Her First Embroidery Project

Mind you, I'VE never done an embroidery project before.

I do, however, have the habit of purchasing, when they're on enormous sale, or acquiring, when I find them for free, craft or homeschool supplies that I think will be useful "someday," and then putting them on our craft or homeschool shelves. I find that with my creative, busy, industrious children, someday does come, and so I wasn't really surprised when Willow pulled Sublime Stitching off a shelf one evening, spent some time flipping through it, and then asked to do an embroidery project.

I bought that book, or perhaps received it as a Christmas present, years ago. This is how it happens here.

I think I could have pulled together all the needed supplies--fabric, embroidery hoop, embroidery floss--here and there from my stash of freely acquired stuff, but I also have, also bought years ago, also at a good price, a Sublime Stitching Stitch-It Kit, complete with two tea towels, an embroidery hoop, and embroidery floss.

And that's how, twenty minutes after she first professed her desire, without a lot of fuss or stress or searching about, Willow was here:

We read the directions and properly set up the embroidery transfer on the fabric and in its hoop, and organized the floss in an untangled manner, but I didn't see a good point to asking Willow to master any particular proper "stitches," so I just let her have at it:

Yes, the transfer is on the dark and thick side. It's meant to be transferred lightly, but I wanted Willow to have a good outline to follow.

And so onward, towards a swan with a blue beak and pink feathers, and a plan for green wings, I believe:

Like any good embroidery project, this one is set aside and taken up again at leisure. It lives, in its free time, on a shelf here in the study, right next to the embroidery book and the stitch-it kit and Sydney's embroidery project, because of course she took one look at Willow working away, and realized that she, too, had always longed to embroider.

It's Always a Fine Day for...

...sidewalk chalk paint!

Homemade sidewalk chalk paint is a VERY easy recipe, but it's more of a niche art supply here, in that the girls tend to forget all about it for months at a time, and then, goofing around outside while their dad cleans up the front porch (it had reached the point where, even though I'm not all feng shui and I don't always tend to the appearance of our home from the outside, I was starting to worry that trick-or-treaters would be too frightened to approach our house!), one of them discovers the sidewalk stencils, and then it's as if a lightbulb goes off--

"Sidewalk chalk paint! Yeah, let's do it!"

And there goes the afternoon!

WIP Wednesday: Flannel Kid Pajamas

It's my new study's inaugural sewing project--flannel pajamas for Willow:

The pattern is McCall's 6535 (which means that I could also make Willow a karate uniform!) in a seven--no, I did not bother to consult the finished measurements, but nevertheless I'm shocked to tell you that this pajama top is just massively too big. Willow is lost in it! I don't know what seven-year-old would fit into that top, but whoever it is, they're actually ten years old, at least.

At least I can adjust the pants size using the appropriate elastic, and I'm thinking of making them reversible, simply to make them look nicer when they're (inevitably) cuffed, and to give them more wear, because apparently Willow will be able to fit into these pajamas for YEARS.

Do you like the fabric?

The purple flannel with hearts was in my stash, but there wasn't enough to make a full pair of pajamas, so I gave Willow a piece of the fabric and let her choose a complementary pattern at the fabric store. I am LOVING my educator's discount there!

When these pajamas are finished, Sydney has her pair all lined up--pink flannel princesses and pink flannel hearts in an Oliver + S pattern--and then I think I'll make them drawstring pajama bags to match.

I wonder if I could talk them into wearing Little House on the Prairie-style nightcaps to bed if I sewed those to match, too...

Homeschool Field Trip: Peden Farm

Our hometown is the kind of town where yes, there is an entire working family farm within the city limits, an historic homestead that's only a few minutes' further drive than the house of one of my kiddos' best buddies. Every year, usually in the spring but this year in the fall (this last spring was rainy!), the Pedens generously--SO generously!--open up their farm to visiting schoolgroups--including homeschool groups, of course--of little tykes.

It's called the Children's Farm Festival, and we love it.

Collecting Feathers from the Free-Range Poultry

Blacksmith Demonstrations

Chickens!!!

Admiring Hand-Painted Gourds

Willow made a rubbing of every single leaf on display. There were a LOT of leaves:

Hay Ride

Shearing the Sheep

Old-Time Toys

Hand Pumping Water

Hand-Grinding Corn

So Many Chickens!!!

And yes, for the sake of my child, also interviewed, I even put aside my own horror of interviews and spoke a series of benign inanities to the very nice reporter:

Not bad for a schoolday!

Making Beeswax Leaves

This is the time of year when the crock pot dedicated to crafting sits in near-permanence on the living room table, a pound-ish of beeswax solidified at the bottom. It's required to live there so that every day, when the girls and I come home from whatever walk or adventure or woodsy parking lot we've just enjoyed, we can turn the crock pot on, melt the beeswax (sweet honey scent!), and make beeswax leaves out of the bounty of our most recent collection:

My full beeswax leaves tutorial is over at Crafting a Green World.

Dissecting a Honeycomb: The Yummies Live Inside

Whenever the girls ask what's in a particular dish and I don't want to tell them--either I don't feel like reciting a list of eighteen spices, for instance, or I know that a revelation that the dreaded SUN-DRIED TOMATO or the horrible PEANUT BUTTER or the villainous GINGER or the monstrous PEPPER live inside the recipe will mean that I'm eating dinner alone tonight--I tell them that the dish contains "yummies," as in:

"Momma, what's in the pasta?"
"Hmmm...noodles, and tomato sauce, and garlic."
[Suspiciously eyeing what is, in fact, a sun-dried tomato]: "What else?"
"Oh...just yummies. Want a serving or a taste?"
"Serving, please!"

The only thing this has to do with our honeycomb dissection is that...know what lives inside the honeycomb? Um, bee spit and the occasional bee part and beeswax, etc. You know, yummies!

Here's our honeycomb piece, bought from Hunter's Honey Farm on our recent field trip:

As we learned on our tour, the hexagonal cells are made by the bees from their wax, are filled with honey by the bees, and then sealed by them with more wax.

You can cut it open for a cross-section, and to verify that, yes indeedy, there's sticky honey inside of there!

And of COURSE you can eat it!

Even if you're not too sure about the wax and the spit, etc.

After all, it's apparently MUCH tastier than a sun-dried tomato, sigh.

How Many Pennies in One Dollar?

I re-branded the hundred grid as a dollar grid, so let's see...

This many!

It looks so cool that I considered having Sydney glue the pennies down to the grid so that we could keep it...

And then I thought, "Heck, no! I'm not wasting a whole dollar!"

The girls have recently wearied of all this talk of coins and commerce, so our math is moving on to geometry. Geomags, constructive triangles, spirograph, geoboard, patterns blocks and mirrors--that ought to hold us for a while!

Brownie Batter Bake-off

You knew we'd do it again. The bake-off has become our go-to way to do up desserts around here.

Following in the steps of the cookie bake-off and the carrot cupcake bake-off, I mixed up a batch of extra fudgy brownies using my library copy of The Good Neighbor Cookbook, then divided it into three bowls and laid out every single thing in the pantry:

I figured that I had a sure winner with my peanut butter, lingonberry jam, and wheat germ brownies, but they--and I can't believe that I'm about to say this!--had too much peanut butter. Who knew there could be such a thing?

In my opinion, the best mix-ins were the tart lingonberry jam, the little dried date pieces, carob chips, and wheat germ. It doesn't matter, though--even the brownies with marshmallows, peanut butter, raisins, cream cheese, candied ginger, almonds and poppy seeds got this same reaction:

Delicious.

We used:

At Hunter's Honey Farm

It's that time of the year when our homeschool group seems to have the best field trips! After a few chilly, rainy weeks, it was perfect weather at Hunter's Honey Farm for our field trip there:

Outdoor field trips on beautiful days are the best, wouldn't you agree?

The hive tour was set up so cleverly. One beehive stood on a table in a grassy area, underneath a tent with mesh walls. All the families stood just outside the tent peering in, and the beekeeper stood inside the tent with the hive. He lectured us on the finer points of bees, then took the hive apart frame by frame, found all the interesting things on that frame (pollen! cells with honey! empty cells! the queen!), and walked it around the inside perimeter of the tent so that everyone could see:

He took care to make sure that every single child saw every single fascinating thing:

Inside, we took another tour of the processing area. Mmmm, raw, unwashed honey!

The girls felt pretty fine, indeed, to already be expert crafters of rolled beeswax candles:

But I do believe that the most THRILLING thing for each of them was when they each got to fill their very own honey bear:

Each girl has a honey bear of her own!

Each honey bear is quite sticky by now, as you can imagine.

Let's see...I took home:

• one jar of raw honey (full of protein, and good for your immune system!)
• one half-gallon jug of wildflower honey, because the girls sure as heck aren't going to let me share their honey bears
• one one-pound chunk of beeswax, soon to coat the outsides of autumn leaves, in just the first of its MANY uses around here
• one small section of honeycomb, just this afternoon dissected and then devoured by the children

That may have possibly been this week's grocery budget, but hey--everyone loves honey on toast, no matter how many meals they eat it in a row!

The Great Room Switch: Painting the Study

When Will was a toddler and we first bought this house, we moved all her toys into the second of the house's three bedrooms, really just an enlarged pass-through from the hallway into our own bedroom. It's big enough for a full-sized bed if you keep it low so that it doesn't block the window (although having that window sill above the bed has been the reason for one child's visit to the emergency room so far), has a couple of good walls to build shelves on to hold the girls' ridiculous amount of toys, and it's just a doorway away from our bedroom, so that when little girls make a peep, the Momma and the Dadda are just a doorway away.

Just a doorway. No door. Ahem.

Add to THAT the issue that the girls are early birds and turn on the lights in their room before the sun comes up, AND that they don't want to share a bed anymore, and you have the storm that caused me to hatch the plan that I sometimes see as brilliant and sometimes see as hare-brained:

We're switching the girls' bedroom with the third small bedroom that lives in the front of the house, a room otherwise know as our Study/Studio.

Can you think of two rooms that are MORE full of a truckload of crap to have to exchange? Nope, you can't.

Friends, this move has been ridiculous. Absurd. Worthy of a nervous breakdown. First, we moved all the girls' stuff down to the playroom, where you can no longer even walk due to the accumulation of that on top of the playroom nonsense. I went through a bunch of our stuff. We had a garage sale. I went through a bunch more of our stuff. We took a load to Goodwill. I went through a bunch MORE of our stuff, and we put some stuff out by the side of the road with a sign that read "FREE."

We still have a bunch of stuff.

When we first moved into this house, we were in a big hurry, and so we didn't change anything or make anything look nice. We also had this toddler, so there wasn't really much time to do a good job on whatever we did try to do, like painting or gardening. And then we had another kid just a few months later--you should have seen the lousy paint job that I slopped on their bedroom walls, with them rolling around my feet making messes and getting into trouble.

This time around, one of the things that I'm most looking forward to is the chance to make each room look...nice. Do a little planning. Use a little forethought.

And then I went ahead and painted our new study silver anyway:

And I let the girls help:

No, it's not turquoise like the studios of all the famous crafty ladies, and it doesn't make the room in this already very dark-ish house any brighter, but that's what track lighting is for, and I love how the walls are shiny--it's like living in a treasure chest, or a magpie's brain.

The former gigantic toy shelves are getting all set up with homeschool supplies, and I wrenched my back moving our brand-new IKEA table, and the fabric looks all neat and tidy so far, and you would not BELIEVE the number of fights that Matt and I have had so far about super-important details, like the locations of power strips...

This study is going to be so excellent.