Dyeing Mishap

Today I was dyeing my daughter's white comfort blanket a nice shade of blue. I sewed a bunch of her baby burp rags together into a large blanket, and even though she's 3, she still loves snuggling with those burp rags! Well, I didn't want 8+ years of stains showing (I used them for my son as well who is now 6), so dyeing was the obvious solution.

I put on my rubber cleaning gloves and was squishing the fabric in the dyeing water for about 10 minutes before I had to take my gloves off to do something. Little did I know that one of the fingers had a tiny slit in it and...

Yikes!

Of course it had to be my middle finger that was dyed! I don't really want any attention to be drawn to my middle finger, especially because I'm not the sort of person that just flips people off, you know?!

Next time, a thorough inspection of my gloves will be done before I start dyeing.

Sheesh!

From Pallets to Chicken Coop

Our own homegrown eggs are so close!!!

My husband and I are preparing for the project I've been waiting for most of my life: building a chicken coop to house some chickens! We got this great idea from Mother Earth News for building a chicken coop out of wood pallets. You can usually get wood pallets for free and we're lucky in that our neighbor occasionally ends up with pallets in relation to his job and doesn't know what to do with them. Now that he knows we're collecting them, he just brings them on over! Sweet!

Well, we only have 2 pallets so far, so it's going a bit slow. I guess that's okay though. The wood is free! Sometimes "free" takes time. :-)

I am so thrilled to finally be able to seriously think about chickens! It's always been so far in the distance that I haven't even settled on what breeds I want or how many. I'll need to bust out my chicken book and get studying.!

Homemade Brown Sugar

For me, brown sugar is one of those things that I don't really think about until I need it in a recipe. Usually I have some on hand, but the last time I needed it - I was totally out! I had no time to go out to buy some and it was Sunday. We usually don't go shopping on Sunday. So I was stuck! What was I going to do? Thankfully, I remembered that I had stashed away a recipe on making your own brown sugar with two ingredients - sugar and molasses.

I dumped about 2 lbs. of sugar into a bowl, poured on about a half cup of molasses and started stirring. It definitely turned into brown sugar but it smelled very molassesy. It also had little molasses clumps in it. That had me a little concerned. But I didn't have time to worry about it and continued to make the sticky rolls I was in the middle of making. Well, to my surprise the molasses flavor baked out and everything tasted normal! How cool!

So, if you are in a pinch and need brown sugar, be sure to have some white sugar and molasses on hand. You'll be able to save your own bacon without having to go very far! :-)

Colonial Projects

Right now in homeschooling, my son and I are doing a unit on the colonists. So we started reading about the Jamestown settlement and now we're reading about the Mayflower. As a historian, I am very careful about what we read when it comes to history. History is a tricky thing because primary sources are often very biased, and reading secondary sources can be even worse! It is very difficult to find neutral accounts of history, so sometimes it proves to be rather difficult to find just the right books to read. (Don't even get me started on Christopher Columbus!) For now we're using Mayflower 1620: A New Look at a Pilgrim Voyage done by the Plymouth Plantation. We will also be taking a look at 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving also done by the Plymouth Plantation. Their books look very impressive, with photos of reenactments of the events, and I love that they really seek to bring an equal point of view from the Wampanoag people. 

Anyway, I also found some fun books on Colonial crafts. I was surprised with how many I found! Our first project was knotting a fishing net, because fish was a very important part of their diet. My son is still learning how to tie knots, so I helped him a lot, but it turned out really well, I think!

The cool thing about this project is that it could be applied in so many ways - for the fishing for food aspect, a religious context with Jesus and the apostles who were fishermen, for studying jobs or industries, etc. It was actually pretty simple! We found the project in Projects About Colonial Life by Marian Broida in the Hands-On History series. I think some of the other crafts in there are a little pointless, but I'm picky when it comes to crafts, so that's really just me. Check it out!

Snow Candy

We're into our second day of snow here in Maryland. A lot of it had melted by the end of yesterday; sadly our sledding tracks were mostly grass. But, today's snow storm has more than made up for it and we have plans in the works for an ultimate snow fort for bombarding people with snowballs who are sledding on the hill below. Mwahahahaha!

Our 2 year old daughter has been obsessed with eating snow. Any chance (and any place) she can get it, she will. I had to sit down with her and try to explain which snow not to eat (snow from the car, the house, shoes and the good ol' yellow or brown snow) and the snow that was good to eat. Then we had the idea of collecting some clean snow in a bowl as it fell and putting a bowl out on our porch railing, we soon had some good, clean snow to eat! We got out some spoons and she sat happily eating her bowl of snow. Our 5 year old son suggested we pour maple syrup on it, so we did that and he was happy eating his sherbet-tasting snow.

Then, I remembered as a girl trying to make Snow Candy using maple syrup like in Little House on in the Big Woods, but I was disappointed because it didn't work. The thing that I think was left out in our Snow Candy making was that we didn't boil it. And that's the key to making candy! So, I thought I'd give it a whirl today and it was a great success!

So here's how we made our candy:

I boiled about a 1/2 cup of pure maple syrup in a small pot over medium heat. I didn't really measure time-wise, but I stood there, occasionally stirring with a spoon. The syrup got all frothy and bubbly after awhile, so I added a tiny lump of butter which helped a little. That's optional though. I had a small bowl of cold water that I occasionally dropped a drip of the syrup into to test its hardness. Gradually it went from making soft lumps, to harder lumps, then to being hard and brittle - we had made it to the hard-ball stage! Then I removed it from the heat, got my bowl of snow and poured it out in a steady stream all over the snow. Surprisingly, it didn't melt the snow as much as I thought, but sunk slightly into the soft, white powder. When I removed it, it was a fun, hard spindly shape - delicious for eating!

I think it would be fun to try putting large drops on some parchment paper and letting them harden there. That way we'd have little syrup mounds to suck on. I'm thinking I could make some good throat lozenges this way with honey candy and some essential oils as well! Hmm!

This is the second pouring, so the snow is more melted.
Also, the candy cooked a little longer by that point, so it's darker.

Yummy, golden maple snow candy!

Happy Winter!

Say Goodbye to Wrapping Paper

Merry Christmas! We just got our first snow last night - just in time for a beautiful White Christmas!

We're in the late morning Christmas lull after opening presents. Our daughter is down for her nap and our son is playing happily with a toy. I feel very blessed this Christmas! We tried to keep things simple this year. We only got our kids two good quality toys and one book each. I think it was just the right amount, especially with how young they are. It's so easy to get caught up in the materialistic side of gift giving, but if you make the effort, things can be as simple as you want to make them.

Also, we don't really do Santa, so that, for us, makes it easier and simpler to focus on Christ for the holiday. We used a simple scripture advent calendar which was short and perfect for our young kids.

One of my goals for this year in simplifying was to do away with wrapping paper and to wrap gifts just with fabric bags. They were very simple and fast to make, but I did learn a few things to do and not to do and so thought I'd share. Remember - this is not an exact science! No measuring was done.

1. To start with, over the last few months I slowly collected pieces of the least expensive Christmas cotton fabric at JoAnn's. Searching the remnant bin is key, because you find all sorts of good cotton Christmas remnants of various sizes, and sometimes it's the more expensive fabric for a good bargain. I got various sizes cut: 1/4 yard, 1/2 yard, and 1 yard. It's really whatever sizes you want, but I wouldn't do less than a 1/4 yard because they get harder to sew.

2. When it was time to sew, I just left the fabric folded like it comes off the bolt, cut the widths I wanted or just left the 1/4 yard or 1/2 yard like it was. (For the smaller bags I cut the 1/4 yard in half width-wise and then I just had to add a bottom seam to one of the bags.) Then I flipped the fabric so the right sides were together and sewed up the sides, the salvage edges at the top and left open. Then I folded the salvage edge down about an inch and sewed all the way around to create a channel for the ribbon drawstring to go through. I left a 2" gap near one of the side seams for the ribbon to go into.

3. Then I flipped the bag right side out, threaded a ribbon through using a safety pin pinned into the end to get it through, tied a knot in the ribbon, and then I was done!

4. About the ribbon: I learned the hard way that only two types of ribbon work for this bag - the satin kind and the grosgrain kind. (it's the kind that has a bumpy weave)

Bags

Do not use cording! It doesn't not draw the bag closed very well. And don't use ribbon with any sparkly metalic-looking ribbon. Mine just fell apart! Wired ribbon also probably won't work that well either. These types of ribbon just don't slip smoothly through the channel for drawing the bag closed.

Bad ribbon. Bad! Too much metalic.

Good ribbon! Nice and satiny.
Don't you just love the gingerbread boys? The peppermint candy look so yummy too.

Lots of bags!

5. I also learned that more small and medium sized bags were the way to go. I think we had too many big ones. I did make one large bag made from a whole yard of fabric, but we didn't have any presents that big, so we didn't use it. Most presents tend to be on the smaller side, but it was hard to know that at the time I was making them.

The pros & cons:
The downside to these bags is that there is no hiding what's in there. It's very simple to feel through the fabric unless you disguise the present in something else like a box. Also, the security isn't the greatest. There is no tape keeping curious fingers from slipping the bag open, unless you wrap the ribbon around the top a few times and tuck it in. We put our presents out Christmas morning, so we didn't have that problem.
You also have to store the bags, but they lie flat, so it's not that big a deal.

On the other hand... The great thing is- no clean up! No mounds of crinkly annoying paper to fill up your garbage can or the landfill. You can reuse these year after year and they make adorable bags to give away too. The fabric and ribbon aren't too expensive, especially if you get them on sale or clearance. Also, you can get the cutest fabrics! Just take a look at those adorable snow penguins in the picture above.

Something else we did new this year were homemade gift tags. (You can see them in the first three photos.) There are four of us, so I found four cute Christmas/wintery symbols of the same theme through Microsoft Clip Art and copied and pasted a lot of them into a Word document. (You can search for snowflake, snowman, candy cane, Christmas tree, Christmas ornament, Christmas lights, Christmas mittens, Christmas bell, holly, Christmas candle, Christmas star, Christmas gift, Christmas stocking, and Christmas poinsetta to find ones similar to mine above.) Then I printed them in color onto white card stock, cut them out and punched a hole in each one.

The cool thing, was that the kids didn't know which symbol was theirs. I think this helped with not encouraging the "look at all of my presents" mentality. All we did was put who the present was from on the back of the tag. The kids had lots of fun hunting down their symbol once they knew which one to look for. I just looped the tag through the ribbon using the hole I punched out.

Well, I'm going to go and enjoy my Christmas candy and maybe go out for another round of sledding later. Have a wonderful holiday!

Birds

Whew, it's been awhile! I don't even know if anyone reads this blog anymore... but anyway! I have been busy with homeschooling and taking care of the house, etc.

Right now we're learning about birds in science, and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to read together a childhood favorite book of mine The Trumpet of the Swan. I had forgotten how much information about swans was in there, so it's been the perfect choice! And I also forgot how funny it is. My 5-year-old son has loved it so far. It helps that he's always loved birds and found them fascinating and fun. My kids have owl curtains hanging in their room that I made for them, and every now and then we go over to JoAnns and get a couple little wooden birdhouses for both our kids to paint which sit on their dresser. It's just one of those funny things that has evolved through their growing up.

And it just so happens that we have some woods at the back of our property with a terrific selection of birds that come to visit - and we don't even have a bird feeder!

Vulture - I thought it was so funny to just see him perched in our tree.

 

Blue Jay - Yesterday was the first time I've seen one around

Barred Owl - we hear them hooting pretty often. Really cool!