A Fair of the Arts in June

I had a nice, long break for myself after last year's holiday markets, but on Saturday I celebrated my first craft fair of what will hopefully be a long and illustrious season:

It's nice and peaceful about a half-hour before the fair opens, when I've just about finished setting up. I had a prime location right by the fountain and miniature wading stream this month--I could sell my stuff and supervise the girls having a blast while getting wet.

Like my MUSIC sign? It's not backwards to the customers, you know! You can find my tutorial on vinyl record album stencils over at Crafting a Green World.

There's yet another craft fair application that I ought to be filling out this evening, but I'm tired, and the wren shouting at the cat outside the study window is driving me nuts, so I'm thinking that a beer and a re-read of HP1 is just the thing for tonight. Besides, what would a craft fair application be if it wasn't done at the last stinkin' minute?

It wouldn't be a craft fair application of mine, that's for sure!

Crayon Rocket Pops in the Pumpkin+Bear Etsy Shop

It took a while to figure out a consistent-enough color scheme that I felt that I didn't have to list each of these individually, but finally, just in time for summer when I really want to eat them, the crayon rocket pops have landed in my pumpkin+bear etsy shop:

At least they're listed, but I'm going to have to do another photo shoot with them to edit the listing. I know better than to photograph on an overcast day, and thusly I'm unsurprised about the greenish-yellow cast that I can't seem to edit out of the photos without ruining the colors of the crayon pops:

 
Willow, however, was happy to drag herself away from the seven-hour book and computer feast that it's been every day that Sydney's been away at day camp to help me out with some modeling:

 
I mentioned to Willow as she drew that these crayons would work really well for coin and leaf rubbings, and I was shocked to learn that she didn't remember ever doing those types of activities at all! Has it really been that long? Clearly, after we finish building the model rocket and the wooden dollhouse and dye the playsilks and tie-dye the socks, we have something else fun to add to our homeschool to-do list.

Homemade Laundry Soap Made from Homemade Soap

Willow's afternoon chore recently not only desperately needed doing, but was also sneakily educational, what with all that recipe reading and following and measurement taking, etc.:

I've posted the recipe and tutorial for my homemade laundry soap before over at Crafting a Green World, but this time I used only a little bit of grated Fels Naptha left over from the last time Will and I made this recipe, and for the remainder of grated bar soap that the recipe calls for I hand-grated some of my own hot-process bar soap:

I still have my doubts that a body soap bar will work as well as a laundry soap bar, but the price was right and I certainly have it in stock, and it does look and smell much sweeter than Fels Naptha in my pretty little Mason jar with the fabric on top:

Combine this with the fact that I finally discovered that Matt had been using at least double the proper amount of soap in the washing machine (on the rare occasions that he starts a load of laundry), and I do believe that we're once again all set for laundry soap for a good long while.

Always Time for Oobleck

Now that we've spent a year homeschooling, I've got some idea of tweaks that I'd like to make to how we go about it. Although we still primarily unschool, we also tend to have a few particular areas of study going on at any time, or a vacation or other event to prepare for with some learning activities, or, to be honest, there are just plenty of projects on my list that I want to try out with the girls for whatever reason.

Combine that with my suspicion that the girls could handle more daily chores than they currently perform (and my problem that I have more daily chores to perform than I can currently handle), and I've been playing with creating a workable daily schedule. It currently looks something like this:

• Morning chores (to be done after breakfast-ish and breakfast table clean-up)

1. Give cats fresh food and clean water in a clean water dish.
2. Clean your bedroom, including making the bed.
3. Brush your teeth and hair.

• Morning project. If we need to get something done, I'll assign it, or if we have an outing planned I'll call that our morning project, but otherwise the kids can pick a project or I'll offer suggestions.
• Extra chores. I give out extra chores as punishments, or if there's just something else that the kids need to do in a particular morning, then that's how life works sometimes.
• Afternoon chore. The girls don't have regular afternoon chores, so I assign, or they pick, something else that needs to be done, from sweeping the back deck to scrubbing the toilet (a task that Willow, inexplicably, loves).
• Afternoon project.
• Extras. Extras consist of anything else the girls would like to work into the day (such as buying ice cream!) to a scheduled playdate, or last-minute errand, or whatever, really.

There's no real timetable to the day, although this does need some improvement. If I need the girls to do a chore that they don't want to do, or if Willow is engrossed in a book or the computer, then getting the work done can be a big struggle, the struggle part being what I was trying to avoid by laying out the schedule in the first place.

Anyway, that gigantic preamble was all just to lead to what I wanted to tell you about, which is that Willow recently chose to make oobleck for her afternoon project, and once again I was reminded both of how much I absolutely love oobleck--

 
 
 
 
--and always, ever more clearly every single minute, how much I absolutely love that little kid:

Tutorial: Shaving Cream Puff Paint

Because obviously we need yet another art supply!

To make shaving cream puff paint, mix together equal parts shaving cream--

--and white glue:

Whip it together quite quickly, so that the shaving cream doesn't lose its fluff.

Next, whip in an amount of powdered tempera to your liking:

Just a small amount gets the whole cup of paint quite gorgeous and cheerful:

Oh, and it makes a huge mess. Mental note to hose it all off later:

Prepare all your colors in separate cups--

--and then have at it!

It's a little hard to tell in a photograph how dimensional the paint is, but you can tell, at least, that the cloud blobs in Sydney's painting will dry just as cloudy and blobby as she made them, even if you can't see the waves and turns in her sky:

This paint does not keep, so when you're done painting you have the pleasure of dumping all the paint colors out onto a giant newsprint and playing at marbling them for a while:

What with starting up the summer garden and prepping for next week's International Fair (not to mention next weekend's first craft fair of the season!) and experimenting with getting the girls into the habit of doing a goodly amount of chores every day, it seems as if we've been doing an awful lot of work stuff this past week, so it felt good just to dig in and play for a while. Once the chores are habit and the big events are past (although they do just keep popping up, don't they?), I'm confident that our routine will settle itself into an easier ebb and flow of work and play.

And shaving cream puff paint. Can't leave that off the schedule.

Their Summer Sport

Sydney enjoys a vastly larger variety of extracurricular activities than Willow does, so when Willow said that she'd like to take gymnastics I was stoked, and immediately punched weekly lessons into the homeschool budget. Fortunately, "Routine Day" happened to be scheduled for the week of their second lesson, so I was able to pass through the magic window into the Actual Gym to film the girls showing off their approximately 1.5 hours of instruction thus far:

All the other parents were very good sports at clapping for my two tumble girls, I should add, since their own kids' routines had probably been in the works since at least the beginning of the year, if not longer (one of the kids could actually do that backward flip thing). Still, I do believe (quite humbly) that Will did herself credit during her performance.

As for my Syd monkey, however:

She is obviously another Olympic gold medalist in the making.

The best part of Routine Day, however?

MEDALS!!! On the second day of class!!!

The girls were THRILLED. Will wore hers non-stop all weekend, to Arkansas and back, and neither child so much as questioned why they happened to deserve medals at their second lesson, but if there were any doubts in their minds about whether or not gymnastics was super-fun (it's a little warm in the gym, after all), those doubts were completely and utterly quelled for all time.

Because, for Pete's sake, in gymnastics you get MEDALS.

Our Homemade Modeling Beeswax

On a hot day in the early summer, it isn't quite so much of a chore to warm up the modeling beeswax by hand (other times, we immerse it in warm water)--

--and then to model it into something fabulous--

 
 
 
 
--like a fire-breathing dragon--

--crowned with wildflowers, of course:

Check out my homemade modeling beeswax tutorial over at Crafting a Green World.