Day Trip under Duress: Spring Mill State Park

Do you remember what life used to be like, when you could roll out of bed on a Sunday, look at your two grumpy teenagers staring at tiny little screens, decide that enough was enough, and drag them, furious and loudly complaining, out to the car and take them on a spontaneous day trip to a public space?

What a luxury that was!

Honestly, as stir-crazy as this pandemic sheltering in place is making us, the kids would probably still have to be dragged, furious and loudly complaining, if I tried to take them on another day trip to Spring Mill State Park--the older kid, because dogs aren't allowed in the pioneer village or caves and so I wouldn't let Luna come on this particular trip that we took last summer, and the younger kid, because other than in-person ballet classes and visits her friends, both of which she is devastated to be without, she is the biggest homebody in the world, is NOT stir-crazy, and even 39 days into sheltering in place has no desire to go anywhere where ballet or her friends are not.

Maybe when it's safe to stop sheltering in place Matt and I will leave the kids home and just go back to Spring Mill State Park by ourselves!

On this particular enforced day trip, we mostly hung out in the pioneer village, dodging the historic reenactors by sneaking in to explore the buildings whenever they popped out of them:

Here I am, pretty excited to be on an adventure out in the sun. Notice that there are no grumpy teenagers in the frame!

Fortunately, even grumpy teenagers can't outlast an entire day of fresh air, sunshine, and interesting places to explore. Eventually, the younger kid found that checkers was calling our names--

--and by the time she'd beaten me thoroughly, the older kid and Matt had wandered off to their own adventures and the younger kid and I wandered away, too, discovering...

...A COTTAGE GARDEN!!!!!!!

I am OBSESSED with historical gardens. They make me burn with envy. I cannot get enough of pretending that I can copy them.

Because of that, when Matt and the older kid came back from their wanderings they figured out exactly where to find us!
 

I... don't know why this particular teenager is wallowing in the historic cottage garden, actually. She doesn't look grumpy, though!

Here's an old stagecoach route that the older kid was absolutely revved up about following uphill for so long that I'm pretty sure it was her revenge for me forcing her into this day trip:

It doesn't look it, but it was REALLY STEEP! Poor horses! Poor ME! 

 Here's an interesting rock that the younger kid spotted in the creek:

And here's just one tombstone from the historic cemetery that I also dragged the children through, mwa-ha-ha:

When we're finally allowed out in public again, I'll drag my furious and loudly objecting children back here, because even though we spent the whole day, we still didn't see the Gus Grissom Memorial or tour the caves!

How We Earned the Girl Scout Senior Locavore Badge

One thing about all this time staying on my own property due to the pandemic is that I have been absolutely banging out some nagging projects. Like, long-term to-do list-type projects are getting done over here every day.

Cool, I guess? I'd still rather be able to go to the park every day and drive my kid to ballet class and check out more library books, but whatever.

Anyway, along with trimming back all the shrubs and brush on our property, washing all our LEGOs (I didn't say that these projects were all rational...), auditing my Girl Scout troop's bank account (once every six months is NOT an ideal schedule for this, yikes), deep cleaning the shower (same), and admitting to myself that there are publicist-sent books that I am simply never going to review and I should put them in our Little Free Library, I started organizing some of my digital photos and discovered that apparently I had so many adventures last year that I didn't even write about some of them!

Sigh... I mean, I'm having so few adventures right now that I'm seriously going to describe to you HOW I washed our LEGOs later, but cool, 2019 Julie Who Had So Many Adventures She Didn't Even Write about Them. Cool.

Anyway, this is the story of how my Girl Scout troop earned the Senior Locavore badge last year, when we could all meet together in person and do things in public. These particular plans do NOT lend themselves to being of a ton of use while sheltering in place, but if you've got internet access and a farmer's market that does curbside pickup, your own Scouts could earn this one individually at home.

The inspiration for my own Girl Scout troop earning this particular badge was a grant that our local farmer's market had won, allowing them to give youth groups who arranged a field trip to their market a $50 voucher to buy farmer's market products during their visit. How could you possibly pass up a generous deal like that?!? Even if there were NO relevant Girl Scout badges to earn at a farmer's market I still wouldn't pass up that deal, and I was even more stoked because, of course, Girl Scouts has LOADS of relevant badges to earn at a farmer's market.

PREP WORK

Arranging the field trip with the farmer's market was the most important piece of prep work, obviously.

I also hit up AAA for as many maps of Indiana that they'd give me, which was four. I keep hold of these maps, and we've used them in different meetings to plan hiking and camping trips. I dug out a couple of compasses from the closet (my favorite is this compass, although I do not want to talk about how hard it was to reassemble after Will "accidentally" took it apart), and got troop parents to bring a couple more. 

At the time, I was already working on this large-format clipboard project for my own kids, so I cut the extra MDF to size to make a couple more large-format clipboard bases. I wanted the kids to have plenty of work space for those maps!

Since I wanted the kids to complete the entire badge in one meeting, and we'd be picking out food, anyway, I decided that after visiting the farmer's market, we'd walk a few blocks to the lawn in front of our city hall. The building is unlocked during farmer's market hours, so the kids could wash their hands (and the produce!), and there's a nice tiered grass and stone area where we could spread out. There, I planned to give each group a "cooking challenge" for the food they'd picked out at the farmer's market, so I packed knives, cutting boards, serving bowls and utensils, and asked other troop parents to bring food prep supplies, as well. I also announced that Step 4 of the badge would be on the kids' own to complete, but if a kid wanted to have completely earned the badge by the end of our meeting, they could bring a dish for Step 4 to the meeting to include in our post-cooking challenge potluck. The kids would have been perfectly happy eating just their cooking challenge creations for their potluck dinner, but I thought that it was nice to also have some baked goods and casseroles to mix in.

Along with that optional dish, I asked each kid to bring to the meeting their water bottle, a personal mess kit, and something to tie their hair back--with Girl Scouts, you have ALWAYS got to be making somebody tie their hair back! The kids in my troop don't all have their own phones, so I also noted that I'd be dividing the kids into groups of 2 or 3, and each group would need access to something that could take photos.

The  main thing that I prepared in advance, however, was a farmer's market scavenger hunt. I wanted a way not just to have the kids meet the badge requirements, but also to explore the farmer's market and engage with the sellers, so I wrote this scavenger hunt for the kids to do in their small groups:



You might think that all of my safety info at the beginning is a little weird... well, our local farmer's market was currently dealing with the fallout from the realization that one of their vendors was a white supremacist. There had been a lot of protests and counter-protests, at a previous farmer's market there'd been a bunch more white supremacists "guarding" their stand, and our field trip was going to be on the first farmer's market date after the whole event had been shut down for two weeks.

Also, the white supremacist was a former friend, not just of mine but of some of the other troop moms, too, and most of our kids had been friendly with her kids.

Good times, amiright? Fortunately, I have another friend who knows several farmer's market vendors, and while I was a couple of blocks away with my troop doing our intro and getting ready to walk over to the market, she was texting me that everything was looking peaceful, with no white supremacists selling their Nazi tomatoes anywhere to be seen.

BADGE ACTIVITY #1: What is a locavore?

To begin our meeting, the kids and I discussed the definition of "locavore." The kids brainstormed some reasons why it's good to eat locally, and decided that local food is good for your body because it's fresh, it's good for the economy because you're spending money on the people who live and work in your community, and it's good for the environment because you're not using resources to ship food to you from far away.

The kids got bogged down, though (as I'd hoped they would), when we tried to decide EXACTLY what "local" means. Is it ten miles? One hundred?

The reality is that there isn't really an exact standard; people generally have to decide for themselves their own range for eating locally. I told the kids that part of their task at the farmer's market would be to find out how far some of the producers had traveled to vend here, and to do that, they needed to annotate their maps.

The idea behind annotating the map is that the kids put our current location as the center, and then they used the compass to draw concentric circles that represented distance away from the center. We found the map scale and saw that it was 1 inch to 13 miles, so the kids decided to draw a new circle for every inch.

This was a challenging activity for some kids who'd never used a compass before, and for other kids who'd never practiced much map-reading, but I'd divided them into small teams of two to three kids first, and fortunately there was somebody in every group who knew how to do both. 

Most groups drew 4-5 concentric circles before they decided they'd done enough. Together, we tried to find a familiar place or two on the map for every circle, so the kids could better visualize the scale.

BADGE ACTIVITY #2: Tour the farmer's market, complete a scavenger hunt, and go shopping!

Normally, I'd only give the kids one activity to do at one time, but there was a lot that we needed to accomplish at the farmer's market. Fortunately, all the kids in the troop are good listeners!

Task #1: Complete a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt was designed to meet Steps 1 and 2 of the Locavore badge requirements. It involved interviewing someone involved in the food delivery chain (Step 1), learning when certain foods are in season (Step 2), and finding food sources on their food-radius map (Step 2). 

I added in some more fun activities to get the kids engaged with the food and the vendors, and I included directions for how I expected them to behave. Kids don't always have experience interacting with business owners and retail workers, so part of the learning experience was figuring out how to engage someone politely. It's easy to get so task-oriented that you don't realize you're interrupting, and it's sometimes hard to follow the social script of a new situation.

Matt made it pretty for me. It's good to have a graphic designer as a spouse!

 I told the kids that they didn't necessarily have to complete the entire scavenger hunt, but they all had a blast and so I ended up keeping us at the farmer's market long enough (a little too long, honestly, considering all the other activities we had planned) for them all to finish.

Task #2: Shop for a food preparation challenge. We had three teams of kids, so I gave each team of kids one of the following assignments:

• Garden Salad
• Fruit Salad
• Crostini, or, Something Interesting to Put on Bread

Each team had a budget of $15, and I kept the last $5 to help out if a team went over. (Spoiler Alert: Team Fruit Salad needed that extra five bucks. Fruit is expensive!). 

As the kids worked on their scavenger hunts, they were also meant to be figuring out what they wanted to buy for their challenge. I do think it was nice that they had both the scavenger hunt and the food prep challenge, because this encouraged them to interact with and learn a lot more about the vendors than either activity alone would have done, and it was highly amusing to watch them busily going back and forth between vendors, talking through the pros and cons of various food items and agonizing over hard decisions. Whenever they reported back to pass off their haul, it was clear that some vendors were also being incredibly generous--those kids got a LOT of delicious food for their money!

After everyone had finished the scavenger hunt and spent all their money, we walked a few blocks over to that nice grassy area I'd scoped out, washed hands and produce, and then the kids got to work on Step 3 of the badge!

BADGE ACTIVITY #3: FOOD PREPARATION CHALLENGE

Here's part of Team Fruit Salad in action:

Here's one-third of Team Garden Salad:

And here's an example of the very creative stylings of Team Crostini!

If I had this to do over again, I'd encourage the teams to barter some of their ingredients. Wouldn't some blackberries and apple slices be lovely on bread? And I wouldn't mind some sweet peppers or cucumbers in my fruit salad!

BADGE ACTIVITY #4: Local Foods Potluck

The kids could have gone on happily chopping produce and putting it in bowls and on bread forever, but eventually I called time so that they could show off their creations. Then we washed hands again, laid out our feast, had the kids who'd brought dishes from home to meet Step 4 explain them, and the kids enjoyed a Local Foods Potluck as Step 5 of their badge. 

I'd brought some plastic baggies, so while the kids ate I packaged up their unused ingredients into a variety of bags, and when they'd finished eating, I also portioned out their uneaten food challenge creations while they ran around and played. I called them all back to clean up, and when the space looked as if nobody had ever completed a cooking challenge or held a potluck there ever before, I had the kids all line up, and then got to take turns choosing something from the leftovers, until everything was gone. 

This turned out to be a stellar Girl Scout troop meeting! I think the kids all really enjoyed themselves, and they got a change to practice some academic skills, some practical skills, and some real-world social skills while having fun. They got some exercise, they spent time outdoors, and they ate healthy food. They would have liked a lot more free time to socialize, so this would have been even better as a half-day meeting after the Saturday farmer's market, but for a Tuesday evening on a beautiful day in a summer with no pandemic, I'd say it was pretty perfect!

Six Months Ago: Homemade Halloween Treats: Sandwich Cookie Critters

One Year Ago: Homeschool Science: The Chicken Egg Osmosis Experiment

Two Years Ago: Homeschool Biology: Extract and Visualize DNA from Beef Liver

Three Years Ago: An Afternoon at Ocmulgee National Monument

Four Years Ago: Pom-Pom Pals

Five Years Ago: A Passion for Perler Beads

Six Years Ago: The Best Way to Hike

Seven Years Ago: Kid Meal: The Incredible, Edible Soft-Boiled Egg

Eight Years Ago: Homeschool Boot Camp

Nine Years Ago: On Daytona Beach

Ten Years Ago: A Temporary Flower Installation

Eleven Years Ago: I Can't Be Your Partner in Crime

Twelve Years Ago: Finally, Clean Lockers

Easter at Home, during a Pandemic

It was surprisingly pleasant! Who knew that dyeing eggs bright colors and eating a lot of ham could temporarily put a lid on that bottomless well of aching horror?

Even though we still have full days of school (it's a small comfort to know that my children's schooling is the one thing that hasn't been completely disrupted by the pandemic, considering how  most other children are struggling right now with the annihilation of their school routine on top of all their other stressors), much of that time that the kids used to spend being shuttled to and from extracurriculars, as well as the extracurriculars, themselves, is now free.

Instead of spending that free time sitting on the couch and staring with dead eyes at the wall, for the past week, at least, we've been spending it making ALL THE EASTER CRAFTS.

We spray painted wooden eggs out on the driveway, then decorated them with paint pens and acrylic paint. They turned out amazing, and we loved them.

I taught Matt to blow out eggs, then went a little crazy and ended up blowing out about a dozen on my own (head rush!!!), and then went even crazier and tried filling some of the eggshells with cement and some with plaster.

The cement did not work for me AT ALL... almost as if the random cement that I just happened to have in my garage isn't the exact right kind of cement for making Easter egg molds. Imagine that!

The plaster of Paris worked perfectly, I guess. I mean, it technically worked. Tape off the small hole:

Enlarge the larger hole and then fill it with plaster of Paris:

After about an hour or so, spend WAY longer than you ever wanted to spend in your entire life peeling eggshell off of plaster--

--and then marvel at this. Completely. Typical. Egg:



I guess that if you 1) wanted a reusable Easter egg, 2) did not have any wood or papier mache eggs to use, and 3) DID have plaster of Paris, this would be a good way to DIY some non-egg Easter eggs to paint, but eh. My plaster egg looked identical to every other egg in the world but was a billion times more annoying to make. I am definitely a wooden egg person all the way!

The kids and I made embroidered felt Easter eggs while listening to podcasts and then the first hour of our new Dracula audiobook (only fourteen more hours to go!). These were awesome, too, and were super useful during the kids' Easter morning clue hunt, on account of these eggs can be hidden in very obnoxious places that three-dimensional eggs can't:

Also awesome? I dragged out my under-utilized set of silk dyes for the kids to use to dye our chicken eggs:

These resulted in epic Easter eggs, you guys. EPIC!!!

Check out those saturated colors, those deep jewel tones! And I don't even understand how some of the eggs came out of the dye bath with that metallic sheen?!?

I was actually sad yesterday when we peeled them all and made them into deviled eggs. They really were almost too pretty to eat!

Alas, Syd found the process of hand-molding crushed shredded wheat mixed with melted butter and marshmallow to be so disgusting that it quite spoiled the fun of eating the resultant shredded wheat bird nests:

It didn't spoil the fun for me, though! They were delicious!

Matt had his own DIY build: a drill-powered LEGO egg decorating machine!

Will, especially, LOVED this drill-powered egg machine. She used Sharpies and Prismacolor markers with it, and the eggs came out really pretty! 

The Easter Bunny traditionally leads the children on an Easter morning clue hunt to find their baskets--I swear that our Easter Bunny was doing this years before the Easter Bunnies of all the Instagram influencers! Matt and I generally linger in bed and listen to doors and cabinets slamming, stuff getting kerfuffled during frantic searching, kids loudly bickering as they run around the yard at too early o'clock on a Sunday morning, etc., and only come out when there's a silence that means that each clue hunter's mouth is too full of candy to gripe at her sister.

I don't know what everybody else's Easter Bunny does, but our family Easter Bunny pretty reliably gives the kids too much candy plus a couple of presents that I'm confident they're supposed to share, but instead they always want to divvy ownership of. Later, I will have to talk Will into sharing this wood carving kit with Syd--

--and Syd this sticker mosaic kit with Will:

Our weather forecast was dire, so I was worried we wouldn't be able to have our insanely competitive Easter egg hunt outdoors this year, but fortunately, the rain held off long enough for me to madden the children by hiding 100+ Easter eggs really, really, REALLY WELL!

I don't know why the kids get so competitive over this, as it's literally just our stash of reusable Easter eggs with zero prizes to gain, but at one point Syd found an egg right where Will had just stepped, and in retaliation Will lost her ever-loving mind and just started crawling through the grass to hunt. And then Syd tried to swoop down on the entire basket of eggs that Will had abandoned when she started crawling, and Will got to her feet, ran at her, and chased her off with a stick!

We more successfully divvied up responsibility for Easter dinner, even though we didn't get to eat it until after 9:00 because for some reason Will's math class still met on Easter. Yawn!

Matt made the ham, the mashed potatoes, and the Cadbury Egg martinis for the adults, Will made roasted carrots, Syd made roasted asparagus, I made deviled eggs, and Syd and I made an absolutely epic garden cake.

I had wanted to make something exactly like this Betty Crocker garden cake, and was more than a little worried when my best efforts were making it look exactly like trash, instead, but hallelujah, Syd stepped in with a grass tip and good design skills--

--and our final cake was the cutest thing that I ever did see:

Alas, we didn't have enough room in our bellies to even taste it after our 9 pm Easter dinner! Ah, well... garden cake is also delicious for breakfast.

Easter isn't such a big deal to us (over dinner last night, Will was all, "So, today is Jesus'... birthday?"), and honestly, I think this is by far the biggest fuss we have ever made over it, even counting when the kids were small and wanted to dye eggs every day for a month!

It was vastly more of a sugar fest than my body needed right now, but it turns out that it was exactly what my heart needed.

I'll remember this Easter fondly even when the lawnmower is still hitting random eggs in August...

How to Make Embroidered Felt Easter Eggs--with a Secret Pocket for Surprises!

I HATE this pandemic staycation, but it's no lie that it's given me more time to work on Easter crafts, so there's that, I guess...

Also, handwork soothes my anxiety, gives me and the kids something constructive to focus on, and is something fun that we can do together to make some happy memories. So there's that, I guess!

This particular project also fills an actual Easter need that we have. At our house, the Easter Bunny leads the kids on a giant, far-ranging, whole-morning clue hunt that they have to follow in order to finally find their Easter baskets full of treats. To do that, the Easter Bunny likes to use our family stash of container eggs, but the thing is that I do NOT purchase plastic Easter eggs. Instead, I hoard whatever plastic Easter eggs the kids have happened to receive from other sources over the years. But somehow, some of those plastic Easter eggs walk away every year.

This is such a problem, you guys! A few days ago, we got out our Easter decorations and the younger kid helped me sort them. You want to know how many plastic Easter eggs we found?

Five. You guys, five plastic Easter eggs will not keep my kids busy running around on a clue hunt while my partner and I spend the entire morning in bed.

Obviously, we need more container eggs, and we need to DIY them, and they can't take a ton of time to make (I'd make these papier mache Easter eggs again in a heartbeat, because they were so cute, worked awesomely, and lasted for about five years before I finally composted them, but... they ain't quick to craft!).

It took just a few minutes to think up the idea for these little embroidered felt Easter eggs, and not much longer than that to make them!

The vast majority of the time spent on crafting these eggs is in the embroidering, which you don't even have to do if you don't want to. But this is just about the easiest embroidery project you can think of, so if you've got time to listen to an audiobook and hang out with your kids, I highly recommend doing your Easter eggs up all fancy.

Even better, there's an envelope closure on the back that's also quick and easy to hand-sew with your embroidery floss, and it's secure enough to hold a miniature candy bar, a Hot Wheels car... or a piece of paper with a Very Important Clue written on it!

Here's what you'll need to craft these Easter eggs:

• felt. Normally, I use Eco-fi felt, which is made from recycled plastic bottles. For special little handicrafts like this, though, I dip into my very small stash of wool felt that I buy here. 
• Easter egg template. You can draw your own, of course, but I use the four-to-a-page Easter egg template from Skip to My Lou. 
• embroidery floss, needle, and scissors.

1. Cut out one full egg template, and decorate! You seriously do NOT have to have any sewing or embroidery skills to do this. Just knot one end of the embroidery floss, start it from the back, and get to stitching!

If you think your work looks ugly, the trick is to keep embellishing it! Nothing--I promise you, NOTHING!--can look ugly when it's covered in enough pretty embroidery floss.

I did discover that the kids and I had an easier time thinking of cute embellishments when we lightly chalked some curved lines for our stitching to follow. Chalk will rinse right off of felt with a little running water, so it's a good choice for drawing any kind of pattern or template directly onto the felt egg front.

2. Make two more partial egg templates. In the photo below, you can see that I've got one full egg front, and two different egg backs that overlap each other by a couple of inches in the middle:

That overlap is important, because it's your envelope closure. To make it, first pin the bottom egg piece lined up with the bottom of your egg front, then pin the top egg piece lined up with the top of the egg front. Blanket stitch all the way around the egg to make it look like this:

If you wanted to hang this egg, you'd just have to stitch embroidery floss through the top and tie it into a loop.

If you wanted to stuff the egg, you'd just have to cut out one complete egg back (perhaps you could embellish that, too!), blanket stitch the two together, and stuff it before you'd quite finished stitching it completely closed.

The kids and I have a few more of these in progress, and plans to embroider some more together later today while we listen to Dracula (we finished Pride and Prejudice a couple of days ago, and now we get to watch the Colin Firth miniseries together!!!).

I hope the Easter Bunny finds them useful, and that none of them wander away...

Six Months Ago: The Scented Candle Workshop
One Year Ago: Homeschool Science: The Gummy Bear Osmosis Experiment
Two Years Ago: Nashville is Country Music
Three Years Ago: The Three-Day School Week
Four Years Ago: Earth Hour 2016 and 1980s Trivial Pursuit
Five Years Ago: Civil Rights for Kids
Six Years Ago: Geocaching on the B-Line Trail
Seven Years Ago: Finally, the Sun!
Eight Years Ago: On the Knitting Spool
Nine Years Ago: The Roller Derby Highlights Reel
Ten Years Ago: Dandelion Stir-Fry
Eleven Years Ago: ATC Swapped
Twelve Years Ago: Felt Food for Fun

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!

How I Sew Re-Usable Fabric Face Masks

I HATE sewing these re-usable fabric face masks, and I hate seeing my family wear them. 

I mean, they're not hard or unpleasant or tedious to sew or anything, and the designs look fine and fit well and everyone says they're comfortable, but I hate everything about this pitiful, uncertain shot in the dark in the face of a global pandemic.

I haven't even read the "do they/don't they" articles about whether or not these fabric face masks do a dang thing to protect one from a highly contagious virus. I figure that if there's even a .01% chance that wearing it offers .01% more protection, then obviously we're going to wear them when we have to be out.

Or, in Syd's case, when she's chilling on the couch reading the instructions for her new DIY screenprinting kit:

 

I'm not going to tell you how to sew these face masks, because I don't want to be responsible for you. Instead, I'm gong to tell you how, when I wasn't busy reading every book ever written, *I* sewed these face masks, roughly following the tutorial printed in my local newspaper, since this is also the type of re-usable fabric face mask that local medical establishments, nursing homes, and non-profits that serve the community are asking for. 

For each mask, I used two pieces of 100% cotton quilting fabric, cut to 6"x 9", and two pieces of elastic around 1/8" to 1/4" wide, cut to 6.5" long. I later learned that although Syd is taller than me, she has a petite face, and her elastic probably should have been 5" long at the max. She shortened her own elastic to make her mask fit her well.

I've used both 1/8" elastic and 1/4" elastic, and found that the stretch matters more than the width. For a couple of family masks, I used 1/4" elastic that I pulled out of a super old fitted sheet as I was ripping it up for kitchen rags, and the super old, super soft, super stretchy elastic worked great. For a friend, though, I made another four masks using new 1/4" elastic, and it turned out to be too stiff and uncomfortable to be practical.

I put the two pieces of 6" x 9" fabric right sides together, then pinned the elastic to the corners. I started by folding back the top piece of fabric, and placing the elastic where I wanted it against the front of the bottom fabric:

I wanted it to be at an angle like that so that I didn't catch more than the end of it when I was sewing the fabric pieces together.

I pinned one end of the elastic just to the bottom fabric--



--straightened it out, because twisted elastic would be NO fun behind the ears--

--and then pinned the other end to the corner below it:

I repeated this with the other elastic on the other end of the mask, and then I pinned the top fabric down, sandwiching the elastic between the two fabrics.

I sewed around the perimeter of the mask, leaving an approximately 3" opening for turning and backstitching over the elastic at the corners:

I clipped the corners to reduce bulk--

--and then turned the mask right side out. I finger-pressed the raw edges of the opening to the inside to match the seam, then ironed the mask flat.

I edge-stitched along the top and bottom of the mask only, once again backstitching when I stitched over the elastic. Those little buggers are not coming off!

Because I used a 1/4" seam to sew the mask together, I was left with a flat mask that was approximately 5.5" tall. From the bottom, I pinched the mask at 1.5", then brought that fold down to the .5" mark, ironed it to crease it, and pinned it:



Next, I pinched the fabric at the 2.5" mark, folded it down until this second fold butted up to the first fold, then ironed and pinned it:

I never did figure out how to get my tucks perfectly even, so for the third tuck, I just pinched the fabric 1" from the top, brought it down until that fold butted up to the second fold, then ironed and pinned it:

Eh, they're not totally noticeably uneven, and you can't see the tucks when we're wearing them, anyway.

The only remaining task was to sew down both sides, stitching those tucks in place:

With my fifth mask, I started backstitching every time I sewed over a fold, and I think they look a lot sturdier.

Here are our family masks in all their glory:

And here's me about to low-key risk my life and the lives of my family for a trip to the grocery store!

At least we bought enough food that, barring emergencies, we shouldn't have to shop again for a month.

And by that, I mean that we bought a bunch of delicious food that we'll eat all of in a week, and then we'll go back to the rice and beans and cheese that we already had in the house for the three weeks after that.