Constellations on My Kitchen Shelves

 Remember how I tried to improve my kitchen shelves by sewing fabric baskets to hide all the crap that we shove on them, but that just made me see how ugly the shelves just... ARE?

Laboring under the delusion that paint and wallpaper are cheap ways to spruce up a space, I decided to spruce up this particular kitchen space by painting and wallpapering it. 

Like, for REAL painting and wallpapering it. As in, not using whatever paint I happened to find in the garage, but deliberately shopping for and purchasing brand-new paint. Not "wallpapering" by decoupaging my favorite comics or Harry Potter paperbacks all over the shelves, but purchasing actual, legitimate, real-live wallpaper.

Will volunteered to assist me with taping off the shelves. Thank goodness for that kid!

I painted the trim around the shelves, permitted Matt to talk me down from the wallpaper of cartoon T-rexes eating tacos, and instead bought this constellation wallpaper, on account of my mid-life crisis has turned out to consist of taking up once again my childhood love of astronomy.

In retrospect, I wouldn't pay this much for wallpaper again. I underestimated the square footage of what I needed to cover, and so instead of having a nice, big surplus of wallpaper to use on other projects, I had thankfully enough wallpaper to cover the shelves, but only enough extra to cover a couple of tin cans, so I guess look forward to my upcoming tutorial on covering tin cans with wallpaper to use as utensil holders!

Also, as I was painting the trim, I noticed that the super old paneling on the kitchen walls is peeling away, so... that's cool, I guess.

ANYWAY, here are the shelves all nicely painted and wallpapered!

Pretend like you don't see any bubbles in that wallpaper, please. It's important that you do this for me. Instead, feel free to notice the peeling paneling below the shelves. What on earth am I supposed to do about that?!?

Next up, Matt has plans to build a roll-out shelf next to the refrigerator--something like this! His hobby is mixing cocktails, so he can put all of his bulky bottles of alcohol and mixers there instead of in the kitchen nook, and wouldn't it be absolutely wonderful if he could also fit some of the crap that we now toss on top of the refrigerator so I can't reach it? Even better, perhaps he could fit some of the things that I've thrown in those fabric storage baskets, so that there would be fewer baskets in the nook and you could actually see that expensive wallpaper!

I'm also toying with the idea of thrifting some fabric and putting up a curtain to block the view of the messy hallway from the kitchen, and the view of the messy kitchen from the hallway. It would involve putting a couple of holes in the expensive wallpaper that I JUST put up, though, and I'm afraid that it would look tacky, as well. I don't always have a clear visual idea ahead of time about what's going to look tacky or not...

What do you think, guys--are you on Team Curtain or Team View into the Messy Next Room?

Homeschool AP Human Geography: DIY Large-Format Maps for Reference

I wasn't super excited when Will chose to study AP Human Geography this year, but it is actually a fascinating subject, and now I'm stoked that we get to learn it!

When Will decides what she wants to study, I generally go into research mode so that I can at least figure out a spine and a logical progression of knowledge/skills. It's more involved when it's an AP course, because we know she'll be tested on a specific knowledge/skill set, but still, this basic research method works. 

As I was reading through other instructors' AP Human Geography syllabi, I came across a reference map project that I shamelessly stole.

In this project, the instructor has her students print outline maps of various regions of the world, and then label them according to her criteria. Not only can these maps then serve as reference and study material, added to when necessary, but also, a kid is going to memorize a LOT of that information just through the acts of researching it and then labeling the maps with it. Will, especially, learns very well through this kind of activity.

Although the instructor had her students use 8.5"x 11" outline maps, you all know that I have my own personal free, custom-sized map-printing website with which I am unashamedly obsessed. Obviously, then, I printed 4x4 maps of all the regions using Megamaps.

And then Will and I spread out across the floor and assembled them!

I have the perfect method to assemble these maps so that they stay together but there's no tape on the front. You don't want your maps to fall apart, but you also want to be able to write and draw on them! What you do is first glue them together with a glue stick on their overlapping edges, and then immediately flip each one over and run Scotch tape along all the seams on the back. It is THE perfect method, and I expect you to do it only this way from now on.

When we had all the maps assembled, Will spent a few days labeling each one:

So excited to label them that we couldn't even unpack from our camping trip first!

I think these maps turned out to be absolute masterpieces:

They're not as perfect as a ready-made reference map, of course, but they're plenty accurate enough to serve Will's purpose of studying AP Human Geography, and I love the thoughtful care that she put into her work:

That's a lot of geography learning that took place during this one project! I'm especially excited about the Africa map, as that one can do double-duty for Will's African Studies class that she takes at our local university.

While I was printing these maps, I did print the giant-sized world map to replace the giant kid-made map of Europe that's been on our wall since Will took AP European History. I'm probably going to hold off on assembling, mounting, and having Will label it, though, because surely the kid is sick of map labeling at the moment. Better to hold off until the spring, perhaps, and then use it as a review before the actual AP exam.

OR should I pay Syd to paint us a world map mural, and then we can label that? A Syd-created map mural might have an unwholesome amount of dragons and sea beasts, of course, but that just improves a map's overall accuracy, you know.

P.S. Want to see more dragons and sea beasts and maps and murals? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page, where I post resources, WIPs, DIYs, and pictures of my cat.

How to Make Fabric Decoupaged Blocks

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Don't let outgrown building blocks languish unloved in a back closet when there are so many beautiful ways to upcycle them!

I've been in the process of slowly upcycling my kids' old building blocks for years (I promise, there will still be more building blocks in the world when/if I have grandchildren!), and one of my favorite ways to upcycle building blocks is to turn them into holiday decorations using simple decoupage techniques.

I've already shown you how easy it is to decoupage blocks with paper, but you'll be pretty excited to know that decoupaging blocks with fabric is EVEN easier! Fabric is sturdier than paper, which means that you need fewer layers of Mod Podge to seal it, and the surface is so much more forgiving than paper, so you'll find that every Mod Podge layer looks nice and smooth, in stark contrast to all the fussing that one tends to have to do with paper decoupage.

For paper or fabric decoupage, the supplies are nearly identical. Here's what you need:

Supplies

• Outgrown building blocks. I love the look of plain cubes, but you can decoupage any block shape.
• Fabric, pencil, and scissors. You'll be fussy cutting your fabric to size, then trimming, if necessary.
• Mod Podge and a foam paintbrush. Foam paintbrushes aren't as eco-friendly as natural hair brushes, but they apply the glue smoothly, and if you wash them well after each use they'll last forever.

Directions

1. Prepare your fabric. If it's new fabric, there's no need to wash and dry it just for this project, but you should iron out any creases.
2. Measure and cut the fabric. I like to fussy cut the fabric pieces for my decoupaged fabric blocks, so I use the block itself as my template, tracing around each side on the reverse of the fabric piece. You can do this with a pencil or piece of chalk, and if you cut INSIDE the lines that you drew, the piece will match the side of the block more closely.
3. Glue the fabric to the block. Working on one side at a time, paint a layer of Mod Podge onto the block, carefully smooth the fabric piece onto that side, and then paint another thin layer of Mod Podge on top of the fabric. Let it dry completely before you glue another side--this isn't a hands-on time-consuming project, but it DOES take up a lot of resting time!

You might think that these cute blocks are only for decorating--and yes, they DO make super cute decorations!--but once they're sealed with Mod Podge, a kid can play with them just as they do any other blocks. I wouldn't let a kid who's still mouthing things have them, but any other kids would probably love having some fun, festive holiday elements added to their open-ended block play.

Homeschool History: Make a Gingerbread Stonehenge on Top of a Cookie Cake

This is what happens when you write lesson plans while you're hungry.

Chapter 2 of the high school kid's astronomy textbook covers the history of astronomy, and we've done some really cool projects to extend that information or contextualize it--with even a couple more planned, because I freaking LOVE the history of astronomy.

The most elaborate of these projects--so far--has been making a gingerbread Stonehenge, something that I have wanted to do approximately all my life. 

Modeling is a great way to help a kid really dig into the geography and physicality of an artifact, as well as encourage them to look more closely at it. I mean, yes, you probably know what Stonehenge looks like more or less, but how many stones are there actually? What is their exact configuration? How many are currently standing? What, exactly, do we think it looked like when first constructed?

Making a model, whether it's out of clay or gingerbread, means that you've got to put the research in to answer most of those questions, and the answers will likely stick in your memory, too.

The gingerbread is just the bonus!

For this project, I first made this M&M cookie cake. I've baked this cookie cake a few times, and although it's not my favorite cookie recipe, it IS a reliable and tasty-enough cookie cake, which is why I keep it in my repertoire. But if anybody knows a reliable cookie cake recipe that also tastes so super amazing, please let me know! We eat a lot of cookie cakes over here!

For the gingerbread, I used the construction gingerbread recipe from Serious Eats. This is what we used for our thousand and one gingerbread cookies--and houses!--last Christmas, and anyway, Serious Eats would never steer me wrong. I made royal icing using this Wilton recipe, which is convenient since that's the brand of meringue powder I own! Even halving the recipe I made WAY too much, but the recipe claims that you can freeze it, so, remembering last Christmas Eve when I forced everyone together to decorate cookies at 6:00 pm and THEN realized that we were out of powdered sugar, I was pretty stoked to freeze the rest. Cross your fingers that it's still delicious at 6:00 pm on Christmas Eve!

Add some green cream cheese frosting to the top of the cookie cake (I thought about floating the idea to the high school kid that we pipe it on using the pastry tip that looks like grass, but even I know when I'm going too far. Sometimes), and it was ready for Stonehenge!

The high school kid decided independently how to size and cut her Stonehenge pieces, and she did a terrific job, considering that when she had all of Stonehenge laid out on the cookie sheet, there was just enough leftover for a couple of gingerbread people (which I also froze, because you CANNOT have too many Christmas cookies to decorate!). 

If we had this project to do over again, I'd encourage her to use royal icing to place the gingerbread on the cookie cake before frosting it--maybe that piping bag would have been the best idea, after all! The toughest part was definitely making the stones stand up on the cookie cake, but fortunately that royal icing made easy work of placing all the cross-pieces:

I LOVE how Stonehenge turned out. It's delicious, historically not entirely inaccurate, and delightfully festive for the time more or less around the autumn equinox.

I'm not going to guarantee that we're not going to make another one for the Winter Solstice.

If you're interested in a more sustained study of Stonehenge, check out my other favorite resources!

• Stonehenge Skyscape. I really like this site because it gives an accurate simulation of the position of the sun, moon, and stars and planets visible from Stonehenge, based on the current local time.
• sand clay Stonehenge. This homemade sand clay, with some black food coloring added to the recipe, makes the model Stonehenge look really realistic!
• coloring page. These Education.com coloring pages are often surprisingly good. If you print them extra small, they're perfect for adding to a homemade giant map.
• British Prehistory. This BBC page is a good way to get some more geographic and historical context for Stonehenge and other henges from the same time period.
• Stonehenge visitor information. The official website for Stonehenge is SO GOOD! It tells you a ton of background information about the site, has excellent photos of artifacts in the attached museum, and links to a bunch of other prehistoric sites in the UK. 
• Stonehenge audio tour. Do you like to close your eyes and use your imagination? This audio tour, meant to be listened to actually at Stonehenge, will make you feel like you're there!
• Stonehenge: The Story of a Sacred Landscape
• If Stones Could Speak: Unlocking the Secrets of Stonehenge
• A Brief History of Timekeeping

Next up: the high school kid and I follow in Galileo's footsteps and observe the nightly positions of Jupiter's moons!

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!

We Took Part in a Water Quality Sampling Blitz

 I think you'll agree that someone who has earned a 5 on the AP Environmental Science exam is now qualified to give service in the area of environmental science.

And if that someone can put another lab into their possibly-not-yet-terribly-robust APES lab notebook at the same time, then all the better!

A couple of weeks ago, the Limnology Department at our local university held a water sampling blitz for our local watershed, and Will and I were two of the lucky citizen scientists who took part. Our job was to drive to several GPS coordinates, figure out a way to access the creek at each location, then fill out a Qualitative Habitat Evaluation field sheet, measure the stream's pH and temperature, and collect water samples for more testing back at the base. 

We brought a lot of bug spray, because the streams were all beautiful, but accessing all of them basically required parking at the side of the road, inevitably anxiously near No Trespassing signs and Trump flags, then climbing down a steep ditch through underbrush and copperhead nests, always to end up somewhere quite magical:

Fortunately, I had an adept scientist at hand. While I got to admire the scenery and take photos, she buckled down and did most of the work:

Fortunately, even when we met a stream bank that was too steep even for my mountain goat lab partner, we still had a way to get our samples:

Seriously, how cool is that? It works because water doesn't change temperature very quickly, so the extra time to take a bucket sample doesn't effect the measurement. 

The bad news is that none of the streams performed particularly well on the Qualitative Habitat Evaluation or the pH tests--

--and considering how many cornfields, yards, and cow pastures we saw on the edges of our streams, I'm not feeling optimistic about the results of the nitrogen or fecal coliform tests that we also measured out the water for back at the base.

Nevertheless, many of the streams managed to look happy enough, and it was magical to tromp through somebody's yard, scramble through the underbrush, slide precariously into a ditch, and then suddenly find ourselves somewhere like this:

Just out of view cars were still driving down whatever country road we'd stopped on, cows were still mooing and corn rustling, suspicious people were still peering out their windows and around their giant Trump flags at our parked car, but at the bottom of every ditch it was just us, the birds, the crawdads, and a little piece of natural wonderland trying its best.

It was the best kind of science, and not a bad way for an eleventh-grader to spend a school day, either.

How to Sew a Fibonacci Quilt

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

Quiltmaking is surprisingly mathematical. If you love to sew quilts, then whether you realize it or not, your geometry and trigonometry skills are probably on point!

Why not celebrate how mathematically beautiful a well-made quilt is by making a quilt out of one of the most beautiful mathematical sequences that we know so far.

Let's sew a Fibonacci quilt!

The Fibonacci sequence, named after the guy who first noticed it, is a series of numbers created by adding up the two previous numbers in the sequence. You're given 0 and 1, so add them together and the next number is also 1. 1 and 1 make 2, but then 2 and 1 make 3. 3 and 2 make 5, 5 and 3 make 8, and you can just keep going, ad infinitum.

To make the Fibonacci squares, use each of the Fibonacci numbers as the length of the sides of a square--leave out 0, because that doesn't make a square, of course. Piece them together in a spiral, much like a log cabin quilt block, and you'll have a Fibonacci rectangle that looks like this:

CC BY-SA 4.0

We're going to go up one more number in the sequence, all the way to 34, because that's the last number in the sequence that you can make from one continual piece of yardage. Here, then, will be the finished measurements of the quilt pieces that you'll need:Now, pretend that each of these squares is the finished measurement of a quilt block--wouldn't that make an absolutely beautiful quilt?

• 1"
• 1"
• 2"
• 3"
• 5"
• 8"
• 13"
• 21"
• 34"

I used a quarter-inch seam allowance on all of the pieces, so add a half-inch to each of these measurements when you cut your quilt pieces.

You will also need the following:

• one 34"x55" piece of backing fabric. I backed this quilt with nothing but another piece of quilting cotton, and I am in love with how light it is. Not every quilt has to be warm enough for winter--some quilts are destined for summertime naps on the couch!
• double-fold bias tape. You can make your own double-fold bias tape, but I buy mine from Laceking on Etsy.
• cutting and sewing supplies.

1. Pre-wash, measure, and cut fabric pieces. Don't forget to add 1/2" seam allowance to each measurement!

2. Piece the quilt. This Fibonacci quilt is easy to piece--just follow the above diagram, adding each piece in numerical order of its measurement. Be very strict about your 1/4" seams, and iron after every seam. I like to use a walking foot when I sew quilts, so if you're struggling to feed your fabric evenly, that might be worth checking out.

3. Put the front of the quilt with the back, wrong sides together. Pin it as much as you can stand to!

4. Sew double-fold bias tape all the way around the quilt. Miter the corners as you go to save time--I really like the first method shown in this video.

When you're finished, you'll have a lovely, light summer quilt that's both aesthetically and mathematically beautiful:

Interested in more cool math activities? Check out my list of even MORE fun Fibonacci sequence stuff!

Now get back to your sewing machine and get going!