Back when I was a tween crafter, probably around the same age Butterfly is now, I hadn’t long finished my first quilt, when we were heading off on holidays. For no other reason than it amused me, and I liked the fabric, and I wanted to, I used some of my scraps to sew a tiny backpack – from memory […]
Late last year, Beetle Boy decided he was done with forever trailing after his big siblings and just doing whatever activities they were doing. He wanted something just for his own, somewhere to make friends that were someone other than the younger siblings of his own siblings friends. Scouts, we thought, might be a good fit for him. To say […]
Along with most of our belongings, the children’s fabric easter baskets we made a few years back are packed up, buried somewhere in the depths of the shipping container, hidden under layers of books and games and spare blankets and three million crates of lego. For the last three easters, our tradition has instead become a morning of crafting and making, creating […]
Christmas doesn’t feel like Christmas, in our house, if there aren’t three million craft activities on the go at any one time. I’ve been madly crafting my 12 Days, which has ground to a halt today. One item isn’t quite right, and I need supplies, which I can’t get locally. The last two aren’t going to work so I’m scrambling […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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), […]
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 […]
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