The Fashion Show Project: Crowning Achievement, and Thoughts about the Process (So Far)

The final element of the little kid's overall Butterfly Fairy Princess design that we submitted to the Trashion/Refashion Show is the fairy princess crown:

This crown gave me the most grief! My first instinct was to wire the whole thing together out of wire hangers, and then cover it with fabric. The wire hangers, however, are thick and unwieldy enough that it was impossible to construct an oval smooth enough to fit the kid's head well without hurting her--a little too crown of thorns-y in practice, alas.

My next idea was to construct the band out of folded newspaper, which would enable me to sew the royal purple fabric (leftover from the same cotton blouse that furnished the butterfly wings) onto it. I thought this because I've sewn on paper often, but I've never sewn on paper that I then wanted to wear--the holes for stitching made the paper just too weak for this purpose, and it fell apart.

Finally, I took an extra trip to the big-box craft store to buy yet more hot glue (I really need to start buying this by the case), and I used SO much glue to cover the newspaper band with the purple fabric. I had my partner cut the wire hangers into 16" lengths (the kid likes her crowns tall) and fold them in half, then I hot glued red sequined fabric to the front and purple cotton fabric to the back of each crown point, then I hot glued each crown point inside the fold of the newspaper hatband, THEN I bent the hatband into a circle and hot glued it closed.

Hallelujah, it worked! And although the red sequined fabric isn't repeated anywhere else on the outfit, it's what the young master designer wanted, and thus...the Butterfly Fairy Princess Dress, complete:

For footwear, the kid drew me a picture of what appeared to be 14" red high heels, and I said, "Nuh-uh. Find something from your closet." So cowboy boots it is, although I have plenty of that red sequined blouse left, and I may make a rosebud or two to adorn them:

 From a homeschool perspective, this project has been so beneficial to the little kid, in so many ways:

  
 

From a parent's perspective, however...it's been troubling.

When I originally submitted the kid's outfit to the Trashion/Refashion Show committee, it was rejected. The representative of  the committee who emailed me wrote in explanation, "[W]e find it a bit too sexy to a young child."

Poor grammar aside, I OBVIOUSLY found this criticism to be completely inappropriate and highly offensive. First of all, the kid's dress ISN'T sexy. It's a fantasy costume, sure, but it's a four-year-old's fantasy, as designed by herself, with, fine, a little bit of Barbie's influence, but with a hell of a lot more influence from her own vivid imagination. I mean, the child has never even seen a Disney princess movie.

To say that my child would design a sexy outfit for herself is to say that I've exposed her to so much sexy imagery that she's internalized it as the ideal, which isn't the case. To say that I would sew a sexy outfit for my child is to say that I'm just a bad parent, frankly, which I'm not.

But to actually apply the word "sexy" to a child's outfit at all...well, I'm astounded that a group of adults would dare to make such a conflation, would say it out loud to each other, and then would tell someone else about it. We just don't apply that word to young children in our culture. Even on Toddlers and Tiaras, in which show children are basically prancing around in tassels and hotpants, the go-to word is "sassy." One child dresses as a "sassy policewoman." Another child is a "sassy cheerleader." Etc.

If you think that I've sewed my four-year-old a whore outfit then fine, that's what you think. But if you're a judge and it's your job to tell me why you're rejecting my outfit, then that's certainly not what you say, because if you do, then I'm going to think that you're a bad, nasty, damaged sort of person who looks at a four-year-old playing dress-up and thinks about sex, and I'm going to keep my kid away from you. How about, instead, you tell me that the outfit is a "little too sophisticated?" "Not as child-like as we're looking for?" Whatever, just as long as you're not telling me that you're thinking my kid and sexy at the same time.

You might wonder why I'm still at all interested in this show after that. I wonder a little, too. However, the truth is that this outfit design project and even the runway show is an experience that I want the kid to have, as interested as she is in clothes and fashion and art and design. We're having fun working together on it, and it's educational, and that's that. So when the committee invited me to "rework this design and make it more child appropriate," I went ahead with the kid and we didn't rework it, but instead added in the wings and crown, elements that I described for the committee in the original submission, but didn't show them as they weren't yet complete.

However, in my re-submission, I did write the following: "Although I appreciate constructive criticism, you should know that as a parent, I found the term "sexy" as applied to my young child to be completely inappropriate and highly offensive." There was a lot more that I felt like saying, but might as well be concise if you're not blogging, right?

The kid's outfit was accepted after its resubmission. In that email accepting it for the fashion show, the spokeswoman wrote, "The committee is very pleased with the revised submission." Since the submission wasn't exactly revised, a fact that I did make clear, I'm wondering if the committee is now beginning to pretend some things about our exchange, especially as not one word was said about my complaint. No apology, nothing. Interesting, yes?

So all's well that ends well, right? The kid is THRILLED, and I haven't even told her that hair and make-up services are being donated to all the runway models the day of the fashion show--frankly, I'm not sure if that would even rev her engine more, because I don't think that the kid has ever actually seen any make-up before, and the only time that she's ever been inside a hair salon is the day that her sister chopped off half her locks for her. There will be several rehearsals nearer the show, and although I've made it clear to the kid that she'll be doing the runway walk independently, and she's totally on board, she is a preschooler, and thus...we'll see.

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A Monopoly Junior Math Equation

One of the many games that Willow enjoys (along with Quirkle, Scrabble, Sorry, chess, checkers, Chutes and Ladders, etc.) is Monopoly Junior:

 

Whenever we play Monopoly Junior, Willow is ALWAYS the banker (she loves it!), and I ALWAYS pay her in large bills and require her to make change. The subtraction itself is, of course, no problem, but Will still needs a lot of practice in the problem-solving aspect--you have to understand, and then memorize, the procedure involved in making change, which can be complicated for a newbie. We verbally go through the procedure each time Will needs to, but I also write it out for her as an equation to reference:

 

And that makes making change much more managable:

 
It's my goal at some point in the near future to translate my chalkboard globe project into a chalkboard game board, which will give me a portable yet large-scale chalkboard so that I can expand the equation into even more mathematical awesomeness, along the lines of "Let P=amount of money give to the banker," etc.

The Fashion Show Project: Beautiful Butterfly Wings

Just as I'm stretching my abilities in constructing a runway-ready outfit for Sydney, Syd, herself is learning quite a lot in this homeschooling project of ours. Consumer science, I suppose--remaking an outfit is much less expensive than buying one, although much more work, and one still must conform to a budget.

Math--the yardage of the fabric is what it is, and can go only so far and no farther.

Home ec--sewing without a pattern still requires careful measurements, frequent fittings, and precision.

Careers--modeling a garment can be tedious, and a photo shoot intended to display certain views of the garment consists of certain poses, which are repeated until the photographer is pleased with the result.

Art--with a lot of work and a LOT of creativity (and a lot of hot glue), you can create an outfit that is very similar to, though not identical to, your original vision.

Syd's vision of her outfit includes not just the garment, but butterfly wings and a fairy princess crown. For the butterfly wings, I used wire hangers, a stretchy cotton sweater, a stretchy cashmere sweater, duct tape, four broken sewing machine needles, extra fabric from the pink dress, hot glue, and ribbons to make Sydney's vision real:

 
My little fashion model has the hang of the photo shoot, don't you think?
 
 
 
 
You can check out my wire hanger butterfly wings tutorial over at Crafting a Green World; keep in mind that although the tutorial is for one pair of wings, I actually used two pairs and then attached them together at the middle with duct tape covered by dress fabric for the layered effect.

Magical Math Grids

I could do some really cool things to trick the girls into learning math. I could build an elaborate gnome village, for instance, in which the math gnomes could practice fractions in the little gnome bakery, and physics on the little gnome playground, and arithmetic in the little gnome grocery store. I could draw a giant hopscotch grid on the basement floor and have the girls hop out equations. I could invent an intricate computation game with our numbered beanbags, and offer prizes for the winners.

Or I could just hand the girls a simple number grid to busy their hands at the table after dinner:

 
 These number grids (1-50 and 1-100) and blank multiplication grids are all printable math activities at Kids Can Have Fun. I gave the number grids to the girls with some markers and showed them how to skip count by coloring in the appropriate number squares, and then I showed them how to transfer those numbers to the appropriate row and column in the blank multiplication grid.

Then I let them go:

 
 
 Syd really likes goal-oriented projects, and so it wasn't long before I realized that she was not going to give up until she had filled out her entire multiplication grid:

 

Willow was less intensely immersed (Zoo Tycoon is not going to play itself, after all), but she enjoyed the challenge of filling out her multiplication grid by skip-counting in her head:

Syd, however, colored in every single square of every single number series (with me hanging out at her elbow to help her out), then transferred those numbers first to the right row, then the right column on her sheet:

 
 
 Dinner came and went, clean-up time came and went, playtime came and went, and finally we shooed her off to bed. But the next morning, while I drank coffee and read the newspaper and was available for assistance, Syd (in the same shirt she wore the day before) went right back to her work:

 And eventually achieved her goal: a complete multiplication grid:

And then the little mathematician went off to play ponies.

Construction and Deconstruction

Constructing a bunting for a local business:

 With breaks to tear up this old globe for a new project TBA:

Both should be finished today, barring tantrums by small children or the unavailability of latex primer.

A Little Green in the Grey Winter

We just needed a little touch of green the other day, and so we hiked off for a morning at the greenhouse:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
After the greenhouse we were just sitting around on campus, and the girls could not agree on where they wanted to go next. Sydney wanted to walk home and play, but Willow wanted to walk to the library and read. I told the girls to find a compromise and figure it out, and then I sat back and read for a while.

Willow was a champion negotiator, and kept offering all these compromises: "Let's go to the library for two hours, then we'll go home and I'll play anything that you want for two hours;" "Let's go to the library, and the next time that I have money I'll buy you a present;" "Let's go to the library, and when I have candy I'll give it to you."

Sydney was having none of this compromise business, and so eventually I told her that she just plain lost due to her failure to attempt a negotiation. And she threw a fit.

But on our way to the library, hiking through Dunn Woods, Syd still throwing a fit (but silently, since silent public fits is the only rule that I have ever been able to instill in my children, pretty much), she spied something. She stopped in her tracks, squatted down, sifted through the fallen leaves next to the path for a minute, and unearthed a pristine little doll. It's some sort of litle plastic character, with a rubber dress that's practically impossible to put on and take off, just about the size of Sydney's palm.

Sydney ran over to me, doll clutched in her hand, and showed it to me, screaming, "I am SO glad that we're going to the library!"

The way home, you see, is another direction--no doll lying next to that path.

Tutorial: Cornhusk Dolls for Pioneer Girls

I can't tell you how many times I have read the Little House books. I can tell you that I read them several times as a child, always from my Mamma's boxed set. When I was pregnant with my first kid and hyper-emetic, with no relief from constant nausea for a solid month (until my midwife had a miracle cure mixed up for me at a compounding pharmacy, but that's another story), my partner lay next to me, tried not to jostle me, and read me the entire series over again. Little House in the Big Woods was the first novel that I read to my girls chapter by chapter, one chapter every night at bedtime. And when my big kid could first read, REALLY read, she watched me ceremoniously move Mamma's boxed set of Little House books down from my adult bookshelf to her child bookshelf, and soon after she was asking me exactly how Almanzo had grown his pumpkin so big, and if we could try that, too.

Just recently we've again been exploring the Little House. The Little House in the Big Woods audiobook was such a hit (even though I highly disliked the narrator's voice--sorry!) that we're now working our way through all the audiobooks. We've got some good Laura Ingalls Wilder timeline tidbits for our big basement timeline. And we've got a Little House cookbook and a Little House craft book, and we're not afraid to use them!

(Well, I am a little afraid of the cookbook, and don't tell my partner, but as the official homeschool errand man, it will soon be his responsibility to track down a particular cut of meat known as "salt pork", and then he's going to have to cook it with the kids, on account of I get grossed out cooking meat, and I definitely get grossed out cooking meat called "salt pork." Shudder.)

Of course, it wouldn't be a proper homeschool if there weren't a lot of craft projects involved. There's the model of the covered wagon that we're putting together, there's the nine-patch quilt, there's the godawful salt pork, and there are the kids' newest plaything, the cornhusk dolls.

Cornhusk dolls aren't really seasonally appropriate for February, but I pulled the dried cornhusks out from my magic craft closet, and you can either get your own cornhusks from non-local, out-of-season corn at the grocery store, or you can wait until harvest time. Or just live vicariously through me and my project, cause here goes:

If you're using dried cornhusks, soak them for maybe half an hour first.

 If you're using fresh cornhusks, you can skip this step.

Pick out three or four of the longest, best-looking cornhusks and stack them on top of each other. Fold the stack width-wise until you have a width that is a good one for your doll, and then fold the stack in half. The ends of the stack are your doll's skirt, and the folded part is your doll's head. Tie a piece of twine tightly around the cornhusks at your doll's neck.

If you're a rock star and your cornhusks are fresh, you can use a cornhusk to tie the knot, but I just used twine. I'm not a rock star, although I am a craft star.

Pick out two short but good-looking cornhusks and roll them tightly. Poke the roll through the folds in the cornhusks just below your doll's neck, and tie another knot under this roll for your doll's waist. Trim the roll at both ends to a good arm-length.

The little kid needs to trim her arms a little more:

At this point you're basically done. You can now play with your doll, or make her some clothes, or, apparently, just draw some clothes on, because it makes you pretty darn happy to do so: 

Sure beats a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, doesn't it?

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