Greece with Kids: The Gulf of Corinth, Spoon Sweets, and We Gave the Children Wine

Day 01 is here and here.
Day 02 is here.
Day 03 part one is here.

Welcome to the rest of Day 03!

Who's got two thumbs and also her computer back?!?!?!?

Thank goodness for warranties, computer shops who charge way less than a hundred bucks to clone my hard drive before it's sent for repair since you KNOW they're going to wipe it, and my husband who dealt with it all so that I didn't have to freak out about losing all of my photographs and writing.

And now that I have back all of my photographs and writing, I can continue for you the riveting tale of our family trip through Greece!

When you last saw us, we were just leaving Ancient Olympia. Our tale continues in this random tourist shop, where we were treated to an olive oil and wine tasting. Friends, there are SO many olive oils in Greece, and they all taste completely different and also delicious:

Many people in Greece don't actually buy commercial olive oil like this, even though it's all local. People have their own olive trees, and so they have their own olives pressed to make their own olive oil, and that's all they use. They even get picky at the press because they want to make sure that they're only getting THEIR olives, not a neighbor's olives mixed in.

Alas, we're too stingy to 1) pay for checked luggage on our domestic flight or 2) pay for shipping, so there was no question of bringing any of this delicious olive oil home with us. Might as well gorge on it while we're in Greece, then!

Same with the wine, which is also made from local grapes, and which we also tasted all of.

Our tour guide didn't want the children left out, so she shuffled around the wine bottles for a bit, then proudly presented them with... WINE! At first, I thought that she was telling me that this was "children's" wine, something of low alcohol, perhaps, that was suitable for children? But what she actually meant was that it was Μαυροδάφνη, a kind of wine that all children in Greece commonly taste, because it's the most common wine used in the Greek Orthodox churches there.

So not a children's wine, but a wine that Greek children are familiar with. And as everyone knows, when in Greece, you do what the Greeks do! Therefore, I present to you my children's first wine tasting:

Unfazed by her first taste of wine.

How about this one? Also unfazed?

Negative. The subject is highly fazed.

Of course, just because we're not shoppers doesn't mean that we can't appreciate all of that tourist crap. Case in point:

I did, as a matter of fact, want every single small figure of mythological beings cast in bronze (and later I did treat myself to a teeny bronze Spartan helmet). But as I often tell myself, we can afford to travel OR we can afford to buy a bunch of stuff. We choose travel.

One set of photos that I am NOT showing you are the NSFW pics that I took of penises everywhere in all of the tourist shops. Matt and I were kind of baffled by this the first time we saw it, but I did some research, and y'all, the penises are a legitimate thing! Ancient Greece was ALL ABOUT the penises! Not only did they have endless phallus processions and herms on practically every street corner, but I read a lot of Aristophanes in AP English in high school, and one very important thing that my teacher seems to have forgotten to tell us is that Ancient Greek comedies were deeply wrapped up in the penis. Costumes, by rule, consisted of short togas that allowed gigantic red leather penises to be seen hanging beneath them, and some sources say they could even be raised and lowered for comic effect. I don't know how I missed the veiled references and double entendre in these plays, other than that I was more focused on what I thought would actually appear on the test.

So yes, expect to see lots of penis statuary and pottery... and, um, bottle openers and key chains and coffee mugs and whatever in Greek tourist shops. You have been warned.

Usually, lunch was on our own at one of the day's stops, but on this day we had something special planned for us: a meal at a private residence in a small Greek village near Patras. The bus wound up a series of small roads, giving us better and better views of the miles of olive groves on all sides of us. Matt and I were sitting in the very front of the bus on this day, with an unobstructed view out the picture window (our tour guide switched up our seats every day, so we could all have a turn in the seats with the best views), and we helplessly clutched each other in horror at every corner turned with centimeters to spare, every fence post just missed on every narrow road, every moped driver zipping through every small gap that happened to turn out to be exactly big enough to fit a moped driver.

You're probably somewhat familiar with Greece's economic downturn, and I doubt you'll be surprised when I tell you that the austerity measures that the government continues to put in place to help it recover primarily affect, and are devastating to, lower-wage earners. Measures such as pension reductions and increases in health care costs are far more debilitating to those who have less money to spare--this seems obvious, yes? I mean, remember the garbage worker strike that we saw evidence of in Athens? It was because the government was keeping the workers on short-term, low-wage contracts instead of allowing them full-time employment. They can't live on that salary, but if they quit, then someone else desperate for any kind of money would be happy to take the trash out instead of them. But of course, they wouldn't be paid a living wage, either, so the cycle will simply continue.

Life can also be economically hard even in these small villages far away from the strikes and protests of Athens. Young adults often move to the cities to find employment, which means that village life is slowly dissolving, and especially means that fewer children are being born into village life. It's hard to keep the local schools going without enough children, and that means the schools close and the kids are bussed hours away every single day. And when that happens, that's one more disincentive for families to stay in their villages, and so that cycle continues, too.

You might think that it's not safe to travel to a country that's experiencing unrest, but tourism is great for local economies--we bring money into the country, and we leave it there. Our tour company's relationship with this small village, then, is the small-scale version of a really cool concept: they support the village, and then a couple of times a week a tour bus rolls in, tourists tumble out, and villagers escort them through the village and feed them lunch:

bread, cheese, rice, fava beans stewed with tomatoes, watermelon and cucumber salad, spanakopita, meatballs, wine, and bottled water (it isn't safe to drink local water outside of major cities) 

Oh, and Greek coffee!



We were also introduced here to what is now my favorite food. This, my friends, is a spoon sweet:



Spoon sweets are local fruits, boiled gently down with honey or sugar--our tour guide said honey, as Greeks use honey for all of their sweetening, but all of the recipes that I've been able to find, because I deeply want to recreate this delicacy, call for sugar, not honey, and our tour guide *did* also say that she can't cook and so her husband does all the cooking in their house, so maybe she doesn't really know how they're made...

If you or someone you love is Greek, please tell me how to make spoon sweets!

Per usual, a feral cat came meowing up as we were hanging out on our hostess' front porch. Syd immediately went over to it and crouched down, trying to make friends, but this village kitty was skittish, and didn't want her to touch it. Our hostess, who didn't speak English, slipped inside her house and brought out a napkin filled with meatballs, which she gave to Syd, gesturing that she should use them to feed the kitty. Syd happily fed the kitty meatball after meatball while the hostess' son videotaped her on his smartphone, apparently tickled to death at yet one more crazy thing these tourists were doing.

On the first day of our land trip, we crossed the Gulf of Corinth over the Corinth Canal; on this day, we recrossed the Gulf of Corinth, this time over the cable-stayed bridge the Γέφυρα Ρίου-Αντιρρίου--

I have a bad habit of muttering to myself, so that on this trip Matt was constantly asking me, "Sorry, what?" and listening to me tell him that oh, I wasn't talking to him, I was just trying to pronounce the name of that restaurant, or remember Herakles' twelfth labor, etc. I muttered to myself about this bridge for several minutes--"Is it a type of suspension bridge? No, not with cables like that. A cable-stayed bridge? Do they use a series of cable-stays for that or is it called something else?"--until our tour guide happened to mention the answer in her spiel. 

--and into Nafpaktos (Ναύπακτος). We stopped at a bar to drink shots of mastika--our tour guide was not going to consider her job done until we'd tasted all of the indigenous alcohol of Greece!--and then we hit the beach!

The way to the beach led through this arch under a medieval fort and castle, because of course it did. The history here stuns me with how easily it's integrated into the everyday tapestry of the cities.

Here we are, then, happily paddling our feet and finding interesting rocks on the edge of the Gulf of Corinth:

Another view of the bridge!

Because life is the same everywhere, there was a group of teen/tween boys taking turns jumping off the pier into the harbor, aiming for a gap about two feet wide between two fishing boats, teasing the one boy who was too timid to turn a couple of somersaults on the way down. I reviewed my CPR and first aid training as I watched and held my own two kids back from leaping off the pier along with them.

From the Gulf of Corinth, we drove northeast up the mainland to Delphi, and to our hotel at the top of... a cliff? Seriously, the entire village that we stayed in looked like it was hanging onto the side of a mountain. And there were higher mountains beyond:



All of our dinners were included in the price of the tour, and hosted in the hotels that we stayed in. These dinners are certainly more inauthentic than wandering the town and finding a little restaurant, but they sure are convenient, especially when all the kids really want to do is swim, eat, and go to bed. On several nights, the dinners also included wine for the adults and sodas for the kids, and on this night dinner included two different types of fancy cakes, to celebrate the birthday and the anniversary of some of the other people in our group.

On the whole, then, I was a fan:


And so were they!


See those tired and happy faces? They were sound asleep within the hour, and we weren't far behind them. There was going to be more mountain climbing in the morning, when we were going to Delphi!

P.S. I post on my Craft Knife Facebook page all. The. Time, sometimes even while I'm in Greece! Come see!

How to Make Glittered and Painted Shells

As part of the prehistoric fashion unit of our History of Fashion study, Syd and I had a project to embellish shells and make them wearable.

We didn't use exactly the methods that prehistoric people would have, but we achieved the same results: decorative, wearable fashion accessories!



Sure, the prehistoric peoples probably had different ideas than we do about what looks decorative, but they didn't have glitter and gold paint to work with.

We used artist's-quality acrylic paints and my favorite paint pens for the shells, with no priming needed:





To glitter a shell, first spray it with Aleene's Tacky Spray (this item is one of my crafting secrets, by the way--I use it ALL the time!)--

Notice the tons of newspaper we put down, and I still wouldn't have let Syd use the spray in the house if it hadn't been raining outside. I got this stuff on that very table once upon a time, and it's still there--I'm one of the main reasons why we don't have nice things.

--and then glitter it until it begs for mercy:



After it begs, give it a little more glitter anyway:



Because of course you can't have too much glitter!



I'll tell you more about the other resources and activities that we've used for this prehistoric fashion unit another time. Right now, though, Syd and I are throwing a party for her American Girl dolls out on the driveway. There will be cake on real dishes, and tea in real cups.

It's gonna be a great afternoon!

P.S. Here's how to drill those holes that you can see in some of the shells.

History of Fashion Study: How to Drill a Hole in a Shell

Syd and I started a History of Fashion study this summer, using this book as our spine:



It's a very leisurely study, with lots of handicrafts, so we've actually spent most of the summer on the first unit, Prehistoric Fashion. We studied how animal skins are prepared, how the first sewing needles were invented, we worked with leather, we learned about the invention of weaving, we did some weaving, we learned about the first types of jewelry, and we crafted with shells.

I'll give you the full run-down of this unit later, because it's been awesome, but first: if you want to craft with shells, you probably at some point need to know how to drill a hole in a shell. I'm here to help you with that!




As you can see in the image above, you only need two things: a drill and a suitable drill bit. You can go old-school prehistoric and use a hand drill, or you can use what I use, which is a Dremel. It's so high-speed that it drills through pretty much anything as if that thing is butter.

If you use a Dremel, you also have a lot of choice in what bit you use. I used an engraving bit because that's what I had on hand and I was too lazy to go to the store, but I regret that a little now, because the bit was a bit too soft and I managed to wear it down in the course of drilling through just a few shells. I'd have done better to put the shells in a very shallow pan of water so that I could drill them wet, but it would have been best if I'd used an actual drill bit, such as a narrow tungsten carbide bit or even a diamond bit.

Ah, well... Next time!

Regardless, didn't these shells come out perfectly?



I'll show you another time how Syd and I painted and glittered them, and all the random stuff that we did with them, but right now Will is taking a practice SAT exam at the table near the computer, and I can't wander off with my camera and photograph shells because I have to supervise her and remind her every ten minutes that she can't actually make snarky comments about the questions out loud during the actual SAT...

Homeschooled kids. I tell you what.

P.S. Now that I'm no longer the editor of Crafting a Green World, I spend all my social media time on this blog's Facebook page. I share interesting links to homeschool resources and craft tutorials, and I take weird photos of my WIPs and our homeschool day and put them there. Come see me!

We Made Rainbow Jello, and It Is Righteous

One magical day at IKEA, I impulse-bought a large trifle bowl, and it was one of the best decisions that I have ever made.

It's turned out a lot better than lots of my extremely well-thought-out decisions, to be perfectly frank with you.

Because of that trifle bowl, Syd and I were able to make this last week:



Why, yes, Friends, that IS a giant bowl of rainbow Jello!

The kids and I are not strangers to the idea of using Jello as a decorative element. I also used this very trifle bowl to make the blue Jello ocean--with whipped cream waves and a graham cracker beach--for Will's ocean-themed seventh birthday party, and we used even more blue Jello to make the seas around our giant cookie map of Ancient Greece just a few months ago.

This, however, is my favorite Jello memory: the first time that Will made Jello independently when she was eight years old. Hijinks ensued.

I've had it in my mind for a while to try out making rainbow Jello in that bowl, and finally I decided that spending the week with Syd while Will was at day camp, and the need to make sure the idea worked because maybe I wanted to have it at my Girl Scout troop's Bridging party in a couple of months, were excuses enough to just buy seven boxes of Jello and make it happen.

Make that six boxes:

No Jello manufacturer in the entirety of Kroger's (and there were several--who knew that Jolly Rancher had gotten into the Jello business?!?) could provide me with more than one shade of blue.

I'd wanted to add fruit to each layer in a bid to make the dessert something beyond mere empty calories, but Syd was having NONE of this. She was absolutely horrified by the idea of putting purple grapes in the purple Jello, and blueberries in the blue Jello, and green grapes in the green Jello, and starfruit in the yellow Jello, and mandarin oranges in the orange, and cherries in the red.

She was even more disgusted when I suggested that we add a layer of marshmallows to the top of the finished Jello, and they could be clouds.

So we made plain Jello for each layer, and to be fair, Syd actually did most of the work. We had to wait until each layer had set, about four hours, before we could add the next layer, so the entire creation took two days, but I kept coming into the kitchen to check if the Jello was set yet, only to find that Syd had come in just before me, found that it was, and went ahead and added the next layer without fanfare. I think she ended up adding four of the six layers!

The one bummer is that the bowl is so wide that you can't really see as much color in the bottom layers as you can the top--the light just can't shine through it. But on a sunny day, or in front of a light table, the colors show better, and, of course, when you're ready to serve...



Magical!

P.S. If you want to avoid the artificial colors in Jello, I am positive that you can get this same effect with unflavored gelatin (or even agar-agar) and juice, but I'll tell you right now the same problem that I ran into when I was planning Syd's rainbow party--you can't find natural juices in all the colors of the rainbow.

How to Paint a Folk Art Coca-Cola Bottle

I've been spray painting some of my vintage Coca-Cola bottles because they look awesome that way, even though I don't know what to do with them afterwards other than put them back on the same shelf where they lived before, but now looking awesome.

I'm thinking candle holders. Stay tuned.

Anyway, every now and then I mess up the spray paint job and end up with bubbles or drips, so I was also trying to think of a way to rescue the messed-up bottles, when I remembered how even more awesome the folk art Coca-Cola bottles that we saw at World of Coca-Cola were.

The folk art bottles were embellished in all kinds of ways, from decoupage to beading to even more extreme transformations, but the most accessible method that still had beautiful results was simply to paint on them.

To make the most authentic folk art, you should have no expectations built from previous experiences of what the artwork should be, so instead of trying something myself, I first gave a red spray-painted Coca-Cola bottle to the youngest of us. I provided her with my new favorite art supply, paint pens, and asked her if she would like to paint on this bottle for me.

Reader, she would!



And you're not going to believe what she came up with. The specific decorations are very much her own, but I think that the overall look reminds me VERY much of other folk art Coca-Cola bottles that I've seen:



I love that she went over the embossing in white, so that it stands out, and there's also a cat and a ballerina, representing her favorite things, and a mug of hot coffee, which she says represents my favorite thing.

I've already tried to get Will to paint a bottle, too, and she refused because she didn't like the feel of painting over the bumps, but I'm hoping that if I can catch her in the right mood she'll agree another time, and then I'll corner Matt, and then I'll make one, myself, and then we'll have a whole family of painted folk art bottles.

Just don't ask me what I'm going to do with them...

P.S. Here are some other things you could do with a stash of clear vintage bottles on your hands:

• Cut them down and pour candles in them.
• I'm pretty sure I have the right tools to drill a hole into a glass bottle, maybe for a string of twinkle lights or a post.
• If they're filthy, here's the best way to get them squeaky clean.
• I do NOT have the tools to flatten a glass bottle. Do you?
• I think this paint-dyed glue would make a more economical alternative to paint pens.
• I don't love the effects of dyeing the bottle from the inside, but maybe you do?
• I also want to try painting them from the inside with craft acrylics.
• Cover the bottle in twine, and it would make a lovely vase.

Homeschool Botany: Let's Dissect a Seed!

Schooling just with Syd is keeping me hopping this week! Syd is thriving on the one-on-one attention, but I am struggling to get any of my own work done--I forgot to eat lunch until 4 pm yesterday, because I spent Syd's lunchtime working on my own stuff, and I totally did the thing where I bolted awake in the middle of the night fretting about emails that I didn't send.

Today, I MUST put our troop's extra concert ticket for sale on our local Girl Scout Facebook group, and fill out my kids' field trip forms and send them in, and set up a schedule for meetings to prepare for the workshop we're hosting next month, AND respond to the people who've registered for that workshop to tell them I've got them signed up!!!

Deep breath. More coffee...

ANYWAY, instead of doing any of that yesterday morning, much less any of the real stuff on my to-do list, Syd and I spent the entire morning studying seeds. This was a kid-instigated, parent-mentored study that stemmed from Syd's interest in "growing bean sprouts and doing experiments on them." We bought beans last week, planted them, and they did sprout, but when I asked Syd, "What next?" it turns out that she doesn't really want to do any experiments, so instead I devised this morning study that nevertheless let her add to her knowledge and get more hands-on experience.

On Sunday, we took a family trip to our local co-op and Syd selected a few types of beans from their bulk bins--I'm hoping that since they're organic, they'll sprout. That method worked well for our DIY rice paddy in a bucket, at least!

When we got home, I put six of each type of bean into a Mason jar to soak, and by the next morning, they were ready for science!

To begin the activity, we read A Seed is a Promise together. It's a little baby-ish, but it gives most of the relevant information, and it's a lovely, well-written book that's a pleasure to read. Next, we went over this Diagram of a Seed together--mental note that next time, I need to research how to pronounce scientific terms before I use them with the kids, because I mispronounced "cotyledon."

Education.com also has a quiz version of this diagram, which I don't think we'll be using.

And now, on to the dissection! We used an x-acto knife and a metal probe, paper towels to pad the work area, the diagram for reference, and our USB-attached microscope to get a closer look. I really like the USB microscope, because you can use it to take photographs of what you're looking at. Here, then, is the cotyledon of a pinto bean:



Here is its hilum:



And here is the inside, where you can see the endosperm and the entire embryo, consisting of the radicle, hypocotyl, and epicotyl:



In this dissection video that we later watched, the teacher put a drop of iodine on the dissected bean to make its parts stand out, but I didn't think it increased visibility at all. Our dissection worked fine without iodine.

A couple of years ago, I wanted the kids to learn how to create infographics, so I regularly assigned them. The kids got quite handy at them, and then last year we moved on to other ways to represent information and I'm afraid that I forgot all about asking them for infographics. That shows, because I gave Syd a few options for reporting on her work, and the infographic that she chose to create (rather than a blog post or a poster or an essay or a diagram of her own) shows that while she remembers how to physically build an infographic, she does not remember our discussions of what makes a GOOD infographic:



She didn't use any of the photographs that she took herself, even though she knew how to upload them, and... um, there are an awful lot of cat images for an infographic about seed dissection, sigh.

Since we didn't review the qualities of a good infographic before she started (and that's on me, alas), I only remarked on a few grammar and punctuation errors in her text, and didn't make her remove any cat pics, but rest assured that we WILL be spending more time reviewing the qualities of a good infographic and practicing that skill much more next semester!

So if you happen to read Syd's infographic and then for the rest of your life you wonder why you always start thinking of cats when you're trying to think about seeds... my apologies.

Want to do even more with seeds and plants? Here are some ideas:

• I'll show you another time how we set up germination habitats for our leftover seeds.
• If you're studying China, or interested in unusual ways that plants grow, here's how we created a rice paddy in a bucket.
• Are your kids more interested in art than science right now? Teach them the lost art of flower arranging, and you'll increase the beauty in their lives forever.
• In the mood for a field trip? Visit a greenhouse!
• Do you now have more dried beans than you can handle? Dye them and let the kids make a mosaic in an upcycled CD case.

How to Make a Beeswax Candle in an Upcycled Container

You know that I've been obsessed with my found vintage Coca-Cola bottles, right? I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be happy until I've figured out a hundred ways to upcycle them.

Here's my latest creation, and the project that I'm currently the most excited about:



Why, yes, I DID turn a vintage Coca-Cola bottle into a candle!

Here's the best way to clean your old glass bottles. Cutting, grinding, and polishing the bottle is a whole other skill set that I've been learning, and I'll tell you all about that another time--although I HAVE found the perfect technique for it all, rest assured!--but for now, let's just talk about how to pour a beeswax candle into an upcycled glass or metal container, as that on its own is an awesome skill set to have and it makes an awesome candle.

Here's what you'll need:

• beeswax and a way to heat it (I prefer a crock pot, which is dead simple to find dirt cheap at any thrift store)
• upcycled glass or metal container, such as a Mason or jam jar (I am not responsible for making sure that your container can handle heat--use common sense, Friends!)
• candle wicks. If your candle sucks, it's pretty much always because you used the wrong diameter of candle wick. Wicks have specific diameters for specific diameters of candles, so do your research.
• hot glue gun, hot glue sticks, tape, and a pencil with an eraser.
• heat gun or hair dryer

1. Set up the candle wick in the container. Put a generous amount of hot glue near the end of the wick, then use the eraser end of the pencil to help you push it into the middle of the container and center it at the bottom:

Don't do this immediately before you pour the hot beeswax; the hot glue needs a little time to cure, or it will melt and set your wick free when the melted beeswax hits it. If that happens, put an oven mitt on your hand and just pour the melted beeswax back into the crock pot, ready to start again.

Wrap the wick a few times around the middle of the pencil, which you're going to set on top of the container. Get the wick nice and centered, then tape the free end to the side of the bottle:

Your wick will stay stable and centered, and you won't have to cut it at this step and waste it.

2. Melt the beeswax. If you melt beeswax at too high of a temperature for too long, it will darken, so keep your crock pot on low and turn it off when you no longer need the beeswax.

3. Pour the wax into the candle. I spilled a lot of beeswax before I decided to stop trying to pour around the pencil and just pour into the middle of the container, right over the pencil. You can clean the wax off of the pencil later, or it can just be the pencil that you always use in candlemaking.

I poured a little too much wax into this candle--

--but I did a better job with this bottle after I realized that I should mark a line on the bottle to pour to rather than eyeballing it:

4. Fix your mistakes. Let the beeswax harden, then cut off the wick and check out all the places on your candle that suck. I had a lot of dribbles and spills, and with that Coca-Cola bottle, especially, I had a LOT of air bubbles, especially against the sides of the bottle, messing up the whole look. And I had those marks on the amber bottle candle where my excess wicking was touching the top of the wax.

To fix all of your mistakes, what you do is get out your heat gun or a hairdryer, and remelt the beeswax. Don't point it at just one spot so that you don't crack the container, but melt all around the bottle and at the top so that air trapped against the sides of the bottle can get out, and new wax can flow in from the top. You can even melt more beeswax in the crock pot and pour it over the top, although you'll have to do the heat gun step again after that wax cures, too, probably:

After you've evened out the wax and gotten all the air bubbles out, your candle should look pretty dang awesome! Light it, love it, and don't leave it alone.

P.S. Now that I no longer have Crafting a Green World's Facebook page to handle, I miss the interaction that social media brings. Please come hang out with me at my Craft Knife Facebook page instead! It's fun!

We Made Beeswax Lip Balm for the Girl Scout Cadette Breathe Journey

I have never met any Girl Scout leader, parent, or girl who has admitted to enjoying a Girl Scout Journey. They're cheezy, oddly baby-ish in the way they speak to the girls and yet at the same time over-involved and over-complicated in what they expect from the girls, over-engineered with a LOT of filler, and really unclear on the requirements to complete them. Must a girl only do the specific steps listed for her award in the back of the Girl Book, or must they do most or all of the several more activities set out in the Leader Guide?

The only positive thing that I will say about them is that completing the Agent of Change Journey did give Syd the skills and experience that she absolutely needed to be able to plan and carry out a successful Bronze Award project. But even that Journey was an utter slog to complete, during which I had to lead a variety of pointless activities that didn't inspire me, much less the girls, AND it was at least a Journey focused on its Take Action Project. This Cadette Journey, Breathe, has bizarrely juxtaposed a theme of air with a theme of... like, personal care, kind of?.. and the TAP is both less of a focus and much more of a pain in the butt that will at some point require each girl to ask adults who the Journey hopes will be total strangers and experts in some field to join her "Air Care Team."

Stop right now and imagine a tween or young teen asking a total stranger to join her Air Care Team, while literally saying the words "Air Care Team." I really think that if a tween or young teen did that, an actual hole would open in the Earth and swallow her to save her from her embarrassment.

So, no, the girls don't love it, and neither do I, but we're doing it anyway, because they need a Cadette Journey under their belts before they can start their Silver Award projects, something that Will has about 14 months to complete. She'll need as many of those months as I can give her, so we are finishing this dang Journey this summer!

That being said, as with everything Girl Scouts, you can modify the Cadette Breathe Journey somewhat in order to fit with your own girls' interests. We'll be exchanging more sophisticated experiments for the simplistic ones detailed in the Journey (although, again, it's debatable if the science component is even required, so make your own judgment there), and our meteorology unit study intersects with it nicely, so we'll be completing that study as part of this Journey.

This particular project is a modification of the bath and beauty section of the Journey (which I am, again, not completely certain is required, but if you're going to jump through hoops, might as well jump through all of them, sigh...). The Cadette Breathe Journey as-written in the Leader Guide includes instructions for the girls to create aromatic bath bags, using dried lavender, and lotion, using rosewater and lime juice. My two girls aren't into baths and lotion, so instead we're going to create scented air and drawer fresheners (using my wool felt and essential oil air freshener tutorial here), and over the weekend we made the beeswax lip balm recipe from Beekeeper's Lab:



Will and Luna also really like the Honey Dog Treats from this book, by the way.

I made a few modifications to the beeswax lip balm recipe, some of which worked and some of which didn't, lol. Instead of using lip balm tubes, I used a stash of little containers, very similar to these containers, that I already had on hand--yay for stash-busting!

I also already had the beeswax, lanolin, and sweet almond oil on hand from other projects, so I only needed to buy the Vitamin E oil--if you know of any other recipes that use Vitamin E oil, PLEASE tell me all about them!



The recipe calls for the use of a double boiler, but I already had my crafts-only crockpot out and filled with beeswax for an upcycled beer bottle candle project that I'm working on, so my Great Idea was to have the kids measure out all the cold ingredients first--

The recipe doesn't call for essential oils, but since we were using this as a recipe for the Breathe Journey, it needed some aromatherapy components. Part of this activity, then, included discussing which essential oils were safe for the skin and how you could conduct the research to make sure. We discussed essential oils in general and some of their specific properties in an earlier session, which I'll tell you about another time.

--and then add the hot beeswax and stir them together. I'd assumed that the beeswax would melt the cold ingredients, but the cold ingredients instead chilled the beeswax, so instead of saving time, I instead spent 40 minutes with these Mason jars of lip balm mix in the oven at 170 degrees, checking on them every five minutes to see if they'd melted. I couldn't just blast them or I'd ruin the qualities of the Vitamin E and essential oils already added, GRRRRRR!!!

Finally, though, they were melted and ready to be re-stirred and poured.

Before I tell you the next story, I have to preface it with the fact that I make the children do five sit-ups or five push-ups as discipline sometimes. I do it primarily for negative self-statements--think "I can't" or "I'm not good at," etc. It's just something super quick to break the cycle of negative thinking.

Now, the story: Will, our newly-minted teenager, was being just impossible at pouring. She didn't want to wear oven mitts, but the Mason jar was too hot to hold--duh! Nor was she able to successfully just pull her T-shirt over her hand, sigh. So she consented to put on one mitt, but only on her non-dominant hand, and also the oven mitts make one's hands unwieldy, also duh, and so she really needed two.

She would almost pour, then the Mason jar would slip and she'd almost drop it on the floor, so she'd put it down and fuss and decide to try again, doing the EXACT SAME THING, almost drop it, and set it down to think again as her mixture grew in danger of starting to solidify. The little hamster was running on the little wheel inside her brain, though, just not quickly, and not pointed in quite the right direction yet, but it was persevering and so was she.

Matt, however, was losing his ever-loving mind watching this skin-crawlingly painful struggle with the seemingly obvious--seriously, I could see him going crazier by the second, witnessing this crazy overload--and all of a sudden he was all, "Here, let me do it!" and took the oven mitt off Will's hand. He had put both oven mitts on his own hands and was even holding the Mason jar over the lip balm containers before the loud gasps of both me and Syd registered with him. My girls, they KNOW what's going to piss me off.

Thanks to that gasp, I had plenty of lung power to shout across the table at Matt, "YOU ARE DISEMPOWERING YOUR DAUGHTER!!!!!" The look on his face as he came out of his "OMG get it done!" fugue and realized what he was doing--without a word, he put everything down on the table, dropped to the floor, and did five push-ups. Will barely noticed, as she went back to her labors. Syd asked if she could sit on his back while he did them.

And believe it or not, both kids successfully poured their lip balm into the tiny containers:





Each recipe filled three containers, which is perfect as it makes one to keep and two to give away. If you're doing this activity as a whole troop, I think it would be nice to keep one, set one aside for a future gift, and trade one to another Girl Scout. You could also make custom labels either with stickers or a 1" round punch and a glue stick, but since the tops of these containers are clear, the kids didn't want to cover them, and they didn't want to put the labels on the bottom, either.

My kids tend to like to have only one activity at a time, but again, if you were leading a larger troop, you could combine this project with making the air fresheners, since you'll have the essential oils out out anyway. Or maybe you don't have to do any of it, because maybe it's not even actually required by the Journey? Feel free to let me know your opinion!

P.S. Did you know I have a Craft Knife Facebook page? I post links and pics related to homeschooling, crafting, and Girl Scouts there every day, so feel free to join me!

I Figured Out the BEST Way to Clean Glass Bottles, and Surprise, It Requires Power Tools!

First, some news:

News Update #1: Crafting a Green World has been sold, and so I am no longer its editor. I might write a post a week or so for the new iteration of Crafting a Green World, or I might not--in other news, negotiating sucks and I hate it. I do love being paid, though, which is now not happening, so this is as good a time as any to remind you about my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop and that if you shop on Amazon using my Amazon Affiliate links--why, look! Here's one now!

--I get paid a miniscule percentage of that sale, but hey, every nickel shifted my way from Amazon is one more nickel towards my kids' ballet classes and horseback riding lessons.

The upside is that I've finally discovered that what I actually needed in order to consistently work on my novel-in-progress was actual dedicated writing time, and so using my formerly CAGW writing time as novel writing time has been excellent.

Which leads me inevitably to...

News Update #2: I'm on a roll with working on my novel, so of COURSE my laptop died. The computer repair shop says the motherboard stopped working, and the laptop is under warranty so Dell says they'll fix it... in 10-12 business days, not counting transit time. Many men have mansplained for me not to worry, Little Lady, your computer's memory is fine and so you'll still have your novel and all of your photos when it comes back, but in my 40 years on this planet I have learned some distrust, let's say, for the patriarchy, so all I'm gonna reply is a disenfranchised sort of "we'll see."

And that's why today's post is 1) not a continuation of my Greece vacation, on account of all of my Greece photos are on my laptop with a dead motherboard, and 2) concerning a subject that normally I'd be writing about on Crafting a Green World, because I'm not writing for Crafting a Green World right now, and although I'm negotiating (shudder), I'm not holding my breath that I'll be writing for Crafting a Green World again, so why sit on a post that I've researched and am ready to write?

If I do write for them again I'll probably wish I'd sat on some posts and had them researched and ready to write, but whatever. Live in the moment, Y'all!

Anyway, y'all know that I have been trying to find meaningful uses for a neverending supply of vintage glass bottles pretty much since we moved into this house. It was about a week afterwards that the kids and I discovered that the drive-in next door apparently spent the 1960s and 70s dumping its trash into the back of the woods, and man, if you went to the drive-in in the 1960s and 70s, you sure as hell drank a lot of beer and soda!

None of them, not even the perfect Coca-Cola bottles, are worth more than a couple of bucks, and the vast majority of them are worth absolutely nothing, but still... I can't put them in the recycling, because if they're not soda-lime glass, they won't go through the equipment correctly. And I CANNOT toss them in the trash, because then they'll just live forever in someone else's dump instead of my own.

So yeah, I hoard them. One day I'm going to get over my fear of being axe-murdered and put them on Freecycle, but today is not that day.

To make the thing a little more annoying, even if I do want to clean up some of the nicer bottles to display or maybe even sell, it's ridiculous, because they've spent 40-50 years outside in the woods, and so they're dirty and gross and need a good scrubbing inside and out. I broke my heart trying different methods to get them clean, always coming back to the need to scrub each one by hand for a million years...

Until Matt thought of the solution. It looks like this:



This is a cordless drill with a paddle bit attached, and to that paddle bit Matt has duct taped a bottle brush. Here's a closer look at the sophisticated join:

Yes, I love it, but I do want you to notice that he used not the regular duct tape, but the more expensive gold duct tape that I bought for making Spartan armor.

That, my Friends, is all you need to do this:

Thanks to Syd for the excellent photography. No thanks to anyone in the family for not helping enough with the dishes.

You put a squirt of dishwashing soap into the bottle, then some water. Then you insert the bottle brush and use the drill to scrub that baby OUT!

Soap will fly everywhere if you do, but you can also scrub the outside with the same set-up:

See the soap flying everywhere? Worth it!

It used to take FOREVER--seriously, I promise you it took forever--to scrub one bottle, but yesterday I did seven of them, timing myself with the oven clock, and my average was five minutes per bottle for the whole process, including rinsing it out afterwards.

If you're dealing with vintage bottles that have been exposed to the elements, this will not make them perfect. Nothing will do that. They won't have degraded, because they'll never degrade (which is why you want to keep them out of the waste stream as much as possible), but the sun will have done weird things to them, as will the soil, as will the 40+ years of temperature fluctuations and freezes and thaws. If I want them to look as nice as possible I will then fill them with straight vinegar and put them in a bucket of straight vinegar and leave them to soak for at least a day.

I didn't do that for these bottles, though, because I'm probably just going to paint them. Still, don't they look very nice?





Some will be cut and turned into candles, because I've also taught myself how to cut glass bottles in my CAGW-free time, but for most, I have this weird idea for painted bottle candle holders that I'm playing with...

...so stay tuned!