You may occasionally get paid to color.

The Story:  In your readings of picture books for storytime and such, you come upon a title that would make a great storyboard.  Sequential, clear reference to objects, illustrations you can recreate in felt.  You've never made a felt story before, but you've been handling them for years and they're just shapes cut out and glued together and sometimes painted.  How hard could it be?  Well, if you'd chosen a simple story, with very easy illustrations to recreate and few of them, it wouldn't be hard at all.  Instead, you've chosen a story with more than a dozen animals to make out of felt, plus two people.  This is going to be quite the project, and so you decide to make the most difficult pieces first, to see if you can do it.  That way, if you can't, you haven't wasted all this time making pieces for a story you can't finish.  You look up various how-tos for making felt pieces, but you don't 100% love any of them, so you make it up as you go along.  And as it turns out, one of those steps involves coloring.  Yay!

Step 1 - Pick what picture is going to be made into felt from the illustration.  Usually, it is whatever animal or object that is referenced in the text of that page spread.  

Step 2 - Decide if a direct copy of the illustration is going to be recognizable and worth doing exactly, or if it is better to find a drawing of that thing online and copy that.

Step 3 - Trace the image from the book or internet.  If you don't have a light desk, which most libraries don't, you should photocopy the page, open a new publisher or word document and make the blank page fill the whole screen, then tape the photocopied page and the blank page to the monitor.  This will let you isolate the image you want from all the background noise, getting a clear line drawing of your object.

Step 4 - Make multiple copies of your line drawing.  You will need one for each piece of felt (or you can group them into pieces that don't overlap; see picture at bottom of post), because you'll need to cut them out separately, and sometimes one piece will overlap another.  If you only have one drawing to work from, you're screwed.

Step 5 - Color one of your copies, and keep each colored pencil/crayon/whatever so that you have your palette of colors.

Step 6 - Take your coloring implements to the craft closet or store and use them to choose which colors of felt to get.

Step 7 - Use a marker to outline what you're going to cut out of each piece of paper, making sure to leave extra room where things will be attached later, and figuring out which pieces are going to be doing the overlapping and which ones will be overlapped upon.

Step 8 - Make the cut.

Step 9 - Put the outline side down on the felt and trace the shape you just cut out using a sharpie or other marker.  This will give you the reverse of the shape you want to end with traced out.

Step 10 - Cut out the shape.  Flip it over.  If you were not exact with your cutting, any messy outlines leftover from tracing will now be on the back of the felt piece where nobody can see them.

Step 11 - Repeat for all the shapes that make up your story piece, and glue them together.  That industrial strength glue you got for fixing toys?  Perfect for felt crafting.  Put it on with a toothpick, and put scrap paper or cardboard down on your desk to reduce the marker stains and glue globs.

Step 12 - Paint or color any additional details on your felt piece.

Step 13 - Repeat for all of the pieces in your story.

The Lesson:  Sometimes, crafting can be fun, and while technically also work, it can also be a kind of zen-like release from the stresses of your other day-to-day work-related responsibilities.  So don't feel guilty about not doing "real work" when crafting.  Sometimes, you just have to get paid to color.

The Resources:  There are a million and a half tutorials on felt/flannel board story making online.  Some of them are cut-and-glue, others are print and iron-on, others are cut one shape and color/paint all the details.  Everyone has their preferences.  The method I used takes a bit more time, I feel, than the others seem like they would, but I like the quality of the pieces better.  I did use google image search quite a bit to come up with clip-art/line-drawing/coloring-page style animals to use for some of the characters where tracing what was on the page would not translate well.  Honestly, google image search and homeschooler/mommy-blogs will get you most any craft project you could think of.

You may find yourself using some strange tools

The Story:  As a librarian, you have many intellectual tools in your toolbox:  querying databases, the art of the reference interview, organizing meta-data.  However, you may be unaware of the actual physical tools you will sometimes require to do your job effectively:  hammer and nails, box cutter, canned air, various industrial-strength glues, an assortment of screwdrivers, allan wrenches, pliers, scissors, and, yes, a toothbrush.  Things break in the library, and you will be called upon to know, or learn quickly, how to fix them.  This is especially true of new technology, or slightly less-new technology for which you may not have free or in-house tech support or replacement options.  If you want to do innovative crafts, you'll have to get your hands on some innovative tools, and not be afraid to use them.  All of the tools pictured above are things I have actually used in my workday to fix toys, prepare after-school maker/craft activities, and trouble-shoot new technology (a.k.a - the 3D printer is clogged again).

The Lesson:  Always be willing to learn, try, and fail before you succeed at fixing something physical.  Also, never underestimate the power of google.  There are so many how-tos and fix-it/DIY websites and forums out there, that you can learn to fix, replace, or take apart just about anything.  Don't be afraid to look beyond the manufacturer's website for help if your problem doesn't come up in their FAQ.  Also, if something is broken enough that you have been called upon to fix it, it's likely that you can't break it much worse if you're actually following some kind of directions rather than just tinkering and hoping for the best.  And once you do actually manage to fix the darn thing, it can be kind of fun and empowering, knowing that you were able to do this thing yourself.

The Resources:  Youtube, Instructables, WikiHow, Lifehacker, and iFixit (one of my personal favorites).  There are a ton more out there, too, devoted to any specific problems you might have.

You may find that aprons are just not enough (Butterfly Garden Part 4)

The Story:  Things get a little messy and disorganized at our second meeting, where we planted the stratified seeds from the first meeting in starter pods to help them germinate.  We also painted garden stones to identify what each plant is once they're in the ground.  The names of each plant were written on the bags they were stratified in, and I only put one bag per table, and one seed starter pallet per table, in the hopes that they would maybe kind of stay together, but they didn't.  Some kids put seeds in the plant pods faster than others, and went over to help other kids.  Some seed bags had more seeds than others, some kids wanted to paint more stones than others, some people took seeds from other tables, and some kids took seeds that weren't stratified from the bags of wildflower seed mixes which were on the cart for the after-project (making more take-home planters for those that finished with the seeds and the stones faster than others).  Once seed pod trays were full, they went to the window ledge where I tried to write names on the lids of the trays in a timely manner, but sometimes people just put them on the windows without telling me (I was frequently busy assisting/supervising) and I had to guess which plants were in there later.  It was all rather chaotic.  After the program, I had to find room in staff areas of the building with wide enough window ledges to support all the trays (7 total).  I knew that leaving them unattended in publicly accessible areas of the building would prove disastrous.  So for at least a month, everyone's office and break room was graced with the presence of (sometimes) sprouting plants.  They were all pretty good sports about it, thankfully.

The Lesson:  Be prepared to be messy.  We had aprons for the patrons, but that did not contain the amount of mess to be cleaned up afterwards.  Paper was put down on tables to keep them from being painted, but water was necessary to start the pods, and of course some people managed to spill almost whole pitchers of water on the table, making the paper's paint-catching qualities non-existent.  Thankfully acrylic paint washes off pretty easily, I made sure I had extra time to clean up, and I wore clothing I didn't care about.  I don't think I can reiterate enough on this blog how messy being a librarian is.  They don't tell you about this part of the job in library school, so consider yourself warned.

The Resources:  I already had paints and brushes, and I bought large river rocks at a craft store for the painted garden stones.  I felt it was better to do this in person rather than online, so I could pick the bags that had the best sizes and shapes of rocks for painting (smooth, semi-flat, palm-sized or bigger).  I used this seed pod starter, but got it from the local hardware store.

If you thought this was the end of the story, you can think again.  So keep your eyes peeled for more butterfly garden silliness.

You may have an urgent need to become the resident botany expert (Butterfly Garden Part 3)

The Story:  You find all these great butterfly garden seed mixes and kits online, so you order a bulk native seed kit/mix from a native gardening site, but when it comes in, you realize that many of the seeds are pre-mixed.  When it listed which species there were, it didn't mean they'd come separated out.  This throws off your whole game, because you had super-cool plans to have the kids learn to identify different plants and make garden markers and all sorts of stuff to inform visitors to the garden about what was growing there.  So, you put this aside, and use it for a completely different tween program, still with tons left over.  Then, you go back to the native seeds site, and order individual packets of most of the plants in the seed mix, substituting other ones that you've determined through way too much online research into monarch butterflies to be the best species of milkweed for your soon-to-be habitat.  You discover, however, upon further investigation, that your timeline will have to be pushed back a bit, because despite all the hubub about planting seeds in spring, this is not how most native wildflowers operate.  They need to experience winter in order to sprout in the spring.  So, you have to trick the plant seeds into germinating through a process called cold stratification.  Basically, you put the seeds on a damp paper towel, put that into a ziplock bag, and put them in the refrigerator for several weeks.  As you look more and more into it, you are dismayed to learn that most seeds require multiple months in the fridge.  Well, to heck with that; you don't have that kind of time.  You decide to put them in for one month, maximum, and let nature handle the rest.

You run your program, the kids and their respective parents and grandparents help them prepare the seeds for cold stratification.  You explain the science behind it, teach the kids some new big words, and since you know this won't take the whole hour, or at least you hope you'll have enough people there that it won't, and you want to give them something to take home, you plan a craft project.  Using newspaper, masking tape (because it's biodegradable, as you've just recently learned), and a mason jar as a mold, you teach the kids to craft their own plantable, biodegradable starter pots.  They love these, make multiples, and fill them with soil and seeds from your earlier botanical botch-up.  Win-win.  Though you still have a ton of leftover wildflower/native grass seed mix.

The Lesson:  It pays to do your research on many levels, and it also pays to be flexible and to have a boss who doesn't ask too many questions about how much money you're spending on seeds.  Even if you've done a thing at home for a while as a hobby, changing any bit of it to bring it in to your library for a program is going to throw you out of your comfort zone.  I'd been native gardening in my yard for a couple years now and thought I had a handle on the situation.  I'd mostly bought already-grown plants from nurseries in the spring, and seeds that I bought in the spring and threw in the ground in my garden sprouted anyway (or some of them, at least).  But when I wanted to ensure a bigger success rate for the library garden for the patrons, I realized how much extra work it would be.  However, everything is a learning opportunity, for both yourself and your patrons, and without knowing about my seed-buying mishap, all the kids really enjoyed participating in all this preparatory activity, and the adults came up to me after and said how great it was that their kids are seeing plants from the very beginning and how even though they themselves had been gardening for years at home, they didn't know about cold stratification and they congratulated me on being able to teach them something new.

The resources:  I bought my seeds from Prairie Moon Nursery.  They have lots of different kinds of milkweed, and each plant has a range map so you can figure out if it is native to your area, as despite what many "wildflower mix" seed packets will tell you, there are very few plants that actually belong on the whole continent, and to make your garden serve a purpose for butterflies or other wildlife, it's best to plant something they can actually use.

I figured out the minimum amount of time I could simulate seed hibernation online from a variety of sources, but here are some of the best places to read about how to properly start and grow milkweed:
Monarch Butterfly Garden
American Meadows
Prairie Moon.

I got my directions for a biodegradable planter here, but there are tons of other options out there on the mommy blogs, so I'm not going to reinvent the wheel and post all about it here.  Just find one that works for your own purposes and run with it.

Fear not, for there is more nonsense to come in the garden saga.

You may wind up with flour on your ass

The story:  This was the scene the other day in the children's room as I frantically mixed salt dough to prepare for this weekend's special craft program.  I had help from one of my library assistants who is super-crafty, which is a good thing, because I probably would have taken four times as long and messed it up somehow had I done it on my own.  And here's why:  I was multi-tasking, badly.

Due to scheduling abnormalities, I would have no other time to make this stuff for the weekend, and I would also have no other time to have a meeting with my cataloger, and I also would have no other time to set up for an after school program that day.  So, all of this had to happen at once.

We started mixing the salt dough (recipe here), and I very quickly realized that I was ill-dressed for the occasion.  I had decided to wear a black pencil skirt that day, completely forgetting what I'd be doing.  My hands were gooped up with dough and flour and there was already a white spot on my skirt, so I went to get an apron, thinking I'd prevent further mess to my outfit.  I tied the apron on myself, and only when it was too late did I realize that in tying it behind me I deposited further flour mess onto my backside, and that trying to wipe it off with dirty hands would only make it worse.  So, to Hell with it.  I went back to the children's room, and mixed some more dough, and had a very professional, in-depth conversation with our new cataloger about my cataloging philosophy and specific examples of inconsistencies and inaccuracies that needed remedying.  We discussed how many decimal places a children's non-fiction book really needs, whether climate change belongs in the three hundreds or five hundreds, and when a personal account crosses over into biography...all while my coworkers politely ignored the smear on my rear.

And then the leader of the after school program walks up, and has to awkwardly shake my floury hand.

The Lesson:  Plan your schedule, have extra clothing and an apron at work (and actually remember to change into it BEFORE you get messy), think about asking for help before you make an even bigger mess, and don't get phased by a little white powder.  I took several children's literature classes in library school, and while we touched on children's programming, I never really foresaw myself as a children's librarian, so if there were classes on crafting (I don't think there were), I missed them.  I think my biggest realization throughout my career is exactly how physically messy this job can be.  Luckily, I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty.  (Or my skirt for that matter.)

Resources:  
Salt dough recipe
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