Work Plans for the Week of May 1, 2017: Ballet, a Birthday, and Britain

I rearranged our priorities last week. The kids are fondest of doing their schoolwork off and on all day--there's no push to complete their work by a specific time each day, except that I don't allow them their hour of screen time until their schoolwork is finished. They're content with this system and it works well for them, but it doesn't really always work well for ME. There's often a kid asking me for a lesson or to help with a project long after I'm longing to turn my brain off for the day--sometimes as late as 9 pm, or later, when I'm already hanging out on my bed with a glass of wine and a Captain America graphic novel.

Last week, then, to start to get a handle on the problem, I asked the kids to meet me at the school table at 10:00 (yes, they're late starters--they like to veg out until 9:00, then do animal chores and have breakfast, then Will has to make herself a cup of tea and veg out some more while she drinks it), and then to work with their best effort for three full hours, with no slacking and no breaks, and we would finish school for the day promptly at 1:00, no matter if we'd completed work plans or not. There was still some slacking and some breaks, which means that Syd didn't always finish, and realistically, I want Will to work for more like 4 hours, not 3, so she didn't always finish, either, but since my goals were to get them accustomed to working for an extended period of time and to remind them of how lovely it is to finish school and have a whole afternoon and evening of freedom, the schedule suited my purposes.

I've also had some difficulty with the kids protesting at our lessons, and inconsistently, as well. First they love food-related projects, and then they don't. First they want to study such-and-such, and then they fuss at the actual assignment. So over the weekend, as I made our lesson plans for this week, I called each kid in individually, showed her every single thing that she didn't complete last week, and asked her if she wanted to complete it this week. If she didn't, I dropped it from the schedule, because it's not worth the fight. Then I went through every single assignment that I had planned for this week, and got their buy-in on every single thing. Will, most particularly, had to be made to understand that for every lesson, I have to see some sort of output from her; she cannot simply read a text and move on with her life. This got her buy-in for some of this week's hands-on projects, when I asked her what she'd rather provide me for output and she drew a blank. It's for sure time, though, to start thinking of more self-directed studies to give her for eighth grade.

After all that, then, it was more fun than I had anticipated to drop all of our responsibilities and head out to an overnight trip that our Girl Scout council put on as a Girl Scout Leader/Daughter Appreciation Event. Staff hosted us at one of the Girl Scout camps and provided fun activities--





--and a catered dinner--



--and prizes--



--and then let us enjoy having the camp all to ourselves for the rest of the day and night:

Camp Dellwood has an amazing wildflower hike, interspersed with exercise equipment. The kids LOVED it!

It was the perfect relaxing weekend before we start a week that will end in maybe a little more relaxing, but will also contain a birthday party and a ballet recital.

Whew!

Daily work is the same this week, with both kids' buy-in: ten minutes of journaling or writing to a prompt; practice on Typing.com; reading from their MENSA reading lists; Wordly Wise 7 for Will and a word ladder for Syd; a Hoffman Academy lesson or keyboard practice; and SAT prep through Khan Academy for Will. Syd will also be expected to help me with party prep every day this week, whether it's putting together the games and crafts or preparing the food or cleaning the house, AND she has hours of ballet rehearsal every night for her upcoming recital. She's going to be a busy girl!

Books of the Day consist of a couple of selections from the MENSA reading list that I have to be a little more encouraging about, a couple of non-fiction books on Ancient Greece, and a couple of things that I just thought they'd enjoy--a much more in-depth book on backyard chickens for Will, and the complete collection of Madeleine stories for Syd.

I'm not adding anything new to Memory Work this week, so it's still reviews of Platonic Solids, helping verbs, and Sonnet 116; and common prepositions, Pythagorean triples, the first eleven lines of Beowulf in Anglo-Saxon, and the apostles of Jesus.

And here's the rest of our week!



MONDAY: Syd is getting close to the end of Junior Analytical Grammar, which she's pretty thrilled about, as it's not a curriculum that she's loving. Too bad for her, as it's also a curriculum that is for sure teaching her the grammar concepts that I want her to have. When she's finished Junior Analytical Grammar, I'll likely give her a month or two off, and then it's on to Analytical Grammar! Will had a mind bender on this day--she's making such short work of them that I might skip to the middle of the book for her next one.

For now, we're moving very slowly through the Middle Ages, partly because there's so much more to explore than is there in Story of the World volume 2, which I'm using as a spine mostly for the chronology, and partly because we have so much more to do than Medieval history. There's no rush, though, and the kids are loving the study, so crawling away we go! This week, we're still in chapter two of Story of the World, because the kids remain interested in the Anglo-Saxon period and there's a lot more that we can cover. On this day, we're going to learn more about the Sutton Hoo ship burial. You can request free high-resolution images of artifacts held in the British Museum, but for efficiency's sake, they've also prepared a Powerpoint slide of Sutton Hoo artifacts, and that's what I'll be showing the children. Sutton Hoo isn't the first ship burial that we've encountered (there's also one in Beowulf), so we'll be discussing ship burial and burning in a little more depth, as well, using this dissertation as my resource. The kids then have the opportunity to make their own Viking longship, if they'd like, using either this tutorial or this printable, and we can either bury it or fill a Rubbermaid bin with water and burn it--gee, I wonder which they'll choose?

The kids really like completing Junior Ranger badges by mail, so even though it's a bit of work on the weekends, finding a badge program that 1) accepts badge books by mail and 2) has badge books that can be downloaded and can be well completed using internet research, it's worth it. For this week, I found that the Juan Batista de Anza National Trail has a badge program that can be completed online--score!

After loads of research, I finally bought the Level One curriculum in modern Greek from Greek123. If you're interested, I can tell you another time how I figured out which curriculum would be best, but for now I'll just tell you that the philosophy is to learn to read and write the language the way that a native child would; you can move more quickly, of course, using the same texts and workbooks,  and once you have around a third-grade reading knowledge, you can begin to read children's books written in the language, which will improve your skills even more. To make it more fun, and because you can't take a vacation unless you've studied for it, we're doing our Greek lessons nightly as a family, all four of us squeezed around the textbook, all four of us coloring the picture of μαμὰ in our workbooks. The curriculum includes access to an online tutor, so that's what the children will be practicing with every day as part of their work plans. and as it's also very important to expose ourselves to Greek daily (remember how many words a young child needs to hear before kindergarten? That's us!), right now we're listening to a lot of Greek pop hits on Spotify, although I'm hoping to also find some good Greek programming on Youtube.

I'm hoping that Will can finish up her Budgeting badge this week--starting a badge is always the most fun, but if Girl Scouts had their way, they'd do the funnest three activities from each badge, then drop it and start the fun activities for another badge. You've always got to encourage them to finish a badge by giving them more attention for the last couple of activities and making them more fun. For Step 4 of the Budgeting badge, then, I'm encouraging Will to complete the first activity, which is to make a list of her interests, then look for non-profits that are related to that interest. This will also open her up to more possibilities for a Take Action Project for the Breathe Journey that she's working through.

Will didn't do the temperature project last week, but says that she does want to do it this week. Since she's doing that, I won't move forward with our weather unit this week.

TUESDAY: Using the decanomial square to explore binomial squares was an activity that we didn't get to last week, but both children said that they did want to do it this week... we'll see. Syd also didn't interview her friends at playgroup last week, because most of them weren't there--the end of spring semester is a busy time for everyone, even homeschoolers! Rather than try a different activity to meet the badge's requirements, Syd said that she really wanted to try again this week... we'll see. Will could possibly finish her Budgeting badge on this day, by creating a workable budget and savings plan for our upcoming vacation to Greece. At first, I thought that I'd just have her plan for her own spending money, but now I'm thinking that it would be a more valuable experience to ask her to plan a family-wide budget and savings plan. We saved a lot to be able to pay for the vacation before we booked it (we don't carry credit card balances, which is a whole other discussion for a whole other day), but we could certainly do with more money for the trip itself!

Since Will is between seasons of Analytical Grammar, she has a worksheet in her Review and Reinforcement book on Tuesday and Thursday.

WEDNESDAY: Since I want to emphasize Greece even more in our applicable studies, I've decided to pause our Story of Science unit just before our chapter on Ptolemy and use Story of the World volume 1 to cover Greek history to that point. This week, we're covering Ancient Crete, Minos, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, and Daedalus and Icarus. On this day, the kids will read/listen to the chapter, answer the quiz questions, and we'll do the mapwork directly on our travel map of Greece--when we take this map with us to Greece, the kids will have an easy reference for what happened where! I also have some Youtube videos to show them of bull jumping, the Palace at Knossos, and Crete, etc.

The kids have been oddly reluctant to complete their current Your Kids: Cooking lesson, but they both insist that they don't want to skip it. Maybe this week we'll have quiche for dinner? Normally, Syd also has a separate baking assignment just for her, and she LOVES it, but this week her baking assignment is wrapped into party prep--she's going to bake all of the components for her castle cake herself.

THURSDAY: The National Mythology Exam didn't cover Theseus, although I'm sure the kids read that chapter for fun. Nevertheless, they'll read it again on this day, and make a trading card for Theseus.

Will didn't do her Beowulf translation yesterday, but I got out some of my Old English and Middle Welsh texts this weekend to show her, and she was enthusiastic about looking at them, and claims that she does want to try the translation this week. I hope she does, as I'm really looking forward to what she comes up with!

FRIDAY: We'll probably spend a majority of the day in party prep for the next day's fairy tale-themed birthday party, but we'll set aside some time for a lesson on the futhorc, the runic language of Anglo-Saxon Britain. We'll have a lesson and look at some examples, and then the children can create a moveable alphabet of runes, if they wish. When I showed this activity to Will, she claimed that she'd be willing to do it (despite grousing about every single activity that we did last week), but Syd is more likely my sure thing.

SATURDAY/SUNDAY: Birthday presents. Ballet recital dress rehearsal. Birthday lunch. Party prep. Fairy tale birthday party. Sleep. Wake up. Ballet recital. Frozen yogurt afterwards, perhaps, if we're not already too sugared out from the birthday party.

What are YOUR plans for the week?

Tutorial: Teeny-Tiny Tooth Fairy Pockets

I used the exact same technique for these tiny tooth fairy pillows that I use for my envelope pillowcases, cut way, waaaaaaay down:

The big fun, however, came in personalizing them! I replaced Will's old tooth fairy pocket, too, so that the girls could match, and for hers I used the same tooth fairy stencil that I used for the original pocket (although I should have replicated the monogram, too--I LOVED how it turned out that first time!):

For Syd's tooth fairy pocket, however, which I made just as her very first loose tooth was getting pretty darn loose, I had Matt draw a diagram of the primary teeth (using a diagram from Google Images as a model), then when Syd finally lost that tooth, I let her color it on the diagram and I wrote in the date:

Neither kid has ever been interested in having the Tooth Fairy take her teeth, and the pockets are also a good place to simply keep those shed teeth between visits. The Tooth Fairy does, of COURSE, take the letters that the children write to her. She gives them back to me later, though, because she knows that I'm making a collection of the children's correspondence with all fairies and Santa and imaginary beings.

Because Syd often writes to unicorns and asks them to send her candy. I don't really know why. They never do. But they do write back with silly messages, so that's fun, too.

Bibs for Babies

I am not going to have anymore babies on purpose (knock on wood), so it's a source of sadness to me sometimes that I didn't become the hyper-engaged crafter that I am today until after my second baby was born.

Think of all the blankies that I missed out on sewing for my own babes. The baby gowns! The rompers! The Boppy covers! The cloth stacking rings! The little hats! The diaper covers! The mei tais! All the weensy little things, sewn by me, just for my baby, and I get to put them on her, and look at her all super-cute, and take her picture, because in this fantasy I'm also not half-functioning under a fog of exhaustion.

Suffice to say...

I sort of have a thing for sewing presents for other people's babies. 

A few weeks ago, there was a perfect storm of babies being born. My half-sister had a baby, and a friend here in town had a baby, and a co-worker a couple of states over had a baby.

I got to sew little baby presents in batches! 

It totally beat to hell the sympathy cards that I had to write in batches a couple of months ago.

And what's great for batch sewing for babies?

Bibs, that's what!

I used my old pattern for these T-shirt bibs that I made, gasp!, almost five years ago, to make bibs for all the new babies. I really, really liked the look of the T-shirt bibs, especially the tie-dyed ones, but I'm trying to sew from my stash this year (have I mentioned that the girls and I are undertaking another epic road trip in a couple of months? Hershey World, here we come!), and I have lots of lovely quilting cottons in my stash.

So I ironed interfacing to both pieces of fabric, sewed them and turned them and edge-stitched them--

--stopped to admire them in a can't-stop-beaming-at-them way that totally disturbed poor Matt when he happened to walk by and catch me at it--

--snap set them, monogrammed them, forgot to take pictures of them, and gave them to babies. Two sets were mailed, and one set was given in person, along with that fabric matching game big siblings present that caused me so much grief.

As I was chatting with my friends that day, including the new mom, we were talking about my "baby presents in batches" thing, and I confessed that I actually had yet another long-distance friend who had just had another baby, but they weren't getting another baby present, because they hadn't acknowledged the last one.

"Oh, you're one of THOSE people," the new mom said, probably half-operating under her own fog of exhaustion and contemplating a future of having to snap a bib around the neck of the baby currently at her breast and show it to me as yet another chore to complete before she could catch her entire hour in a row of sleep that night.

I said, "OH yeah, I'm one of those people! The only reason on this Earth why someone would make someone else's baby a gift by hand is that they want to see the damn baby WITH their gift. The whole time they're knitting a little baby hat or sewing a blankie or whatever, they're thinking, 'That little baby is going to look so cute in this hat/blankie/onesie whatever! I can't wait to see it!' So yeah, if the person that you made a baby gift for receives the gift, throws it in the baby's dresser, and gets on with their life, gift unacknowledged, it kind of kills the point of making them another baby gift. Their new kid needs some bibs? They can go to Wal-mart--they don't have to personally thank the sweat shop workers there."

And that's how I probably took the flavor out of one new mom's zest for receiving gifts for all her current and future children. Just please remember that I never have claimed to be one of those good person-type thingies. 

I just like making stuff for babies.

A TARDIS-Painted Baby Gown

How much do I love Doctor Who?

So much that not only will I paint a TARDIS on my own stuff, but I'll also paint it on a newborn's baby gown:

The gown itself is sewn from an old tie-dyed T-shirt and some stash jersey knit:

The momma is another big fan of Doctor Who, of course, but soon enough, so will the babe be!

A TARDIS on a T-Shirt

Along with my lovely TARDIS laptop sleeve, I also now have a freezer paper stenciled TARDIS T-shirt, once again putting something geeky onto one of the very few plain items of clothing that I own (even the pants are affected--I have a pair of jeans with a TIE Fighter on them, a pair of cargo pants with a volcano on them, and a pair of shorts with a starry constellation on them):

I asked Matt to take some photos of me wearing my new shirt, but then I immediately got busy forming no-rise baguettes out of very sticky bread dough--

--so I'm afraid that this is all the modeling you get!

I have two more fangeeky projects ready to be done this week:

1. freezer paper stenciling a TARDIS onto a baby gown in preparation for a baby shower next weekend, and 
2. writing the entire Gozer the Traveler monologue onto the back of my thrifted Ghostbusters T-shirt.

And, of course, there's homeschooling and making dinner and doing my writing gigs and prepping for a road trip, etc., but all that pales compared to geeky fan art!

Chess Bag

We do not have a complete set of chess pieces; instead, we have what seems like a dozen incomplete sets of chess pieces. When we play, we organize them like "I've got the darkish pieces, and you've got the light-ish ones," or "I've got the browny ones, and you've got the reds," or "I've got the big ones, and you've got the tiny ones."

Will used to keep all her pieces in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, until I finally got embarrassed enough about watching her cart a dirty plastic bag of mis-matched chess pieces to chess club and tournaments, surrounded by those kids with the competition-style chess sets and the private chess tutors, to sew her up a bag for holding chess pieces that is worthy of my own little chess-playing kid.

The pattern for the bag is as simple as it could get--it's just my drawstring bag tutorial, sized up to match that big old Ziploc bag that I was pretty happy to throw in the trash. The real fun came in finding a stencil of chess pieces online, cutting it out of contact paper and ironing it to the bag, and then having Willow paint it:

We both ended up VERY pleased with our efforts:

And then off it went to chess club!

A TARDIS on My Laptop Sleeve

I'm not going to show you a tutorial for the creation of my laptop sleeve, on account of I did it wrong. I was so afraid of sewing the laptop sleeve too snug that I accidentally sewed it too roomy, and so now I'm pretending like I did it on purpose so that I can also sew our family ipad a protective sleeve, and then I can store the ipad in its sleeve inside the laptop sleeve with the laptop--it's that roomy!

Fortunately, nothing can salvage a poorly-sewn laptop sleeve like a freezer paper stenciled TARDIS.

the TARDIS stencil, originally a BBC freeware image, most recently and easily located at Crafty Lil' Thing

the finished TARDIS, with BLAIDD DRWG ("Bad Wolf" in Welsh, because I'm THAT big of a nerdy fangirl) cut out and ironed on, ready to paint

painted and drying--I had to hit the crafts store for TARDIS-blue Jaquard fabric paint, just so you know how far I'll go

...aaaaaaaaaaaand FINISHED!!! 

There you go--an homage to my current most favorite TV show, my most favorite character and plot line on that show, and a laptop sleeve that I like a lot now, even though it's secretly way too roomy for my laptop.

Acrylic Paint and Fabric Paint Duke it Out!!!

Y'all, don't get locked into that whole "only use fabric paint on fabric" business. It's a conspiracy, I tell you, and frankly quite unnecessary.

These past couple of weeks, I've been sewing up a coupla dozen personal peace flags for a long overdue pumpkinbear etsy shop update (I have to take photos outside for them to look at all decent, and in this weather...brrr!), and if I had to use my uber-expensive Jacquard Neopaque fabric paints on every single PEACE, I would be out of business!

That's not to say that you should never use fabric paint on a non-wearable fabric project, or should always use fabric paint on a wearable fabric project...basically, you have to experiment a little, and figure out what paint to use based on the properties of the individual paints.

For instance, acrylic paint dries stiffer than fabric paint--good quality fabric paint shouldn't dry stiff at all. So for a T-shirt, or baby clothes, you def want to use superior-quality fabric paint. But for your jeans, or a hat, or any other article of clothing for which drape isn't important, knock yourself out with acrylics, if you'd like. But if you're painting even a non-wearable fabric project, but you need it to be flexible and have a lot of drape, you probably want to use fabric paint. With my peace flags, the stiffness of the paint doesn't make a difference, so it doesn't matter if I use fabric paint or acrylic.

Coverage does matter, though, and it pretty much depends on the color of the paint, and a bit on the brand, how well a particular paint will cover a particular fabric color. Even with the Jacquard Neopaque fabric paints, which are supposed to be, well, opaque, the yellow needs two coats before the blue fabric print behind it doesn't show through. Same with the green over the silvery-white fabric that I chose. The white, however, gives perfect coverage in one coat, even over the green fabric that I'm using, as do the rest of the darker colors. With the craft acrylics, every color that I've tried needs two coats before it's opaque over a dark print, so if I have to do two coats anyway, I'd rather use the cheaper acrylic paints than the waaaay more expensive fabric paints.

I like to work with what I already own, too, so for me color matters--I'd rather use the perfect color in a more expensive paint that I already own than go shopping for the perfect color in a less expensive paint. For instance, I like the green of the fabric paint much better on this particular fabric, and I thought the red of the acrylic paint gave the best contrast on the trickier-to-match red fabric, so that's what I used:

Of course, you can always purchase textile medium to give acrylic paint the draping properties of fabric paint, but that's just something else to buy.

Work in Progress: DANCE

 
 
 
All I need now is to acquire some ribbon someplace or another, and my little dancing girl will have a tidy place to keep her tights, leotard, and ballet shoes.

Tutorial: Painted Peace Flags for the New Year

Here's an homage to Tibetan prayer flags that my girlies and I put together over the last couple of weeks. It involved several pleasurable Project Mornings and Project Afternoons in our homeschool, some more reading about Tibet, some more reminiscing about the snow lion, and some happy sewing for me while Matt had the girls out watching football on TV somewhere in the city (one of the nice things about not having TV channels is that must-see football games equal alone time for the Momma).

You can do this project a couple of different ways, either by freehand painting or by freezer paper stenciling--I did the same project both ways, because that's how I roll, so I'm happy to show you both options. The colorway is meant to invoke the color order of the Tibetan prayer flag: blue, white, red, green, yellow. It's your flag, though, so do what you like.

To paint the flags, iron flat some nice, plain, white fabric--

 --and cut it into identical rectangles. Ours are approximately 8"x10".

To stabilize the flags for painting, iron them onto freezer paper. Then, with your favorite fabric markers or paints, go to town!

For this particular project, the girls and I spent some more time talking about peace, what it means to be a peaceful person, and how to keep peace in our hearts and our words and our deeds (my, I'd like them to embrace that one!). Then I asked them to each draw a picture of something that reminded them to be peaceful or that represented peace to them. Willow drew a scene of the Peace Pole outside her former Montessori school--she has many happy memories of the children's peace ceremonies there.

Sydney drew a picture of a beautiful bunch of flowers growing in the dirt. She says that looking at pretty things makes her feel peaceful:

We used Tee Juice markers that I bought in a limited color palette at 70% off on a Joann's Black Friday sale, just to try out. We liked them so much that I bought some more colors and widths last weekend. I think we'll get a lot of use out of them.

The girls wanted to use the remaining fabric that we'd cut out to draw pictures of dinosaurs, and unicorns battling other unicorns, so I made do with the three rectangles that we had painted, and so here's where you get to learn about freezer paper stenciling peace flags, too!

I knew that I wanted the Tibetan prayer flag color order of blue, white, red, green, and yellow, so I pulled printed cottons in those colors from my fabric stash and layed them out to see how I liked the look of them:

Pretty well indeed, I say! Three of the flags have a peace painting on one side and a printed cotton on the other side, and two of the flags are made from printed cotton alone.

To cut out a printed cotton peace flag, cut your fabric at your desired width + two seam allowances and twice your desired length + one seam allowance. Fold it in half with right sides together, sew up the two sides--

--and turn, then fold and press the top edges inside and sew closed. You can insert a ribbon loop in the middle of this top seam, if you wish.

Your painted peace flags will be backed with printed cotton, and finished with a back-to-front mock binding. Pin the painted fabric to the printed cotton, wrong sides together, and cut the printed cotton a half-inch wider than the painted fabric on all sides:

Turn twice and edge stitch on all sides:

Add ribbon loops to the top edge, if you wish.

The printed cotton can easily be freezer paper stenciled even after you've sewn it. I know that you're worried that the paint will bleed through, but it won't. Simply iron your stencil cut from freezer paper to your fabric--

--and then paint!

My best advice for fabric painting is to use the best fabric paints that you can afford. When in doubt, I choose a limited palette of high-quality paint over a large assortment of the cheap stuff. The paint that I used above is Jacquard Lumiere in bronze--this is the current go-to color for pretty much all our projects these days, but one little bottle does last a looooong time.

Heat-set your fabric paint according to the manufacturer's instructions:

Then thread a nice, long piece of twine or ribbon through the hanging loops:

Our peace flags are double-sided. One side faces the front yard and the street, and on that side reads the message that our family would like say to the world at large, and what we would like to have said by others when thinking about our family:

The other side of the flag faces our house, and can best be seen from inside it:

This side is more personal, I think, to be seen just by us and the loved ones who visit us (and our mailman). Here are our personal visions of peace, and some gentle reminders to us to be peaceful as we leave our home and venture out on our daily business.

And if the girls can somehow internalize that peace means that you shouldn't just walk up and smack your sister and then run away, well...that would be so great.