Day 4 at the Steiner Institute, Summer

I know I haven't really shared much of the experience of being here at the institute this week outside of my class. Uploading pictures from here has really turned out to be a pain because of the computer I brought with me so I've been documenting my class as best I can and just skipping the rest. I just wanted to briefly mention the event last night though, just in case anyone is considering coming in the future. Last night was the weekly "coffeehouse" event, which is basically an open mic night, and it was such an amazing experience. We were treated to singing from a local singer/songwriter (whose CD I bought), singing in French, poetry, spinning tops in candlelight, a silly song about Rudolph Steiner, a group singing a beautiful hymn, poetry in Spanish, and many other lovely, funny, touching events. I'm so glad I was able to be a part of this sweet and wonderful community for a week.

The discussion on summer was the least developed of the week, probably because of the ending of the school year. We did talk about a sweet (and out of print) Japanese story called The Moon Maiden, that I will probably try to find a used copy of. For felt projects today, we just worked on anything that we hadn't yet tried and finished up projects from earlier days. I started off making a summer sunset picture. It's not yet dry, which is where the wrinkly look is coming from, but I love the effect that the mica has in the descending night sky.

Late yesterday, I decided to make a pumpkin and a mouse, which is hiding inside the pumpkin, to go along with the verse from autumn. The pumpkin isn't quite big enough to cut holes into so I might need to make a bigger one for the mouse, but I love how the top comes off and treasures, or mice, can hide inside.

The Easter eggs are now cracked as well.

And I thought a story mat to use for both Peter in Blueberry Land and Blueberries for Sal might be a fun summer activity. I'll have to make Peter and Sal later.

Today was our last day for felting. Tomorrow we'll be moving on to sewing as we talk about birthdays. I had an inspiration at some point today to make Finn a felted birthday crown, so this is the beginning. I'm planning to put a star of some variety on his crown each year for his birthday so that the stars number his age. I also made a star out of the same wool, which has sparkles that are hard to see in this photo, that I'll likely make into an ornament for Finn to hang on the tree since he's a Christmas baby.

Tonight's song:

See how the bee with busy wings,

Home to the hive, the sweets doth bring.

He gathers from the flowers of spring.

Day 3 at the Steiner Institute, Spring

We began our spring discussion with the often still-cold month of March, early April. The teacher's root children table, pictured below, is often a wonderful carryover from the Valentines/Mrs. Thaw to the more springy look of Easter.

Next is the teacher's spring nature table, including a close-up of Lady Spring, who is so lovely holding her bluebird friend.

She also had some lovely spring fairies hanging for spring.

Most of us decided to work on a flat picture today. Mine, at the request of Elizabeth and Philip, contained a duck and a bunny. I felted my picture onto a piece of wool felt fabric. In hindsight, because you have to needle felt that way, I think I would have preferred a roving background to soften the image a bit more.

We also felted over plastic Easter eggs to make fillable felt eggs. They haven't been cut open yet as they are still drying, but I think this will be a special Easter basket tradition--to fill their felt eggs with a treat.

We also worked on a few individual projects. I chose to make a dragonfly with a cookie cutter and a bluebird, which I'll probably try to hang over our nature table next spring.

I've also spent quite a bit of time drooling in the bookstore since I've been here. Not only have I ordered some wonderful books, such as What's Hiding in There, a lift-the-flap book for Finn, but I also purchased a couple of tiny and adorable knitted toys that will probably grace our nature table in the future.

I'll close with the words to a simple song we've been singing, often in rounds, in the evenings:

The sun descends in fiery tone,

All alone.

The blackbird sings;

The day is done.

Tomorrow is summer, so stay tuned! For those who have asked: Yes, I'm having a wonderful time and learning so much!

Day 2 at the Steiner Institute, Winter

On Day 2 at the Steiner Institute, we talked about winter festivals, starting with advent. While the teacher was talking about the winter festivals and ideas, projects, verses and songs that go with the winter season, some of finished our Prince Autumn dolls. I also added a pumpkin to stand with mine.

Our teacher had some wonderful nature tables set up around the room for advent and winter. She showed us how to make transparency windows that you can use on the nature table or a larger version to cover one of your own windows as winter moves into the season of darkness.

She had some wonderful Saint Nicholas dolls, and we discussed St. Nicholas Day with it's traditional shoe goodies for a bit.

With advent, we discussed special ways to celebrate, such as a bell appearing on a branch of the nature table each day, or a new needlefelted star appearing somewhere in the house (or on a grapevine wreath) each day. We also discussed the nativity and baby Jesus appearing or Madonna and child appearing at the end of advent.

We, of course, discussed King Winter and Mrs. Thaw, which aren't really as appropriate for where I live since thaw happens about 3 hours after a snow. Although you could certainly do them to represent cold weather rather than snow.

I really liked the use of the brown silk under the white that Mrs. Thaw is sweeping, since in the Northeast, thaw is followed by mud season.

We also talked about Valentine's Day and some ways to keep that holiday sweet, including cookie-cutter felted hearts. You simply place a cookie cutter on your felting sponge, place wool inside the cutter and go to work. It's fun, quick work and can make nice ornaments for your children to give as gifts.

Here are some of the cookie-cutter felties that I practiced making today:

The teacher let us get creative and decide what kind of winter project we wished to work on today. After talking to the kids on the phone last night, I decided to make Jack Frost, at their request. Paul said that the first thing Philip asked when he picked him up from the Y this evening was if I had made Jack Frost. :) So here's Jack Frost! He carries an ice wand to leave frost crystals on the grass. The lighting's not the best and I have NO photo-editing software with me so you can't see the dark blue color variants on his clothes and hat, which include some glitter. We're fortunate to have a vast array of wool to work with, and I'm taking advantage of that!

Tomorrow is spring, and we've discussed making a Lady Spring or wet-felting a spring scene. I'll keep you posted!

Day 1 at the Steiner Institute, Autumn

So...I left my family bright and early Sunday morning to travel to Easton, Massachusetts, to the Creating Festivals with Children workshop (aka Felting through the Seasons).

When I walked into the classroom for the first time, this was the first of about a dozen nature tables that was setup around the perimeter of the room. Our teacher, Celia Riahi, has been an in-home Waldorf preschool teacher and taught at Waldorf kindergartens in both Manhattan and MA for more than 30 years.

The first day we focused on autumn and we were able to see and explore some of the items on our teacher's autumn nature table. She also talked about several autumn projects to do with children, including:

1. thinly slicing apples sideways across the middle so that the star shows through, then cutting out the star with a star shaped cookie cutter and drying the apple slices for stringing or attaching to a wooden dowel as a wand
2. wrapping wool around a small stone and felting, then sewing streamers to the back of the ball and needlefelting a star to the front of the ball to make shooting stars
3. dipping leaves (or even small branches with leaves) into melted paraffin or beeswax to preserve longer on the nature table.

The following pumpkin was felted over a plastic wiffle ball then the top cut open and the holes cut to make him a jack-o-lantern. She told us a small story she wrote about the mouse and the pumpkin.

In my garden grows a pumpkin

orangy and gold.

Along came a little mouse
so the story goes.

Nibble, nibble went the mouse;

'til the pumpkin was a house:

two small windows

and a door

and lots of feathers on the floor.

There the mouse slept well, I know,

even when it began to snow.
(or "even when the cold winds blow" if you live in a non-snowy area, like me)

The Autumn Prince was our main project for today. We made him by first felting the ball head, then wrapping a small layer of felt over a pipe cleaner for his arms. Then we wrapped many layers of wool around his head and arms, layering down to his body. After the body was the right size, we chose autumn-colored roving to make his clothes. I also chose to add an acorn decoration to his shirt, and some of us (including myself) chose to make a cape for his shoulders. Mine is gold with layers of orange, green and red sparcely on top and leaves adorning the edges.

Another huge component of this workshop, for me, is the wonderful food served here. Nearly all organic and many local foods make this a feast for the eyes and the palate.

Breakfast: fruit salad, granola, yogurt, whole grain bread with almond butter and blueberry jam

Lunch: veg chili over brown rice, garden salad, beets and carrots

Dinner: living lasagne, garden salad, green beans with slivered almonds, quinoa

Next up, we'll be discussing winter festivals tomorrow. I'll keep you posted as I can. :)

4th of July

I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th of July! We had a relaxing day as a family, then went to a local park and met some friends to watch the fireworks. The kids thoroughly enjoyed watching the fireworks...almost as much as they enjoyed making and eating their flag cake earlier. :)

Finn decided that the fork was just slowin' him down!


And what 4th of July celebration would be complete without the requisite watermelon treat.

I realize there are far many more pictures of Finn eating food around our house than the other kids, part of that is that he's unable to scarf his food down as quickly as they do, and the other part is the cute things he does like gingerly holding his cake by the sides to indulge completely in the flag cake. The older kids don't do those cute things anymore so they aren't shown on my blog stuffing their face quite as often as Finn; of course that's a double-edged sword because if they were doing those cute things, I'd just tell them to mind their manners.

I'm heading out first thing in the morning to fly up to MA for the workshop at the Steiner Institute. I'll try to find time for some posting while I'm there. Stay tuned! I'm so excited to see what this adventure will bring!

Saturday Lunch

Now that we have the whole family back together again, we took a quick trip to the farmer's market this morning for some fresh fruits and veggies. Our lunch today was comprised of fresh corn on the cob, which I had to cut off the cob to cook because 3 of our 4 kids have missing teeth; smoothies with frozen strawberries and peaches (from earlier crops), blueberries, and plums; and sourdough bread from the Amish stand with strawberry jam, made a few weeks ago. We are thoroughly enjoying our fresh meals this summer!

An Honest Scrap!

The Magic Onions, a wonderful blogger who does fun, magical activities with her little ones quite frequently, passed me this blogshare so I decided to play along. So here I'm supposed to list 10 honest things about myself. Yikes! Buckle in.

1. I am one of the least patient people that I know. I don't like this about myself so it's something I'm continually working on. I'm particularly trying to have more patience with my kids. One of the ways I do this is by placing myself in their shoes and trying to see how I'd want my mom to react at any given time. It doesn't always work, but I'm trying.

2. I'm also one of the most dependable people that I know. Maybe that's why I was nominated Most Dependable my senior year in high school. At the time, I thought that was synonymous with boring. hmmm...

3. I'm a serious over-acheiver sometimes. I don't always like this about myself either. Remember the whole birthday post about living in the moment? I often have a hard time doing that. I graduated high school at 16, college at 19, got my first office job at 19, paid cash for my first car at 21, bought my first house at 22, and had my first child at 23, then I started wondering if I might be missing out on some of the best things in life by plowing through everything like that.

4. When I was a child, I always thought I'd have 4 kids and be done having children by the time I hit 30. (Don't ask me why; I'm an over-acheiver, remember?) When I was divorced with 1 child at 25, I thought there is no way that would happen. Then Paul and I got married and became an instant family of 5, and Finn was born when I was 29 1/2.

5. Sometimes I'm thought of as being a very crunchy mom with all the answers on raising a natural and green family by the Natural Living/Attachment Parenting group that I moderate on a local Mommies board. This makes me uncomfortable because I know how far I still have to go.

6. When Elizabeth was born, over 8 years ago, I knew nothing about being a crunchy, natural mom. There were many decisions I made to keep her as healthy as possible that started me down the path I'm now on, but I still cringe at some of the decisions I made because I didn't know any better back then.

7. My favorite color is orange. I think it's the most undervalued color in society. JMO

8. I've seen Harry Connick Jr in concert 7 times, in nearly every city in NC. I'm not obsessed or anything.

9. I used to have a serious ice cream addiction. It was a rare day that I didn't eat ice cream at least once. When I got pregnant with Elizabeth, the ice cream-love just went away. Just like that. It didn't make me nauseous or anything, the desire just left. In an interesting turn of events, Finn was highly dairy-allergic as a baby, and I couldn't eat ANY dairy products at all for over a year. As hard as avoiding dairy was, can you imagine how hard that would have been with an ice cream addiction still intact?!

10. I never thought I'd stick with this blogging thing. I've never kept a diary or anything else that required constant, near-daily attention of this variety. I only started because poor Finn had less baby-toddler pictures than any of the other kids so I thought it would be a good thing to force me to take more photos and chronicle events in their lives. Look at me now!

I'm nominating a few people who I'd like to hear an Honest Scrap from:

Melissa - The World More Beautiful

Jenni - Little Callahans

Lisa - 5 Orange Potatoes

Nicole - Frontier Dreams

Jessica - Turkey Cookies

Jane - By the Maple Tree

W.I.P. Wednesday and a night at the park

The bag that I was working on last week came together beautifully. I couldn't be happier with my little felty yarn bag. Now I can carry my knitting around with me everywhere. Woohoo!

I also managed to finish 2 hats this weekend while Paul was out of town. The first hat, out of Malabrigo kettle-dyed worsted merino, is for Philip, probably a Christmas surprise, so I got Elizabeth to model for me. She immediately asserted that since Philip's head is bigger than hers, and the hat fit her perfectly, she should probably just keep it and I should make another hat for Philip. :) Seriously soft and yummy yarn!

The next hat is a fall-ish hat for Paul, knit with Araucania Aysen using the Brother-in-law Basket Weave pattern. It was a nice little surprise to welcome him home, I think.

My current WIP is for Elizabeth: a pair of legwarmers and a hat to match using Rowan Colourscape Chunky lambswool. I love the funky striping and I think she'll really enjoy it as well. I'm hoping I can convince my friend Melissa to make Elizabeth a matching cordoroy dress when the fall fabrics arrive.

Next up, but always subject to change, Punta Merisoft Hand-Painted merino in such a fallish colorway that I fell in love. I'm thinking Soulemama's My Hat of Choice for this one. What do you think?

Last night, to celebrate my birthday, Paul and Finn took me to a local vegetarian restaurant then to a favorite park. We had such a peaceful time just walking around in the forest watching the wildlife. This is easily Finn's favorite kind of activity. Turning 32 was all-in-all a wonderful experience. Thank you for all the well wishes!

Another year older...

...but another year wiser is debatable. Today is my 32nd birthday. I was thinking this morning of some wisdom I might have gleaned over my 32nd year to share with you, but I couldn't really come up with anything concrete, except this: Be in this moment, this day, this year. Be in this situation, good or bad, and savor it. It astounds me that Elizabeth will be 9 in 6 months, and Finn isn't really my baby anymore. I used to hear people say that, and I thought it was so contrived. I don't think that now. Now that I'm 32 and each year flies faster than the last. I'm the world's worst for being goal-oriented to a fault. Always looking toward the next activity, next holiday, next vacation...not enjoying today as much as I should be. Just my 2 cents. :)

For my 32nd birthday, Paul asked me if it would be ok to send me to the Steiner Institute in MA to take a workshop on Celebrating Festivals with Children for a week. My first thought: "um, no. That sounds lovely; maybe another year, but NO." The more we talked about it and I thought through the logistics (and there were ALOT of logistics) the more I warmed to the idea. Oh, not the idea of being away from my family. I'm especially wistful at the notion of being away from Finn for a week for the first time. But ultimately, I think this workshop has the potential to enrich our family and bring new meaning and new traditions into our home. As such, I guess I can miss my family immensely to learn these new skills and bring home new ideas. (Quite the martyr, aren't I, considering I'm the one leaving for a week.) Also, it is quite a generous birthday gift from my dear husband who will be mom and dad, taking care of all the responsibilities of our household while I'm gone for the week. And I immeasurably appreciate him, and this gift.

Last, but not least, I just wanted to share this photo of a wonderful kit that Paul bought me from She's Sew Slye on Etsy. How cool is that French material with the 1977 calendar? The kit includes several vintage fabrics and instructions for making a bag. I'm so (or is that sew?) excited to work on this project! probably after I return from MA :)

**photo #1 is from the Steiner Institute; photo #2 is from the She's Sew Slye shop on etsy

summer afternoon

Finn and I braved the late afternoon heat on this, our last day alone together, to commune with the flowers (and toys) in our front yard. Paul returns this evening, and I'm more than ready for him to be back. I'm also grateful for this bit of time I've had to spend some quality time with Finn before I'm gone for a week. (more about that tomorrow!)

Our mums are blooming!

Did you know they make 3D sidewalk chalk now? Hmmm...

Finn likes to weed! I hope this enjoyment of weeding sticks around to his older years!

And he really likes to roll cars down the driveway.

Our vincas are flowering like crazy.


Finn likes to push his scooter around more than actually ride it.

He also enjoys admiring the vincas from his rock seat.

Off to bath!