself back to DC and make my life whole again).  The house smells of cinnamon and apples.

Also this weekend:

I went to Crafty Bastards, the Washington City Paper Craft Fair....oh yes I did!  I bought the most expensive skein of yarn I have ever owned from this lovely lady who is raising pygmy goats on a four-acre farm in MD.  I enjoyed her story (told in an extremely entertaining flat affect) and her yarn so much that I had to have some.

100 yards of sheep/goat wool, sparkles and other fun things.

I can't bring myself to ruin the perfectness of how the yarn looks by itself by knitting it into something.  Trying to decide whether it is appropriate to just wear the skein as a scarf.  Actually, that's a lie.  I wore it as a scarf to work today.

I call this self-portrait "Pale self in khaki cubicle with beautiful scarf"

It smells like sheep/goat which smells a little like hay which smells like a petting zoo.  So basically, I smell like a petting zoo today.  And I find it very comforting...

The Most Evil of the Crafts

Before you say it, yes, I do have way too many hobbies.  I am a chronically bored person and coming up with new ways to entertain myself is just what I do.  First there was beading, then beading turned into card-making, then knitting, then to wire wrapping, then sewing and now back to knitting.  And with the current project on-hand, I will have to learn to spin and dye (and shear??) as well.  But I was recently introduced to the most evil of the crafts: weaving. 

A space opened up in the weaving class at the Art Space.  Art Space DC is a community, volunteer based art center where anyone can go and take really reasonably priced art classes like photography, cooking, pottery, etc.  Pretty much all of the teachers are volunteers, including my teacher, Ms. Maybelle Bennett (I promise a post on her another time).

Here is why weaving is evil:

The first week, Ms. Maybelle taught me how to wind my warps (warps are like the longitude of your fabric).  You use a warp board like this to make the warps the length you want.  You have to wind the just the right way so that they go on to the loom correctly.  There is a guide string on the board to help you do it right.  It took me two hours to learn the parts of the loom and then wind my warps.

Warp board with guide string.

The second week, I started to set up the hand loom by tying the warps to the leash sticks.  Then one by one I pulled the threads through the leash sticks and through the different parts of the loom.  The first part is the reed.  The reed is a series of metal slots (called dents). The size of the loom is talked about in terms of the number of slots you have per inch.  The table loom I am learning on is a 12 dent loom, meaning it has 12 little slots per inch.  It is twenty inches wide.  You thread each warp into a different dent on the reed.  The reed is in the beater that moves back and forth to smoosh (or beat, I suppose) your weft (also known as woof or filler) threads tightly against the front of the loom so that your weaving stays nice and even and tight.

Front of the loom with the reed completely sleighed.

I only have 70 threads (compared to the hundreds that might be needed for a wide shawl or blanket) for this first sampler project.  It still took me more than two hours to "sleigh" my reed.

The back side of the reed as I pull the threads through towards the heddles.

The third week I pulled the strings that I just put through the dents through each of the heddles located on the harnesses.  The harnesses are the the things you pull up and down (using levers at the top of the tower) to make the patterns on the fabric.

This is the loom from the back but you can see the tower (the tall part), the levers on the side, and the harnesses (the metal frames in the middle).

These are the heddles.  Essentially they are wires attached at to the harnesses at the top and the bottom.  They move from side to side depending on how many warp threads to have and where you need them to be.  They have slots in the middle through which you thread your warps.

The threading of the heddles sucks WAY less than the sleighing of the reed, but took a whole evening nonetheless.  So why do I think that weaving is evil, you ask?  Because it has taken me three nights (that's six hours) so far and I am only half way through the warping process.  I have at least one and maybe two more nights before I can even begin to weave.  Additionally, this is me only learning to warp the loom for twill weaving.  Next I will have to learn overshot warping.  And I am sure there are other techniques as well.

Don't get me wrong; I am going to stick with it because it is an interesting skill to learn (and a good way to use up the yarn stash).  But ohmygosh is this a slow process.

Me, trying to pretend that I know how to weave.

Neon

Some people's mothers like neutral colors (taupe, nude, beige, eggshell), and decorate their homes in those colors.  My mother had a period once when I was seven when I think she liked light blue and white, and think we had a light peach bathroom for a while.  Five minutes later, though, she declared lime green and hot pink "earth tones" and destined my sister and me to a lifetime of shockingly bright home decor decisions.  There was a period in high school where if you walked up the stairs in our house, you would be accosted by my lime green bedroom, my sister's bright turquoise bedroom, and a hot pink bathroom (with cow print accents) in quick succession.

So no one should be surprised about what happened this weekend when I was faced with a ridiculously bare new bedroom to decorate.

Ridiculously bare new bedroom.

I made an ill-advised (because it is college-dorm-replenishing season and sort of like hell on earth at any big box store anyway) trip to Target to see if they had any cheap bedding.  After realizing that I must be the only person under age 93 that uses a duvet cover, and as such could not find one in any color but beige and navy blue, I stood in the bedding aisle for an embarassingly long time as worried mothers and hysterical college freshman grabbed twin XL sheets from the shelves around me.

I stood there trying to decide between making my room outreageously loud to the point of annoying anyone who enters or yawn-yawn boring (there didn't seem to be any in-between in the sale section).  Then I realized that unlike in grade school when you had slumber parties and/or random let's-go-over-to-JoAnna's-and-paint-our-toe-nails events and unlike in the dorms where the simple act of opening your door let 70 other individuals examine the contents of your room, there may be a total of five other people that will ever see this new room.  I am allowed to make it as outrageous as I like.

So I got this rainbow comforter on Saturday.

Tried it out for a day and decided that it wasn't nearly bright enough.  So I went back to Target on Sunday and got the matching sheets and made them into curtains.

I ironed and pinned even though I hate doing it.  The curtains are just twin top sheets turned upside-down with a five inch hem at the top for the curtain rod to slide through.  Took a total of an hour to make three of them

One blue curtain, one green curtain, and...

one pink curtain (it really is hot pink and not red like it looks here).

Still trying to work out how to tie them back (I think I am going to cut up the fitted sheets and make ties for the curtains as well as throw pillows for the bed), and the room is still in obvious need of a book shelf and work table, but I think the brightness makes a huge difference.

Thanks for my sense of color, Mom.

Other things I did this weekend:

Pizza toppings that I swear were eventually made into a pizza.

• Listened to an opera recital in an old folks home in Tenleytown. No joke.  When the singer hit the first high note, 70% of the audience reached up to turn down their hearing aids.
• Knit a sweater in 90 degree weather.
• Made pizza, taking a picture of the toppings but not the resulting pie.  I will give out the recipe for the crust if you ask nicely.
• Realized, as I crawled head first down the stairs with a dust rag to clean the baseboards, that nothing in my new home has been dusted since mastadons roamed North America and that I may be a tad OCD when it comes to cleaning.