Pumpkinbear on Pinterest

Do you pin?

Oh, my goodness, do I pin!

I have my own little Pumpkinbear Pinterest land right here:


On it you can see my seemingly millions of boards, all neurotically categorized.

I have board for projects organized by theme:

  

I have holiday boards, with projects and recipes and crafts and homeschool unit studies:

   

I have recipe boards, some for recipes that I want to make--

--and some for recipes that I make all the time:

I have boards for projects that are imminent to-dos:

 

 I have homeschool boards:

    

I have idea boards:

  

 I have boards for projects organized by material:

 

And those aren't even ALL my boards.

Also, because I'm a big nerd with a library science degree, I curate my boards, which means that I go through them, perfect the links, cross-reference them to relevant boards, and edit the commentary to be descriptive, accurate, and informative.

I can't believe how useful Pinterest has been for me. I use it to brainstorm for homeschool activities within the girls' areas of interest, and for holiday projects and kid crafts. I try new recipes from Pinterest (I've got these cranberry sauce meatballs in the crock pot right now!), and if I like them, then I move them to my Favorite Family Foods pinboard so that I can find them again easily.

Didn't people used to use file cabinets for stuff like that? Geez, wasn't that a fire hazard?

Triple War!!!

Of course I HAD to take a photo!

Tutorial: Fat Quarter Cloth Napkins

If I could dress the girls in raincoats at dinnertime, with drop cloths under their chairs, and a Roomba and a medium-sized dog to clean up after them, I would.

If I could get them to stop wiping their fingers on their shirts, or their bare chests, or the underside of the table, I would think fewer evil thoughts quietly inside my head, I have no doubt.

I'm currently, slowly, building up our collection of nicely-sewn cloth napkins to use at mealtimes. I'm not really into white linen, though--my favorite napkins are ample, double-sided, and made from mismatched quilting cotton. I like each napkin to be different, and I like to use fat quarters to make them, so that they sew up quickly and end up identical without me having to measure. I like to have a lot, though, because I like to wash them often, and so every time I make a new set of four and put them into the dinner rotation, it's not long before I think to myself, "We could really use at least one more set of napkins!"

If I happen to be at the store when the fat quarters are on sale, I'll have the girls help me pick out a selection to make a few more napkins, and Willow is happy to help sew them.

First, you have to wash and dry and iron your fat quarters, then match them up. I like to use two different, but complementary, prints for each napkin, but the girls are the most fond of novelty prints and combinations that in no way match or look good together, but hey, if it gets them to use their napkin...

Match up two fat quarters, then lay them out, right sides together, on a cutting mat, as lined up as you can get them. With a clear plastic ruler and a rotary cutter, square up the fabric by trimming all four edges, using the gridded cutting mat to make sure that you've got right angles at all four corners:

Pin the napkin all the way around--

--leaving about six inches that will be open in the middle of one side. I use chalk to mark the ends of that unsewn part:

Starting at one chalk mark, sew all the way around the perimeter, making good turns at corner, and stop when you get all the way around to the other chalk mark:

Clip your corners!

Use the opening to turn the napkin right side out, and use a chopstick or an unsharpened colored pencil to poke out the corners. Iron the napkin flat, turning the raw edges of that unsewn opening to the inside and creasing them so that they're even with the hemmed-and-turned rest of the napkin.

Edge stitch around the entire perimeter of the napkin, catching the folded-under raw edges of that unsewn part and sewing it shut as you go:

These fat quarter napkins are so big that I like to quilt them a little, so that they stay flat and properly shaped in the wash:

We currently have enough napkins to last us about half the week, which is technically plenty since I do laundry at LEAST twice a week, but...it's not enough. I really need at least one more full set!

For breakfast and lunches, I sew my lunchbox cloth napkins, which are about a quarter of the size, and I definitely need more of those, because the girls are ALWAYS eating, and it's always something messy. Since they generally help themselves to their own meals during the day, my dream is to sew a couple of rainbow sets of lunchbox napkins for each of them, so that each girl has a fresh napkin for each meal, color-coordinated by day, that she can put into her own laundry, which she does herself.

While I kick back on the couch, eating chocolate and watching "Days of Our Lives," of course...

Crayon on Candle, Melted

The morning began (as many mornings around here do) with encaustic art:

It soon became apparent to me, however, that on this day, Willow was more interested in the reactions of the candle and crayon to each other than she was in their effect on the canvas surface, so I showed her how to drip some wax onto the canvas and use it like glue to mount her candle, at which point she could experiment more closely with her specific interest:

The rolled beeswax candle IS really fascinating to play with in this way--sometimes the melted crayon pours down between the rolls, so that you can vaguely see it through the translucent layers of the candle, and sometimes it pours down the outside, and layers add to layers, etc.:

Will burned that candle down to the ground, let me tell you, and many unwrapped crayons lost their lives, but the intuitive knowledge that she's gaining of the math of how fluid flows and the rate at which fire burns, and of the chemistry of heat reactions and changes in states of matter, and the practice that she's getting in problem-solving and meeting inquiry, not to mention how her mind and body are experiencing the ego-less pleasure of immersive free play, and the contemplative state of being of watching soothing, smooth, unpredictable reactions--well, that's a morning quite well spent!

P.S. I have a round-up of crayon crafts that DON'T involve coloring over at Crafting a Green World today, if you're interested.

Practical Life: Using a Washboard

Okay, these days using a washboard probably isn't considered so much practical life as it is hands-on history, but if you've got anything in your wardrobe that prefers to be hand-washed, or washed on the delicates setting in the washing machine, then I assure you that a washboard is the way to get those clothes the cleanest while keeping them the soundest with the least expenditure of effort.

And so, when the baby's ballet togs begin to look dingy, I send her into the bath with leotards and tights, a bar of my hot-process soap, and the washboard:

I generally do a quick pre-wash and rinse of the dirtiest parts of the uniform myself--the feet and knees of the tights, the belly and butt of the leotards--using a bar of Fels Naptha and the washboard in the sink, before passing it all over to the kid, and in the past I would give each item a second rinse, as well, as she passed it to me, before wringing it out and hanging it over the shower curtain rod, but this last time Syd had rinsed everything so well that I didn't find any extra suds, so next time that's just one less job that I'll have to do for her!

I think that I could hand-wash each of Syd's ballet uniform pieces in a couple of minutes, flat, and the fact that Sydney takes an hour in the tub hand-washing them just means that she enjoys the job so much. In fact, I'm imagining that in the summer, when she can take the washboard outside with a bucket, a bar of soap, the garden hose, and the clothesline, I could probably trick permit her to wash all our white T-shirts and handkerchiefs and what-have-you's independently out there and hang them right up to dry.

Don't you love it when the play that is a child's work is actual, you know, WORK? I sure do!

Tutorial: Melted Crayon Canvas Art

At any given moment, I have on the back burner easily two dozen projects that are kid-centric, just waiting for a willing kid or two to come and do them--models of the Nile seeded with chia so that they really grow, a working model rocket just waiting to be put together, a bag full of wood scraps to paint and glue into sculptures, a DIY sailor's valentine kit, instant snow powder, UV-sensitive beads, embroidery, BINGO, you name it. Normally, a kid or two chooses something, and I come along for the ride, making my own acid-base eruption or dipping a few leaves in beeswax, myself, before I back off and let the kids explore.

Sometimes, however, we do a project because I want to do it. That is, I see a project online or wherever that looks so awesome that I want to do it myself, so I set it up and start working, and then a kid or two comes by and sees me and says, "I want to try!" and I set it up for them, too.

Such was the case with the melted crayon canvas art that I've been seeing around, a simple encaustic art activity (and you know how we love encaustic art!) that just looks so cool that as soon as I saw it, I wanted to try it myself.

You will need:

• stretched canvas (I pick these up every now and then when I can find a good price, and keep them in the closet until needed)
• crayons (need I even admit that I over-buy these when they go on back-to-school sale? I'm betting you could have figured that out about me already)
• glue (I use E6000 for my own art, but my impatient kids both used hot glue, and the heat gun didn't melt it later)
• embossing heat gun (you probably don't think that you need one of these, but they're surprisingly useful. I've used mine dozens of times, and never yet for embossing!)

Choose crayons that still have their wrappers, although, as the little kid discovered, you can break them or cut them to size. Keeping the glue on the wrapper, NOT the crayon, glue the crayons to the canvas wherever you want them. Both the big kid and I chose straight lines at one edge of the canvas, the better to show off the melting wax--

mine

and the big kid's

 

--but the little kid awesomely glued her crayons just every which way, and it worked pretty well!

Set the canvas propped up on a table, with newspaper underneath it to catch the drips. You want the canvas tilted somewhat, so that the wax can leave a trail and not just fall plop onto the newspaper, but you don't want to tilt the canvas too much (or do you? It's your art!), or the wax won't go far before it re-solidifies.

The embossing heat gun blows its hot air, so you don't want to hold it too close to the crayons, unless you LIKE splashing molten wax on yourself (although that's a thing, isn't it? Well, now you know what TO do, I guess). It won't take you long to discover the sweet spot in which the heat gun melts the crayons just right, and to figure out how to hold the heat gun to manipulate the wax:

Sure, it looks cool and all, but it's hard to get a reading of exactly HOW cool all that brightly-pigmented, different colored wax looks as it's melting, so I made you a video!

I know, right? You're totally sold now, but I'm still going to show you how great our finished canvas pieces look:

This, though, is my favorite part:

The texture of the finished piece IS fascinating, and I love watching my child explore the tactile dimension of her finished art. 

So that's our new artwork! And now on to that chia seed Nile...

P.S. Interested in more super-fun kid projects? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Felted Wool Sweater Christmas Trees

New in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, one of our favorite handmade holiday decorations: felted wool sweater Christmas trees--

I use wool sweaters that I felt, and then I overdye them green--the color doesn't catch on all of the sweaters, but it catches enough that the trees all match, while retaining the obvious juxtaposition of different colors and patterns:

The day after Thanksgiving: that's the day that our own felted wool forest will come to life here at home!

Homeschool PE: Jumping Rope

The girls have been transitioning into some new passions lately: fairy tales, particularly princess stories, for Syd, and for Willow--dragons, Garfield, and board games of all sorts. Money math and Ancient Egypt, while still being explored somewhat, are less all-consuming now, the girls haven't read a Rainbow Magic book in weeks, and they've both rediscovered their gigantic collection of those little Safari Ltd. animal toys and play with them for hours daily. With my encouragement, both kids have been willing to start trying out nature journaling a couple of days a week and math journaling most days. Willow is back into chess, and she recently asked if I could request more dinosaur books from the library--whew!

Another new-ish passion: jumping rope:


Willow was the instigator on this one, but I also LOVE taking turns with her, as jumping rope is an excellent cardio activity, and Sydney--


--well, Sydney is NOT going to stop until she gets it.

Another thing that I love about homeschooling is that an area of interest isn't just one academic field here--instead, it's everything. That jump rope may be an excellent cardio, large muscle conditioning, hand-body coordination tool--

--but it's a stepping-off point for memorizing jump rope rhymes, and learning jump rope games played around the world, and me figuring out how to make/procure a bigger double-dutch rope so that we can do Cinderella Dressed in Yella. That jump rope is also ROPE, and with rope, and hours to explore it, amazing things can be discovered, such as how to finally make use of the playground's zip line, which is too high up for a little kid to reach:

Also at the park during this time were not only a pesky kid that the girls played with for a while, grew weary of, and then practiced how to gently fend off (ah, the life lessons learned on the playground!), but also, amazingly by coincidence, a group of four older boys, perhaps around age 13 or so, who also had rope. They were tying a loop into one end of this rope, tossing it around the top beam of the swing set, and then taking turns stepping into the rope and being pulled all the way up to the top beam by the other three boys. My girls watched them, entranced and highly impressed.

And at the hardware store later that evening, shopping for concrete, tile grout, and a new oven, I bought the girls their own nice, loooong length of rope, a metal pulley to fit the rope, and a carabiner to fit the pulley. Let the games begin!

Me and Willow and Home Education Magazine

Here we are!

Here's my article that I wrote for Home Education Magazine about the peculiarities and particularities of parenting my precocious little kid. It's in the October-November 2011 issue of Home Education Magazine (ask for in a bookstore or library near you! ahem...), whose production was delayed, and so the magazine has only been on the newsstands for perhaps a couple of weeks (Remember how I had an article accepted for publication into Craft, and then Craft went under? When it looked like HEM wasn't going to make it to this issue, Matt started calling me the black widow of the magazine industry).

Will is pretty blithe about her utter stardom--since she's recently discovered how awesome dragons are, it's rare that she looks up from her latest dragonology encyclopedia (yes, seriously, they make them) to offer any insights or opinions about much other than dragons, or eagle nests, or chess strategy, or Angry Birds, but my little Sydney has already begun asking me when I'm going to write a whole story about HER.

I do have a little something in mind, actually...

Practical Life: Lighting a Match

Here's a simple, fun, useful, educational activity that (bonus!) kept the girls intensely engaged for nearly an entire morning recently:

I did require the girls to close the matchbox before lighting a match on it, and to keep the matchbox that they were using separate from the other matchboxes that we have, and to stay in one specific area where I knew where they were and that there wasn't anything particularly flammable nearby.

However, I let them practice until they could light a match nearly on the first try, and I let them experiment with lighting more than one match at the same time, and with lighting a match held by a sister with an already burning match, and with how long they could hold their lit match, and with whether they wanted to shake it or blow it out, and I let them panic and drop lit matches onto the ground, and burn their fingers a bit, and they went through at least four entire boxes of matches, and had themselves a wonderful time.

I did the same exact thing when I was their age, only I was hiding in the backyard with my grandmother's stolen cigarette lighter...good times, that.

Six Weeks Early, Five and a Half Years Later

six weeks early

Actually, that picture was taken a little over a week after Sydney's precipitous, premature birth. We didn't bring a camera on that quickie weekend road trip to visit some of Matt's relatives, and it simply never occurred to me to ask Matt's extended family for a camera so that I could take photos of our unexpected baby girl. 

Some dear friends of ours drove ten hours to bring us some things from home, using a house key that Matt overnighted to them the day that Sydney was born, digging around in our basement for the Rubbermaid bins of baby clothes that I hadn't even begun to sort through. When they stopped by to visit us, they brought their camera! It was the kindest, most thoughtful, most generous thing that's ever been done for me.

Sydney took a turn for the better right before our friends arrived (oh, the turns that a preemie will take! Better, then worse, then better, then much worse...I was terrified to leave her alone), so they didn't have to see the CPAP that took up her whole face, and in this photo you can't see the needles stuck in her body or the wires glued all over her. I regret not having photos of my labor to show her now, but I don't miss having those first days of her life on film--having the memories haunts me enough.

five and a half years later

Is it indulgent to have a surprise half-birthday party for a five-and-a-half-year-old? Sure.

Is she worth every simple pleasure, every indulgent little surprise, five and a half years after she needed a machine to help her breathe, and a tube down her throat to feed her, and a team of neonatologists to treat her, and a $200,000, three-week NICU stay?

Oh, you bet she is. I'd give that kid a flying pink unicorn for her half-birthday, if only I could get my hands on one, I'm so thankful to have her.

Today is World Prematurity Day. Who are you thankful to have?

Sydney Masters the Hundred Grid

We're big fans of the hundred grid around here--it's such a versatile math tool! You can use it to help you add and subtract, with skip counting, with coin calculations. Because Sydney likes puzzles, she also occasionally enjoys using our big laminated hundred grid with some overhead transparency number tiles that, even though I bought them at different times and places, happen to be exactly the same size--score!

I especially like the transparency of the overhead tiles, because if a child is still working on number recognition (and, as I learned while assisting Sydney through the most tedious three games of BINGO ever played at their 4-H club holiday party this week, we ARE still working on number recognition!), then that transparency allows instant self-correction.

During our most recent play with this board, I witnessed Sydney unlock one of the patterns implicit in the number grid. No more random seek-and-find for her--watch this girl go!

I was pretty thrilled that I was there to see it happen.

Syd has a lot of focus, and although she wearied a bit of the task near the end, she kept working, because she wanted to see it through:

Success!

Pretty proud kid, right?

We have an old garage sale BINGO set of our own, and I think that we'll be playing a lot of fun at-home BINGO games this week, because not only is Syd clearly ready for number recognition up to 100, but I'm not taking her near another BINGO party game until she has it down--geez Louise, what a nightmare!

Five Things to Paint with Watercolors, OTHER than Paper

salt dough, play dough, or cornstarch dough, wet or dry

I didn't get a picture of Sydney's finished work, mostly because by then we were deep in the process of all things watercolor, but every homemade kind of dough that I've ever worked with has taken watercolor like a champ, and doesn't seem to get wet or sticky as a result.

popsicle sticks

The watercolor ends up looking like a vibrant wood stain with these. As a matter of fact, watching the girls paint these, and seeing how vivid the colors stayed, I was left with an idea for an upcoming project... Stay tuned!

coffee filters

And nope, you don't have to cut them into novelty shapes first! The fun with these is watching the colors bleed and blend, which is why it's so great to use an eyedropper--you can drip and observe, drip and observe...very contemplative.

unfinished wood of all sorts

We have a grab bag of random wood objects that we're ever so often painting, in preparation for a gigantic and ridiculous free-form sculpture project that I'll introduce at some point in the future, but any unfinished wood, such as tree branches with the bark peeled off, or lumber scraps, is very fun to paint and takes the paint well. Again, the paint will bleed at the edges, so I haven't found watercolor good for detail work on wood, but it's great for abstracts.

ice

Eyedroppers are the tool of choice here, as well. Now that the weather is cool I put whatever ice the girls want to paint and sprinkle salt on in an aluminum baking pan on the table inside--when they're done or the ice has completely melted, it's easy to pour out into the sink and then rinse for re-use.

We happen to use these liquid watercolors, and we're lavish with them--no watering down for us! However, you can use whatever watercolor floats your boat, and it's not going to bother me. I'm going to be too busy working on my secret liquid watercolor and wood project to complain.