Crafts for the Apocalypse: Syd's Girl Scout Silver TAP

 

My kid wrote a book!

For Syd's Girl Scout Silver Award, she wanted to focus on the problem of tweens and teens spending too much time on screens. Syd really enjoys crafts and recipes and likes to follow tutorials to make new creations, so she decided that making a set of craft and recipe tutorials for other kids to follow would be a fun way to encourage them to put down their phones and pick up the cardboard and scissors.

Thus began one of the LONGEST Silver Award TAPs in history. OMG, I had NO IDEA what an involved process this would be, particularly when accomplished by the world's pickiest perfectionist.

First, Syd had to brainstorm and then settle on possible crafts and recipes. Then she had to test each one, discard the ones that she wasn't happy with, and decide on a final line-up. Then she made them all again, sometimes a few times, until she had the perfect process for each one. Then she wrote each tutorial, and went through a few revisions on some of them, because it's tricky to write a tutorial!

Fortunately, tutorial writing is exactly within my very specific skill set. 

Syd sent a draft of her tutorials to our Girl Scout troop to be beta tested, and revised some of the tutorials again based on her feedback. As all this was happening, and for the next several months after the tutorials were finished and polished, she was also creating all the art. She went through several drafts to create an original character to model the finished projects, and then a zillion drafts as she drew each of the illustrations. 

And, of course, the book needed an overarching theme, both for the illustrations and the cover art and title.

Thanks to the pandemic, the entire book became... apocalypse-themed. 

When Syd was FINALLY happy with her illustrations and art, she imported it all into Adobe InDesign and Matt showed her how to do even more edits and make the layout:

When Syd was happy with the layouts, she sent a pdf back out to the Girl Scout troop to proofread, made more corrections based on their feedback, and then made even more corrections after feedback from the MEAN GRAMMAR AND PUNCTUATION MOMSTER. 

Originally, Syd had the idea that she could present physical copies of her activity book to kids, perhaps at day camps or after school programs, possibly with a kit included or possibly in concert with some in-person programming. Obviously that was out, thanks to the apocalypse, so instead Syd created a blog to host free downloadable pdfs of her book, and then promoted it.

Syd still wanted to give out *some* copies, though, so she decided to have a few copies printed and drop them off in Little Free Libraries around town. She wrote a budget proposal and presented it to our Girl Scout troop for the funds, then emailed back and forth with a local printing company to get her order made.

And at long last, Syd had real copies of Crafts for the Apocalypse in her hands!

But only briefly, as off they went into all the Little Free Libraries in town:

I had hoped (and advocated for, and nagged about) the project would be completed and the paperwork submitted before Syd began her public school adventure this week. The paperwork isn't submitted, because apparently none of the brilliant minds in this family are brilliant enough to figure out how to create a multi-page pdf (SIGH!), but the rest of the work is done and the forms are filled out and the essays are written, so perhaps today will be the magical day when the pdf fairy comes down from on high to compile the essays and time logs and forms into one clean and efficient multi-page pdf.

This was the perfect project for Syd, even though it turned out to be way bigger than it needed to be for the Silver Award (the suggested time commitment for a Silver Award TAP is 50 hours; Syd put in over 90, and even then didn't log everything). She got to exercise her creativity, express her love of art and making things, and work through the big challenges of maintaining a giant project independently. 

And of course, the fact that her project concluded with a connection to Will's Silver Award TAP is especially sweet to me.

Now... on to Gold!

Six Months Ago: Fraction Models to Review with Your Eighth-Grader

One Year Ago: How to DIY a Large-Format Clipboard

Two Years Ago: Homeschool Physics: We Made Paper Roller Coasters

Three Years Ago: Greece with Kids: Ancient Delphi, Castalian Spring, and How We Lost Syd

Four Years Ago: Work Plans for the Week of August 16: Sharks, Intolerable Acts, and Molecular Modeling

Five Years Ago: Work Plans for the Week of August 17: Police!

Six Years Ago: Out West 2014: Through Wyoming to Yellowstone

Seven Years Ago: Aerial Silks, at School and Home

Eight Years Ago: One Night on Top, the Next Night on Bottom

Nine Years Ago: Tutorial: School Glue in Many Homemade Hues

Ten Years Ago: Here's our Homeschool This Week

Eleven Years Ago: It's Mostly about Piecing, Not Stripping

Twelve Years Ago: I'm a Wench

Trashion/Refashion Show 2019: Gibbon Girl

It's fun to see how Syd has grown in the nine years that she's participated in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show:

2011: Fairy Princess

2012: Rainbow Fairy

2013: Rose Dress

2014: Upside-Down Orange

2015: The Awesomes (with WILL!!!)

2016: The Phoenix (which I sewed while sick with the flu)

2017: Supergirl of the Night (the last design that I helped Syd sew)

2018: Medieval Maiden (the first garment that Syd constructed completely independently)

And that brings us to 2019: The Year of the Gibbon!

These are Syd's application pictures, and every year they suck, because February is rarely well-lit. Oh, well. You can still see that Syd's vision is a caped black tunic and leggings (upcycled from a few black tops and sweaters that we thrifted). The highlight of the garment is a pair of sleeves that Syd can make look ruched, but can also make look like this:

She used a pair of pants for those sleeves, and later altered it so that she could have a secret pass-through for her hands when they're in their super-long formation.

Syd really, really liked the idea of sleeves that drape like a bridal train, but she also intended from the beginning that they could be fully weaponized, like so:

I love seeing her have so much fun with her design. From the very beginning, Syd's garments have always been playful, and most of them embrace big, powerful movement.

Her garments are never something that you simply wear; they're something that you DO:

 Our town's Trashion/Refashion Show is happily well-situated within our busy spring every year--it's generally about a month after cookie season, and about a month before Syd's birthday party. It's nice, because as soon as we finish planning for one thing, we can move right into the next!

The day of the fashion show is the hair/makeup call, then the stage rehearsal, then cooling our heels in the house while the other acts rehearse--

--then the pizza party--

--then the fun time of squeezing into a few square inches in the overcrowded dressing rooms backstage--

--and then I go sit in the audience with the rest of the extended family, and Syd?

She shines.

Here are some cheater pics that I took during the dress rehearsal:

And here's the real show:



This year's official show photographer has been taking photos for four years now, and he also created the slideshow that played between the acts. Check out this awesome tribute that he made for all of the Trashion Kids--he made a whole slide for each kid that he'd seen come back every year, and here's Syd's!

Look at how she's grown. Syd actually HATES it when people tell her how much she's grown (it's Nutcracker-related trauma on account of they cast by height and they're always looking for the shortest kids and it sucks), but look at the kid in those photos. She has grown! Syd has always been an artist, but she's become such an able DIYer, too, confidently constructing her vision garment from top to bottom, shoes to hairstyle. Those leggings? She sewed them from a stretchy black sweater, sure, but she also did it WITHOUT A PATTERN. No template. She didn't even trace another pair of leggings! She just... started cutting, sewed them up, and boom. Perfect leggings.

Perfect leggings. Smoky eye shadow that she applied herself. A garment with sleeves fit for royalty and suitable as long-range weapons.

I absolutely can't wait to see what this kids does next.

"Resist!" Perler Bead Sign from Crafting the Resistance

The tutorial in Crafting the Resistance makes a knitted bookmark, but I don't have knitting needles and yarn and... knitting skills. I don't have those, either.

You know what I DO have?



Perler beads. Audiobooks. A kid who loves nothing better than to sit down and hang out and craft with me.

So that's what we did! This project is modified from the Well Read Bookmarks in Crafting the Resistance; I followed the chart, but instead of knitting the pattern, I created it in Perler beads:

Yep, those are GLOW-IN-THE-DARK Perler beads there! You can resist even at night!

The kid? She made herself a giant Applejack:

I received a pdf of the book from the publicist for review; I actually find craft books really hard to review over pdf, but it IS handy to be able to simply print a page to access the template.

Applejack now lives on the wall in the kids' bedroom where Syd is displaying her Perler Bead My Little Ponies--

This is one of the results of the kids' bedroom redesign: dedicated display space for Syd's My Little Pony collection! Right now, we've got her Perler Bead Ponies and a framed piece of fanart that I bought her from a Comic-Con, but I'm hoping to add small shelves and convince Syd that her My Little Pony toys could live there, too.

--and the "Resist!" sign now lives above the big work table in our studio--



--where it can inspire us to use our hands to change the world.

Trashion/Refashion Show 2013

It's been epic over here, y'all! Last weekend the littler kid and I finally, after rehearsals and dress rehearsals and practicing and tons of prep work, performed in the 2013 Trashion/Refashion Show. It's so hard to remember what you're supposed to be doing right as you pop onstage in front of all those lights and sounds and people, so I really encouraged the kid to practice her runway walk a LOT this year. She taped a mock runway with painter's tape right onto our living room floor, and practiced on it every single day, taking constructive criticism and Momma suggestions like a champ, and creating almost entirely by herself a perfect routine that involved her showing off the best features of her dress, holding her marks for the proper time, and memorizing the announcer's cues, all while staying energetic and happy toward the audience.

Seriously, that kid worked HARD.

I think she could see how well it paid off, though, as yep, she always knew her cues, and she always knew where to go and what to do there, and that kind of confidence feels good.

Perhaps partly because of all the practice, and partly because her grandparents had flown in from California to visit us that weekend, this is the year that the kid really seemed to grasp what a lot of work goes into being a runway model, and part of a major show like this. Not only did she miss her Science Fair for a dress rehearsal, but on the day of the show, while her grandparents, Matt, and the bigger kid built model rockets and launched them at the park, this littler kid and I were getting her hair and makeup done:

While the grandparents, Matt, and Willow hit golf balls on a driving range somewhere, the kid and I were waiting at the theater, doing yet another full-dress run-through, and waiting some more:

The entire time, the kid was deeply conscious of the fact that her dearly beloved grandparents were somewhere just out of reach, having loads of fun with her sister, and yet she was a great sport about it. She's got a killer game face, that kid.

One HUGE treat that made that weary time of waiting around at the theater a lot more bearable was the Bloomington Flight Club, which performed at the Trashion/Refashion Show and thus needed to practice their routine in that venue several times over the course of the day. I've never been to a Cirque do Soleil show, and I have NEVER seen anything like this before, and I (and everyone else hanging around in the theater!) was flat-out amazed by their performance:

It was just crazy stuff--climbing that silk, and tangling it around their feet to do some tricks, and winding it around them to do some other tricks, and then unraveling it and falling a long ways and yet still hanging on and everyone in the audience shouts "YAY!!!!" kind of stuff. Seriously, wow.

Eventually, though, we were backstage for real, with me trying to touch-up the kid's makeup and her being super picky about how she wanted it to look (Thank god for baby wipes!), and me putting my foot down about her definitely wearing the ton of red body glitter that we'd made together for the show and her changing her mind about wanting it and surreptitiously trying to wipe it off when I wasn't looking and me saying, "Dude, I can SEE the cloud of glitter at your feet," and her smiling and being like, "What?":

Meanwhile, in the audience:

The Skullduggery Pleasant love is VERY real!

The official Trashion/Refashion Show video will come out later (and will be shown off and on all year on local access TV, which makes me super happy, because back when we had cable a million years ago, local access was my favorite channel), but until then, I woo you with home videos of the event:

my favorite of the two Flight Club performances:

the runway walk:

As per usual, my kid was calm, cool, and collected, and I was so nervous for her that I wouldn't have been surprised if I'd had a heart attack or a stroke or something (well, maybe a *little* surprised, because I've been working hard on my health lately, but you get the idea). As I stood near the back of the theater, waiting to make sure that she made it safely up one aisle of the audience, then to meet her in the lobby and escort her back down the other aisle and through the stage door and backstage again, I experienced her runway walk completely differently. Also, completely incorrectly. When she first walked out onstage, I experienced her standing at her first mark FOREVER. I was sure that she'd missed her cue and was going to stand there like a rock the entire time! Foolishly, I even lost my head and began to wave "Come on!" gestures from the BACK of the DARKENED theater. I let out a deep breath when she finally began to move forward, and felt light-headed from apparently holding my breath for the entire time that she'd just stood there.

Yeah, that didn't happen at all the way that I experienced it. Even if you don't want to watch her entire walk, watch, like, the first five seconds, because that's all it takes for her to walk onstage, hit her first mark, wait for her cue, and then skip forward. That's also exactly how long it was supposed to take.

This is why she's the runway model, not me.

It was a great night, of course, but also a long night, and for the first time ever, the kid didn't want to stay through intermission and watch the second half of the show. She wanted to collect her congratulations--

--to change her clothes, to get the heck home, to take a shower, and to get into her jammies.

Interestingly, the kid's been saying that she might not want to do the fashion show next year. She thinks she might try roller derby when the bigger kid tries it in September, and is also considering not taking ballet again next year (although the fact that this is recital weekend, with MORE dress rehearsals and stage makeup and fancy hair and stress over missing uniform parts and a missed practice that was hidden on page 20 of a 25-page recital handout--seriously, WHO gives out a 25-page recital handout for a children's recital?). She's been saying that she's tired of going to ballet class on Saturdays, when she could be playing instead, and although that's kind of rich from a homeschooled six-year-old who spends the vast majority of each day in active, immersive, imaginary play, it's still her experience, and if that's how she feels, then that's how she feels.

Of course, the kid's not planning to quit all her previously cherished activities in order to go and live under a rock next year. It took about five minutes after we were all back home from the fashion show for each kid to ask me if they could learn how to do what they saw the Flight Club do. I did some research, and why, yes, the Flight Club DOES offer children's classes!

So after this horseback riding session, and after the softball season, and after the kids and I take a road trip to Connecticut and back, I promised them that I would sign them up for aerial silks classes. Perhaps next year, BOTH kids will be at the Trashion/Refashion Show--if not on the stage, then maybe 30 feet above it.

Handmade Dresses For Two Little Girls Who Live in Haiti

We don't know these two little girls, but thanks to the Homemade Dress Drive for Haiti, we do know the exact orphanage in Port Au Prince, Haiti, where they live.

We know exactly the perfect sundress to make for them.

We know exactly the perfect thrifted sheet from my fabric stash to use:

It should be cool and comfy in such a warm climate. Even though the sheeting is mostly white, it didn't seem thin enough to need a lining. I'd likely have added one, anyway, and made the dresses reversible, if I'd been the one sewing them, but I was not.

Each little girl sewed her own sundress for a little Haitian girl, and we know that the little girl who receives that dress will be just size of my own little seamstress, because each little girl sewed her dress in exactly her own dress size.

I printed out the sundress pattern in a 5 and a 7, assembled them, and handed them off to the girls, who were in charge of making sure that I cut out each of their pattern pieces the right way and in the right number. Will took pictures, presumably as evidence that I was going about the whole thing properly:

You can, of course, sew the yoke and straps in a complementary fabric, and perhaps use bias tape to hem the dress instead of a simple folded hem, but we just kept things simple:

This is, after all, each girl's largest and most complicated sewing project ever, to date. Can't you tell?

I did have the girls do french seams for the sides, however. French seams are just about as simple a way to finish a seam as you can find, and extremely sturdy.

I laid the pieces out, ironed and pinned them, then called each girl in when it was time to sew her piece--

--then ironed it, laid out the next piece and ironed and pinned it for the next girl when she was done. The girls went back and forth from their play to sewing and back to play, and I was delighted (and not a bit surprised) to see that every single time I called to them, for every single piece that they had to sew, they always ran to me immediately, screaming "YAAAAAYYYYY!!!!!".

I often feel that way about sewing, myself.

I sewed the straps myself, and I basted the bottom hem, but the entire rest of the dress--yoke in the front and yoke in the back, each sewn at the top and the bottom; two side hems with wrong sides together, then again with right sides together to make the french seam; and the bottom hem--each girl sewed entirely by herself:

It was a big undertaking, and a big accomplishment for two little girls:

I hope that the two little girls in Port Au Prince who receive these dresses will find them useful, and pretty, and that they'll be just the exact sizes of my own little girls, who got such pleasure out of sewing for them.