Hopscotch

It's no lifesize dinosaurs drawn on the basketball court or anything, but hopscotch is as sweet a way as anything to welcome Spring:
Have you ever read the rules for hopscotch? It's really not that fun. So we just threw stuff--
--and hopped:
And it turned out that THAT was fun.

Tutorial: Felted Wool Easter Eggs While You Wait

I must tell you that Willow and I are getting QUITE good at the guitar. We can do walking fingers, and Easter Bunny Gets Depressed After Easter, and tomorrow we are going to the music shop to buy music notebooks so that Will can do the rest of her guitar homework, which is to draw some quarter notes.

Will woke us up early this morning with her guitar practice, and it's a good thing that she got it done, too, for she has been sick AGAIN today. Thank goodness no barfing, because I don't think my nerves could handle another stomach bug so soon, but I am firmly against medicating a non-severe fever, and guess whose child of course gets hysterical every time she has a fever?

Fortunately, the child was placated with an endless supply of Mythbusters and Magic School Bus, and so I still had time to sew, and do laundry, and draw pictures with the baby, and cook a veggie chili that I distractedly made far too salty, and straighten the house, and read , and felt up some Easter eggs.

Felting with wool roving is one of the very few crafts that I do using new materials, and one of the very few activities of any sort that I do using animal products, and it's still not my favorite thing, frankly, but in a child's Easter basket it's non-plastic, non-sugary, non-factory-farmed chicken egg...and also colorful and soft and fun and suitable to be handed down to future generations of guitar-playing little girls, so there you go.

To felt your own Easter eggs, you will need:

• egg forms. After Easter, when I can pick them up for free at the Recycling Center, likely, I have plans to make felted wool shaker eggs with those awful plastic Easter eggs, but for these particular eggs, which I intend to be heirloom-quality for my children, I'm using wooden eggs from Casey's Wood Products. I also have a fondness for their wood dinosaur cut-outs, if you must know.
• wool roving. I buy my roving from The Arts at Eagle's Find, where I am assured that the shop owner knows the happy sheep from which the wool came.
• hot water
• dish soap
• aluminum foil and a clothes dryer--just go with me on this for a bit

1. Cut off a goodly amount of roving--anywhere from twice to three times the size of your object, depending on how bulky it is: I always try to get by with a smaller amount of roving than I really need, but don't be like me--give yourself a generous amount of roving to work with.

2. Roll up your egg in your roving, trying not to have a bunch of the edges of the roving meet in the same place.

3. Get your roving-wrapped egg nice and saturated in the hot water and dish soap, and just sort of pat it down for a while. Pat, pat, pat all around the egg, gently working the roving into an even layer all over the egg. You don't want any spots that are too bulky, and you don't want any thin spots where the wood will peek through:
4. Keep doing this for a while, perhaps ten minutes or so, until the roving feels somewhat felted and holds itself around the egg. You can also rub, agitate, or roll the egg around in your hands--all that friction helps the roving felt.

5. When the roving is pretty well felted around the egg--it doesn't have to be perfect by any means--rinse out all of the dish soap, and then, while the egg is still soaking wet, wrap it snugly in some aluminum foil:I'm not a big fan of aluminum foil, either, but parchment paper and wax paper just didn't work. Aluminum foil works.

6. Throw the foil-wrapped eggs into your dryer along with a load of clothes, and dry everything on hot. The heat and agitation in the dryer will do an excellent job of completing the felting on your eggs, while you go do something else.

When you're done, your eggs will look something like this:
Aren't they cool? I think that I'm going to felt around most of the smaller eggs in our collection, and save the larger ones for decorating in other ways. Easter is coming up, after all, and we haven't gotten out the Sharpies or hot glue even once!

P.S. Want to follow along with all of our other handmade, homeschooling activities, tutorials, and resources? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Matt Does His Homework

Matt's mid-term for his drawing class consisted of...well, a drawing. Choosing something handy from around the house for his still life, he of COURSE ended up sketching a portrait of a stegosaurus:

There are several things that I love about this video:

• I love how Matt is wearing a sweater over a collared shirt. Isn't that adorable?
• I love how he's embarassed for about three seconds that I'm videotaping him, but then he almost immediately forgets about me and gets way into his drawing.
• I love that he's drawing a stegosaurus. We're going to hang it up in the girls' room when the instructor returns it. AND the instructor better not mark on it.
• I love most of all how the part that he's drawing just as I'm filming? Looks NOTHING like the parts that came before, and NOTHING like a stegosaurus.

And in other news, I also love that Matt bought me a guitar from a pawn shop, because I want to learn guitar along with Willow, whose first lesson is this afternoon. To borrow a compliment that my Mama once bestowed upon me after spending a week in the same house with me and a colic-y two-months-old Willow: that man has the patience of Job (pronounce it "Jobe").

Building the Courthouse Steps

Today we: 

• went to the library 
• ate homemade biscuits 
• checked out WAY too many books (again) 
• drew 
• read 
• played computer games 
• took Sydney to dance class 
• baked whole wheat hamburger buns and ate them with veggie burgers and baked potatoes

 In my scarce child-free time, I: 

• read 
• bought a guitar 
• made whole wheat hamburger bun dough 
• sewed and sewed and sewed more dinos 

The log cabin quilt is probably the easiest kind of quilt to sew, after the one-block quilt, of course, because it doesn't require a template. And if you're not way into precision (which I'm not), sketchy math skills just make it look better. 

The traditional log cabin block starts with a middle block that is a perfect square; since my middle block is made from the picture on the front of a T-shirt, however, my middle block is rarely a square. Here's how I start with that to build a Courthouse Steps log cabin block that IS perfectly square: 

1. You can save some time while piecing if you have some guidelines in mind and prep accordingly. For instance, although I'm building my blocks with strips of various lengths and widths, I know that I want each finished strip to be no wider than 1.5" and no longer than 12". When you add in the seam allowances, that means that my largest possible strip could be 2"x12.5". So I pre-cut every strip to that measurement, and just trim off what I don't need as I'm piecing. To save extra time, I also basically chose that 1.5" width just so that I could cut strips to the width of my 2" clear plastic ruler and not have to measure. 

2. You build a Courthouse Steps block with mirror-image symmetry, so that what you do to one side, you do to the other:
You do top and bottom, then left and right, then top and bottom again, taking turns to build up your block: Obviously, some of the pieces on the longer side will have to be trimmed to be narrower than 1.5", otherwise you won't be able to get to a perfect square AND have the same number of pieces added. When you're done with one block, repeat (can you figure out how I messed this one up?): And repeat again:

And then go do something else, because piecing gets tiresome.

Our First In-School Homeschool Field Trip

It's a little silly to be doing so much homeschool stuff while the girls are still, you know, in SCHOOL, but I do like figuring out some workable strategies and activities ahead of time, and I like that we're meeting other homeschooling families and getting the community vibe ahead of time, and the daily digest from the homeschooling group that we joined is always stocked with a TON of awesome stuff that we want to do! I've already had to miss out on a farm tour and two ski trips, so I was NOT going to miss out on this morning field trip to the IU Art Museum.

It's a great space, because the galleries are small and, in the mornings, at least, not very crowded--VERY important to kid-friendliness, because huge expanses seem to invite running in a way that smaller rooms do not, and it's much more relaxing to be able to hold a conversation without using your whisper voices. We enjoyed mosaics--
--and masks--

--and the guards here, unlike the guards in the Indianapolis Art Museum, for instance, were very friendly and approachable. I did get chastised, AGAIN, for taking a photograph (when will I learn about temporary exhibits?), but a couple of guards chatted with the girls, and one even came over to point out to Willow that, in her rambling little monologue about a sculpture she was examining, she had actually guessed its title--it was very Montessori-like, perhaps is why.

We did meet several other homeschoolers and their moms, but--and perhaps this is very homeschool-like?--as soon as we all entered the first gallery we scattered and I didn't see most of them again, at least on that trip. The organizer also handed us some pretty awesome scavenger hunt stuff, but--and perhaps this is very homeschool-like of us?--we basically just did our own thing with sketchbooks and photographs and wandering, and didn't do the hunt, at least that time.

But we did do the gift shop, of COURSE. One postcard for each person and, as an extra treat, an IU Art Museum coloring book--how cool is that?

I assure you, Sydney's representation of the museum is dead-on.

Working on the Dinos

Thank goodness! The SUN was out today! The sun was OUT today! The sun was out TODAY!!! And...wait for it...the temperature hit 55 degrees! Sitting outside for three hours on a park bench while the girls played, pushing the occasional swing, taking a little hike down the creek bed--this was exactly what I needed today. I then had the energy to do a load of dishes, and feed my children lunch, and straighten the study and the kitchen, and make dinner.

We had vegan beans and franks. I ate vegan beans and franks! I am DEFINITELY cured.

The timeline for my Craftster dinosaur swap has just this minute begun to seem very protracted. Um, why am I basically making three quilts at the same time? Well, because I want three dino quilts, and I'm not sure how much dino fabric I have to parcel out. Still, the dino deadline is fast approaching.

Here are the new dinos to add to the collection:

Yeah, that last one is crooked. I'll figure it out later.

Sydney Shines

Phew! Nothing like a nasty, mid-week stomach flu to take a person off of the grid for a while. No email, no Facebook, no housework, no book work, no craft work--it would be quite the refreshing break, if I didn't still feel about halfway this side of death.

Willow, fortunately, is fully recovered now, but she and I were both struck ill at almost exactly the same time, and were both VERY unhappy girls for a couple of days. Matt did as much as he could within his work deadlines, even skipping his drawing class when it became clear that I was NOT going to be able to cope, but Syd, my pampered, spoiled, sweet little baby of the family, was not only left to her own devices quite a bit (something that she is not used to, what with having a constant sister-in-crime at her disposal), but was also needed to help out quite a bit, and she made good.

While I was barely able to move, myself, in the next room, Sydney kept Willow supplied with water, dry cereal, Netflix, and plenty of snuggles:
I staggered into the room during one interlude to find Willow sound asleep leaning on Sydney, with Sydney still watching their movie and absent-mindedly stroking Willow's hair. When she saw me, she said, "Momma, can I get a blanket to keep Willow not cold?"

By Friday night, at least, Willow and I were well enough to be planted on the bleachers at the ice rink, holding each other up and swathed in blankets from home, while Matt handled all the preschooler-corralling so that Sydney could shine in another capacity:
The smallest skater in the Spring Ice Show may not have remembered her choreography, or consented to wear her costume (in the car later, Matt was baffled as to why Syd started to throw a tantrum when he tried to put on her duck outfit. I said, "I can guess. Sydney, was your costume pretty?" Sydney, from her carseat in the back, shouted, "NO!" Mystery solved), or even stayed upright for the entire time, but she does claim that she could see me in the darkened audience, waving frantically at her.

And I could not be prouder.