Author Archives: Jess

Oh, the wonders of Kool-Aid

I’ve been working on my Back Tack II project. My buddy has expressed some interest in rug hooking, so I’m making her a bag of rug hooking goodies. I went to buy some wool fabric so that I could hook a little rug-patch to decorate the outside of her bag, but fabric is just way too expensive! I decided I’d buy some unwashed, undyed wool and give kool-aid dying it a try. After all, it works great on my handspun yarn and handmade felt.

koolaid dyed wool fabric.jpg

And it worked great here too! I wanted a good pink to match some of the flowers on the lining of the bag (to be unveiled as soon as my little rug decoration is done), so a mix of strawberry, orange, and a little graped did the job beautifully! I also overdyed some green wool to give it a little more depth and it turned out great too.

Kool-aid is great for penny pinchers like me!

who knew?

I learned something at the library today (amid the wielding of too many very heavy books and trying to heave them into the book drop before Logan did too much damage to the public copy machine–after which I strapped him into the stroller so that his path of distruction was only as far as his arms could reach, which is surprisingly far, but I digress).

September is:

NSM_Sept_180.jpg

which is nearly over, but hey, sewing is good– and it has a month. Who knew?

For more info check out www.sewing.org

our homeschool

family tree .jpg

We started school almost 3 weeks ago now. I subscribe to the “kids should not be taught like little adults” philosophy, but am trying to find a happy medium between total unschooling and playing sergeant mom. We start the morning with a song and a prayer, say the pledge of alegiance (mostly because Jonah thinks it is way cool), then check the calendar and the weather. I try to work in some phonics for Jonah and started 1st grade Saxon math with Brenna. Both of them love the math–we stack and count legos and color pictures and count on a 1-100 counting chart. Then Brenna reads and reads. She’s also been listening to books on CD. I had to take The Land of Oz back before it was due because we all had it memorized. She was listening 24/7. I’ve been trying to read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (book 5 in the Chronicles of Narnia) with her, but she gets impatient with my limited amount of reading time and reads ahead. Oh well. I’m certainly not going to complain about my 5 year old reading novels, but it is kind of sad that she doesn’t need me anymore. I’m not the only one with magic reading powers.

We’re also dabbling with history, hence the family tree. This has taken 3 weeks for her to make. I’m glad it’s done so we can be archeologists and dig in the sand box!

Here’s a close up:

family tree close .jpg

loving the cute off-ers

Hillary and Amy are having a “cute-off” to inundate each other with cute (japanese) inspiration. They’ve been on a little hand carved stamp kick.

Now, this is cute:

stamp bags.jpg

The printmaker in me is itching to cut some stamps. I’ve got the carving tools and some speedball safety-cut, and now I want to find some fabric ink. I’ve got a project in mind…

UPDATE:
I drew little pictures and got all ready to make them into stamps, but I have no lino cutting tools. None. This printmaking major, the one who spent two years in the printmaking lab cutting things up to print them has no cutting tools in her newly reorganized art room. So back-tack buddy. This is a good idea after all!