inspiring a playfully creative life
As I ran down my list of materials I needed to finish for the “13 Materials” part of my 202020 challenge, I could brainstorm ideas for almost all mediums, but I kept getting stuck on one – glitter. Glitter is a pain to deal with at the best of times, but in a tiny house, the thought made me want to claw my eyeballs out
One of my favourite parts of Waldorf-inspired home education, is the beautiful handcrafts we get to make, and call it school. Most recently, Master 6 was working on a language arts block around fairy tales, and we decided what we needed to help us recount the story was a puppet. For the Hare & The Tortoise, I grabbed some grey felt and sketched out a
So last weekend, when I was busy sewing away on a secret squirrel project, I was thrilled to have Miss Butterfly perch herself up next to me, with a pile of felt and some scissors, and off to work she got. For the most part, she happily worked away on her own, needing only my help for some problem solving to make her bun squishy,
The first count down to Christmas appeared sometime in the middle of November, around the same time the Christmas decorations and marketing reached saturation point in the shops. After one too many days of the beetle baby asking me how long there was until Christmas, even Boy2 was over it, and took himself off to the craft room and whipped up a cute little paper
In July, we took the children to Parkes for the weekend, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing at The Dish. It was an amazing experience, being able to walk up the tower and around the azimuth track, attend talks by a whole mix of scientists, watching The Dish At The Dish (very cool, both figuratively and literally), and back up on day
We have been quite lucky with our children. Only one hospital stay. No surgeries. One broken arm and one greenstick fracture (which, to be honest, is a much higher success rate than we ever though possible, given the inverse relationship between a certain small boy’s fearlessness and co-ordination…). Overall, not a bad hit rate for over a decade with four children. Of course, though, there
It is probably somewhat unsurprising to anyone, that my kids love craft & creating almost as much as I do. Multiple times a day, I get asked if they can do craft. We build handwork into our homeschool days. There are always multiple projects on the go at once, with their desks and the school table and the lounge room and their bedrooms littered with
For the last couple of years, it has been a tradition that we spend an afternoon getting messy in the craft room, creating ourselves some Christmas canvases. This year Bear & Boy2 picked mini square canvases, which gave us two each. I did two individual canvases, Beetle threw some paint around and had a whole lot of fun, and both Bear & Boy2 created diptychs
All the way back in December of last year, the children and I had a play with easy fabric dying. Small squares of Aida, soaked in tea and then left to dry, were supposed to become cute little stitcheries. Except we were late in the day getting them dyed, and then by the time they dried, the kids had moved on to other things and
Last term, Beetle and I merrily trundled off to our weekly music class. We sang. We clapped. We danced. Then the teacher pulled out a cute little pop-up puppet for a game or three of Jack In The Box, and our little Beetle boy was smitten. He stared at it. He cackled when it popped up. He clapped and giggled and enjoyed the heck out
