Her First Embroidery Project

Mind you, I'VE never done an embroidery project before.

I do, however, have the habit of purchasing, when they're on enormous sale, or acquiring, when I find them for free, craft or homeschool supplies that I think will be useful "someday," and then putting them on our craft or homeschool shelves. I find that with my creative, busy, industrious children, someday does come, and so I wasn't really surprised when Willow pulled Sublime Stitching off a shelf one evening, spent some time flipping through it, and then asked to do an embroidery project.

I bought that book, or perhaps received it as a Christmas present, years ago. This is how it happens here.

I think I could have pulled together all the needed supplies--fabric, embroidery hoop, embroidery floss--here and there from my stash of freely acquired stuff, but I also have, also bought years ago, also at a good price, a Sublime Stitching Stitch-It Kit, complete with two tea towels, an embroidery hoop, and embroidery floss.

And that's how, twenty minutes after she first professed her desire, without a lot of fuss or stress or searching about, Willow was here:

We read the directions and properly set up the embroidery transfer on the fabric and in its hoop, and organized the floss in an untangled manner, but I didn't see a good point to asking Willow to master any particular proper "stitches," so I just let her have at it:

Yes, the transfer is on the dark and thick side. It's meant to be transferred lightly, but I wanted Willow to have a good outline to follow.

And so onward, towards a swan with a blue beak and pink feathers, and a plan for green wings, I believe:

Like any good embroidery project, this one is set aside and taken up again at leisure. It lives, in its free time, on a shelf here in the study, right next to the embroidery book and the stitch-it kit and Sydney's embroidery project, because of course she took one look at Willow working away, and realized that she, too, had always longed to embroider.

It's Always a Fine Day for...

...sidewalk chalk paint!

Homemade sidewalk chalk paint is a VERY easy recipe, but it's more of a niche art supply here, in that the girls tend to forget all about it for months at a time, and then, goofing around outside while their dad cleans up the front porch (it had reached the point where, even though I'm not all feng shui and I don't always tend to the appearance of our home from the outside, I was starting to worry that trick-or-treaters would be too frightened to approach our house!), one of them discovers the sidewalk stencils, and then it's as if a lightbulb goes off--

"Sidewalk chalk paint! Yeah, let's do it!"

And there goes the afternoon!

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!