Sew a Mini Square in a Square Log Cabin Quilt Block

My log cabin quilt block obsession has grown both larger… and smaller!

The log cabin was the second quilt block that I ever learned to sew (everyone’s first quilt block should be the Nine-Patch!), and it’s remained my absolute favorite. It’s the kind of block whose versatility works for both newer sewists–wonky pieces are absolutely acceptable here!–and advanced sewists who want to experiment with color, value, and dimension.

My current obsession is mini quilt blocks, and I’m loving one specific type of log cabin quilt block, the square in a square subset, for highlighting a fussy cut center piece. The pieces around it, while constructed in the traditional log cabin way, make a series of frames that further highlight that piece, similar to the concept of highlighting the red “hearth” piece in the center of a traditional log cabin quilt block.

Even with this very simple block pattern, there’s a lot of scope for the imagination. I wanted something summery, so I’m playing with yellows and oranges, but there’s an infinite amount of variety of color and width to be played about with here.

Here’s how to make these mini square in a square log cabin quilt blocks:

Materials

You will need:

• fabric. Even though it’s a bit of a waste of fabric, depending on what width I choose for my log pieces, I’m cutting all my fabric 1.5″ wide and then simply adjusting my seam allowance to get the finished width that I want. My narrowest log pieces will be .5″ wide, so for those I’ll also be sewing with a .5″ seam allowance. The pieces that I want to end up 1″ wide will get a more traditional .25″ seam allowance.
• measuring, cutting, and sewing supplies. I LOVE a clear, gridded quilting ruler for precise measuring and cutting. I cut the strips with a self-healing cutting mat and rotary cutter, and I fussy cut the center square using a pair of sharp sewing scissors. To make the fussy cutting even easier, I recently splurged on a piece of gridded plastic that I could use to make my own cutting templates. It’s NOT eco-friendly, but I love it and I’ll use it forever! For machine sewing, I like a narrow, sharp needle and matching thread. And like it or not, you have to have an iron!

Step 1: Cut the pieces.

Above, you can see that I’ve got my colorway figured out and my pieces chosen. All the strips are 1.5″ wide, and the center block is 1.5″ square. The little heart in the middle is just .25″ square, so I’m going to aim for all my finished logs to be .5″ wide. That means that all my seam allowances will be .5″. It’s overkill and don’t tell the quilting police, but just between us, I kind of love piecing with a wider seam allowance. It always feels so much easier for my fumbly fingers to handle!

Step 2: Frame the center piece.

Line up the seams of the first log piece and one side of the center block, wrong sides together. This first log piece will be the shortest, and although you won’t be able to tell by more than the lines of stitching, since all the pieces of this frame will be the same color, I nevertheless like to place it at the bottom.

I don’t like to start my stitching at the very edge of the fabric, because I can’t figure out how to keep the fabric from bunching at that edge when I do (let me know if you have tips!), so I like to offset the log pieces and then trim the extra away after sewing each seam.

Sew the seam, then use your sharp sewing scissors to trim each side of the log piece to match the edge of the center piece. Unfold and finger press the seam to whichever side you prefer–for this project, I’m pressing the seams open, but again, I think that’s something that I don’t want you to tell the quilting police that I do…

Above is the block that I sewed from the right side. You can tell that the top left is a little uneven, and if you want you can trim it down so it’s perfect again before you continue sewing.

Do I want to, though? Nope!

Here’s the block from the back side:

One piece of advice that I did receive once upon a time, and that I DO follow, is to iron quilt blocks from the right side, not the wrong side like in the photo above. I don’t know why that is but I do it anyway.

Sew the next three log pieces just the way you sewed the first one, continuing to border that center piece.

Each time, you’ll trim the log piece to match the two sides of the block, then iron the seam open (or to the side you prefer!) from the right side:

Remember that you can always trim the block to the correct size, so I don’t think you should get too fussy if one of your seams is a little imprecise. These blocks are tiny!

Your complete frame will look like the photo below:

Notice that you can see the lines of stitching for each piece in the frame, but that won’t really be visible if you’re not looking at it with your nose two inches from it like we are right now.

Step 3: Continue piecing additional frames.

Add as many additional frames as you want to this log cabin quilt block. I kept up with the .5″ seams for this quilt block, and you can see in the photo above that it’s definitely added “dimension” to the quilt block, but I don’t think it made it too bulky. I think I’m going to use these quilt blocks for coasters, anyway, so a little more thickness will just make them more absorbent.

I think that it looks the nicest to continue rotating the blocks and adding pieces in the order that you started with the first frame. So if you went clockwise like I did in the above photo, keep going clockwise! And even though we’re still looking at it with our noses two inches from the block, I think the stitching in the frames already looks less obvious, and it will continue to fade into the background the more frames you add.

Here’s my finished quilt block, below:

Instead of adding another frame with that 1.5″ strip I have there, I’m going to use a different piece of that fabric to sew a back-to-front binding when I turn this, and several of its identical friends, into coasters.

But the world is your oyster when you’re choosing what YOU want to do with your square in a square mini log cabin quilt block! You could make a zippered pouch, or a needle book, or a quilted postcard, or gather it together with 359 more mini quilt blocks and make a whole quilt top.

Let me know what you end up making--you know I'm nosy like that!

P.S. Want to know more about our adventures in learning, and the resources that we use to accomplish them? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Didn't Think I Was Cut Out for the Fairy Smut Book Club, But 700 Pages Later and I Might Be After All?

SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERS!!!!!!

There will be ALL the spoilers for A Court of Thorn and Roses here, and some bonus spoilers for A Court of Mist and Fury, since I've somehow already found myself fifteen chapters in...

While you think about whether or not you ever want to read this book for yourself and therefore do or do not want spoilers of it, here is some actual footage of me posting this book review on Goodreads:

And now, on with the show!

A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Setup: I read this book because the cover was copy-pasted onto a flyer advertising the "Fairy Smut Book Club" at a college I was touring with my high schooler. Nobody else in the parent/kid tour group reacted when we walked through that hallway and passed this flyer, but I was all, "Fairy smut? What on earth is FAIRY SMUT?!? If other people know about fairy smut, then *I* should also know about fairy smut!!!" I figured, if it's good enough for some undergrads to make a whole club about, I should read it!

Later I learned that you only need four kids to start a student club at this college, AND I think all the student clubs get funding from the school, so maaaaaybe you don't have to have a super big reason to start a club there and I didn't need to feel fairy smut FOMO, but what's done is done.

All that to say that I'm willing to concede that I might not be the target market for fairy smut. But I listened to this on hoopla (having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!) while I washed dishes and sewed some new coasters for the house, so at least I know how to pronounce all the names... but I might not know how to spell them correctly for this review, ahem.

Also, the coasters are little log cabin quilt blocks with a fussy cut bee print as the center panel. They're adorable.

Soooo... this book in general is kinda... rapey, right? Are we all getting the rapey vibe? And it's not just the scenes in which Feyre's consent is violated--the fact that I had to pluralize SCENES, because it happened more than once, is grossing me out all over again!--or the specific scene in which she was almost gang-raped by fairies at that spring sex party, but also, seriously, it was a vibe throughout the entire book. Like, that's half the "fun," ahem, of the Rhys character, right? That he's a dark, night-themed sexy boy who's always on the cusp of raping her? And he forces her to dress in "sexy," super revealing clothes that she doesn't want to dress in? And he forces her to have her "intimate areas" painted by fairy servants? And he forces her to dance I'm assuming "sexy" dances for him in public--which reminds me that the other time that she danced a "sexy" dance for Tamlin, which, yuck, SHE WAS ALSO DRUNK!--and in the morning she can't really remember what she did but she's relieved, y'all, that there's evidence that he only touched her waist and arms. Oh, and he non-consensually body-modified her.

That's rapey, right?

Also: Tamlin. Not only does he absolutely sexually assault her, because I HEARD her tell him to let go while I was trimming the batting for my coasters (I'm using stash polyester felt instead of proper batting, but I think it's working really well!) and he did not, and then she literally pushed him and I think that's when he bit her, but tbh that's not even the rapiest thing about him. So maybe it's because I listened to this book instead of reading it with my eyes, but did anybody else notice how many times Feyre says "high lord?" A high lord just spoke to her at the breakfast table! A high lord serenaded her with his fairy fiddle! A high lord wants to swim in liquified starlight with her! It's just... if she's using his status instead of his name when she thinks about him, that's because she thinks about him as his status instead of his name. And she's clearly super impressed by it, so it's definitely a factor in how she feels about him. It sets up a power dynamic between them, and crossing that power dynamic is always going to be sketchy. Like, sub in "my boss" or "my teacher" if you want to set it in the mundane world. See? It's sketchy, right? And not to mention that she's not *exactly* imprisoned inside his estate, but she IS imprisoned inside of fairy land, and if she does leave his estate then she'll get eaten so also she is kind of imprisoned inside his estate. Sub "my warden" or "my guardian" for "high lord" and it's even grosser!

All that to say that I'm not even dinging the book on stars because it's rapey, because books are allowed to be rapey if they want--it was just something I wanted to talk about. I DID personally ding the book on stars because Feyre said "high lord" into my headphones so much. It got on my nerves.

I also dinged the book for being weirdly plot-less for the first 80%, and when Feyre finally went under the mountain and started doing stuff it honestly made me even more annoyed because hey! She was always capable of doing stuff! We could have had a plot the whole time! Tamlin is apparently NEVER capable of doing stuff so it's not his fault we didn't have a plot while we were at his house, I guess. I'm trying to think of something he even DOES in the book... Okay, he came and scared the snot out of Feyre's family in Beast Mode and abducted her and did a ton of magic to ensorcell the rest of them while setting them up for life, which must have taken all the energy out of him for the rest of the book because later he makes a huge stinking deal about magicking his dining room table to a different size. Otherwise... he picnics with Feyre. He sits at the table and eats. He stands there and lets Feyre be the one to comfort that random wing-less fairy as it dies from blood loss. He gets hopped up on spring fairy magic at one of his parties and nearly rapes Feyre, and then at another party he's part of the house band. He sits on the dais with Amarantha and widens his eyes once. He sneaks her off to try to have sex with her the night before her third task, I'm only assuming so Amarantha kills them both on the spot instead of making Feyre go through the actual task. Like, half the time when Feyre is admiring how powerful or whatever he is when's he's standing there doing absolutely nothing, she's all, "His claws almost came out that time." But they didn't.

I was pretty much just listening to this book for the noise until Feyre went Under the Mountain, and then all of a sudden it got interesting! I don't know if I really liked it yet at that point--I'm still not sure if I actually liked this book at all or not--but it was surprising, and I became much more interested in the plot and unable to predict the characters' actions. I am so invested in how completely odd Rhys behaved and how he was written, for one thing. I was all, "Wait! Are Rhys and Feyre about to be A Thing? Ooh, are Rhys and Feyre and TAMLIN going to be A Thing?" I'm still not totally sure, tbh; I'm pretty sure we got some Rhys and Tamlin backstory at some point but I wasn't paying attention, so I'm not sure if Rhys and Feyre are supposed to be low-key into each other and that's why Rhys kept sticking his neck out for her, or if Rhys and Tamlin are down-low a thing and he's sticking his neck out for her to help Tamlin... or he's just supposed to be a chaos lord who's sticking his neck out for Feyre just to have something to do. Being an immortal fairy really seems like it would wear on you. I'd be bored to death after four of those Under the Mountain cocktail parties, and they've apparently been doing them every night for multiple human generations, yawn.

Okay, but until then the book was pretty uneventful and very light on graphic details, and then all of a sudden it got INSANE and I was so there for it! The worm battle was kind of stupid but Feyre was left with literally her ARM BONE STICKING OUT OF HER BODY and OMG they just left her like that! For a crazy long time! And then Rhys is all, "I'll heal you but only if you enslave yourself to me," and Feyre is dithering about how she should probably wait for Lucien to do it, but then she does the deal with Rhys and worries that it was a huge mistake, etc. So the way I'd have expected this to go is that Feyre says, "Nope, I'm loyal to a fault, that's why I'm here Under the Mountain instead of on a boat halfway across the ocean with my asshole family by now, duh, and I am of course going to wait for my pal Lucien," and then she does, and Lucien heals her.

But y'all!!!! NOOOO!!! Later, after she's done the deal with Rhys and has to do all the mostly-nude dirty dancing, she actually talks to Lucien about it, and he shames her for her decision even while in the same breath telling her that Amarantha fucked up his back torturing him and he'd only been able to stand up the previous day. AND THEN NOBODY SAYS, "SEE? IT WAS THE RIGHT CHOICE TO DO THE DEAL WITH RHYS BECAUSE OTHERWISE YOU'D HAVE DIED." Nobody mentions that AT ALL!!! I am both inordinately amused/entertained that the wrong decision *was* the right one, and irritated that nobody pointed that out to congratulate Feyre on making what it turns out was the right decision after all.

Okay, and then. And then! Obviously, the entire point of the third task should have been for Feyre to refuse it. It should have been an agonizing decision for her, of course, but in the act of refusing it, that's when the solution to the riddle should have come to her. Because the whole point should have been that she, as a human, while she doesn't have the powers that the fairies have, has the power of her humanity and that is what makes her equal to them and able to overcome Amarantha's fairy wickedness. Also, she's showing that she's no Jurien and Amarantha is obviously wrong to treat all humans like they, too, are inconstant and immoral. Because YOU GUYS. HUMANS OUGHT NOT EXECUTE INNOCENT PEOPLE IN COLD BLOOD. I'm sure that's a basic moral stance that should unite us all. If someone, anyone, any fairy tells us to, they're wrong and we shouldn't do it. If there's some magical task that instructs us to do it, the task is wrong and whoever made it is bad and we should not do it. Even if it means death, we are supposed to embrace our humanity and make the right choice.

So I was shocked--and honestly thrilled because it was so surprising--when Feyre literally murders those people just because the task told her to! OMG! I mean, she was very sad about it and she's definitely going to be traumatized for life, but I can't believe she did it! AND that it was apparently the correct move! Like, what on earth kind of amoral psychopathic fairy tale IS THIS?!? Our heroine just executed two innocents for The Greater Good like freaking Grindelwald! It would have been even more hilarious if it had been a test and she failed it, but whatever, at least the plot kept moving.

It does make sense, then, that she's turned into a High Fae herself, since she apparently gets nothing and no guidance from her humanity. Considering how poorly her family and most of that village treated her, actually, maybe she'll go all Evil Fae on them in a future book?

Okay, last thing that got on my nerves: I'm not going to try to sift back through the audiobook to check, but I swear that when Rhys and Feyre did the deal to heal her, she promised to enslave herself to him for one week a month "for the rest of her life." I was sure that part of the ending gimmick would be that because her life had ended then she was free. But nobody mentioned that, so I guess no? I could have remembered wrong, though.

No, wait, this is the last thing, but this is something I loved: We never learn what the question was that Feyre had to answer with the levers in the second task, lol!

Predictions for future books:

*We're going to learn that Feyre's mother has some sort of connection to the fairies, or some other reason for making Feyre be the one to promise to support her entire family, and not, say, her older sisters or, I don't know, her FATHER?!?

*Nesta is going to become a mercenary and there will be conflict and drama there. Because otherwise, what was the point in having that scene with the mercenary at the beginning of this book? Just to tell the news about Trouble in Fairy Land? We didn't actually DO anything with that news!

View all my reviews

Here lie the spoilers for the first fifteen chapters of A Court of Mist and Fury:

Are you SURE you want to keep reading? Don't spoil yourself if you think you might want to read A Court of Mist and Fury, because shockingly, it's good so far! While you think about it, here's some archived footage of how I spend my days:

Fortunately, I solved the above problem with this series, as I'm listening to it on audiobook while I sew lots of little patchwork pretties. I finished the coasters, and now I'm making blank greeting cards with patchwork fronts to give as graduation gifts. They're turning out so adorable!

Now, back to our show!

Mind you, I know nothing about the author of this series, but if I had to guess, I'd say that ACOTAR (check out how I can do the acronym title like all the real fans!) is one of her early works, and she learned a lot in the process of writing and promoting it. I wonder if she got some good feedback and applied it, or if she thought through the plot and characters with a long-term view. Because ACOMAF (I don't even know if people do acronyms for the later books or not, but I love it and I will not stop) is SO much better!

And not just better than the first book--it's SO genuinely good so far!

There's more action, yes, and although Feyre hasn't actually acted much of that action her ownself, Maas is writing in a ton of realistic trauma responses that make a lot of sense and that are also easily applied to the characters' stupid behaviors from ACOTAR. 

Like, I still don't know if we're supposed to really, genuinely think that Feyre murdering those innocent fairies for the third task was the Right Decision, but Feyre is for sure hard-core suffering from it in a way that shows that it wasn't, at least morally speaking. 

And Rhys, who was a full-on sociopath in the first book, literally told Feyre that his 50 years Under the Mountain with Amarantha had been a hostage situation for him, and he strongly implied that Amarantha had been raping him the entire time. So his awful violations of consent with Feyre, and that one bonkers torture scene where he touched her literal ARM BONE VOMIT, are still awful, buuuuuuut now they're in line with his character at that time, sort of a "hurt people hurt people"/Stockholm Syndrome/acting out one's abuse onto others sort of vibe. 

Even some irritations that I had with this very book are calming down as I get further in. I was so irritated with what a miserable bastard Tamlin was being at first, because the same thing happened in the first part of ACOTAR with Feyre's family, mainly implying that when you're not supposed to like someone, DON'T WORRY ABOUT FIGURING IT OUT BECUASE MAAS WILL TELL YOU. 

But I dunno, because now I'm pretty into what a miserable bastard Tamlin is being, AND it makes sense with his behavior in the first book, AND AND it's turning into quite a compelling domestic violence narrative that actually reads pretty realistically considering it's a fantasy novel. I still don't really love how Maas writes her secondary characters without a ton of nuance, but I would not have told you even 24 hours ago that I would be 15 chapters into the book and gushing even this much about it.

So stay tuned, I guess, because I think this book is going to see me through at least the rest of this graduation present and possibly through the Little Free Library bookmarks I'm making next!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Log Cabin Quilt from Upcycled Denim.... And It's King-Sized!

I originally posted this tutorial over at Crafting a Green World back in 2023.

What better summer project could there be than sewing a king-sized upcycled denim log cabin quilt?

I roasted while I sewed all that denim and flannel in the smack middle of the summer, but I’ll be so comfy this winter!

I’ve had this log cabin quilt sewn from upcycled denim in my mind’s eye for a few years, but it’s the embarrassing state of my fabric stash that finally prodded me into action. I may not have projects in mind for all that quilting cotton and canvas and jersey knit fabric, but sewing the giant plastic bin full of old jeans and that three yards of extra-wide flannel into the quilt of my dreams has certainly made a big dent in my hoard!

Here’s what I used for my quilt:

• soooo much denim. I’ll never lack for fabric to sew with if I can just keep outgrowing my jeans every few years! I’d like to thank Covid and perimenopause for sourcing much of this latest quilt for me.
• extra-wide flannel. I prefer to use thrifted sheets to back quilts, but in this case my thrifting luck deserted me, so I bought three years of extra-wide flannel. At about 108″ x 108″, it was nearly the perfect size to back my king-sized quilt. Just a little bit made it back into the fabric bin for later! The big box fabric store near me has a decent selection of extra-wide fabrics–I can at least get the color I’m aiming for, if not an exciting print.
• measuring, cutting, and sewing supplies. You need a sturdy machine to sew over all those denim seams, and a sharp sewing needle.

Step 1: Measure and Cut Log Cabin Pieces

The beauty of sewing a king-sized quilt is that it can be a giant square–anywhere between 90″ and 110″ looks good and fits the space well.

For a log cabin quilt, this means that you can sew the entire quilt as if it’s one giant log cabin quilt block!

Because I’m the laziest, I wanted to make my strips as wide as I could get away with. For the jeans I’ve got in my stash, 6″ wide was a good choice, resulting in the least waste and looking proportionate in the oversized quilt. But of course the beauty of a log cabin quilt is that you can be really creative with it, so feel free to have fun with your sizing.

When I had a huge stack of strips, I sewed them all into a single strip, short sides together. Because the denim was all different weights, I finger-pressed each seam to the side that felt thinner or lighter… or, tbh, just in the direction that it seemed to want to go. No reason to stop being lazy now!

I can’t even tell you how many pairs of jeans I used in this quilt, but I got through a lot of podcast episodes just cutting log cabin pieces!

Step 2: Sew a Center Panel (Optional)

You don’t have to have a special center panel for a log cabin quilt, and when I first sewed this half-square triangle from upcycled denim, I thought that it would be a pillow front. But sometimes items change their purpose when they’re on my sewing table, and this one became the center panel for my quilt!

Step 3: Piece the Oversized Log Cabin Quilt Block

I sewed my pieced strip around and around my center panel, cutting the strip even at the end of each seam and beginning it again on the adjacent side.

Cut this piece even with the quilt, turn the quilt 90 degrees, and keep sewing!

This quilt would have had more of a log cabin look–and a really stunning one, too!–if I’d used a single color per strip, but that would have taken a lot of effort to sort my denim by color, and as I’ve mentioned, I’m the laziest!

At the end of every podcast episode, my favorite thing was to lay the quilt out to see how it was growing.

Can you see where I spilled my ice water on the quilt top? This thing was so bulky and heavy to haul around, and it knocked everything off of every surface I passed when I carried it around.

When it got to the point of having to move furniture to make it fit, I knew that I was almost done!

Step 4: Add the back and binding.

Finally bought myself these sewing clips after eyeing them for years. They’re not quite as life-changing as I’d hoped, but they DO make quick work of pinning bulky seams like these!

I am in the process of working through my sadness that I didn’t actually quilt this, so don’t make me feel worse about it. I even had a cute design in mind, but my at-home sewing machine can only do so much! By the time I finished this, I wasn’t sure if I could even fit the entire thing under my sewing machine anymore. Next time, I’ll think through some kind of quilt-as-you-go method, perhaps.

As it was, my family had to help me move half the furniture in the family room to make space for me to lay down the flannel fabric, tape it taut, lay the quilt top over it, trim the backing to 2″ past the quilt on all sides, then double-fold it around the quilt and pin it.

Four more straight seams later, and the king-sized upcycled denim log cabin quilt of my dreams was done!

I should probably be more careful of it considering how much time I put into it, but I believe that quilts are meant to be used, and this giant quilt DOES make an excellent summer picnic blanket! It’s super heavy and warm, too, so I’m excited about using it this winter.

My new goal is to think up some throw pillow covers that I can also sew from upcycled denim, but that won’t be so matchy that it looks too country… Pixelated skulls, perhaps? Or maybe monograms?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Saw the Aurora Borealis Above My House

What a year of wonders it has been!

Honestly, the total solar eclipse alone would have been enough of a celestial wonder to sustain me at least through the rest of the year, but I have been spoiled with riches, because last weekend there was also the Aurora Borealis! ABOVE MY HOUSE!!!

And it turns out that the Aurora Borealis even works when there are clouds!

I mean, it definitely would have been better without the clouds, but thank goodness it still works with them. It might have even made it more spectacular in some ways, because never before in my life have I seen parti-colored clouds at night.

I used a long exposure for these photos to pick up all the Northern Lights that I could, so these photos are for sure brighter than we saw in person, but still, it was pretty bright! It wasn't so bright and distinctive that if I'd wandered outside having no idea what was going on I'd be all, "Ooh, the Aurora Borealis!", but it WAS bright enough that I'd definitely have been like, "Um, WHAT is wrong with the sky?!? Why is it pink? Are we experiencing a nuclear attack? Do we now have aliens?"

Without the long camera exposure, it looked more like this:

See? If you walked outside at 10:00 pm and you didn't know what was up you probably wouldn't immediately clock Northern Lights, but you would know SOMETHING was happening. Aliens, probably. Perhaps nuclear war. So it's nice that I did know what was going on, because instead of ducking and covering I could then be all, "Family! Come hither to experience magic and wonder with me!"

The family *kinda* experienced the magic and wonder with me for a little bit, but their patience for magic and wonder is far inferior to my own, I'm sorry to tell you. They were like, "Cool, pink sky! Someone tell Nick Drake! [two minutes pass] ...welp, now we've seen the Aurora! Bye!" and then they went back inside to their various unmagical and wonder-free pursuits. 

I, however, was going to be damned if I let a second of celestial magic and wonder pass me by, and fortunately, that's why god invented the lawn chair! It was also the perfect evening--cool and breezy (darn those clouds!), the frogs from the swampy backyard bellowing mating cries to compete with the distant sounds from the drive-in next door and the even more distance sounds of the racetrack a few miles away, early enough in the season that I didn't have to swat mosquitos--it was just about as good as springtime in Indiana gets.

The photo above is my greatest triumph--there's a little bit of camera shake, oops, but there's also the Aurora Borealis lighting up the Big Dipper, and in the bottom right of the photo I even caught a meteor!

I still want to see some proper, cloud-free, way-up-north Northern Lights one day, but these particular Northern Lights were a delightful, unexpected, probably once-in-a-lifetime-in-Indiana gift that I'm super happy got tacked onto my year.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool Science: Periodic Table of the Elements Resources

Quick Pick Six Elements with my ten-year-old. I miss those long-ago days of literally homeschooling around our big family room table!

Throughout our entire homeschooling journey, I always LOVED studying the Periodic Table of the Elements with the kids. And tbh, I don't know if we came back to it so often because it was really always coming up in our studies... or because I was always making an excuse to come back to it!

For instance, in that same homeschool year as the photo above, we studied the Periodic Table of the Elements as part of a chemistry unit, a geology unit, and a history of science study. We came back to it over the years every time studied biology, every time we studied geology, that one time that we did the history of science study... and this last homeschool year, my high school Senior and I took one last spin through the Periodic Table as part of her Honors Chemistry lab science.

You won't be surprised, then, to learn that I've amassed a lot of resources relating to the Periodic Table of the Elements. Here are some that we've used over the years:

We have worked this PTOE puzzle SO many times!

• Quick Pick Six Elements. I printed the playing cards on card stock and the kids colored them; I don't usually put that much effort into a handmade material, but we have used the snot out of this game! There are some other element flash cards that are already colored in available here.
• Interactive Periodic Table of the Elements. Click on one of the elements, and you can see images and descriptions. It's probably better for younger kids. This interactive Periodic Table of the Elements is better for older students.
• Periodic Table of Mistakes. After your kids have learned how the Periodic Table is organized, present them with this and see if they can spot all of the mistakes!
• PTOE Cookies. You know how we love baking delicious things for school! I really want to make cookies or cupcakes of the entire Periodic Table.
• Element Collection. How large of a collection can you accrue? I also think it would be fun to organize this as a scavenger hunt--how many elements do you already own?
• Lewis Dot Diagram of the Elements. Try this one instead of your standard Periodic Table.
• Build a Periodic Table of the Elements. Here's a big project for the semester--build your own wall-sized Periodic Table! If you don't need as much hand-holding, here's a free download that shows you how to set up this assignment.
• Egg Carton Periodic Table. Make your own Periodic Table of the Elements out of egg cartons.
• Periodic Table of Videos. TED-Ed has a lesson for every element in the Periodic Table.
• Cartoon Elements. Need your elements anthropomorphized? Here you go!
• PTOE Battleship. Here's a great way to get kids comfortable with pronouncing (or trying to pronounce!) the names of the elements.
• Periodic Table of the Elements Lapbook. My kids never got into lapbooks, although I do sometimes have them complete some of the smaller elements to include in the notebooks that they do keep.
• Chemical Element Trump Cards. Here's another card game, this one available as a free download.
• Element Coloring Pages. You can only get a few of the pages for free, but if your kiddo enjoys them, you could buy the book!
• Montessori Three-Part Cards of the Elements. A Montessori kid would adore these.
• Blank Table. Why not just write in your own?
• Cross-stitch Elements. This probably isn't for the kids, but I now deeply desire to make an entire cross-stitch Periodic Table of the Elements. Or maybe Perler beads?
• Cheater quilt. You can print the table, itself, onto quilting cotton via Spoonflower, and then sew it yourself, or use it as a beginner sewing project to do with the kids. Kids love hand-quilting! This one, on the other hand, is more of a patchwork sewing project, but you lose the element info. 
• Poster. We have always LOVED our large-format anchor charts over here. The bigger they are, the more room the kids have to draw and glue things all over them!

We also watch a lot of YouTube videos when we study something. When the kids were little I pre-screened videos before I watched with them, but I always had several go-to sources that I knew would be good. You might want to add these to your Watch List sooner rather than later, because you know how things are with YouTube--today's video is tomorrow's static!

And here are our FAVORITE favorite resources--THE BOOKS!!!!!!!!!

• The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Elements
• The Disappearing Spoon
• The Stardust That Made Us
• The Periodic Table: A Visual Guide to the Elements
• The Secret Life of the Periodic Table
• The Periodic Table: Elements with Style
• The Elements Book: A Visual Encyclopedia of the Periodic Table

Although all my kids are officially done with all of their homeschool studies as of this week, you're probably still going to find me doing my own little PTOE crafts now and then. I want to find a way to make a Periodic Table quilt that is both patchwork AND has the info for each element, for instance... I guess when both the kids go off to college in the fall, my partner and I can spend our lonely evenings designing element quilt blocks for Spoonflower to print for me!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Homeschool High School Chemistry: A Historical and Artistic Look at the Periodic Tables of the Elements

Twenty-ish years ago, when I was studying for my Master's in Library Science, I took a class entitled The Organization and Representation of Knowledge and Information.

It was... just as fussy and pedantic of a class as you'd imagine from the title. I thought my instructor was fussy and pedantic, I thought the structure of the assignments was fussy and pedantic, and after two or three years of English grad school by that time, I found the endless class debates over the philosophy of how to organize and represent some specific piece of knowledge or information to be just the worst kind of parody of grad school education.

I just looked, and the school DOES still offer that exact class, but the syllabus is completely different! It looks so practical now! I might have come out of that class with a genuinely marketable skill, dang it!

ANYWAY, I was not my best self in that class (actually, I might have been in the early stages of pregnancy in that class, now that I think if it. Wonder if that had anything to do with my mindset, ahem?), and the only thing that I really remember from it is that there are infinite ways to organize and represent knowledge and information. The trick is to figure out the best one!

So when my teenager and I took what I knew would be the last of our numerous pass-throughs of the Periodic Table of the Elements this past school year, I decided to shake up our usual look at the Table as an unquestioned artifact by instead exploring its history, and some of the MANY variations the structure has taken in the quest to find the absolutely most perfect iteration. 

This was a great topic to move into soon after our lesson on alchemy, because scientists have been trying to organize the elements since before the only elements were earth, air, water, and fire! Here's one of the beautiful tables that we looked at first:

Tria Prima image via Mark R. Leach

Most of our Periodic Tables were taken from the Internet Database of Periodic Tables run by Mark R. Leach. With every table that we looked at, it was interesting to discuss why that table was arranged the way it was--what organizational problems it tried to solve, what patterns it tried to create--as well as what organizational issues that table caused, leading to yet another iteration. And of course one mustn't neglect the artistic merits of each table!

The teenager and I are both hands-on learners, so, for instance, we both liked this table from 1814:

Wollaston's Physical Slide Rule of Chemical Equivalents image via Mark R. Leach

It's a Periodic Table because it's ordered based on the weights of the elements, but you can see why it would be somewhat impractical for many purposes. What schoolchild could afford it? Who could manage carrying it around for ready reference?

Emerson's Helix from 1911 is prettier, and much more practical to put one's hands on:

Emerson's Helix image via Mark R. Leach

But you can already see it's not going to work with as many elements as we have today.

THIS Periodic Table of the Elements, though--THIS one really gets into the meat of what personally interests me about how the elements are organized:

Rare Earth Pop Out Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

There is just not a practical way--one that also makes sense!--to get all those elements into one nice, neat, lined-up table. Something always wants to stick out!

I really like this 3D pyramid from 1983; it's organized so that each side represents one type of atomic orbital... mostly. 

Or you can organize the elements based on your own usage of them: this 3D cube has the elements sized "in approximate proportion to their importance in cement chemistry."

And to be honest, I can't work out how this table from 2008 even works, or how one is meant to read it:

Angular Form of the Periodic Table image via Mark R. Leach

It's VERY pretty, though! I would happily work it as a puzzle!

Since, alas, we do not have an Angular Form of the Periodic Table puzzle, we happily reworked our good old 1,000-piece PTOE puzzle that we've reworked many times before--

I had thought that it might interest the teenager to create an art piece organizing the elements in any unique way that she chose--a Minecraft creation, perhaps, or a menagerie. A PowerPoint organized by vibes. A series of ceramic vessels. She wasn't feeling inspired by the prompt, though--it's possible that I've brought up the PTOE maybe a couple of too many times over the past 12 years, ahem--and part of the fun of being a homeschooler who chooses your own adventures is also NOT choosing adventures, so an artistic, unique Periodic Table did not become part of her Art of Chemistry portfolio.

Instead, we colored ourselves anchor charts of the table that we've all agreed to know and love today, internalizing, as we did, how this particular knowledge and information is organized and represented:

While we worked we listened to The Disappearing Spoon on audiobook, because I'll be damned if I don't sneak in just a LITTLE more Periodic Table content before this last year of homeschooling ends!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!