Matboard Stencil Tutorial, IF You Have a Cricut (Sorry)

You betcha stencils are important in Montessori education. Stencils allow for the precise reproduction of shapes whose forms should be internalized--not so much letters or numbers, which children must learn to recognize in a variety of scripts, but geometric figures, for instance, whose degrees and angles remain consistent. The premise lends itself well to my idea to make stencils of each of the fifty states: precise reproductions of consistent forms that the girls would do well to memorize.

Montessori stencils are generally made of metal, and are expensive. Metal, of course, is a logical material for a Montessori stencil. Montessori philosophy avoids the use of plastics, but a paper or cardboard stencil not only wouldn't be nearly capable of withstanding average wear, but it also wouldn't have the kind of high, very stiff edge that gives support to the child's pencil without becoming worn down over time.

Expensive, though...yeah. I'm saving up for a microscope for the girls, and I wouldn't dream of buying stencils. Good thing that I own a Cricut! I've used my Cricut to make everything from paper dolls to patches on my pants to felt board figures--pretty much everything EXCEPT scrapbooking.

Even on the Cricut, cutting matboard is a stretch. But with a little more effort you can make a perfect stencil, and matboard is the perfect material. It's very stiff and very sturdy, yet inexpensive, recyclable, and doesn't require so much fussing that if you wreck a stencil you feel angst about tossing it and trying again.

To make a matboard stencil, you will need:

• Cricut with the cartridge that you want. I'm using the 50 States cartridge to gradually make the girls an entire set of 50 states stencils. Any kind of geometric shape would also be very fun and useful.
• Cricut deep cut blade and deep cut blade housing. It's VERY easy to switch these out on your Cricut.
• matboard pre-cut to the appropriate size. I cut my matboards to approximately 8"x10", with the stencil being at least an inch smaller on all sides than the matboard that contains it.
• X-acto knife and self-healing cutting mat.

1. Install your deep cut blade and deep cut blade housing, and set it to its deepest cut. Then, set the Cricut's pressure dial to almost its highest point, and the speed dial to around the midpoint, if not a little slower.

2. Press the matboard face-up on the sticky mat, and load it into the Cricut. Manually set the paper size as a little smaller than the real size of your matboard, to prevent the Cricut from cutting the stencil too close to the edge of the matboard. Remember this exact paper size, however.

3. Set the size of your shape so that it is at least an inch smaller on its widest side than the size of your matboard.

4. Turn on the multi-cut function.

5. After the Cricut finishes its cuts, re-set the paper size exactly the way you did in step four, and re-cut the stencil, again using the multi-cut function.

6. Unload the mat and, using the x-acto knife, finish cutting out the last little bits that didn't completely cut in the Cricut.

And then you're done!

Now go tag somebody's building with Kentucky.

Raw Wool, 1/4 Fleece

Guess what I bought at the Ann Arbor farmer's market yesterday?

It has grass and twigs in it, and smells like sheep. The girls and I are going to have a blast this summer.

A Big Reunion for My Little One

She chose an outfit consisting of all her favorite party clothes:

She wrote her name on her nametag so that all her former nurses and doctors could remember her:

Her father showed her an incubator just like the one that held her four years ago:

She got her face painted--

--like a purple pony, which was just what she requested:

She ate lots of party food:

She played lots of party games:

She did the bubble dance with her sister:

And she reminded us once again, as she reminds us daily, that we are very, VERY lucky people:

I hope that you had a lucky day today, too.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tutorial: Coffee Filter Tie-Dye (Sorta)

I've mentioned before that my Papa's house contains all kinds of bulk goodies that my house doesn't--white flour, cake mixes, paper towels, paper plates, paper cups, etc. The girls would add to this list pudding cups, Pringles, Cheez Its, American cheese, cream soda, Reese's Cups, Wonder bread, etc., etc., until I tear my hair out, but let's stick to my list so that my shoulders don't get all tense, shall we? Mmmkay.

So even though we try to be pretty eco-friendly in our crafting at home, when we're at Papa's house we can experiment with perhaps some crafting projects that I've been tempted by in my various readings but that call for ingredients that I'm not comfortable buying. Papa's house was where I first made play dough, which calls for white flour, and now I actually own a stock of cheap white flour that I use just for crafting. I also made my first rainbow cake experiments there, and you all know that I am now the rainbow cake queen of the universe.

Guess what? Papa also owns coffee filters, and I have been wanting to try this wet marker tie dye project for FOREVER. And it turns out that it IS awesome, so you do it, too. Here's what you need:

• 
  
  coffee filter
• 
  
  markers, but probably not the washable kind

• 
  
  water
• 
  
  eye dropper or spritzer or, as we did, a fingertip to dip and then shake

1. Flatten out the coffee filter with your hand, then color a big, bold picture in it with your markers. Don't bother for anything too elaborate, but feel free to be super-colorful:

2. Drip or spritz water lightly over the entire surface of the filter, taking your time so that you can enjoy the sight of the ink running and spreading and mixing. This is the same concept that we'll use when we revisit coffee filter chromatography in a couple of weeks (on account of I put some of Papa's coffee filters in my suitcase--thanks, Papa!). Put a paper towel (shout-out!) underneath the filter to catch any ink that washes completely out of the filter, and keep in mind that if you pour on too much water, the ink WILL wash out completely. You'll have a pretty and colorful paper towel then, I suppose

3. Lay your coffee filter flat to dry, then enjoy!

Did I mention that Papa's house also has all the popsicles that you can eat?

Horses! Horses! Horses!

Kentucky Horse Park? Has a lot of horses.

Lots of different breeds of horses, with their riders dressed in appropriate costumes:

Although this rider, during the horse-and-rider meet-and-greet after this show, did respond to my eager nerd questions about her bareback riding of her Appaloosa by smiling, putting her finger to her lips, then lifting up her saddle blanket to show me the real saddle hidden underneath.

The saddle set-up on this Frisian doesn't look authentically medieval, either, but there was JOUSTING!!!

JOUSTING!!! Five points if you knew before this very moment that I have a master's degree in English with an emphasis in medieval studies.

I mistakenly brought only my telephoto lens, assuming that all the horses would be in pastures or shows and thus far away. I regretted this for the entire day, as we were invited over and over again to pat draft horses, carriage, horses, saddle horses, and show horses. A trainer walking by with a horse, if one of the girls showed the slightest interest (and of COURSE they did), would invariably stop and encourage the girls to pat that horse, while gamely engaging in horsey nerd-talk with me. I now know several very interesting things about horses, from the reasoning behind giving draft horses very short names to the fact that if a thoroughbred is retired to breed and it turns out that he's sterile, he gets infertility treatments.

The Kentucky Horse Park is also a working establishment, not just a tourist destination, and we were welcome to walk down to the arena area and watch this dressage competition:

It was a hot, sticky, horse-filled, day, wrapped up by a trip to the gift shop for horse trading cards and postcards.

In other words, it was horse heaven:

 The early bedtime that night didn't hurt, either.

The Monkey Bars on our To-Do List

It's long been a goal to put some hard-core playground equipment down in the basement playroom, so the girls and I were all three pretty excited to see these hard-core mini monkeybars at the Arkansas Museum of Discovery in Little Rock:

Definitely buildable.

P.S. Check out my weekend blog posts over at Crafting a Green World--a tutorial for oven-bake salt dough, and a step-by-step tutorial for DIY postcards.

Mud Island, and the Miniature Mississippi

One of the most amazing things that I've ever seen while traveling is the Mud Island River Walk. It's a five-block-long scale model of the Mississippi River, made with reference to topographical maps, where 30" equals one mile and granite ridges measure depth in 5' increments.

Oh, and you can wade in it:

A few of the biggest cities along the Mississippi are also mapped to scale, including New Orleans, and looking at New Orleans topographically and the Gulf of Mexico, which is represented by a paddle-boat pond...yeah, it seems obvious in hindsight. The girls didn't care about New Orleans, but they did really enjoy that the representations of all the biggest cities along the Mississippi also included the city bridges across the Mississippi: 

It was the perfect weather for running and jumping and playing and exploring, and I'm pretty sure that some geography got mixed in there somewhere, too:

VERY IMPORTANT: When you go wading, don't forget to hold your dress up out of the water: 

Otherwise it might get wet, and then you'd be embarrassed.

Postcards from the Trip

Because Momma is cheap.

And because we like to make art.

Because it's homeschooling in geography.

And because gift shops don't usually sell postcards of our favorite weird stuff that we saw, or the random imaginary stuff that we thought about.

Hence our DIY postcards, drawn in fine-point Sharpie on Bristol board that I cut to USPS standard postcard sizes. Thus Sydney was able to draw a Gateway Arch with sunflowers growing almost up to its top, a sight that I'd REALLY like to see in real life:

And Willow was able to send her impressions of the Real Pirates exhibit at the St. Louis Science Center back to one of her little playmates, who she knows would enjoy the idea of the swordplay:

I sent Matt a postcard of the Gateway Arch on which I diagrammed the location of all the mean/nice people and weird overheard conversations that I encountered--it wasn't as good as being able to poke him and hiss, "Oh, my God! Look over there!", but it was close.

One night, when we were working at the dining room table in my parents' house, I asked the girls to draw a postcard of their absolute favorite thing from the past couple of days of travel that we'd just finished. Here's Sydney's postcard:

It's the hotel pool, of course.

My Child as a Confederate Soldier

Do all history museums let kids dress up like a Confederate Soldier, or just the history museums in the South?

It definitely takes a special kind of history musem to have a real, live, working soda fountain:

Although sprinkles may be a more modern invention:

But after eating a lot of ice cream (with an old-fashioned cherry coke for me and a strawberry coke for my mother), there is nothing better than to run around outside on the grounds of the old Fort Smith, chasing covered wagons--

--and doing a happy little jig next to the gallows:

Unfortunately, it wasn't the anniversary of any executions, and so the noose wasn't up. Can't have everything, I guess...

I Rawk at Tetris

I accepted, met, and EXCEEDED the challenge put out by the St. Louis Science Center, which sadly did not put its money where its mouth was:

I love Tetris. LOVE it. I can remember sitting in civics class in junior high, playing Tetris in my head the way that I've heard that really smart people play mental chess, or mental baseball. Of course, I was a really smart 80s Nintendo nerd who'd never even touched a chessboard until I bought one myself with my own money at Wal-mart later that year, so I played mental Tetris.

The girls, too, enjoyed these Tetris magnets--

--which reminded me that I totally have some magnet-backed felt at home (bought at clearance from Joann's, and likely put on clearance because it's such an odd item), and I am TOTALLY going to make my own set of Tetris magnets when we're done with our road trip.

Speaking of road trips...I showed the girls how to use a rotary dial telephone at the local history museum today. They did NOT get it--Sydney kept just poking her finger at each number, no matter how many times I demonstrated the dial procedure, just poke, poke, poke, and I was all, raising my voice, "You have to DIAL it, that's why it's called a DIAL telephone, because you DIAL the number!!!"

When is the last time that you actually dialed a telephone number?

630 Feet, Straight Up

Was our visit to the Gateway Arch wonderful? I mean, was it crowded and touristy? Was it tiresome and tedious? Were the kids whiny and bored? Was security a pain in the butt, and also worryingly lax?

Sometimes, but also?

Yes, it was WONDERFUL!

Will thoroughly enjoyed her every second, from start to finish, parking garage entrance to parking garage exit. Syd was a bit more of a challenge--she's a child who enjoys her comforts, and a long walk on a warm day, a long wait in a long line, are nearly intolerable to her. However, there are three things in her favor: 1) She rarely throws a fit in public, 2) She perks up readily when the scenario changes, and 3) she can often be settled down with a Sesame Street podcast on my ipod. So she watched a lot of Sesame Street while we waited.

And the wait? Worth it. The crazy tram-ride was apparently super-fun, and as soon as we got all the way up and out of our tram at the top of the arch and the girls saw what it was all about, they were thrilled.

THRILLED.

Universally and unequivocally thrilled.

The little windows along the top of the arch are perfect for children, because they're on a well-carpeted slant that even a little kid can easily scramble up, and two kids fit perfectly at one window:

I was worried that the kiddos would look out the window for two seconds and then be done, and that I wouldn't get much of a chance to sightsee, but that wasn't the case at all. The girls visited every single window in the arch, and spent long minutes at each one, excitedly pointing out to each other objects of fascination such as Swimming Pools! On roofs! Satellite dishes! On roofs! A chair over there! On that roof! And lots and lots of debris floating down the flooded Mississippi.

I thought that it was pretty cool to watch a Cardinals game from the top of the arch:

And those tiny, tiny people?

They're 630 feet straight down from us.

We had a looooooong drive after that, which encompassed the final book in our Geronimo Stilton trilogy and the first seven audiobooks of the Magic Tree House series (book 8 is waiting for us on the way to Memphis, and then we'll move on to The Mouse and the Motorcycle), and today has been mostly about tantrums and junk food and dark circles under little eyes, but Willow did draw a picture this evening that looked a lot like this photo:

630 feet, straight up from us.

Next on the Agenda

Guess where we're going today!