Thursday, November 9, 2017

How to Make a Girl Scout SWAPS Banner

Of course, girls can store the Girl Scout SWAPS that they've collected in a shoebox or plastic bin, and most girls do, which is fine, but frankly, in our house we have more wall space than we have shelf space, and so I thought that SWAPS banners would be a cute decoration for my girls' bedroom, as well as a way to organize and display their SWAPS that didn't mean there was one more plastic bin sitting untouched on a shelf.

I don't do that KonMari thing at all, but I do like our possessions to be actively used and loved!

If you've done any kid crafts, you likely have felt in your stash, and you may very well have an unused dowel hiding out in your garage, or a nice-looking stick in the backyard (after yesterday's all-day/all-night storms, which included me having to hide five young party-goers in the children's bathroom during a tornado warning, complete with their plates of cake because they wouldn't let go of them, we have LOTS of nice-looking sticks in our backyard!), which means that you could very well make this banner today, using supplies that you already own.

That's my favorite kind of project!

To make this Girl Scout SWAPS banner, you will need:

  • felt, any color, dimensions 12"x24": You can cut your felt to any size, of course, and if you're part of a council that's really into SWAPS, or you have several destinations planned where you know there will be SWAPS, you may well want to make yours larger--maybe a lot larger! Our council doesn't offer many SWAPS opportunities, however, so the only chances that my kids have to exchange them are at the yearly Girl Scout overnight at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and recently at the Girl Scout National Convention. If the pace doesn't pick up, then this banner will have plenty of room for the rest of their Girl Scout SWAPS.
  • letter stencils: I wanted to use my Cricut to make stencils, but the old version of Cricut Craft Room isn't playing nicely with my newish-to-me computer, so I used some large-format alphabet stickers as stencils instead. I think the letters actually worked out really well!
  • dowel or stick: This should be longer on each side of the felt so that you can use it to hang your banner. I found a 3' dowel in the garage and asked Will, who has earned her Cadette Woodworker badge, to saw it exactly in half for me.
  • sewing supplies. I used a sewing machine, but this would be simple to sew by hand, or even to hot glue.
1. Cut felt to 12"x24", then turn the top edge over by 1" and sew:

I made this channel pretty wide, because at the time I hadn't raided the garage, and I wasn't sure what sort of hanger I'd end up with. Stash PVC pipe was another final contender.

2. Cut letters out of felt:

It was pure happenstance and good luck that the stickers that I found to use as stencils fit perfectly on my banner. Yay!

3. Sew or hot glue the letters to the top of the banner:

Seriously, look how nicely they fit! I used hot glue, and put the top edges of the letters over my stitching line to hide it a little.

4. Add the SWAPS:
Notice the post-Halloween candy in her mouth.
One of the reasons why I wanted this banner was so the kids could organize their SWAPS by event. You could print each event and date on fabric and sew it on, but I just wrote it on cardstock. The day was starting to get away from me, and "done is better than perfect!"

You can see both of my labels on Syd's banner below, and how she's organizing her SWAPS by event. Just what I'd hoped for!

I hung the kids' banners in their room, in a piece of wall real estate exactly the right size for them, and next to the behind-the-door hooks where they keep their Girl Scout uniforms:

You might think that one kid is way more into SWAPS than the other, but I believe the reality is that Will hasn't remembered where she stashed all of her SWAPS yet (probably stuffed somewhere I don't want them, after hearing me prod the kids to clean their dang room already because we're having company).
I like that the items are themed together--hanging from the doorknob is even a washer necklace painted in Girl Scout colors!--and now I consider that entire space to be devoted to Girl Scout decor. I have a postcard-sized portrait of Juliette Gordon Low that I've been looking for a home for, and I'm wondering if I should paint the Girl Scout Law around the door frame (although surely that would also involve repainting that grody nonsense first...) or stencil a quote onto the high part of the wall above the door.

Any suggestions?

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

I Made My Kids Halloween Pillowcases

Holiday pillowcases are my new thing. They use up a ton of stash in a flash, AND since they're holiday-specific, they use up those weird holiday prints that you bought for, like, one project and now they're all just sitting there because where on earth are you otherwise going to use orange quilting cotton with candy corn printed all over it?

In a pillowcase, of course!!!

I panic-sewed these Halloween pillowcases the day of trick-or-treating, because I had the dream of the kids using them as their trick-or-treat bags instead of plastic Jack-o-lantern buckets. Before Wal-mart started making cheap plastic buckets a thing, kids actually would use pillowcases, and I think the nostalgia behind the look is sweet.

The kids didn't love my idea, because their vision is a giant trick-or-treat bag with handles for easy carrying, but whatever. When they sew their own bags (Ha!), they can put handles on them.

Until then, they have these bags!

The kids had to dump the candy out before I could take photos.
 

Here's Luna, acting like she's guarding the candy, but really she's hoping that we'll leave her attended with it.

On Halloween night, Will left her bag of candy within Luna's reach. The next morning, of COURSE we woke up to an empty bag and too few wrappers. We figured out that there wasn't enough chocolate in her bag to have poisoned Luna, but still, three days later I had to dose that dog with coconut oil and psyllium husk powder before she pooped.

Rotten dog.


I used the burrito pillowcase method, which is by far my favorite method of making pillowcases. You could probably even ditch that narrow piece of trim, for a super simple pillowcase that kids should have an easy time sewing:

I still have some Halloween fabric left (seriously, why do I have so much Halloween fabric?), but if I made Halloween pillowcases for me and Matt, that would just about use it up.

And you know what? I have Christmas fabric around somewhere... 

*wanders off to go make Christmas pillowcases instead of lunch for her children*

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Halloween 2017: Stick Girl and the Unicorn

It's bittersweet, how our Halloween traditions evolve as the kids grow older. How many years since I've made them ice skulls to dissolve with salt and liquid watercolors? How many years since hammering nails into a giant pumpkin was their very favorite holiday activity?

How many years since we've spent the whole, entire day of Halloween doing festive Halloween activities? Not this year, since Will needed to take yet another practice SAT exam in the morning, and Syd needed to spend half of our city's official trick-or-treat hours in ballet class.

Jack-o-lantern carving remains the funnest, though, although I do believe that this is the first year that the children wanted to try using stencils instead of making their own faces. I miss those original, kid-created faces, but the stencil designs are lovely, too, and I think the kids are even more pleased with them:



My favorite Halloween tradition now is one that we've only been doing for a couple of years, because it only works with these big, independent kids. One evening in late October, we have a Halloween feast, with each member of the family responsible for choosing and preparing her own Halloween dish completely independently. Syd made breadstick bones, which I forgot to get a photo of, we ate them up so quickly. Will made worms in dirt cupcakes:


I was boring, in that I made mashed potatoes and roasted brussels sprouts--not Halloween-themed at all, but we needed some vegetables in our bellies!

Matt was the most interesting--he made both this zombie brain cocktail, which looked a LOT better than it tasted--

--AND this meatloaf mummy:



It was the hit of the party, for sure!

It was also delicious.

On another night, Syd decorated our homemade pizza to look like a monster:

That one didn't actually end up looking monstrous at all, post baking, but we told ourselves that it was quite spooky, anyway, and munched it up while watching Young Frankenstein.

If you have kids of trick-or-treating age, you may have noticed over the years that trick-or-treating events have gotten completely out of hand. As if one night of begging for candy isn't enough (it IS!), in our town you can also go trick-or-treating from our local university's fraternities and sororities the week before (which we do, because it's awesome), trick-or-treating from downtown businesses the weekend before Halloween, trunk-or-treating from any number of churches in the weeks leading up to the day, and this year our annual Girl Scout overnight at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway ALSO had trick-or-treating!

 I unabashedly gave out glow sticks instead of candy, because seriously, nobody needs this much candy!

And when we ran out of glow sticks, yes I DID give out apples! "It's NATURE'S candy!" I declared to a frowny-faced tween. Her friend laughed at the look on her face, too, and then immediately took a big chomp out of her own apple right then and there.

The shining moment of Halloween, for parents, is the photo of all the kids in their costumes heading out for trick-or-treating, excitement on their faces. Every year, however, we are ever more ruled by Syd's ballet schedule, and not only did she have Nutcracker practice instead of the fraternity/sorority trick-or-treating this year, but for the second year in a row (and I think it'll be the same next year, sigh...), she had ballet class ON Halloween. And that class ran until 7 pm!

And that's why I have separate photos of the kids this year. Here is my unicorn:








And here is my Stick Girl!



Just between us, assembling this costume is one of the worst things that I have ever done in my life--just maddening. Agonizingly frustrating. Tedious. And you had to pretty much do the whole thing from scratch every time she wanted to wear it! I was practically in tears each time. And yet it was so, so worth it!

I bought Will two strings of battery-operated LED lights (and we could have used three), with the understanding that we'll use them someplace else afterwards--I think they'd be great for lighting up a campsite, for one thing. I also bought her a black hoodie and black sweatpants--thank goodness for Goodwill! She painted her face, and then Syd and I taped the lights directly to her clothes. The lights do have sticky backs, but you still have to tape over them with clear packing tape to make sure they really stick. You also have to do the math to figure out how to arrange them so that you don't run out before you've got everything placed, and yes, I DID have to pull one set off and redo it every. Single. Time.

But just look at what you end up with, and ignore my super loud, high-pitched giggling:



It's even more hilarious in person.

Thanks to Facebook, I noticed the absence of a few trick-or-treater photos this year. It seems that some kids Will's age, and even some kids a year younger than she is, are no longer trick-or-treating. I have to admit that I'm relieved and thrilled that it never so much as occurred to my big kid, thirteen whole years old, that she might be too old to trick-or-treat. She and her buddy, who's within a week of being her exact age, both dressed up in the two most elaborate costumes that I saw all night, and both hit the neighborhoods hard, walking for hours, happy as clams. We for sure saw bigger kids out and about, too--I saw a high schooler whom I know from fencing, out with a pack of people her size, all happily trick-or-treating, as well.

I don't want my kids to cling to childhood, exactly--don't we all know some people our age who do just that, and it's not that great?--but I don't want them to feel like they have to abandon it, either, before they want to. I want them to savor all these small experiences, the trick-or-treating, the pumpkin carving, riding bikes and camping with their friends, dressing up dolls and building with LEGOs, without any pressure to change themselves or fit in with someone else's perception of what an eleven-year-old or what a thirteen-year-old should be doing and enjoying. I mean, one year they won't even WANT to go trick-or-treating, and that's the year they should stop, and not one year before.

And certainly not this year, when Stick Girl and the Unicorn had the time of their lives, were driven home in the dark, and then sat on the family room rug and spent the rest of the evening sorting their candy.

Friday, October 27, 2017

Montessori Pink Tower Extensions for a Sixth Grader

As we have been playing a lot with exponents lately, I finally hit the big red button and purchased a Montessori pink tower.

Well, actually I specifically purchased an unpainted one, so I guess it's a "pink" tower. FYI: I've bought a few Montessori materials over the years, and I've always found the best prices at Alison's Montessori. That stuff is still spendy, though, so let me know if you ever find a cheaper place!

The kids first used the pink tower with the tower of squares that they'd previously made:

To make that tower of squares, you need a looooong roll of butcher paper and several sheets of cm-gridded paper. The kids are to make a tower by cutting squares from the cm-gridded paper, going from 1cm^2 to 20cm^2. They're to arrange it nicely on the paper to make a tower (it's dealer's choice if the tower is centered or aligned at one edge), and then they are to annotate each square with its exponent (2^2), its exponent in long form (2x2), and its total units (4). Keep it forever, as you'll be pulling it out for extension work forever, as you can see above!

In the activity above, the kids matched each cube to its square footprint (it became immediately clear that our cm grids weren't perfect centimeters, so there was a bit of averaging). There were cubes for the first ten squares on their chart. Then they put the same information--exponent, long form, and total units--on index cards, and matched them to the cubes. It was a quite informative visualization!

Even though it was still valuable for Will to engage in the work, and have her hands on those exponents, this activity was really more at Syd's sixth grade level, which became clear when as soon as the project was complete Will abandoned it to go do something else, and Syd continued to fool around with the tower. I was amused to see that she built it several times as perfectly as possible, just like a good Montessori schoolgirl, but she did quickly move on to exploring extension ideas:

After I saw that, I researched pink tower extensions, and printed out this set of pink tower extension cards for Syd to explore.

I think she liked them!





I've watched the kids as Montessori preschoolers, so it was especially interesting for me to see this new work presented to them. Both kids were interested and engaged in the exponents work, but Will had no interest in sensorial exploration with the blocks beyond that. Syd had a great interest in further sensorial exploration, and concentrated on the blocks quite deeply for a while. Just as a preschooler would, she started by building the tower, but whereas a preschooler would possibly do this dozens upon dozens of times, Syd got all she needed from doing it just a few times, and then seamlessly moved into exploring other patterns. She was deeply engaged for a while in making these patterns, and then she and I invented some patterns that also used Cuisenaire rods (I'll show those to you another time), and then, just like that, she was done. The tower is still sitting in a pile in the playroom, untouched for a week now, so this weekend I'll have her put it away.

But think of that process--Syd was just as engaged as a preschooler would be in this sensory material, and her experience was no less valuable just because she moved through the entire process in a week rather than three years, and no less valuable just because she's eleven, and not four. It clearly fed something in her, and I don't need to key it to state academic standards to know that, and I don't even need to know what, exactly, she took from the exploration--she took something, was engaged and happy and productive, and therefore it was a great school day.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

How to Make Miniature Book Girl Scout SWAPS

I've been ALL about the Girl Scout SWAPS for a few weeks now. You'd think that since they're crafty I'd have been all over them from the beginning of our Scouting experience, but I dunno... SWAPS aren't a huge deal in our council like they are in some, and a lot of them are... kind of cutesy? I'm really not a crafter of cutesy things. Ducks in bonnets aren't really my jam.

But then I joined this Facebook group of Girl Scout troop leaders and volunteers across the country, and they're super into it and not all of them are into the cutesy nonsense, either, and THEN I made plans for the kids and I to go to the Girl Scout National Convention, where not only do adults also exchange SWAPS but you've also got to bring your A game because there are also people from across the country there...

...and yeah. SWAPS are a thing now.

ANYWAY... I'm taking my Girl Scout troop to an event soon where there will be SWAPS to exchange, so I've been doing a lot of prepwork and encouragement lately (the one bad thing about SWAPS is that you have to make a LOT of them, because what? You want to go somewhere and exchange just one SWAP with just one person? No! You want to exchange just one SWAP with every person! At the event we're going to, that's 40-50 SWAPS!), and setting up a lot of invitations to make a lot of different SWAPS, because my kids, at least, don't really have the interest to make 50 of the exact same thing; they'd rather make five of something, get bored, make 10 of something else, find it tedious, then come gripe to me, etc.

Here, then, is a pretty quick-and-easy tute that I made to make miniature books. Stick a safety pin in them and they're SWAPS. Don't stick a safety pin in them and the kids can use them in their doll house or with their Barbies.

You will need:

  • thumbnail-sized book cover images. Google your kid's favorite book and you'll find plenty of small images of that book's cover. Save it to your computer, paste it into your favorite word processor or graphic design program, and do it again until you've got a page full of book cover thumbnails.
  • colored copy paper. You'll be using this for the rest of the book's cover, so you can match the color to the book cover image or not. I let the kids pull whatever paper they wanted from our paper stash.
  • old book pages. You want writing on the inside of your book, but it doesn't have to match what the book's about--here is where you use resources wisely! I pulled an old, torn paperback out of my books-as-crafts stash, and we used that. It just happened to be an Old Sweet Valley High book, and so now I have to request some of those from the library, as the children were FASCINATED. I guess I hadn't noticed that Sweet Valley High isn't a thing anymore!
  • scissors, glue stick, stapler, pen, safety pin

1. Cut out the thumbnail book cover. Use that as a template to cut out one piece of colored copy paper twice the width of that book cover, then use THAT as a template to cut out two pieces from the old book page:

When you're done, you'll have the following pieces of your book:
See how all the other pages are twice as wide as the book cover?

2. Glue the book cover to the right side of the colored paper:

3. Stack the two book pages behind it and fold in half:

4. Staple exactly on the fold. To make a SWAP, put a safety pin through the fold near the top:


And they look amazing!!!

You need to include a little information with your SWAP to identify your location and to make it clear, if it isn't already, how the SWAP is Girl Scout-related. We include our troop number and city/state, and the kids wrote Book Artist on these, because they're a call-out to the Book Artist badge that they're currently working on. Inside the front cover or on the back would be good places to include this information.

Syd liked these so much that she managed to make 30 before she got bored and wanted to try a different SWAP idea. Will only made five or six, but she's not really into crafts. 

Rather, she's not into paper crafts, because I firmly believe that there's a hands-on creation for everyone. With that in mind, I bought a bunch of dog tag blanks and played around with metal stamping them, and later today I'm going to see if a kid who isn't into paper and glue so much might be into metal and hammers...

I think maybe yes!

Monday, October 23, 2017

A Girl and Her Dog Photo Shoot

I know that I just wrote about this girl and this dog, but that was before we decided to throw a birthday party for the dog next month.

Stop laughing. I'm serious!

It turns out that my older kid, who hasn't wanted a birthday party for herself since she was... eight, I think?...is super revved up about the idea of having a birthday party for her dog. Yes, we're going to invite real people. Yes, we're going to have a craft project (metal stamping dog tags). Yes, we're going to have food (hot dog bar, because of course), and yes, we're going to make a cake just for the dog. I even showed Will photos of first birthday smash cakes for inspiration.

The people will have a cake, too. I've already found the tutorial for cutting a cake into a giant 4. We reckon Luna is turning four, maybe?

Anyway, we needed a photo of Luna for the invitations, so so that's what inspired this photo shoot. The kid brushed her hair, collected the dog, and off we trotted

literally
 --to my favorite photo shoot location, the drive-in next door. I had some shots planned out--some, like the one that I wanted of Luna's paw in Will's hand, went bust, and others, like the one below, I'm really, really happy with:

But the best shots that I got were after I just sat back in the grass, a little exasperated that the dog wouldn't sit where I wanted or stay sitting once I'd gotten her there or put her paw at just the right angle, etc. I sat back, sweaty and frustrated, and just took a break for a minute while the kid and dog goofed off.

Except that I actually sat back intending to take a break, then saw what the kid and dog were actually doing as they goofed off, and I put my camera back to my eye as surreptitiously as possible and got this:

And this.


After a couple of minutes of that I told Will that we were all done, and sent them off to play:


A dog who can put that specific look on that specific kid's face? Of COURSE that dog is getting a birthday party.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

A Day in Cincinnati, and the William Howard Taft National Historic Site Junior Ranger Program

Here's our trip to Ohio so far:

We spent the first day at the Girl Scout National Convention in Columbus.
We spent the second day touring Native American mounds near Chillicothe.
We spent the third day sightseeing aviation history in Dayton.

And we spent the last day of our trip in Cincinnati!

Syd's ballet schedule this semester allowed us to spend just one more day on fall break, and we chose to go back to Cincinnati, where we'd had so much fun on an overnight with our Girl Scout troop a couple of months ago. Unlike that troop trip, during which the weather was so beautiful that we did all outdoor experiences, on this day it was still pretty wet and gross, and Syd was still pretty sniffly, so we stuck to indoor activities.

Such as the William Howard Taft National Historic Site! I didn't actually have the kids do any prep work on any of the places we'd be visiting on this trip, so their only experience with William Howard Taft is that time that I had Will memorize all of the presidents in order (I'd consider having them memorize this again, as Will has forgotten it and Syd never learned it, but we're currently memorizing exponent rules and The Fifth of November, so we're full up on memory work).

Fortunately, there's nothing better for giving a thorough biography of a person than a National Park visitor center and introductory film:



And even better when there's a house tour!








Fun fact: William Howard Taft didn't really have ambitions to be president--his dream was to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His second wife, however, always had her eye on the White House, and consistently pushed him there until he was elected:


But in May of that same year, she suffered from a stroke, and had a long, hard recovery. She wasn't able to do any of the fun hostessing duties anymore, and Taft no longer had her help with decision-making. And since she was the power behind the throne, as you say, his next election--


--did not go well:


The good news, though, is that guess who eventually became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?!?

YAY for Taft!

And here's a fun fact that illustrates term limits: Washington established the first Supreme Court. We know that from Washington to Trump (sigh), there have been 45 presidents of the United States. Want to guess how many Chief Justices of the Supreme Court there have been in that exact same time?

Seventeen. It's a lifetime appointment.

So even though we knew nothing about this site before we got there, and the kids weren't super enthused about going, we found it to be a fascinating house--


--and a fascinating man:


After becoming the William Howard Taft National Historic Site's newest Junior Rangers, there was only one single thing that the kids wanted to do before going back home to see their much-missed pets: 

Just last night, we watched Goosbumps for Family Movie Night and ate some of the international treats we bought there: sweet basil potato chips from Thailand, cappuccino cream-filled cookies from Italy, dinosaur-shaped corn puffs also from Thailand (that country has great snacks!), Jammie Dodgers from Great Britain, and lemon cookies from Canada!

We're saving the horror-themed sodas from the US for another night.