That One Blessed Week of Snow This Year

 Now that we're far enough into spring that writing about snow shouldn't call it back down upon us (it's in the mid-60s and calling for thunderstorms today--it's SPRING!!!), I'm safe to brag about the beautiful week of snow we had this winter!

This winter's Week of Snow was especially precious, because last winter we had none! We didn't make a single snowbeast, or skate outside one single time. There were two full years' of dust on the sleds when Matt brought them down from storage. It was a big, noticeable bummer that year, so we made extra sure we got our snowy memories made this year.

Syd let me take many photos of her in her beat-up pointe shoes in the snow, as well as a few of these still-lifes of her nice, new pointe shoes:

Will, who hasn't stepped skate into an indoor ice rink in over a year, got to skate to her heart's content on a nearby frozen lake:

And then she and I took Luna out for a nice wander on the ice:

Alas, we returned with our coat pockets absolutely stuffed with trash, because not only did the iced-over lake make it manageable to find and remove all of the various tangled fishing lines and lures and hooks from all the branches overhanging the lake, but when we finally stepped back on shore, we discovered that some monstrous evil had staged a... Promposal, perhaps? Or engagement photo shoot?... on the path, and had simply left an absolute zillion fake flower petals just lying there. If you look closely, you can also see whole strings of dead LED lights on both bannisters, but Will convinced me I could leave those for a park ranger to remove, since we'd already spent all of our remaining allotted free time picking faux flower petals out of the snow. 

And for our remaining allotted time with the last of the snow, we finally got to make our snowbeasts!

We even made our very first fort EVER:

It was wonky, fit Matt and Syd together only if they sat up very straight and didn't breathe too deeply, and melted nearly completely overnight when the weather turned, but it perfectly topped off the most perfect winter week we've had in year.

Homeschool STEM: Our Popsicle Stick and Kite String Wave Machine

 

Because energy travels in waves, and we can prove it!

This DIY popsicle stick and kite string wave machine is one of many hands-on projects that Will and I are doing as part of the spectroscopy chapters in her astronomy study, but we're both completely obsessed with it. It is really fun, and really fascinating to watch. It both soothes and stimulates (if that's possible? Is that possible? It feels possible!) both of our pattern-loving brains, and we can each entertain ourselves endlessly just by flicking a little popsicle stick and watching the energy cascade down the line.

To make our wave machine, Will and I followed this tutorial: 

I don't exactly know why I randomly always seem to have 1,000+ popsicle sticks just hanging about in the homeschool closet (some clearly leftover from failed seed starting projects of yore), but they do come in handy!

The real fun, though, is in playing with it!

See the wave move, even though each popsicle stick stays glued to its place? That's how all energy moves, whether it's light, sound, or tsunamis. Beyond just that demonstration, though, there's a lot of visual interest in simply playing with and watching the patterns that emerge through various manipulations of the wave machine. That kind of play and exploration builds intrinsic understanding, which is a very real way to build concrete knowledge and skills. As part of Will's AP Human Geography study, we've been thinking about the ancient stick maps of Micronesia. These maps represented not geography as we conventionally think about it now, but instead a model of the waves around the islands, which is also a very real aspect of geography, but one that most people would find it impossible to comprehend, much less use as a navigation tool. It's likely that sensory experience of the ocean waves provided the intrinsic understanding that made it possible to use the waves in such a way. 

It is FASCINATING to see energy travel so concretely, and there's a lot of scope for play and experimentation. I wish I'd made this with the kids when they were young, as I think it would be a picture-perfect hands-on STEM project for upper elementary!

Nevertheless, we have it now, and it hangs in homemade honor from a ceiling hook in our family room. I mean, it's not like we put any effort into tasteful decorating; a popsicle stick wave machine isn't even the oddest homemade thing on display in that room. 

And when it's hanging in easy reach, we can still play with it!

Our wave machine, as I mentioned, was a quick little demo for spectroscopy, but understanding how energy travels in waves is also crucial for some of these other studies:

• CALDER AND KINETIC SCULPTURE. Mobile-making and kinetic sculptures of all kinds are a great way to explore physics, as well as to add an art history component to a STEM study. Here's a great resource on the physics of mobiles, and an interesting history of kinetic sculptures, with a lot of images for inspiration. 
• SOUND AND HEARING. Vibration is another word for waves, and there are a lot of fun ways to explore how sound travels through space and how our ears work to sense it and our brains work to process it. Use tangible demonstrations like this one with a speaker and salt, this one in which you measure the distance of a signal, and the DIY wave machine, along with a study of the anatomy of the ear. 
• TSUNAMIS. Is my kid the only one fascinated by natural disasters? I think we've done deep dives into just about all of them by now! Anyway, use the wave machine along with this TED-Ed video on tsunamis and this DIY diagram of tsunamis to explain the physics behind that particular natural disaster. 

This isn't a comprehensive list, of course--it's literally just what's happening to occur to me from our own studies as I'm writing this--and so I'd love, as always, to hear your ideas and suggestions, too. I LOVE multi-disciplinary connections!

How to Make a Decoupaged Cardboard Tray

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Do you have a lot of little bits and bobs that like to clutter up some particular surface in your home? A lip balm, three different remote controls, matchbook, and erasable pen that all want to live on the exact same 12"x18" surface of your nightstand, say? 

 Here's a little pro tip for you: toss all that nonsense in a nice tray, and it's no longer clutter. Because it's CONTAINED! 

 Bonus points if the tray is handmade, and double bonus points if it's handmade from upcycled materials! Tidying up is MUCH more fun if Wolverine is helping! 

 These decoupaged cardboard trays are some of my favorite things to make. Other than the glue, all the supplies come from the recycling bin, but you'd never know it because these trays are as cute as they're handy. The decoupaged paper makes them surprisingly sturdy, and I LOVE being able to embellish them exactly the way I like. You do have to wait for stuff to dry a few different times, but the actual hands-on time for this project is also quite low, making it easy to make multiples or to spend a little extra time to make one crazy-elaborate, fancily perfect tray.

Supplies & Tools

 Here's what YOU need to make your own decoupaged cardboard tray!

• Corrugated cardboard. Look for pieces that are clean and uncreased. I use Girl Scout cookie cases for EVERYTHING, so that's what's going on here, but I've also spent my pandemic staycation being kind of grossly consumerist, so I can also tell you that Zappos and Amazon boxes work well, too.
• Cutting and measuring tools. I use a self-healing cutting mat, metal ruler, x-acto knife, and scissors.
• Hot glue. I've just realized that the hot glue gun I've used for my entire adult life is a low-temp version. What magic can one do with a high-temp glue gun?!?
• Papers for decoupage. You can decoupage nearly any paper, although for this project since we're partly relying on the paper to add to the tray's strength, you'll want to avoid tissue paper, napkins, or paper products of similar weight.
• White glue. I use Mod Podge or Elmer's with a little water mixed in.
• Polyurethane sealant. Look for a water-based, clear sealant

Directions

1. Cut Your Pieces from Corrugated Cardboard

 One of the coolest things about these trays is that you can make them just about any shape, but I'm being kind of lame here and making a simple hexagon-shaped tray, with a 2" rim. Cut your rim pieces to the height that you want the rim to be, but don't bother trying to cut their lengths to match the tray bottom yet; I'll show you a neat trick for that in a minute! If you can cheat like I did, though, and use the natural bend in a cardboard box to cut your tray's bottom with a side already attached, go for it!

 

2. Cut the Rim Pieces to Size

 

This is SUPER easy to do. Just line up the piece against the side, mark the cutting line, and cut it!

3. Hot Glue All the Sides to the Tray Bottom

 

Corrugated cardboard lives for hot glue, so this is also an easy step. Your hot glue will adhere best if you have the patience to let the glue gun get nice and hot, and if you hold the pieces together for a few seconds after you glue them. 

 Don't worry if you've got a few see-through cracks at the joins, because the decoupage will cover that completely! 

4. Decoupage the Tray

 

This project works best when you cover the cardboard tray completely in glue, then paper, then glue. The easiest way to do this is to treat it like papier-mache; I dip each piece in white glue, squeegee it off with my fingers, apply it to the tray and smooth it down, and repeat with a new piece of paper. It's not a tidy activity, so make sure you don't have too many closed doors between you and the nearest sink! No matter which kind of white glue you used, let the entire tray cure for at least 24 hours before you seal it. It sucks to wait, but you want that tray to be bone dry!

5. Seal the Tray

 Coat the entire tray in 4-5 layers of clear, water-based, polyurethane sealant. I don't generally recommend polyurethane sealant for, say, a solely decorative project, just because it's not eco-friendly, but you're going to get a lot of use out of this tray, and you want it to last. Again, let the tray cure for at least 24 hours after its final coat before you start tossing all your clutter into it.     

I think this cardboard decoupaged tray is an easy way to neaten up any surface in your home. And if you have too much clutter for one tray to hold... 

 ...stack another tray on top of it!

30 Ways to Decorate Wood Easter Eggs

 Want to know my hands-down favorite holiday crafting supply?

Unfinished wood Easter eggs!

I first bought wood Easter eggs on a bit of a whim over a dozen years ago, and we have absolutely loved them every year since. We end up embellishing several every Easter, and if we decide we don't like the look of one, we just cover it up with more paint and re-embellish it the next year! 

Because we did more Easter stuff than usual last year (thanks to a global pandemic!), I restocked us this year. Don't get me wrong--we do NOT need more Easter eggs; I mean, least year I hid over a hundred for the kids' egg hunt!--but we enjoy decorating them so much that I can't imagine not having some on hand. 

AND while I was buying just our favorite sizes from Casey's Wood Products (hen eggs with flat bottoms for most of our projects, but a few jumbo eggs for the really special stuff), I saw that they've got a new style of egg this year: basswood eggs suitable for carving!

The kids' woodcarving kit was a hit last Easter, so it's extra fun that this Easter they can use it to carve some of our decorations.

Below is a list of our favorite ways to decorate wood Easter eggs. There are activities for little kids, activities for bigger kids, and activities that are equally fun and lovely for any age. The kids and I have done most of these--some of them we do every year!--but there are also a few that are here because they're on our to-do list. 

• wood burned Easter egg with watercolor stain. Wood burning is lovely on its own, but it's extra special when combined with a watercolor stain, or careful watercolor painting. Eggs that are wood burned are still quite hardy, but the watercolor stain can bleed if it gets wet, so you'll want to keep it away from most Easter mischief.
• galaxy eggs. I made a couple of these last year with jumbo wood eggs, and it went exactly the way the tutorial said it should! They're some of my absolute favorite eggs now.
• Lichtenstein-style painted eggs. I love how this is also sneakily an artist study!
• yarn-wrapped eggs. A method that completely covers the wood egg is a great way to re-use an egg that had an unfortunate paint or marker job done to it in a previous year.
• eggshell mosaic egg. I haven't tried this tutorial yet, but I'm really intrigued by it. I think that if I wash the shells well, they should be archivally-safe. I mean, I've got blown-out eggs that I've had on display for years and they're still nice!

• felted wool Easter egg. If you felt the wool roving directly onto the wood egg you won't be able to remove it, but I think it gives the felted wool egg a pleasingly realistic weight. If you do want to remove the roving, perhaps to make an egg that you can open and shut, put plastic wrap around the wood egg before you felt onto it.
• hot glue raised embellishments. I tried this a couple of years ago with jumbo wood eggs, and I really love the look of the hot glue! Instead of the silver leaf that this tutorial uses, I spray painted my egg light blue, and then coated it in glitter spray. It looks not at all homemade!
• pen-and-ink eggs. These are the pens that I also use for rock painting, so it makes sense that they'd work great on Easter eggs!
• cactus egg. I am going to make a couple of these this year just because I think it'll be funny to perch them in my potted plants for the egg hunt!
• chalk painted eggs. I'm really curious to try out chalk paint sometime.

• chalkboard Easter egg. This project is less about the final result than about creating a process-oriented, open-ended Easter activity. Coat a wood Easter egg in a few layers of smooth chalkboard paint, and it can be decorated over and over again! Our favorite supplies for this are chalk pastels and chalk markers.
• spin art eggs. This is a perfect project for little ones. The heft of the wood eggs makes them work especially well with spin art, and if you offer a kid only two or three color options, they'll be able to enjoy the sensory and process-oriented experience of spin art egg decorating... AND the eggs will still be suitable for display afterwards!
• bunny and chick painted eggs. These are ridiculously cute.
• speckled eggs. These are also ridiculously cute, and I'm obsessed with how weirdly realistic they are!
• unicorn eggs. They're too delicate for an egg hunt, so they can supervise from the table set for Easter dinner.

• Sharpie-embellished Easter eggs. As you can tell, this is the first method we ever used for decorating our wood eggs. Look at my little Syd baby! She's always been so artistic. In subsequent years, I sometimes first put a white base layer on the eggs to make them look a little more realistic under their Sharpie embellishments. If you pick up some paint pens, you can put any color down as a base layer, because paint pens will show up well on top of anything.
• coloring page decoupaged eggs. Decoupage of all kinds works especially well with wood Easter eggs. This project is a fun way to upcycle part of a coloring page onto an egg.
• Mandalorian and Baby Yoda painted eggs. It's my second-year-in-a-row tradition to treat myself to a month of Disney+ after closing out Girl Scout cookie season. There's something about watching Moana every day for 30 days that just washes away all the Girl Scout cookie stress! I LOVE The Mandalorian, too, so I'm stoked to make myself a little Mandalorian Easter egg!
• book page decoupaged egg. This would be so awesome to do with a beat-up copy of a book that the kids and I have read together. If I can find a Percy Jackson at the very tag-end of its life Syd would be thrilled!
• acorn eggs. I love how this tutorial uses pinecones and hemp twine to make eggs that look like acorns. Paired with the unfinished wood eggs, it makes for a completely natural project!

• watercolor-dyed Easter eggs. This is absolutely the easiest method to make some extremely bright and colorful wood Easter eggs! Liquid watercolors are beautiful on their own, but you can also add Sharpie or pain pen embellishments for even more fun.
• painted babouchka eggs. Painting projects of all kinds work great on wood eggs, so I have a lot of fun and random ones. No reason for me having a babouchka egg other than that I think it's cute!
• painted animal eggs. I really like the felt and pipe cleaner embellishments that make these animal eggs look even cuter!
• gold foil eggs. I have been longing for an excuse to play with gold leaf!
• stained wood eggs. I have no idea why this had not occurred to me at ALL until I saw this tute, but I am seriously about to go drag out all the wood stain I own and try it. This would look really pretty on top of a wood burned egg. 

• tissue paper-decoupaged Easter eggs. The kids and I didn't know what to expect when we first tried this project, but the result is surprisingly lovely! Tissue paper is so thin that you can actually blend the colors, and the ample application of Mod Podge makes the finished eggs super shiny with colors that have depth and seem slightly translucent.
• stamped tissue paper-decoupaged eggs. You can get all kinds of cool details by stamping onto tissue paper. If you want to try this, don't use the dyed craft tissue paper that we use for the previous tutorial--that stuff bleeds like crazy!
• mood eggs. Syd actually has some thermochromic powder leftover from her years-long passion for slime-making. I wonder if the paint would stay working well for multiple years in a row on our wood eggs?
• painted ice cream egg. Here's another niche but weirdly adorable painted egg project.
• masking fluid and watercolor eggs. I had never heard of masking fluid before, but Syd likes painting with watercolors, so it might be a useful purchase in general for her--and then I could play with it by making Easter eggs!

P.S. If you know of a good way to decorate a wood Easter egg, please tell me about it in the Comments. I can always use another happily-embellished Easter egg in our stash!

Girl Scout Cookie Recipes: Samoa Cheesecake

 

In between selling over 1,500 Girl Scout cookies so far this season, Will has been helping me with the other project that I always start to crave at the first of every year: making recipes using Girl Scout cookies!

This Samoa Cheesecake is literally just a traditional cheesecake recipe with a food processor full of Samoa cookies substituted for graham crackers. I think I overbaked the crust and therefore made the caramel in the cookies pretty stiff, but otherwise they were a perfect substitute:

I had intended to top the cheesecake with dried coconut flakes and drizzled caramel, but as you can see, people started digging in before I got to it!

Cheesecake is my favorite dessert, but this is the first time I have ever made it myself--for some reason, I had it in my head that cheesecakes are fiddly and difficult to make, but this cheesecake was super easy! It wasn't too sweet, although next time I'll DEFINITELY add the coconut and caramel, because "too sweet" isn't actually a problematic descriptor for me. The Samoa crust was chewy due to the caramel, and it was VERY yum. 

Want to make more recipes using Girl Scout cookies? A few years ago, I created a whole list of Girl Scout cookie recipes!

Make a Wood Burned Stick Plant Marker

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

My favorite plant markers are the simplest ones you could make--they're just wood burned sticks! I've experimented with more decorative and elaborate plant markers over the years, and some of them ARE really fun to create and display, but I haven't found anything more eco-friendly, easier to make and use, or sturdier than wood with a wood burned label. 

These wood burned stick plant markers have no paint to fade, no glue to lose its adhesion, no sketchy materials to worry about leaching into the ground, no artificial substances that will sit around forever if I neglect to collect them from the garden! A nice, thick stick will stay serviceable for several years, it will never lose its contrast with its wood burned label, and when I'm done with it, it'll happy decompose wherever I leave it, benefiting the soil as it does.

Supplies

To make your own wood burned stick plant marker, here's what you'll need:

• Stick. Look for a stick that's around 1" diameter, and cut it to lengths approximately 8"-10". If you find the stick somewhere other than your own property, you might want to also bake it using the same method that you use with acorns. I might be the garden version of a helicopter mom, because I worry about introducing random fungi, parasites, or insects to my plants from outside sources, but baking will kill anything that grows.
• Carving knife. You don't need a full-on set of wood carving knives (although my kids and I use ours all the time!), but you do want some sharp knife that you can do a little whittling with. Don't be scared, because it's easy and fun!
• Wood burner. Wood burning kits are easily available and fairly inexpensive, but if you don't see yourself using one often, it's worth it to ask around among friends and family to find one to borrow.

Directions

1. Prepare Your Stick

 Cut it to size, if you haven't already, and peel the bark off if you prefer that look. 

  2. Carve The Stake 

Choose one end of the stick to be the bottom, and use your carving knife to begin carving that end of the stick into a point. It's pretty messy, so do this outside, and it's somewhat slow going, so I highly suggest working your way through an audiobook or becoming obsessed with a podcast to help the time pass. 

Eventually, though, you'll have shaved that end down to a nice point. You don't have to make the tip sharp, of course, unless you think it might be helpful to have some vampire-slaying stakes disguised as plant markers. I, personally, do find this helpful.

3. Flatten One Side For a Label

 

Use your carving knife to shave away one side of the top half of the stick, creating a flattened area for your plant marker's label. This is a little trickier than carving the stake, but the good news is that this flattened area does not have to be at all perfect for you to be able to wood burn the label. If you get really frustrated, you can cheat by using a palm sander and your most abrasive sandpaper to even out the surface. 

 I warned you that wood carving is messy!

4. Wood Burn the Label

Follow the instructions on your wood burner to attach the appropriate tip and heat it up, then use it like you would an unwieldy sort of pen--it's really that easy! Going slowly helps, and don't be afraid to go over the same line a couple of times to make it deeper and darker. Try not to let the tip just sit in one spot, however, as that will add a large, burned blot to your work. 

When your label is wood burned on, your plant marker is ready to go to work! Unlike most projects that you use outdoors, you don't need to seal these plant markers; wood ages well and each plant marker will easily last several years in its spot before it needs to be replaced. 

I like to place these markers next to my perennial plants, especially the ones that I don't have confined to garden beds. My milkweed, for instance, tends to pop up late and likes to spread out, so a permanent marker to remind me where it keeps me from trying to put an annual on top of it. 

In the photo above, my brand-new sunflower plant marker is going to help me remember that I transplanted some of my perennial sunflowers into that narrow bed this year. They LOVE it there, but until they get tall and start to bud they tend to look kind of weedy, the poor dears, so that nice sturdy plant marker will (hopefully) keep me from absentmindedly pulling them next spring. 

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!

I Made Rainbow Fibonacci Placemats, Because It's My Pandemic Hobby

 

I've been obsessed with rainbows (it's like alphabetizing for colors!) and math (so many patterns, so many puzzles, so many correct answers that it's possible to suss out!) forever, and teaching myself how to make my niece's Sierpinski triangle quilt also got me obsessed with how satisfying it is to sew absolutely perfect seams and angles and iron them just so and end up with a creation that's gloriously precise.

Add in a nice long podcast, preferably in the true crime genre, and nowhere else to be and nothing else to do but sew and listen, and I'm as happy as a clam can be while remaining socially isolated and terrified of the ongoing global pandemic...

And we actually DID need placemats! I Googled around for a while trying to find a pattern I liked, but I don't like anything floral or cutesy or too curvy, I'm not in the mood for something novelty or pop culture, and the only color schemes I really like are galaxy and rainbow, because I am ten years old. I was about to just put the whole project on the back burner when I suddenly thought, "Ooh, I could sew the Fibonacci sequence just like I did when I made my Fibonacci quilt, and stop on a number that's the perfect size for a placemat!"

"Let's see... how many different squares would that give me.... OMG SEVEN?!?!?!?"

And the rainbow Fibonacci placemat is born!

Don't those squares, sewn so precisely and ironed nice and sharp, soothe that tense pit in the bottom of your stomach?

And don't you find that concentrating on cutting and pinning the layers together and matching everything up just perfectly requires so much focus that there's no room for any actual original thoughts in your head?

So pretty! So orderly!

And isn't it nice to quilt such nice, straight lines while listening to the behind-the-scenes story of the Chippendale dancers?

And doesn't it make your kid's ravioli soup, ripe peach, and half a homemade pumpkin chocolate chip cookie look elegant instead of the result of you 1) cleaning out the freezer and 2) foisting off the last of the canned goods you panic-bought almost exactly one year ago today because it was practically the only thing still on the shelves at THE HARDWARE STORE (stay classy, Midwest!)?

Also, both that placemat and table are kinda dirty. I'd warn you not to look too closely, but I suspect you already knew I'm not landing on the cover of Good Housekeeping anytime soon...

I'm so happy with how these placemats turned out!

I wanted to make more, but we don't actually *need* anymore (especially not if I'm going to make myself a whole other set out of rainbow prints, ahem...), so I made a rainbow Fibonacci placemat listing in my Pumpkin+Bear shop, because making them for other people is just as fun!

Anyway, I suppose that mathematical rainbow-themed quilting is as good of a pandemic hobby as anything else!

P.S. The Fibonacci Sequence makes a great homeschool math unit!