Rainbow Fairy Dress Revealed

This dress was completely Sydney's vision, with my construction to order. If you're curious, I go into much more detail about the pattern-drafting and my sewing methods in my project show-and-tell over at Crafting a Green World, but here I just want to show off the outfit that both Sydney and I worked very hard on, and that we're both pretty thrilled with in its outcome:

 

Ideally, Sydney will be modeling her Rainbow Fairy Dress in this year's Trashion/Refashion Show in our community. Otherwise/in addition, I'm sensing a spring and summer full of lots of rainbow fairy magic coming our way.

Willow's New and Improved Handwriting

Handwriting practice has been added so seamlessly to the Daily Schoolwork List (which does not get completed anywhere close to "daily," but more on that another time), that it's really a pleasure to watch the girls consistently working on it. I like to think that the kiddos take pleasure, too, in handwriting that has so steadily and vastly improved that it has to be as obvious to them as it is to me.

A dear friend, whose homeschooled son has beautiful handwriting, suggested that I show Willow examples of all the different styles of handwriting and ask her to select which she'd like to learn--it gives her ownership over the process, and allows her to learn a style that she'll find lovely. Willow's choice: the Palmer Method. It makes me crack up, because I feel like a 1950s kindergarten teacher, but Palmer handwriting really is nice.

I purchased, using my monthly homeschool budget that I fund through my paid writing and my etsy sales, Startwrite 6.0 so that I could create handwriting copywork that was consistent in method and relevant to the girls' other studies. Although the user interface is a little wonky and non-intuitive, it does have everything that you'd ever need to customize a handwriting sheet. Because Willow has formerly shown no attention to the details of letter formation or placement, and doesn't always form each letter the most efficient way, we go whole hog on her sheets--lined pages, an outline of each letter to help her stay within normal parameters, dots along each letter's path that she can aim for, arrows and numbers to remind her where and when her pencil needs to go, and a free space after each word so that she can practice:

 Syd's handwriting is pretty great, although she still likes to play fast and loose with placement on the line, and she prefers her handwriting pages with just the outline:

Even beyond the ability to customize the same page for each child, I'm loving the ability to write handwriting sheets that are relevant to what the kiddos are actually doing each day. Here, Will is writing the definition of Anastasia's Mate, a good endgame trap that she learned in chess:

And here she's writing the ingredients list for the rainbow play dough that we sell in our pumpkinbear etsy shop, to include with the order that we ship to the customer:

We've also done the names of the presidents in order (which Will is in the process of memorizing), geography labels that get cut out and pasted onto big maps that they're making (Africa, currently), short letters to the grandmas, and reading/spelling words. I like stuff that can work double-duty!

With the model, and the lines, and the arrows, and the dots, Will has a better method for completing her handwriting systematically, and although Syd finds all that information overwhelming (which is why she does without it), I think it all helps to remind Willow to slow down and write methodically. I never thought to videotape the slapdash method that she used to use to crank out her former illegible handwriting, but it's vastly different from how she works now:

Along with coloring pages and drawing lessons to practice fine motor skills in general (not to mention lots of play with power tools and taking stuff apart with screwdrivers, etc.), regular copywork practice is really, obviously working.

Yay!

Homeschool Chemistry: Acid Plus Base

As the first two demonstrations in the girls' fabulous chemistry set, acid plus base experiments are so easy, so fun, and so wildly rewarding that still, my girls do these two demonstrations over and over again, each time absorbing more information about the science behind the reaction and learning more about the tenets of chemistry.

Of course, we've long used up the chemistry set's supplies of baking soda and citric acid--fortunately, since we often bake and preserve, we've got both of those materials in our kitchen stores, and I tend to buy vinegar six gallons at a time when it's on sale, since it's about all I use for cleaning. Nevertheless, whether or not you own a chemistry set, I still highly recommend a good stock of nice glass test tubes and cheap plastic eyedroppers; the eyedroppers allow children to have more control over the amount of water or vinegar that they add to their mixtures, and the test tubes are really ideal for observing the chemical reaction.

Experiment #1: Small Scoop of Baking Soda, Eyedropper of Vinegar

It's nice to keep the amounts very small so that the chemical reaction between the sodium bicarbonate and the ascetic acid is easy to observe. Notice the bubbling, notice the fizzing, notice the foam!

Experiment #2: Small Scoop of Baking Soda, Small Scoop of Citric Acid, Eyedropper of Water

I think that this version is even more fun, because the two powders, one an acid and one a base, nevertheless do not react--

--until you add water as a catalyst!

Extensions:

• Look up the chemical formula for each ingredient, then explore the elements that make up the formulas.
• Write an illustrated tutorial for each experiment.
• Use the chemical formulas and the scientific notation of the chemical reaction as copywork or memory work. 
• Compare other liquids to water when conducting Experiment #2. Does rubbing alcohol affect the reaction? Does orange juice?
• Play with the reaction as a sensory experience, as long as you don't have any cuts on your hands. Neither vinegar nor citric acid are strong enough to hurt healthy skin, so get out a big baking pan (or go outside--I wish!) and make big piles of baking soda, on which you drop vinegar rain.
• Add powdered tempera to either the baking soda or vinegar to make fizzy paint.
• Make and erupt the traditional baking soda and vinegar volcano.
• When the kiddos were finally finished with their play (nearly an hour later!), they asked me what they could do with all their test tubes and mason jars of vinegar. I suggested that they use it to scrub the kitchen floor--and they did! 

It WAS a productive morning!

I Love My New Ruffler Foot

We have one sewing machine and supplies store here in town, independently operated. I go there pretty frequently for sewing machine repair and servicing, and when I want to buy a new specialty presser foot.

Also, I hate them.

It's the kind of place where you can go in knowing exactly what you want--a buttonhole foot for your old-school Brother, say--and the employee will still make you feel like an idiot. You can't answer some specific question about the exact type of shank on your machine, perhaps, which lack of knowledge is somehow the catalyst for her making you feel like you barely have any business getting yourself dressed in the morning, much less operating a sewing machine. And the other employee, the one who would  know off the top of his head what your shank type is, is out for the morning and won't be in for three more hours. And that book that you can see right there, the one that would say exactly the type of shank on your machine, looking things up in that book isn't the job of the particular employee in front of you, nor are you permitted to use it. Oh, and they don't stock buttonhole feet, anyway, so they'd have to special-order it, which is the responsibility, perhaps, of some third employee, who's also not in the store at the moment.

Because I'm a big chicken, I've taken to forcing Matt to patronize this store for me. He says that they're really rude to him, too, but I don't care.

The absolute only redeeming quality to this store is the fact that, since I do have an older machine, all this rigamarole notwithstanding, I do invariably end up with the correct foot, including the correct shank type, for my Brother. If you've got an older machine, you'll know that can be tricky.

And that's how I came to own this fancy contraption, otherwise known as a ruffler foot:

It's wonderful. You set the gauges for how many ruffles you want per how many stitches, and how wide you want your ruffles, then you feed the fabric into the middle, and off you sew, ruffling happily away:

I bought it because I knew that I would be sewing mad ruffles for Sydney's rainbow fairy dress, and I did NOT want to gather every single huge layer by hand (nor could I, really, with a couple of the wonky fabrics that I chose). And while I still need to do a lot of playing around with my ruffler foot before I can do a really precise job using it, with muscle, and a lot of jiggering, and some blatant cussedness, those ruffles, they did get ruffled.

While I Sew, the KittyCat Suffers

I've spent the week so far sewing Sydney's entry for this year's Trashion/Refashion Show (more on that later!), and while I've been busy, the girls have been busy, too, playing outside in the unseasonably mild weather with their stuffed animals, including all their thousand toy horses into three-hour baths with them, completely immersed in their game entitled Animal Rescue Obstacle Course.

From what I can tell--

--it seems to involve doing mean things to their toy animals and then rescuing them.

Yay, Animal Rescuers!!!

Math Play

The girls haven't been interested in computation, math drills, or any sort of problem-solving work in a while. Instead, I see their little brains resting from all that heavy concentrated thinking and instead focusing on internalizing visual, spatial, and relational mathematical concepts.

That looks like this:

That plus a lot of painting, project-building, chess games, taking stuff apart with screwdrivers, testing physical limits on the playground, picture drawing, and constructing elaborate costumes out of play silks is what math looks like around here these days.

Tutorial: DIY Deep Conditioner

Back in December, the girlies got head lice. I don't have any leads on the origin of the infestation, although I am pretty suspicious of these riding helmets.

Treating for head lice, while not super-fun, was actually not even remotely as bad as I'd feared it would be. We didn't even nit pick, and although I know that you're going to tell me that we did it all wrong if we didn't nit pick, we didn't.

We did use two doses of a CDC-recommended pesticide shampoo (because yes, I use poison on my babies), spaced nine days apart, to bomb the little bastards into the next century, and although that, combined with a dedicated focus on avoiding cross- or re-contamination, worked for us, man, did it do a number on my poor little kids' hair! Their hair was so dry afterwards, and Syd had the addition of an itchy, flaky scalp. I'd use it again if I had to, because it worked, but after a few weeks' time and the conclusive evidence that the head lice were all gone, the kiddos' hair definitely needed some rehabilitation.

Have you ever put olive oil on your hair? I still won't do it on my own kind-of dry hair, because I find the flashbacks to my junior high years, when my hair seemed to be greasy again a half-hour after I washed it (and I refuse to even recall the condition of my face), too painful, but I happily had Willow mix up the following recipe of one part olive oil, one part apple cider vinegar, and one part honey:

I was tempted to add a couple drops of a nice essential oil, lavender or tea tree or peppermint, but I'm too leery of putting essential oils directly on my children to actually do it, so instead I worked it through the kids' dry hair (it was REALLY messy, like crazy messy, and you know that I am not afraid of mess), let them read for a half-hour so that it could soak in--

--and then shampooed their hair.

Results: The treatment did work, although it wasn't ideal at the time. It took three separate shampoos to wash all of the oil out of their hair, and since I didn't want to wash their hair three times in a row, figuring that wouldn't be helpful to their dry skin and hair, I spaced the shampoos out over six days, just braiding their hair in between times and ignoring the fact that it was oily.

Now, however, their hair is perfectly glossy and smooth, doesn't feel dry to the touch, and Syd no longer has an itchy, flaky scalp. I'm trying to be more vigilant about putting leave-in conditioner into their hair after every bath to combat any more dryness before it begins.

I've heard that leave-in conditioner also has some prophylactic properties regarding head lice--the reasoning being that it's harder to get a grip on a hair strand with conditioner on it, I suppose? I'm also trying to insist that the girls shampoo their hair more frequently than they'd prefer, and to better supervise their hair brushing, because I think that I could have caught that head lice infestation earlier if I'd been more vigilant. I'm stopping short of treating their hair with essential oils, because those same oils are in all our cleaning supplies and our soap--they're getting a pretty good dose of tea tree oil every day even without me spraying it on their hair, I'm thinking, and I'm reluctant to add more directly onto their bodies. I'm insisting that each girl use her own hair brush, and not her sister's, but they still share towels--and a bed!--and half their clothes and all their playtime.

Eh, at least it's not pinworms again. Now THAT was gross!