Growing

Whipping up a grocery bag holder took me less than an hour.  I like the result, it's pretty and useful, but more importantly I can see in this craft a number of ways that I've grown as a crafter since beginning my challenge this year.  Unlike last year, I can now:

1. Read a mention of an object, with no picture to go on, and imagine that I could make it
2. Troll Pinterest and find a number of tutorials to make that object
3. Skim the tutorials just to find the average dimensions of fabric needed, and the general techniques used
4. Compare the techniques and materials used by different crafters in their tutorials and determine which best suit my vision, skills and taste
5. Come up with my own ideal measurements, and also realize that with anything other than tailored clothes, these measurements can be fudged a little to suit what I have on hand
6. Sew the object, start to finish, using my own common sense and what I remember from the tutorials, without having to go back and reference anything

Ways that I'm still trying to grow: 

• as a businesswoman, I want to be better at choosing what to sell for my possible, future 'home baking business'.  I'm kicking myself that I bought a bottle of anise just before deciding I don't want to make biscotti after all-- what a waste!  And I've spent years baking dozens of recipes each year, and somehow I still can't decide what would be easy & popular enough to make a good home business.
• as a homeschooling mom, I want to be better at finding 'teachable moments' and opportunities to learn together aside from our formal lessons.  I don't mean through online videos or websites, either-- we all spend plenty of time staring at screens.  This weekend Radish and I plan to plant some seeds in the garden, there's a start anyway.  Gardening is a hard sell to Primo, though, I'll have to think of something else to do with him.

Late April Updates

Last week turned out to be one of those 'work on Snorzy's sweater' weeks, since Sweet Hubby was on vacation from work and we were too busy having fun for me to want to plan or execute a new craft.  I'm totally okay with that because since I can knit only a few rows at a sitting, this sweater is going to take forever to complete!  For this week, I'm going to sew a plastic bag caddy as my project.  I found a bunch of tutorials on Pinterest, now I just have to narrow down which one I like best, and get to work.

This is our last full week of our April break from lessons, we'll get back to it next Thursday when May begins (can't believe it's already almost May!  This year is flying by!).  I've previewed most of the curricula that we're going to use, and I'm cautiously optimistic that the kids will like the new things.  Primo will be using History Odyssey, which references Henrik Van Loon's Story of Mankind as a textbook.  Last night I started reading reviews of SOM on Goodreads, and overall they were positive but some people criticized the book and said they would never use it with children.  I've started reading it myself, but I'm not enough of a history buff to know if the history is accurate and comprehensive (I guess I'll have to get Sweet Hubby, history teacher that he is, to read it too).

I'm still in the 'product testing' phase of looking into starting a home baking business.  I tried out biscotti but found them too fussy to make, with too much waste (added to that, I noticed that there is another small business that makes biscotti just a few towns over, and I think that not having an Italian name or heritage might be a drawback).  Now I'm planning to bake some chocolate oatmeal cookies, costing out the recipe and giving it to testers to see if it would be a tempting enough product to sell in local shops.  Lovely Mother suggested I make something pretty, but I'm not sure I want to sell quantities of things that have to be carefully crafted and fussed over.

 

Shirring, and April Musings

As I mentioned in my last post, this week's craft was the Shirt Skirt from the blog Sew Like My Mom...an opportunity for me to try out elastic thread and shirring.  I read a few tutorials first, so luckily I knew this was going to be a bit of a pain-- from winding the elastic thread on a bobbin by hand, to holding the material flat as I sewed so that it would come out right and not too bunched up.  It worked ok, but this was the first of the things that I've made this year that I've been unhappy about-- I don't know if I'll use this skirt.  Here are some mistakes I made, that made this a little unlikely to make it into the wardrobe rotation:
1.  the T-shirt I chose at Goodwill was new (leftovers from Target), soft, and a good color of grey...but not very thick, or well made.  I ripped a tiny hole in it when I started sewing and had to stop, cut off half an inch, and start again.  I should have been as much concerned with the quality of the T-shirt as the color.
2.  there is a ruffley bit at the top because I left a good 1/4 inch edge when I began, fearful of going any closer to the top.  The directions said 1/8 inch, but I forgot that until I sewed all the way around and saw the ruffle appear.
3.  the directions said to do 12-15 rows of shirring but I got bored/worried about running out of elastic thread and having to wind another bobbin (I was already on my second one, that was all I prepped ahead of time) and stopped at 11.  After steaming the elastic it shrunk down and got a little stretchy, but it doesn't grip me tightly and I'd be worried this skirt would fall down if I wore it in public.  Maybe it would have been more grippy if I had gone for a few more rows of shirring.






This one I *won't* be modeling for the blog!  Above you can barely see the dots of green and purple on this light heathered grey skirt, it's hard to see from this picture why the material of the t-shirt tempted me in the first place.




This close-up gives a better idea of the material and the shirring-- I'm glad I tried it anyway, and I would try another one with a better t-shirt (maybe extra long, but not men's XL?) and maybe better quality elastic thread too.  I had to buy Dritz as that was all they had at my local store, and only afterward read in the comments of a tutorial on shirring that Dritz is the worst for this use.  Oh well.

In other news, we're almost halfway through our month-long 'break' from homeschooling-- although it's not a complete break, as things like Debate class and piano lessons are still going on, as well as physics experiments with the 4-H club which the boys just joined and some lessons with our 'tiny co-op' on Fridays with our good friends. This month off has gotten me thinking again (this crops up every couple of years) about doing a home-based baking business, selling cookies through local stores.  I'm not sure if I can really manage it on top of the homeschooling (not just the lessons, but the driving all over for activities) and keeping up with a toddler.  This month I feel like it would be possible, but I might just be thinking so because right now we're on break and my days are not over-full.  Then again, I recently read an article in a magazine (maybe Redbook? I can't remember) about having a bunch of mini jobs, less than part time, instead of a full time job or even two part-time jobs.  It felt like a revelation when I read that, because I tend to do things "all or nothing' in some ways, and it never occurred to me before that I could work a little of this and a little of that, and make money and keep myself occupied without having to compromise what I'm doing with the boys.  So, instead of imagining that I could either have a huge, busy, thriving home-based business, or not do it at all-- what if I only sold to one or two outlets, and didn't have to spend too many hours a week on the business?  The big boys are five years older than they were when I started looking into having a food business (I took a class about it in 2009)...they could be genuinely helpful (not in the cooking, but advertising, delivering, accounting) rather than just cute little sidekicks.  They're actually really excited about me starting a baking business, it motivates me to try because I don't want to disappoint them.  My family is so touchingly invested in seeing me do something besides just be the mom, it's nice.  Or insulting, wait-- are they trying to get rid of me?

April Update

We are on our 'April Break' from lessons right now, and I think I agree with Radish that this is the best of our three annual breaks, because it falls in the spring.  The idea of taking a break in changeable April is that we can pick up and run out the door whenever the sun comes out, instead of having to finish math or some such.


So, you might think that since we're on break, my craft challenge projects must be humming along.  Um, no.  Last week I did *nothing*-- just couldn't get inspired to make anything.  This week was in danger of being more of the same, and derailing my challenge, until I had a conversation with Lovely Mother about crafting and inspiration, and remembered that 'when in doubt', I can always work on Snorzy's rainbow sweater.  I was stuck on that one, once again, this time just because it was time to switch from the trim color to the main color.



 

Once I worked a little on the sweater (and I mean a *little*, I picked it up near the end of nap time so I had about 5 minutes before I heard Snorzy crying), I got out of my rut and the next thing I knew, I had two ideas for sewing projects.  I can thank my friend Jen F. for the first one: she repinned one of my Pinterest pins, from my Sewing board, and I realized this is what I want to make, next week!  It's a 'shirt skirt', made from a men's XL t-shirt, from the blog Sew Like My Mom (I feel like I've made something from her blog before, but I can't think of what).  This skirt involves shirring and elastic thread, two things I've never done/used.  Here's my sweet spot for sewing projects: things from tutorials that don't require paper patterns, about which the writer of the tutorial says something along the lines of "this can be made in an hour!", yet which also involve techniques or materials that I've never used.  This project hits that spot.

 

Also, I was reading the free magazine from Hannaford supermarket, Fresh, this morning while on hold with the phone company about our lack of dial tone, and found inspiration there, too (it comes from the weirdest places, and at the unlikeliest times)!  I haven't looked up a tutorial yet, but I know I've seen them-- for a cloth bag to hold plastic bags from the store until we can take them to be recycled.  Dull, tiny, simple, yet useful and will reduce the clutter in the house rather than adding to it-- fits the bill for my craft challenge.

 

In other news, the Big Homeschool Buy is done and delivered-- I had to move books around to different bookshelves to clear out a shelf in the dining room for all of this coming year's homeschooling materials.  I'm excited about some, intimidated by others, and realizing I need to take some time this month while we're on break to read, and write some lesson plans.  The best part was that the boys spontaneously picked up a few of the books each, read a little, and declared them good.  The one I'm currently the most intimidated by/excited about (yes, both) is a unit study called Microscope Adventure.  It's like nothing we've used before.