Happy Valentine's Day

My girls are giddy with anticipation for our class Valentine's Day party later. Their Valentine mailboxes are ready and waiting (one pink one, and one monster-mouth one), Syd is obsessively remaking several of her Valentines that she this morning decided are inferior in quality, Willow is putting off finishing up the last step of her Valentines and is instead taking apart our hot glue gun that caught fire this weekend, and I'm trying to decide if I have the energy to figure out the pink popcorn that I had wanted to take to the party, or if I should just grab that bag of pretzels from the counter and call it good.

It's going to be a lovely day.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Drawing and Painting

a write-up of the pens that I use to draw on rocks

and a tutorial for remaking ugly scrapbooking chipboard into something that you'll actually use

I painted these particular pieces of chipboard in silver house paint and black chalkboard paint, and as I was working, Syd came over and asked for some chipboard that she could paint for her own, so I set her up with a drop-cloth of aluminum foil (you've got to use something that the paint won't stick to as it dries), and she proceeded to have herself a big time, only accidentally painting a couple of pieces of chipboard in the process:

In the end, as you can see, that chipboard was entirely forgotten for the greater pleasure of fingerpainting on aluminum foil and rubbing deliciously slippery paint around on one's hands, smooshing and squeezing and mixing two delightfully complementary colors.

My big girls have impressed me lately with these types of activities in which they've immersed themselves on our rainy, sleety, chilly, windy winter days, ranging from a giant indoor sandbox in a clear plastic bin on the kitchen floor, to a building block and toy animal zoo that took up the entire living room carpet for two days, to cooperative imaginary games that send them downstairs and back up, outdoors and inside again.

It's a huge relief to have them so happily involved, frankly, since I am astonished, appalled, and outraged to tell you that after an entire day of feeling all better after my weekend bout with the norovirus, I have again been feeling low and puny for the past couple of days. I daydream of warm, fresh air and mild breezes, and fresh-picked salad greens and local fruit. I'm starting to think that my immune system has just about cashed out for the season, and will no longer lift so much as a finger in my direction. 

Schoolwork for the past three or more weeks has consisted of lots of worksheets, memory work, and documentaries, activities that are easy for kids to do while their mother slumps wearily in the chair next to them, or just "closes her eyes for a minute" on the bed beside them. Willow has discovered that she genuinely likes word problems, and is getting exposed to some new math strategies as she solves them, and Sydney is getting very comfortable with adding multi-digit numbers using Base Ten blocks. Fortunately, we'd dialed down to the mammal class in science before my endless crud began, and so many afternoons can reasonably be spent in front of the nine-hour documentary The Life of Mammals.

This leaves the kiddos ample swaths of free time, for their games, and for Sydney to listen to audiobooks (we did all of Peter Pan just this week, and Syd was VERY interested in this alternate, not so flattering depiction of Tinkerbell), and for Willow to play this old-school version of Sid Meier's Civilization that she loves. I'm trying hard not to TRY so hard right now, if you know what I mean, which is very hard for me, because I hate introspection, and I hate not being productive, and I hate not getting things accomplished, and I hate sitting around all day.

And there, now you know a few more of my neuroses--isn't that fun?

A Rose Dress Bodice Muslin, of Sorts

Yes, it's fashion show season again! This year, Syd designed a "Rose Dress," one whose details were a little on the light side this time around, since all her design sketches turned into grand "Sydney on the Runway, Framed by Lights and Surrounded by an Enamored Audience" sketches.

Although my main goal is that Syd take ownership of her design, I didn't push too hard for additional details since, just between you and me, this way it's a little more likely that I'll be able to actually create the dress. Suffice to say, the dress should be red, have a skirt that looks like rose petals, be sleeveless, have wings, and be just as short as I will let it be (and that's knee-length, poor kid).

I have an old bridesmaid's dress given to us by a friend, that I hopehopeHOPE will have enough fabric for the dress' bodice and outer skirt, but I'm trying to be extra careful with the fitting and patternmaking, to be sure, and thus I've been sewing up some practice components in quilting cotton as muslins, of sorts. They're not *real* muslins, because I can't stand to sew anything that isn't wearable on its own, but they do help me create/refine my rose dress pattern, so there you go.

This bodice, for example, comes from Little Girls, Big Style, a book that I LOVE for sewing for Sydney, and I am going to be really sad when she soon maxes out the sizing, sigh:

I used some stash cotton for the outside and the lining (playing for a bit with the idea of making it reversible, but thankfully I abandoned that unnecessary headache), and two giant vintage mismatched white buttons from my stash for the straps. 

Nota Bene: The night that I was sewing this bodice, Matt was out for the evening. He came back quite late, and still found me hunched over the sewing machine (I have terrible, non-ergonomic sewing posture, despite the fact that I sit on a yoga ball). 

"You're not supposed to sew after 10:00," Matt said. "You know you make mistakes." We created this rule after several late-night sewing sessions in which, yes, every evening ended with me making some critical, careless, late-night-induced sewing mistake.

"But it's not ME this time!" I griped. "THIS time there's something wrong with my buttonhole foot!" Indeed, I had been futzing with the damn buttonhole foot for nearly an hour by that time, and I just couldn't get it to work. Clearly, it was broken, or the sewing machine was broken, and I'd have to take it in to THAT sewing machine repair shop, and you know how I feel about that place.

Eventually, bribed with an episode of Toddlers and Tiaras, I did leave the broken buttonhole foot and come to bed. The next morning, walking by my sewing machine on the way to the bathroom, I looked over at it and thought, "Oh, I put the lever on the wrong side!" Problem solved.

And that's why I'm not allowed to sew past 10:00 pm.

The bodice fits perfectly snugly, but was inches too short, so Will helped me measure out and lengthen it:

After lengthening the pattern, and changing the straps (the back of the rose dress will have a zipper, so the straps will be sewn in and needed to look smoother), I've got a rose dress bodice pattern that I'm very happy with. Next, IF I can stop being sick for a few days--can you believe I got the norovirus this weekend?!? That's my third illness since December!!! Whine, whine, whine!!!--is a hoop skirt constructed from unbent wire hangers, and then a circle skirt to encase the hoop skirt, and two layers of petal skirts.

Oh, and wings.

Writing Really Big Numbers

The names of really big numbers is one of Willow's interests. She'll often ask what a number with a certain number of zeroes is called, or what the number is that's one less than a googol, etc. Her head is really deep into multiplication these days, so for a math enrichment activity that didn't involve calculation, Willow and I worked together for a couple of weeks to chart and name some powers of ten.

Will still has clumsy penmanship, so we taped together pieces of whopping one-inch graph paper for her chart. Then she wrote the numbers, with one digit per square, and I labeled them in small letters:

We knew the first few powers of ten, of course, but it wasn't long before we resorted to using the Really Big Number Machine for help (Willow often plays on this Math Cats site, by the way--she LOVES their online games).

There's a lot of great patterning that goes in writing the powers of ten:

• Using the graph paper, it's easy to see how each power of ten increases the number by one digit.
• When the numbers get bigger, the pattern of putting a comma after every three digits becomes clear.
• After a few iterations, you notice that the progression of names goes "one, ten, hundred." One quintillion becomes one hundred quintillion becomes one thousand quintillion becomes one sextillion.
• If you know your ancient languages OR your prefixes, you can predict the next name. BIllion becomes TRIllion becomes QUADrillion becomes QUINTillion becomes SEXtillion, etc. 

Will's very intuitive about patterns, so she soaks this stuff right up. Except for that last one, of course--the ability to predict the next name is a treat just for nerdy old me!

One thing that I wish that I could do, to go along with this activity, is to have a concrete visualization of each number, ideally using Base Ten blocks. Except...I kind of doubt that even the warehouse of the factory that makes Base Ten blocks has a concrete visualization of one hundred sextillion, the largest number that Willow has written on her chart so far, on its shelves. One of my long-term projects is to make (or, rather, have my graphic designer partner and co-parent make) digital Base Ten blocks that we can use with Adobe Illustrator. 

I still don't know if I'd get to one hundred sextillion that way, but one million is probably do-able in poster-size, right?

Cake Wrecks: Buzzard Edition

So once a week, the girls and I volunteer at a food pantry that's just a few blocks from our house. We walk over, help unload the donation truck, stock the pantry, and then help out during the shopping hours by restocking, getting people signed in, handing out shopping bags, carrying their groceries, helping them shop--basically whatever we're needed for. The girls can help out with all of this, or they can read or color at the children's table, or they can hold the door open for the shoppers with their arms full of bags (this is a fun job because, as you can imagine, it comes with lots of praise and positive reinforcement!), or--and this is their favorite thing to do--they can play on the sidewalk outside the pantry, often with gigantic cardboard boxes that they've snagged from one of the adult volunteers before it's broken down for recycling. It's a great, kid-friendly environment, a place where we like everyone and where we like to be, a place where the girls can interact with lots of different people, a place where I can get off my butt and use my muscles, a place where even kids can do meaningful work and see concrete, immediate results from it.

Anyway, the absolute only reason why I'm telling you all about this is so I can also tell you that on this donation truck that gets unloaded are, in particular, unsold items from store bakeries. It's not the pantry's favorite thing to stock, because this pantry tries to focus on real, whole, healthy foods, but the shoppers do love desserts, and anyway they keep coming on the truck, so there you go. But unsold bakery goods are some of MY personal favorite things to stock, because what, apparently, is the number one reason why a bakery good remains unsold?

Because it's horrifyingly butt-ugly, that's why! Think "brownie dippers" that looks like a giant poo pile of brownie pieces covered in icing. Think "butterfly cupcake cake" with a bunch of cupcakes arranged into a vague butterfly shape, covered in piles of orange icing, with a leering green icing smile on the north-most cupcake. Think sheet cake with Justin Bieber's face on it.

A few weeks ago, the mother of all ugly cakes came in:

It's a terrible cell phone shot, so I'll try to walk you through it. In the middle, you see a buzzard. A buzzard! On a cake! The buzzard is peeking out from behind a tombstone. A tombstone! On a cake! Written on the tombstone is "50th." Someone ordered a cake that equated her 50th birthday with being about to die and have a buzzard eat her! Only the buzzard won't be able to eat her because she's clearly been buried, because there's a tombstone. That's probably why the buzzard doesn't look exactly happy, rather smirkingly quizzical,  breaking the fourth wall in order to say to you, "Shall I instead eat YOUR flesh off of the bones?"

But the best part is the writing on the cake, in pink icing: "Happy Birthday Julie." ME! This cake has MY name on it! Sure, it's written kind of half-assed, with too much room above and to the side, the perfect amount of room to write the name bigger and cuter, but the decorator was all, "Nah, I'll just put it here real quick, nice and small, but with a little curlicue on the J to show that I'm making an effort."

And to think that it ended up at the food pantry instead of being purchased by the person who ordered it. I would LOVE to have been a fly on the wall during that particular conversation!

Listening to the Treebobs

For reading enrichment the other day, the girls listened to a set of Treebobs radio plays that they were given by the series' publicist. Radio plays are a whole different ballgame from audiobooks, and the girls, who already love audiobooks, were THRILLED by this one. There are sound effects, and different voices, and music--it's pretty exciting. The imagery is vivid, it's full of action, and each story is relatively short, so you could get through one in less than 20 minutes, IF your kid didn't insist on then listening to all the other stories next, like my kids always do.

It's a really different comprehension activity, too, to listen to a audio dramatization instead of an audiobook. When I asked the girls to tell me about the Treebobs, Sydney, who's normally a great narrator, had this to say:

"The Treebobs are about little fairies and Treebobs, and how witches sometimes do what they have to do."

However, when I asked each girl to illustrate one specific scene from the story we'd just listened to ("The Treebobs and the Dizzy Broomsticks") and then caption it, the results were much more sophisticated:

Isn't that interesting? It's clearly stretching a different part of their brains, to inspire such a different response from audiobooks.

Treebobs have been on HEAVY rotation ever since, beating out the girls' usual audiobook choices of fairy tales, Bunnicula, Tinkerbell stories, Thor's Wedding Day, and whatever other 25 audiobooks that we've got checked out of the library right now. I'm currently searching for more children's offerings in the audio dramatization genre, which is a tricky one to search for in our library's online catalog. We already like these guys--

--but surely there are more?

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Guitar Picks and Body Glitter

a review of a punch for making DIY guitar picks

and a tutorial for making body glitter

Yes, the girls are deep into makeup play again. Syd and I are immersed in Trashion/Refashion Show design right now, which is probably what inspired it, but nonetheless, the weekend found us at the drugstore, picking out brand-new batches of eyeshadow, blush, and lipstick.

The girls still don't associate makeup with conventional gender norms (I don't wear makeup, and for the fashion show, both men and women applied it and wore it, and yesterday, on our way to our weekly volunteer gig, Willow's makeup application consisted of grey smudged all the way around her eyes like a raccoon and a stripe of red body glitter applied in a straight line between her eyes down to the tip of her nose), and my big assignment right now (along with, of course, the fashion show garment, a big bean bag order, revamping our homeschool group's membership application procedure, and other such nonsense) is to free them from conventional color norms, as well. The makeup at the drugstore all seemed to revolve around the same color palette, and we found neither the blue lipstick nor the red blush that Sydney specifically wanted. To keep the emphasis on makeup as a playful, expressive craft, it's really important to me to find a varied palette for all the basics, ideally including the rainbow colors. 

So off I go to browse the online supplies lists of cosmetology schools! With kids like these, there's no danger that I'm going to get locked into my comfort zone, that's for sure.