WIP Wednesday: Flannel Kid Pajamas

It's my new study's inaugural sewing project--flannel pajamas for Willow:

The pattern is McCall's 6535 (which means that I could also make Willow a karate uniform!) in a seven--no, I did not bother to consult the finished measurements, but nevertheless I'm shocked to tell you that this pajama top is just massively too big. Willow is lost in it! I don't know what seven-year-old would fit into that top, but whoever it is, they're actually ten years old, at least.

At least I can adjust the pants size using the appropriate elastic, and I'm thinking of making them reversible, simply to make them look nicer when they're (inevitably) cuffed, and to give them more wear, because apparently Willow will be able to fit into these pajamas for YEARS.

Do you like the fabric?

The purple flannel with hearts was in my stash, but there wasn't enough to make a full pair of pajamas, so I gave Willow a piece of the fabric and let her choose a complementary pattern at the fabric store. I am LOVING my educator's discount there!

When these pajamas are finished, Sydney has her pair all lined up--pink flannel princesses and pink flannel hearts in an Oliver + S pattern--and then I think I'll make them drawstring pajama bags to match.

I wonder if I could talk them into wearing Little House on the Prairie-style nightcaps to bed if I sewed those to match, too...

Homeschool Field Trip: Peden Farm

Our hometown is the kind of town where yes, there is an entire working family farm within the city limits, an historic homestead that's only a few minutes' further drive than the house of one of my kiddos' best buddies. Every year, usually in the spring but this year in the fall (this last spring was rainy!), the Pedens generously--SO generously!--open up their farm to visiting schoolgroups--including homeschool groups, of course--of little tykes.

It's called the Children's Farm Festival, and we love it.

Collecting Feathers from the Free-Range Poultry

Blacksmith Demonstrations

Chickens!!!

Admiring Hand-Painted Gourds

Willow made a rubbing of every single leaf on display. There were a LOT of leaves:

Hay Ride

Shearing the Sheep

Old-Time Toys

Hand Pumping Water

Hand-Grinding Corn

So Many Chickens!!!

And yes, for the sake of my child, also interviewed, I even put aside my own horror of interviews and spoke a series of benign inanities to the very nice reporter:

Not bad for a schoolday!

Making Beeswax Leaves

This is the time of year when the crock pot dedicated to crafting sits in near-permanence on the living room table, a pound-ish of beeswax solidified at the bottom. It's required to live there so that every day, when the girls and I come home from whatever walk or adventure or woodsy parking lot we've just enjoyed, we can turn the crock pot on, melt the beeswax (sweet honey scent!), and make beeswax leaves out of the bounty of our most recent collection:

My full beeswax leaves tutorial is over at Crafting a Green World.

Dissecting a Honeycomb: The Yummies Live Inside

Whenever the girls ask what's in a particular dish and I don't want to tell them--either I don't feel like reciting a list of eighteen spices, for instance, or I know that a revelation that the dreaded SUN-DRIED TOMATO or the horrible PEANUT BUTTER or the villainous GINGER or the monstrous PEPPER live inside the recipe will mean that I'm eating dinner alone tonight--I tell them that the dish contains "yummies," as in:

"Momma, what's in the pasta?"
"Hmmm...noodles, and tomato sauce, and garlic."
[Suspiciously eyeing what is, in fact, a sun-dried tomato]: "What else?"
"Oh...just yummies. Want a serving or a taste?"
"Serving, please!"

The only thing this has to do with our honeycomb dissection is that...know what lives inside the honeycomb? Um, bee spit and the occasional bee part and beeswax, etc. You know, yummies!

Here's our honeycomb piece, bought from Hunter's Honey Farm on our recent field trip:

As we learned on our tour, the hexagonal cells are made by the bees from their wax, are filled with honey by the bees, and then sealed by them with more wax.

You can cut it open for a cross-section, and to verify that, yes indeedy, there's sticky honey inside of there!

And of COURSE you can eat it!

Even if you're not too sure about the wax and the spit, etc.

After all, it's apparently MUCH tastier than a sun-dried tomato, sigh.

How Many Pennies in One Dollar?

I re-branded the hundred grid as a dollar grid, so let's see...

This many!

It looks so cool that I considered having Sydney glue the pennies down to the grid so that we could keep it...

And then I thought, "Heck, no! I'm not wasting a whole dollar!"

The girls have recently wearied of all this talk of coins and commerce, so our math is moving on to geometry. Geomags, constructive triangles, spirograph, geoboard, patterns blocks and mirrors--that ought to hold us for a while!

Brownie Batter Bake-off

You knew we'd do it again. The bake-off has become our go-to way to do up desserts around here.

Following in the steps of the cookie bake-off and the carrot cupcake bake-off, I mixed up a batch of extra fudgy brownies using my library copy of The Good Neighbor Cookbook, then divided it into three bowls and laid out every single thing in the pantry:

I figured that I had a sure winner with my peanut butter, lingonberry jam, and wheat germ brownies, but they--and I can't believe that I'm about to say this!--had too much peanut butter. Who knew there could be such a thing?

In my opinion, the best mix-ins were the tart lingonberry jam, the little dried date pieces, carob chips, and wheat germ. It doesn't matter, though--even the brownies with marshmallows, peanut butter, raisins, cream cheese, candied ginger, almonds and poppy seeds got this same reaction:

Delicious.

We used:

At Hunter's Honey Farm

It's that time of the year when our homeschool group seems to have the best field trips! After a few chilly, rainy weeks, it was perfect weather at Hunter's Honey Farm for our field trip there:

Outdoor field trips on beautiful days are the best, wouldn't you agree?

The hive tour was set up so cleverly. One beehive stood on a table in a grassy area, underneath a tent with mesh walls. All the families stood just outside the tent peering in, and the beekeeper stood inside the tent with the hive. He lectured us on the finer points of bees, then took the hive apart frame by frame, found all the interesting things on that frame (pollen! cells with honey! empty cells! the queen!), and walked it around the inside perimeter of the tent so that everyone could see:

He took care to make sure that every single child saw every single fascinating thing:

Inside, we took another tour of the processing area. Mmmm, raw, unwashed honey!

The girls felt pretty fine, indeed, to already be expert crafters of rolled beeswax candles:

But I do believe that the most THRILLING thing for each of them was when they each got to fill their very own honey bear:

Each girl has a honey bear of her own!

Each honey bear is quite sticky by now, as you can imagine.

Let's see...I took home:

• one jar of raw honey (full of protein, and good for your immune system!)
• one half-gallon jug of wildflower honey, because the girls sure as heck aren't going to let me share their honey bears
• one one-pound chunk of beeswax, soon to coat the outsides of autumn leaves, in just the first of its MANY uses around here
• one small section of honeycomb, just this afternoon dissected and then devoured by the children

That may have possibly been this week's grocery budget, but hey--everyone loves honey on toast, no matter how many meals they eat it in a row!