I Read The Cold Vanish and It Really Bummed Me Out

Cleaned Christmas off the coffee table, and now it's time to eat Domino's and watch Trolls!

Because why would I want to read something lighthearted and fun over my Winter Break staycation, when I could instead read something seriously depressing?

The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands by Jon Billman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is tied with When You Find My Body as a compelling, first-person story of what it’s like to love someone who’s gone missing in the wild. The author, Jon Billman, spends the most time with Randy, the father of Jacob Gray, a bicyclist missing from Olympic National Park. Billman writes vividly about Randy’s obsession with searching for his son, and it really moved me… although not, I don’t think, in the way that Billman intended. Unless he wanted me to spend New Year’s Eve super sad about the meaningless and futility of life?

In between writing about Jacob and Randy, Billman writes about the cold cases and search efforts for other people mysteriously missing in the wild. Cases like Amy Bechtel’s and Marty Leger’s highlight how mysterious and frustrating it is when a person simply disappears, and how often it’s not even in what we would think of as “the wild”--both of those cases happened on marked trails. Bechtel’s case, especially, illustrates how easily a missing person’s loved ones can turn on each other or behave unpredictably; if Bechtel’s husband had submitted to a lie detector test, something that seems like a sticking point for her blood relatives, would it have put their minds at rest, or would the test’s notoriously faulty results have caused him to be unfairly targeted?

However, my biggest takeaway from this book is Coast to Coast AM, a radio show Billman mentions a few times in the book. I found its podcast version on Spotify, and while it’s not going in my regular rotation, it did keep my family entertained for a few hours off and on while putting together puzzles over winter break. 

I’ve since been told that in 2020-2021 the show was all about the anti-mask COVID conspiracies, which is gross, but I found that at least in the recent episodes the dynamic of the host nodding thoughtfully and asking engaged questions while his guests ramble on in pseudoscience nonsense-speak is actually kind of charming? Like, did you know that you should be writing down your dreams because they’re all precognitive? Also, aliens!

Anyway, Billman’s point in mentioning Coast to Coast AM was to bring up Sasquatches, and the people who believe in Sasquatches, and to kind of, in a wavy-hands sort of way, connect them to the search for Jacob Gray, in particular. I feel like the point he originally wanted to make was how kind, helpful, and generous the Olympic Project, in particular, had been regarding the search, including allowing Jacob’s father, Randy, to stay in their headquarters. The larger, better point was possibly meant to be how, due to lack of government oversight/interest in the plight of the missing on public lands, the absence of a definitive clearinghouse of data, and disorganization and petty disputes over authority, it fell to a group of goodhearted crackpots to fill in the gaps as best they could. However, what Billman ends up writing about is how he sat there and watched as Randy grew more and more desperate, and more and more willing to entertain all the crackpot ideas that came his way, whether it was aliens or Sasquatch or wild goose chases caused by every psychic with a cell phone and/or access to his Facebook page. It was abject--you could tell Billman also found it abject--and it ultimately felt unkind and voyeuristic, the way that he notes every time Randy brought up Sasquatches, or followed a lead that was about Sasquatches, or, in a scene that jarred and upset me, cried out to Sasquatches who might be watching invisibly to ask them to help him find his son. It felt wrong to vicariously stare at this man in the most broken moments of his life, a bridge too far while attempting to illustrate what it’s like to be a person whose loved one is missing in the wild, and it made me question Billman’s capacity for compassion.

I was also really uncomfortable with Billman’s anecdote about accompanying Alan Duffy and a couple of his bloodhounds on a completely unnecessary walk through the former neighborhood of the late JonBenet Ramsey just so Duffy could show Billman that even after all these years, his bloodhound still smelled cadaver at her house. The current homeowner--and her young child!--were apparently in their yard at the time, and these guys were enough of a disturbance that the homeowner threatened to call the police. I know Duffy and his bloodhounds do a lot of good, but this particular display was crass and unethical, it distressed innocent people, and Billman should have declined to participate.

Overall, though, this book is better than those few isolated lurches into looky-loo-ism. I did come away feeling like I could see the experience of loving someone who’s gone missing in the wild. That experience, though, is desperately sad, and this is, therefore, a sad book to read. The culmination of all of Billman’s first-person work is the phone call he receives near the end of the book from Randy, telling him that Jacob’s body has been found by some biologists working in the park. It is a terrible result, not the least of which because all of Randy’s efforts of the prior 16 months had been towards finding Jacob. He followed every lead, however unlikely, he dove into swollen rivers to search underneath logjams, he hiked over impossibly rugged terrain, he drove as far as Canada simply to see if Jacob might have gone there. And nothing that he did helped find his son. Those biologists were always going to be in that place at that time. He could have sat his butt at home that entire time and the result would have been the same. That’s the saddest thing, to me. If it was at all possible for a parent to find their child by force of will, by effort or determination, Randy would have found Jacob. But he didn’t, so it’s not possible.

I suppose my main takeaway from this book is that in these years-long searches for missing people, of course there are going to be people behaving poorly, but fortunately Billman also includes plenty of stories of people behaving admirably, as well. Duffy does admirable things with his bloodhounds. Elite cross-country runners volunteer their time to search backcountry areas that typical searches couldn’t touch. Randy Gray benefits from the kindness of strangers over and over again in his search, and is, in turn, kind and generous to everyone around him. Jacob sounds like he was an awesome guy, and I hope that Randy is able to feel some peace now that he knows where Jacob is.

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How My High School Girl Scout Troop Earned the (*cough, cough* unofficial *cough*) Harvest Badge

Yes, we made up another Girl Scout badge.

I'm telling you, though, that if you've got a troop of older kids, especially Seniors and Ambassadors like I do, and you're not letting them make up badges, then you're sleeping on some of the best girl-led experiential learning that Girl Scouts offers!

Because if you've got a troop of older kids, I know you know that the official GSUSA badge offerings for those age groups suuuuucks. I'd way rather have a bunch of happy and engaged kids flouting the Girl Scout Badge Police than I would a bunch of bored kids reluctantly working through that same dang Robotics badge for the umpteenth time (Seriously, GSUSA? Three Robotics badges per level? At EVERY level?!? And they're all pretty much the same?!? Please hire me to revamp your badges I will do such an awesome job I swear). 

Anyway... during last Spring's budget/planning meeting my Girl Scouts got super revved up about this cute Harvest badge design--

--and decided that they wanted to earn it this autumn. And so we did!

The kids decided on most of the activities, and I fine-tuned them and sneaked in a few more educational bits. Our local council is also offering an Apple Quest fun patch this season (similar to the one I listed here), so I also bought those and we added in some more apple-themed activities to our plans.

Here are our activities!

Research apple varieties; taste-test apples.

For our apple pie meeting, each Girl Scout was asked to bring approximately five pounds of one apple variety, a small serving plate, and an informational label that they'd researched and created for that variety. 

At the start of the meeting, every Girl Scout sliced one of her apples (giving me a good chance to observe and make sure that they all had appropriate knife skills for our upcoming tasks) and displayed it on its serving plate, then we went around the room and each Girl Scout spoke about her apple variety while we all tasted it. Every apple variety was purposefully bred, so it was interesting to hear what characteristics each variety was supposedly bred for--and if we agreed! The kids also quickly noticed that the apple varieties browned differently, so that was interesting, too.

Make apple pie filling; make homemade pie crust; bake an apple pie; learn to decorate a pie.

As you can tell from the heading, this step accomplished a few of the required activities for the Harvest badge and the Apple Quest fun patch. The Girl Scouts were most excited about baking a pie and decorating it, and since apple pie filling is dead simple and my teenager knows exactly how to make homemade pie crust, I figured that baking an apple pie from scratch was juuuust about doable as a Girl Scout meeting.

And it just about was!

Here's what I asked each Girl Scout to bring:

• approximately five pounds of any variety of apple
• sharp knife
• cutting board
• mixing bowl
• oven mitt
• rolling pin
• measuring spoons and cups
• hair tie or bandana

A couple of the cleverest kids (or the kids with the cleverest parents!) also brought a vegetable peeler and/or a cutting/coring thingy and a dish towel. I attempted to teach everyone how to easily peel and core an apple with just a paring knife, but this did NOT go over well--the kids hated the very idea of it, and they traded around the peelers and corers instead. Kids these days!

I used troop funds to buy all the pie crust and the rest of the apple filling ingredients, as well as aluminum foil, plastic wrap, aluminum pie tins, a 12-pack of Mason jars, and several prepared pie crusts.

After everyone had taste-tested the apples, my teenager taught the rest of the Girl Scouts how to make pie crust from scratch, while my co-leader and I assisted. It was a process, but everyone did create a pie crust! 

The kids wrapped their pie crusts in plastic wrap and put them in the refrigerator to chill while I taught everyone the dead simple process of making fresh apple pie filling from scratch. I encouraged the kids to use a variety of apples, relying on their taste-testing to help them choose, and to taste the filling as they went to make sure that it was to their preference. We might have a picky eater or two in the troop, ahem...

When the pie filling was ready, the kids took their pie crusts out of the refrigerator and learned how to roll them out and put them in the disposable pie tins I'd bought. They added the filling, then rolled out their top crust and decided how they wanted to put it on. When planning this meeting, the kids had been interested in learning how to decorate their pies and make cute pie crusts, so I showed them several inspo images from Pie Style, but everyone ultimately decided to make a lattice top, which was a new skill for most.

Then the kids crimped the edges, wrapped their pies VERY well in plastic wrap... and put them back in the refrigerator to take home. We did NOT have enough room to be baking five whole pies at once!

Instead, I brought out the prepared pie crusts and the kids used those, along with any remaining apple pie filling, to make hand pies and/or muffin tin pies. I think they might have liked that activity the best, because they baked quickly and then the kids could eat them!

Learn strategies to use up surplus apples.

Food waste is one of my personal issues (and the troop has those pesky picky eaters!), so it was important to me to show the kids some ways to preserve or prepare apples that you don't feel like eating out of hand or in a pie.

Both applesauce and apple juice are the easiest thing in the world to make, so I had both my giant stock pot and my very old juicer (it was a wedding gift!) out, and at the start of the meeting, since applesauce does take some time, I asked the kids which they'd rather make. They agreed on juice, so at the very end of the meeting, after each kid had cleaned up but before she left, she got to juice herself a pint jar's worth of apple juice to take home with her. This was a new experience for almost everyone, and I think they all really liked it! 

And, of course, the most important strategy to use up apples: while the kids worked, they threw all of their peels, cores, and scraps into a giant bowl in the middle of the table. After we'd cleaned up, I tossed the entire bowl of scraps to the chickens, and they feasted!

Create an apple recipe book.

Since most of those apple pie activities has been to earn the Harvest badge, the kids needed, in my opinion, one more apple-centric activity to completely earn the Apple Quest fun patch, so I made a Shared Google Doc and asked them to each contribute one apple recipe so that we could make a little cookbook.

I'd hoped they'd get super into the project, and at that time we had an upcoming volunteer date at a local food pantry so I also had it in my head that perhaps we could print the recipes into a little booklet for the pantry to hand out during those times when it was swamped with apples, but the kids did not get super into the project, and so we didn't do anything more with it. 

To be honest, I think they were just flat-out sick of apples! But the project did remind me that my favorite cake, Smitten Kitchen's apple cake, exists, and it's just as delicious as I remembered, so as far as I'm concerned the whole thing was a huge success. 

Contribute to a harvest meal for someone in need.

The kids definitely wanted to do a service project as part of this badge, but they dithered a bit over what, exactly, they wanted to do. Also remember that high school kids are VERY busy, and some of these kids were also working on college applications, scholarship applications, Gold Award applications... It is a lot of work to be a high school student these days!

I researched a few opportunities for them to consider, including serving a meal at one of our city's shelters or hosting a food drive for one of the local food pantries. The idea that the kids liked best, though, was volunteering on a specific day to help food pantry patrons choose the components for a Thanksgiving dinner. So the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we went to the food pantry's distribution location and helped fetch and carry and otherwise made ourselves useful. I carried soooo many frozen turkeys!

Make an autumn craft.

The kids wanted to make gnomes, but we kept running out of time to make them. Eventually, when we met to wrap the gifts they had bought for the kid we were sponsoring for Christmas (for the same food pantry as the Thanksgiving project!), I tacked gnome-crafting onto that meeting. 

I actually had almost everything for this gnome project already in my stash, so I just bought a faux fur remnant, rice, and hot glue. The gnomes all turned out sooo cute, with bodies made from one of my partner's old Henleys and hats made from some of my infinite felt stash. 

References and Resources

Here are some other resources I had available during our Harvest badgework:

• The Apple Lover's Cookbook: This book has photos and information about lots of apple varieties, and the recipes are good for Girl Scouts to flip through to see all the yummy possibilities for cooking with apples.
• The Book on Pie: The recipes in this book look DELICIOUS, so it was another book that was fun for Girl Scouts to flip there. There are so many kinds of pie!!!
• Pie Academy: This has good process photos, especially of making the pie crust and making a lattice top. It has several different pie crust recipes, and some unusual recipes for pie fillings (one contains KETCHUP!?!?).
• Pie Camp: This was my main reference book for the pie meeting. I taught the kids McDermott's "20-20-20" method for baking, passed on her tips for preventing a soggy bottom, and demonstrated how to make and use the foil shield that prevents a burned top. We also used her cooking instructions to make the muffin tin pies.
• Pie Squared: These are essentially sheet pan pies, both sweet and savory. This would be a good recipe book if you wanted to serve fresh-baked pie at your Girl Scout troop meeting.
• Pie Style: Even though it was plenty for the troop to learn how to make a lattice pie crust, because decorating pies was something they'd expressed interest in I showed them the photos from this book of faaancy pie decorations. Everyone went "Oooh!," but nobody wanted to give any of the ideas a try just then, ahem...

Overall, I think this turned out to be a very successful badge! The kids wanted to do it and helped plan it, everyone learned a new skill, a couple of kids got a chance to practice their leadership by teaching the others specific techniques, we did some community service, and now each kid has some more practical life knowledge in her toolkit. 

Up next: cookie season, including seeing if I can sneak in a cookie badge or two, and travel planning, including me looking for yet another retired or Council's Own travel-focused badge that these well-traveled kids haven't yet earned. 

Hire me to create more travel badge for older kids, GSUSA! I'll do an awesome job!

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Upcycle Photographs into Stickers: Three Methods That Really Work

 

I first published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Upcycle your old print photographs into stickers, and you’ll unlock a whole new way to display and enjoy those magical memories!

I don’t do a lot of crafting with print photos anymore, so I was a bit dismayed recently when I found a huge stack of 4″x6″ photos leftover from my scrapbooking days. Gotta clean out my closets more often, I guess!

I recognized all these photos as ones that I have digital copies of (I’m still not ready to talk about The Terrible Hard Drive Erasure of 2017…), so I could have just tossed them all into the recycling. But yikes, how wasteful would that be?!?

Mind you, I have no problem tossing stuff that I truly want to toss, but Past Julie clearly spent time and money on this photo order, and all the photos are of my adorable babies, now almost all grown up, and our fun traveling adventures. As far as I know the Jedi Training Academy no longer even exists at Walt Disney World, so that photo of my tiny padawan winning a light saber battle against Darth Vader himself deserves a fate much more exciting than the recycling bin!

Also, there is genuine terror in her eyes in that photo, and I laugh every time I look at it. Kid was pretty sure she was fighting for her life up there!

I have fun crafting plans for most of these surprise photos, the first of which is stickers!

Here are three easy methods for upcycling print photos (and book pages, wrapping paper… just about any paper works for this!) into stickers, along with the pros and cons of each method.

Method 1: Adhere a photo to an existing sticker.

Pros: Quick, materials are easy to obtain.

Con: Stickers are low-tack.

If you’ve got a sheet of printer labels on hand, you can have your own photo stickers ready to go in minutes.

These stickers will be pretty low-tack, so cutting the photos down a bit will reduce their weight.

Use an excellent white glue, like Aleene’s Tacky Glue, to adhere the photos to the front of the label sheet. Let the glue dry, then cut out the photo stickers.

Glossy photos don’t make the best stickers right out of the gate because of how easily they show smudges. To solve this, laminate the front of each photo by sticking a piece of clear tape to it.

Fair warning: I, personally, am MISERABLE at jobs like this. One of my teenagers even installs all my screen protectors for me because she can’t stand looking at the state of my phone screen, all bubbles and trapped lint, when I do it myself. I had to cut down that photo above right because I somehow managed to trap a giant cat hair under the tape, sigh. So be super careful with your own tape lamination!

Method 2: Paint the back with Aleene’s Tack it Over and Over Again glue.

Pros: Most eco-friendly, least use of additional materials, stickers are repositionable.

Cons: Most time-consuming method, requires a specialty supply.

This is my favorite way to make stickers. It’s super easy, and I used to do this to make re-usable stickers for my kids from old book pages, toy catalogues, and our drawings all the time–tbh, I think the bottle I used for these stickers is the same bottle I was using way back then!

To make these re-usable stickers, cut your photo to size, then coat the back with a VERY thin coat of Aleene’s Tack It Over And Over Again glue. I like to do this on top of parchment paper, so I can brush excess glue off the edges of the photos and onto the paper:

Let these photo stickers dry for about 24 hours, then peel them off the parchment paper. Even though they are repositionable, I like to stick them to wax paper to store them.

Method 3: Use a store-bought sticker maker.

Pros: Makes the highest-quality stickers by far.

Cons: Most expensive, least eco-friendly.

I wouldn’t buy one of these for myself, but I do use the snot out of the Xyron Creative Station Lite that I bought for my kid back when she was a tween. She creates a lot of art, and I thought that she might like to make stickers and magnets out of her own little art pieces… and she does!

But yikes, this machine is made entirely of plastic, and each cartridge is made from more plastic. Please feel free to spam me with suggestions for more eco-friendly models!

I will say, though, that the stickers this machine makes are WONDERFUL, easily equivalent to good store-bought stickers. We’ve worked with materials as thick as food packaging cardboard, and the stickers always come out well. This cartridge even laminates the top of the sticker, so glossy photos remain smudge-free.

Ugh for all that plastic, though!

I wasn’t excited to find these photos in the back of a closet, true, but I have to say that I am excited to have a fun little way to display some of them! It definitely brings a bit of magic into my daily grind to catch a glimpse of a happy memory and a sweet kid or two.

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In Which the Key to Happiness is Raclette (and Twinkle Lights!)

There were a couple of new-to-me festive holiday activities that I wanted to try this year, because after all, what is Christmas without a glut of too many holiday activities? The Christmas tree farm and five Nutcracker performances and White Christmas Family Movie Night and one or two Krampus street festivals clearly aren't enough to sustain one. If one is truly serious about thoroughly exhausting oneself re: Christmas, one must ALSO drive over an hour each way to visit a Christmas market and walk the grounds of the art museum to see its light display!

I didn't really know beforehand what one does during a Christmas market, but happily we all arrived at Christkindlmarkt hungry, because to the best of my knowledge now, post-visit, what I *think* one does is stand around in the lines for various food stalls, then stand around and eat the food you bought, then walk past displays of nutcrackers and ornaments and those German wooden cut-out things for sale, then buy some more food and eat it.

The lines for all the food were super long, so we divided and conquered, with my partner and one kid standing in line for these weird spiral-cut deep-fried potatoes on a stick things, and me and the other kid standing in line for raclette sandwiches.

As the kid and I were standing at the end of the long line, she said something approximating, "Ugh, I'll be glad when we get closer to the raclette stand so we can get away from whatever this disgusting smell is."

I said, "Uhhhhh...."

If you don't like to smell gross things, I'm afraid that I have terrible news for you regarding raclette.

But look how festive it is!

This was my first raclette experience, as well, and checking out the view of the hyper-efficient raclette assembly was quite a lot of the fun:

But was it worth the wait (and the lingering scent of raclette)?

Friends, I only hope that I smile at my partner sometimes the way that I am smiling about this raclette sandwich:

And when the weird spiral fried potato on a stick envoy returned with weird spiral fried potatoes on a stick to eat along with my raclette sandwich?

Y'all, this may have been my most favorite culinary experience EVER. My previous most favorite culinary experience ever was the yogurt with Nutella and sour cherry spoon sweets that I ate for breakfast every morning on our 2017 Greece trip, but raclette sandwich and weird spiral potato on a stick now reigns supreme.

Who knows what even more delicious food the world might offer?

So... yeah. You stand in line to get stuff to eat, stand around and eat it, walk around to looky-loo at the pretty decorations and Christmas stuff for sale--

--and then stand in line to get something else to eat. To even out the sublime raclette experience, this Belgian hot chocolate was DISGUSTING. It tasted very... buttery? I'm terribly upset by the idea of drinking butter, and it turned out that so is everyone else, as it took the four of us splitting it to finish it off.

And no, don't ask why we didn't just toss it if none of us liked it. That requires far more common sense than any of us have. 

Fortunately, this crepe was delicious!

I had just about pushed through as many crowds as I felt like pushing through by the time we left to get to the Newfield's Winterlights. Every year the Newfield art museum puts up this light show on their grounds, and I'd finally reached a critical mass of Facebook friends posting about it to make my FOMO severe enough that I was willing to shell out genuine cash money for the purpose of looking at twinkle lights.

They WERE very pretty! 

My favorite was the landscape below, which was set up to twinkle along to music. When we walked up, it was just starting the Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy, and y'all KNOW how I feel about Nutcracker stuff this time of year!

I should have brought my DSLR, but my brain was in Quality Family Time mode instead of Cool Photography mode and I didn't think of it, dang it. So just imagine how awesome these shots *could* have been if I'd taken them with a proper camera instead of my at least five-models-outdated phone:

My other favorite spot at Winterlights was this pathway with the motion lights:

I am a sucker for motion lights! 

Christmas is VERY important to me, and every now and then, as the kids grow up, it hits me hard when I realize that they've outgrown one of our Christmas traditions. No more public library story times with Santa, no more Children's Museum winter exhibit (with yet another visit with Santa, ahem), no more doing a little Christmas activity or craft every single day in December. I don't even take the kids shopping anymore to pick out gifts, because they've got driver's licences and Amazon accounts!

One of the things that I had not anticipated, though, is how fun it actually is to try out new family activities as the kids grow. My little kids would not have had the patience to stand in a bunch of lines at Christkindlmarkt and eat a bunch of food and walk around and window shop, but my big kids love that kind of stuff... other than the overwhelming raclette miasma, of course. They would have enjoyed Winterlights even as little kids, but my partner and I would have spent all our own attention wrangling them and making sure they didn't wander off into the dark art museum grounds and didn't trip over extension cords or fall off decorative pedestrian bridges into tiny canals filled with twinkle lights, etc. Or maybe one kid would have been pitching a fit instead of just sulking quietly like a teenager. 

So I dunno. I'm still trying to find my way with these grown-up beings who used to be so small, but I think this was a pretty fair approximation of a holiday win. 

I do think that I can kind of still smell raclette, though...

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I Finished the Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet (and the Dolch Sight Word Cards!)

 

Once upon a time, waaaay back in January 2023, Past Julie thought, "Ooh, I have the perfect idea for a cute Christmas gift for my niece! I'll hand-sew her a moveable alphabet out of the rest of my stash of wool felt. I'll just sew, like, one letter a week and she'll have SO many letters by Christmas!"

June 2023 rolled around, and Past Julie thought, "Hmm, no big deal. I'll just start stitching a couple of letters a week."

During the October meeting of my mending group, I happily cut out letters and burbled to my fellow menders that "I just need to sew one a day and they'll be done in plenty of time before Christmas!"

During the November meeting, I said, a little more grimly, "Just two a day and I can squeak them into the mail just in time for Christmas."

Those last couple of days in December, it was more like six a day while binge-watching Chicago Med DVDs, but look at the glorious result!

I am SO pleased with them! 

Here's a rooster for size comparison, because the entire flock could not get it out of their heads that these colorful nuggets were perhaps made of delicious chicken food:

My favorite part of this project is that even though yes, it took a lot of me-hours to accomplish, the materials are ENTIRELY stash!

The felt is a really nice merino wool felt that I bought long ago for projects with my own kids (it's this exact set, but I bought 8"x10" cuts instead of the 4"x6" cuts shown here). I blanket stitched the letters with basic-grade Amazon embroidery floss and I stuffed each letter with snips of that same felt, and won my own personal game of wool felt chicken because after the very last letter was stuffed, I had less than a handful of little wool felt snippies left. 

I even had all the colors left! I managed a complete rainbow to start the set--

--and also had enough grey, brown, black, and white to make a nice variety and multiples of every letter (except for X and Q, ahem):

My partner handled creating all the Dolch sight words in the same font and size, and I backed each one in pretty paper and laminated it so my niece can use them as templates to make words with the wool felt letters:

Wool felt has such a lovely feel, though, and the colors are so pretty, that I'm hoping that the letters alone are a fun sensory experience. Sensory experiences build intrinsic knowledge and increase one's love for a topic.

It's clear that the chickens, at least, appreciate the sensory appeal!

Even though this project took a loooong time, it was not hard at all, and I actually would recommend it as a beginner-level hand-sewing project for absolutely anyone. Over Thanksgiving break my college kid sewed a perfectly acceptable "I" after about five seconds of instruction, and it's now mixed in there somewhere with the rest of the letters, completely indistinguishable from the lot (well, *I* can distinguish it, but definitely nobody else could)...

Best. Christmas. Yet. Now, to figure out something even more unwieldy to make for next year!

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