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Blue Celery

Willow was given a science workbook, and in that science workbook she found perhaps the most ubiquitous science experiment among all science experiments: celery and colored water.

You will need:

• leafy celery. This was actually hard to find, since it seems that most grocery celeries have the leaves cut off--my theory is that the leaves begin to spoil before the stalks, and so impedes the celery's shelf life. Next spring, we may try to grown our own leafy celery for science experiments.
• liquid food coloring. For cooking and baking, I use professional-quality food coloring gel or paste, but liquid food coloring is often the best for crafting.
• clear glass. We used a Mason jar.

1. Remove a leafy celery stalk from the rest of the bunch, and cut off the bottom half-inch or so with a sharp knife. I cut my stalk at a diagonal, to expose more of the stalk to the water.

2. Fill the glass jar 1/3 to 1/2 full of water, and dye it a dark color with several drops of food coloring. Blue and purple and even a dark red work well:

3. Set the celery stalk in the water, and let it sit all day.

As the celery stalk sits in the water, it acts like any plant, in that it draws water up into its leaves. Because this water is colored, very gradually, over the course of several hours, you will begin to notice spots of color in the leaves as the colored water reaches it. Over time, these spots of color will become larger and more numerous:

If you have a microscope, you can cut a thin slice off of the celery stalk to examine, and also a section of the smallest and thinnest of the leaves. The leaf section is especially dramatic at around 600x, at which magnification you can see the cells, but also very clearly the veins through which the blue water is traveling, now set apart from the green leaf in blue.

And now you may add to your mental picture of what our messy living room table looks like, a jar of celery sitting in colored water, for this experiment apparently often bears repeating.

Remembering

One-Two-Three-Star!

Sydney gets very, VERY frustrated when she wants to draw or write something particular and can't quite manage it. Watching her throw a tantrum each time she tried to draw a star, for instance, would have been hilarious if it wasn't so pitiful. So I made her a dot-to-dot--

--and now she can draw a star.

More Wallpaper on the Wall

Buntings are on my mind for some reason. Here's my newest vintage wallpaper bunting in my pumpkinbear etsy shop, made with my much-treasured vintage wallpaper and my much-, much-treasured vintage beads:

While I'm on the subject, I also have in mind buntings made from comic books, buntings made from dictionary pages, buntings made from Shakespeare, and child-decorated buntings.

I like where this is going.

Gumdrops. On a Stick!

There's always room for another building toy, especially if that toy is sharp and/or full of high fructose corn syrup.

So you take some gumdrops, and you take some bamboo skewers, and you stick the bamboo skewers in the gumdrops--

--and you make stuff!

The gumdrops are sticky on the inside, so they hold the skewers really well, but they're also gummy, so they're very forgiving if you want to change the angle of a certain skewer or fit it somewhere just a little different from where you'd originally intended.

We all had a lot of fun with this, and several massive creations resulted:

Another interesting point is that these structures sort of tell you how to build them as you go. For instance, Will made a vertical triangle, then stuck a skewer straight across from the top of the triangle, but it wouldn't stay. So she tried sticking a skewer straight down from the end of that triangle, but it was too long. So she build another vertical triangle to hold that opposite end of the skewer, which held it up, but the whole structure kept tilting, so she connected the two vertical triangles with skewers at both ends of their bases--

...and so on and so on, the engineering skills building apace.

As for Syd's obsession, have any of you ever read the Tripod trilogy of young adult novels?

Shudder.

Tough Choices

Would you rather paint?

Or snuggle the foster kittens?

You're free to do both, of course:

In other news, we're having an excellent weekend.