"Stitch It Together" Try-It for Brownies

Honestly, this would've been an easier Try-It for us to do at home, but that can't be said for everyone in AnnaBeth's Brownie troop. So, it ended up as a troop project. The girls made doll quilts.

We were instructed to get fabric and cut out 6 squares of 8" by 8", and a backing of 16" by 24" (yes, quick math show that this isn't really correct, as you have seam allowances, but I guess the woman in charge decided it was the easiest way to explain it to everyone, or maybe she didn't feel like doing the math herself -- I never know in these situations). We also purchased some buttons.

Those who were unable to purchase their own fabric had some provided for them.

We happened into a sale at JoAnn's on quilting fabric and buttons.




(Picture is yellow because it was taken on the dining room table in winter.)

At the meetings the girls sewed on the buttons on one square (task #2, Button Collage) and embroidered designs on another square or 2 (task #3, Embroidery). Did I mention that there are about 20 girls in our troop? So, that's 20 kids in 1st through 3rd grade who are trying to figure out how to sew on buttons and how to embroider (and we didn't have hoops, which added to the challenge). And, yeah, we have heavy parental involvement, but an amazing number of the parents have little idea how to sew on a button or how to embroider. It was ... intense. The troop provided the needles, thrjead, scissors, and embroidery floss (I think the floss was donated by someone who had gobs of DMC that the labels had fallen off of; actually, AnnaBeth took some of our from home so she knew she had a color she liked).

After decorating some of the squares with buttons and embroidery, the girls brought all 6 squares to the sewing machines. What sewing machines? Why, the ones lugged in by some of the moms. I took my old Viking, which is absolutely awesome for this task since it has a "low gear" in which you CANNOT sew quickly no matter how much you stomp on the pedal (another plus is its nice carrying case, but a minus is that it weighs about as much as my car). Working closely with the sewing machine mavens, each girl sewed together at least some of her squares. Well, if she wanted to. If she was really timid, she was welcome to just watch while being talked through what was going on. At least, the kids who were with me got talked through it -- my experience teaching Thalia and AnnaBeth to sew merged with my years of library reference work teaching university freshmen how to use the online card catalog, and I was in the ZONE about explaining what we were doing and why. (task #6, Patch It All Together) The seams were ironed flat by the adults; someone had brought in an iron, and a little ironing station was set up.

The troop provided batting. The completed 6 squares were laid on top of the batting and the backing, and sewn together (sometimes by Brownies, sometimes not) leaving a gap for turning. All quilts were turned, and the girls were given needles and thread to whip the gap closed (task #5, Sew What?)

Okay, admittedly some of these tasks aren't spot on how they're written in the Try-It book, but we took at least 3 meetings to do this, and the kids really did work quite a bit on stitching skills.




A finished product.

Thalia thought it was such a cool concept that she got some fabric to make one, too.

Reading

We continue to work our way through Ambleside Online Year One. We're on week 26, sort of. We've finished the Holling C. Holling book already (we had substituted Pagoo for Paddle to the Sea since we'd already read the latter). It has finally sunk in that I really don't like Holling C Holling books, so we whipped through it to get it over with.

In our perpetual Little House Marathon, we are now On the Shores of Silver Lake. This is our second trip through this particular segment of the Little House sequence, and it's striking me as a more depressing journey this time through. I keep noticing all the disasters that befall the family. Sheesh, they should've stayed in the Big Woods.

MrV is reading The LIghtning Thief aloud in the evenings.

Kid1 just finished Crispin for her Bravewriter Boomerang online discussion group (I would link to Boomerang, but Blogger isn't letting me, sigh). Honestly, I don't try to keep up with what all she's reading. She's also working through the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, which obviously has nothing to do with any schoolwork.

Kid2 is reading...well, I really don't know what the heck she's reading. I see her with books. I think she's reading one of the Girls of Many Lands series.

Due to bookstore giftcards, I've had a sudden influx of craft books to browse:




Sensual Crochet by Amy Swenson. Knitting Classic Style by Veronik Avery (if you're on Ravelry you can see all the items in the book there, which is a wicked cool feature of that website), and Designer Needle Felting by Terry Taylor.

I'm also reading Performance Without Pain by Kathryne Pirtle. It focusses on diet, particularly the type of diet promoted by the Weston A. Price organization. Her twist is that she was severely ill (undiagnosed celiac who had eaten wheat for over 40 years), and used concepts in Nourishing Traditions to help heal herself. This has inspired me to re-visit some of the food prep I've done before, so even as I type I have a bone broth simmering on the stove, whey separating out for future use in beet kvass, and some kefir cream soda brewing on the counter (actually I've never done the kefir thing before, and am hoping the whole jar doesn't explode -- stay tuned).

Badge Work

A few weeks back Kid2's Brownie troop worked on their Colors and Shapes Try-It. The girls did 2 projects that day -- mixing colors, and yarn painting. All the moms were to bring in some yarn for the yarn painting.

(The way that ended up working: I brought in a huge bag that barely put a dent in my stash. I'm not sure that anyone else brought anything at all. I announced that I really really didn't want the leftover yarn back, so the troop now has its own yarn stash.)

"Yarn painting" means that you draw a picture on cardboard or card stock, then glue yarn on the picture to color it in. Family Fun magazine featured some leaves done with yarn on cardboard in a recent issue. They looked really nice, and like an adult had done them with nice yarn bought specifically for the picture they had in mind. Sort of a Martha Stewart rendition of a kids craft project.

Kid2 didn't attend that particular meeting (I was in charge of badge work at the Junior meeting down the hall, and she opted to tag along with me instead), but we peeked at the finished artwork. Unlike the Family Fun magazine leaves, it looked more like 18 young girls had done it with random yarn someone had dumped off from their stash. Which isn't to say it looked bad -- it just didn't look like something magazine editors would photograph. It also looked very wet and gluey.

So, in order to "catch up" with her troop, we wanted to do the project at home. But, well. Wet gluey-ness. Available yarn colors that didn't suit the inner vision of the young artist (because I'm not buying new yarn for this project -- sorry, folks). How to make it more appealing for the young artist and her clean up crew?



We tweaked the project. It became painting with roving on wool felt, using a felting needle. I think it turned out pretty good. I had her look through the available roving, then draw a picture based on the colors available. The background felt is actually a wool blend from JoAnn's -- we had several colors, and she decided white would work best for this project. Then we set up foam to work on, got out the felting needles, and she went to it.

After determining that she wasn't going to felt her hand to the picture (she's needle felted before) I wandered out of the room (this either makes me a very bad mommy for leaving a small child with possibly dangerous equipment, or a very good mommy for trusting her creative genius). In the meantime, Kid1 decided to get in on the action, and did her own little roving/felt picture.

I wouldn't have done this project with her troop -- no way would I have 18 kids ages 6-9 brandishing felting needles -- but I really like it for home badge work.

(The other part of the Try-It she missed -- mixing primary colors of paints to make secondary colors as well as tints, tones and shades -- we earn effortlessly since we only own a few colors of Stockmar paints and so mix up whatever else we need as we go along.)

In the meantime, I've made a list of Junior badgework that can be done outside in pleasant temperatures, and we are scurrying to work on those things in this small window where the weather is neither insanely hot (I think it was 90F out about 3 weeks ago, wasn't it?) or uncomfortably cold (and right now it's 21F, which is getting rather brisk).

Kid1 has decided she wants her hiking badge. This involves either 2 all day hikes, or an overnight hike. I anounced that I thought it might be wise to work our way up to that. Once upon a time I could've just spontaneously gone on an all day hike with no muscular repercussions, but those days are gone. We are working on the walking badge, which involves a 3 week program of walking for fitness, and will, cleverly enough, build up our walking muscles. We're also taking shorter hikes in various wooded areas, during which we're working on tree identification (part of the Earth Connections badge -- as soon as she saw it involved learning 10 trees and 5 other plants with their traditional uses she knew I was going to drag her into it, so she had put it on the to-do list), various nature hikes that fulfill Junior and Brownie requirements, taking snacks (also fulfilling various Junior and Brownie requirements), and learning the ins and outs of Finding Your Way. Wisconsin council has a cool bird-watching badge, a forestry badge, and a prairie badge that I'm hoping we can work into our hikes. It all seems like a great way to spend these sunny, crisp fall days.

Scouting is getting to be more and more fun as I get the hang of how to enjoy it.

Crochet Hooks

All fiber-craft bits and bobs in our extended family eventually filter down to me. Fabric, yarn, knitting needles, quilt frame, embroidery hoops, tatting shuttles ... eventually someone decides that I am heir apparent to these collections.

My grandma was particularly fond of crochet. Now that she has passed away I have all of her hooks.



It doesn't look like such a huge collection in this little photo, but believe me, that's a lot of crochet hooks to have in one place.

Some of these are my hooks, particularly some of the large ones. The ones with tape around the bottom are ones I used to teach crochet at Girl Scouts (the tape identified them as loaners for the girls who didn't happen to have a hook).

But those little steel ones? Those are pretty much all Grandma's.

Crochet was the first fiber craft she loved. She used to carry her crochet with her everywhere, tucking it into her pocket. One day she was walking along the lane, crochet in pocket. A neighbor was driving by in his horse-and-wagon (this was when Grandma was a young girl, you know). The neighbor offered her a ride. She jumped up in the wagon. And the crochet hook went right into her leg, digging right into the flesh, hook-end first. Years later she was fairly succinct about the incident -- it hurt a lot and was very hard to pull back out.

I find myself looking at these hooks and wondering if one of them is the actual hook in the story.

I think that would've been enough to put me right off of crochet. But she kept with it. And, towards the end she gave up quilting and knitting, but she stuck with the crochet.

Grandma died 2 years ago. But her legacy remains.

Downsizing

My parents have decided it's time to sell their 3-bedroom house and move to a smaller apartment. This move involves clearing out quite a bit of Stuff.

Most of the furniture has been taken care of, as well as the yardwork related items (we now own a hammock and a snowblower, among other things). And now they're getting down to the real knitty-gritty of moving -- sorting through the momentos of a lifetime, deciding which to keep.

Through the years people have been quite fond of giving my parents handmade gifts. Quite, quite fond, as a matter of fact. I'm not sure what it is about Mom and Dad that radiates "hey, if you make stuff why not give us a sample?" Dad is a retired pastor; perhaps people like to give their pastor handmade gifts? (And, if so, does that indicate love or passive-aggressive thoughts about religion? There have been those items that make one pause and wonder ... most of those have quietly disappeared in previous moves, though.)

This afghan didn't make the cut to go to the new apartment, so I rescued it from the Goodwill bag:



It was woven on a Weavette. Each square has a finished size of 3.25 inches; there are 192 squares. Those grey squares are green in real life.

The guy who wove it (no clue what his name is -- Mom and Dad remember, but he wasn't a close friend of the family) finished it off with cross stitch and a crocheted border:



At least I assume he finished it off himself. Maybe he farmed that part out. Who knows? But, isn't it a triumph of the imagination? How many people with palm-sized looms would decide to weave up a couple hundred squares, put them together into a throw, and then give it to someone with whom they don't have a close personal relationship?

How did he design it? I can picture coloring in squares on graph paper, but who knows. Perhaps there are Weavette patterns floating around in books (this was before the Internet, so I know he didn't simply download it).

By the way, Mom and Dad's house sold within a week, so they'll be moving later this month. In the meantime, they've learned that Dad has a rapidly growing cancer, so he will also be starting radiation treatments this month. Sigh. This was already earmarked as The Most Stressful Month of 2007 on our calendars due to the huge number of Important Things We Must Do this month, which means we can't be there to help them. On the bright side, if we all make it through all of this, the rest of the year should be a piece of cake in comparison.

Green: Adventures with Wilton Icing Colors

I thought it would be nice to have a green silk for spring -- something to put on the Nature Table. And, lo and behold, I found a blank silk in the drawer. And, lo and behold, I found some Leaf Green Wilton Icing Color in my kitchen cabinet. Seems like fate, right?

Of course, I've never dyed fabric with food coloring before. But I'm not one to let little details stand in my way, even when the little details are along the lines of "no idea whatsoever what I'm doing".

I did find instructions on how to dye wool yarn with Wilton. It also mentions dyeing silk yarn. Close enough for me!

I put my silk blank in a Tupperware salad container full of tepid water to soak while I prepared my dye. I started heating the water in the tea kettle, and put filled a pot half way with water, setting the latter on the stove also.

When the tea kettle was fairly hot, I poured water into a measuring cup. I used about half a cup of extremely hot water. I got some Wilton on the tip of a dinner knife (about 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon) and stirred it into the hot water. It dissolved quickly. I then poured the now-green water into the pot on the stove, giving me a cooler dye bath.

At this point the silk blank had been soaking in its tepid water for 20-30 minutes. I removed it from the water, noted the foamy character of the water, contemplated the sudden memory that you're supposed to wash the silk blanks before dyeing (oops), decided to skip that step, and rinsed the silk blank lots and lots, hoping that would count as "washing".

I put the blank silk in the dye pot and started heating it. I don't have a thermometer (or maybe I do, and just haven't seen it for a long time -- I'm sort of hazy on this point) so I simply heated until steam started rising. I stirred the cloth around, occasionally lifting it with a spoon, noting that it wasn't taking up any color at all. None. Hmmm.

(About this time Kid1 came into the kitchen and asked what I was making. "Green. (Long pause) I'm making green."

"Yeah, but what is green?"

"Some fabric."

Because, of course, I was using the regular old cooking utensils. And it did look vaguely edible.)

So, I went to the next step, that of dumping in a glug of white vinegar. The color immediately began migrating to the silk.

By this time A) I was bored; B) I had decided stirring was a lost cause, since water kept splashing on the smooth top stovetop, and if you have a smooth top stove you know that that means the water is likely to run under the lit burner and annoy you greatly (hate this stove! must get rid of this stove!); and C) it was the episode of Start Trek Next Generation where Worf's adoptive parents come on board the ship, while Picard goes down and visits his brother -- not the most gripping episode, but it has some good scenes. All of which added up to wandering off for a few minutes. And arriving back to find the silk merrily boiling away. Oops (again).

It seemed that the water wasn't getting any clearer; also, the water had a definitely yellow tinge. I turned off the stove and let the pot cool on top of the burner (which would retain heat for quite a while anyway, being electric and all -- have I ever told you how much I dislike this stove, by the way?). I went to put kids to bed, then answer a phone call from someone asking about matters such as endometric reticulum, then tell the caller that maybe she should google some web pages about it since I haven't thought about stuff like that for years and years, then hang up the phone and announce to the kids that they were never, ever to wait until the night before an exam to discover they don't understand their textbooks. Then, back to the kitchen to plop the cloth on a cake-cooling rack I'd laid over the sink.

The next morning I ironed out the dried cloth and laid it on our Nature Table:



The color was a nice spring-y green, very even. I couldn't get the silk to iron out smoothly, possibly a function of having boiled it.

Our Nature Table so far has some root children, a Mother Nature (this was made from a kit TheSilverPenny.com used to carry), a bowl of dry earth (a Lenten feature), some seed pods and rocks we liked, and a small mouse sculpture. I'd like to make some Flower Children, and even have a book on the subject. Alas, the book didn't come with what I needed to make any flower children. I have the wool, the felt, the pipe cleaners, the stockinette, but I lack the will to actually get everything out and make something.

But, hey, at least we have green silk to put stuff on now.

Tuesday Teatime

(With bonus Project Spectrum pics!)

Okay, I didn't want to call it Tuesday Teatime. Tuesday was impossibly busy, so we had Teatime on Wednesday. Kid2 said, "No problem, we can just call it Wednesday Teatime." Ack! No! There's no alliteration in that title. I must have alliteration! So I wanted to call it Cocoa Club, a title I picked up at the beautiful blog of By Sun and Candlelight . I thought it was perfect -- alliteration! we're drinking cocoa, so it fits! did I mention the alliteration?! But Kid2 wandered off in disinterest. And I've decided that for the sake of my blog lables I shall stick with Tuesday Teatime.

Our theme was snow. I read some of the huge selection of snow poetry I've accumulated from resources such as A Child's Seasonal Treasury . Then we read The Story of the Snow Children. This book had been on my Amazon wishlist for ages, but when I saw that Dawn had it on her sidebar as a book they were reading, well, I had to get it. (Possible alternate title for this post: "I Try to Pretend I am Dawn of By Sun and Candlelight").

Afterwards the kids colored pictures from Ruth Heller's Stained Glass Designs for Coloring Snowflakes, and also inquired why we were doing a snow theme considering the ground was bare. Hey, the forecast called for snow! NOT MY FAULT! (It did finally snow overnight, so this morning I am vindicated.)

Our refreshements included cocoa, of course. As I was heating the milk I realized that I should've made Mexican Wedding Cakes for cookies, as they look like little snowballs. Whoops! The kids bailed me out by finding a box of Lemon Cooler Girl Scout cookies from the freezer (stuck there from last year's sale). They were sort of round, dusted with powder sugar, and frozen. Sort of snowball-ish.

I had been too busy making decorations to mess with cookies:


(The photography at By Sun and Candlelight is so much better than mine. Sigh.)

I think I've posted the snowball babies before. I was making a King Winter, then, over the past couple of days, but the household vote was to make it a Snow Queen.



There were some rumblings that if we got tired of her as a queen we could take off her hair and add a beard.

Most important is that she is white and icy blue, qualifying her as my first Project Spectrum project.

Discovering How Much Time Being a Homeschool Mom Takes

Since everyone is sick I've had a chance to do other things.

Obviously, I've made about a thousand cups of chamomile tea, another thousand cups of kudzu-apple juice (recipe in this book ; I love this book, and sometimes fantasize that the author is my mom and will come take care of me when I'm sick), wrung out cool cloths to put on hot foreheads, fetched more pillows, and read books aloud (although at a certain point yesterday the vote was to just flip the television on to Star Trek reruns).

And cleaned the house, even taking the shower doors apart to get that little place you can't get to otherwise. And dragged the fallen tree limbs from the ice storm out to the street for pickup (we had a pine tree that lost about half its limbs; I never realized how big pine tree branches could get until I was wrestling them out of the dirt and ice where they'd impaled themselves).

But I've also received the latest issue of Ottobre , and picked out something I can make for Kid2 out of pink velour.

And needlefelted little snowball babies (thinble added for size comparison):



And made curtains for a child whose idea of "beautiful" means it's pink and it involves Hello Kitty:



And read tons of crafty blogs, to the point that I've recklessly signed up for Project Spectrum 2.0 , apparently believing that I always have this much time on my hands to sit around and think of interesting things to do.

(It has helped that no one has felt like eating, so the whole fixing-food-washing-up business has also been pretty much nonexistant. MrV is in Mexico, so he's not here expecting meals either.)

Today's plan is to scrub floors, sew cute little outfits for Waldorf dolls, and think of more books to request from the library. Today's reality will probably be much different. It always is.