One Inch World

While playing we found out that our hangers from Ikea make excellent little marble tracks. Rebecca insisted on filling up the whole thing with my marble collection, good work for little fingers, also there was the challenge of keeping them from rolling where she didn’t want them as the floor isn’t flat..

We also had fun doing some wooden puzzles that I cut with our scroll saw. After Rebecca did them right side up she decided to give it a go upside down. They are small enough that it was a pretty easy job. So if you are bored of your puzzles, try them wrong side up. You could even draw a new picture on the back!

Here is a 100% child led activity. I was dragged. Really.

I was cutting loose threads off a red canvas shopping bag that I had just washed and dyed yet another load of clothes pink with, I’m starting to learn, really, although I just did it again with a purple blanket… And Rebecca wanted to make a new bag with the threads I was pulling off. I think she was upset that the bag was loosing threads, and had a hole in the corner. She asked if we could make a new bag, and I grudgingly admitted that *theoretically* we could make a very small bag, but it would be a lot of work. From there I was dragged into helping her set up a tiny cardboard loom, warping it for her and finding a large needle to use to weave the weft threads. From there she wove her little postage stamp of red cloth.

Later when she was helping me make the bed she said, “Wow mama, someone did a lot of work making this big sheet!” So there you go, the last couple months of chaos we’ve become unschoolers.

Not running away, but assembling Ikea furniture, a great activity for little hands. Rebecca loves using the little torx drivers, and putting all the bolts into the holes.

I know I haven’t written for almost a month, things are getting a little more organized around here, I’d say were 80-90% unpacked. That’s depressing. I do have a lot to write about though, I’ve even been doing some sewing! I just need to make Monday blog-ahead day, or schedule some time for it. That’s what I feel like I need to work on the most right now, coming up with a house cleaning, girl educating, mama crafting schedule where everything can magically get done at its appointed time… There may be too much fantasy in there. I’ve started Fly Lady though, which is one step towards such a miracle schedule.

Want to practice your cranking? Rebecca is fascinated by both baby food and the food mill. She wants her own bowl of baby rice cereal at meal times. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but here she is, working on grinding up a quarter of a peanut butter and jam sandwich… Mmmm… She ate that quarter and then ground another one. Whatever floats their boats, right? (Still old pre-move projects.)

I am lost deep in the black hole of moving hell. Okay, perhaps not quite that bad. But I swear I haven’t done anything other than unpack boxes and buy bookshelves for the last three weeks. The light is starting to come out though, Saturday we finally unpacked the paints, and yesterday I cleared enough space to dust off my ancient Singer Featherweight. (I’ve been borrowing my ex-housemates modern sewing machine for the last 6 years…) She still runs, her name is Elizabeth, and she was my mother’s in college. I think I need to get her serviced pretty badly though, she’s sounding kind of chattery, and I think I’m missing a screw from the bobbin assembly…

Anyhow, here are some awful pictures of Rebecca’s sewing, from two months ago. The next several posts will all be things several months old, before moving took over my life!

Rebecca has been sewing felt recently. For Christmas D-Pa got her a stack of craft felt of her very own. This is a heart that one of us cut out, can’t remember. I think she cut it out… it was for Daddy, went something like: “This heart is for Daddy.” “You’re cutting a hole in it?” “Daddy has a hole in his heart and all the blood is coming out.” “Oh?” “Now I’m taping it up.” “Mom, make a needle for me, I want to sew it to my skirt.” “Oh sure, why not.” “Now Daddy’s heart is stuck to my skirt, and I’ll show everyone at school tomorrow.” Two months and it’s still on there.

Yes, the color on this is awful. We did this at Nenny & D-Pa’s house over winter vacation. Rebecca said she wanted to make a donut, so I cut out two teal circles for her. Yes, she chose the color. First she sewed around the ring in the middle, then she said she wanted to put strawberries on it. So I cut out some strawberries, and she randomly stitched everything together. Then she wanted to stuff it. Sweetie, that’s really the wrong order to do things in, but who’s fault is that really? Sigh. Okay. So I started forcing stuffing in between the front and back between the strawberry stitching, holding the edges shut so that Rebecca could whip stitch around the edges. It ended up plumping up reasonably, luckily she wasn’t very thorough about sewing down the strawberries, because Mama’s always have to make these things work out, right?

By next week maybe I will have unpacked her felt and she can get back to work again. Actually, the biggest stumbling block to that right now: I bought a second hand wood bookcase for craft supplies, sight unseen, or in this case un-sniffed. It reeks of either perfume, incense or ill conceived fake teak scent. Any ideas how to get rid of it? I’m afraid the scent is somehow embedded in the finish and I’m very upset about the whole thing. It looks very nice, but the smell is making my throat raw.

Yes, I realize that the winter holidays are so last month! And frankly, we did this last month, but there you go, right now my house is full of moving boxes and not so full of exciting crafts! Two weeks to go.

The pine cones were a Friday Art Group project, we painted them white and then sprinkled them with kosher salt – it comes in larger flakes than table salt, but not so large as rock salt, and makes reasonable glitter substitute. We have no glitter in our house. Okay, we have one bottle of clear plastic glitter somewhere, but I don’t know where, and if I did I might not say.

The mini tree is a dead bonsai tree my husband gave me… We stuck it in some flour play dough and baked it. Somehow the tree wicked up the salt (maybe it was salt dough, honestly I don’t remember, it keeps a disgracefully long time.) and turned whiter than it was to start with, kinda cool. We hung lots of little mini ornaments on it with tweezers and fingers. It was a great fine motor activity, and lots of fun. The mini ornaments consist mostly of plastic beads and sequins in various arrangements strung on earring wires from the craft store. I have them from years ago, but next year I should find more earring wires (just short wires with a flat bump at the end – you could just twist a loop instead) and let Rebecca make the ornaments. I don’t think that tree is going to make it to next year, maybe we will have to use one of the still-living bonsai, it would be much sturdier too, even if it wouldn’t give as much of the ‘winter’ aspect.