Weaving week!

One of these many weeks that have passed by, specifically the week of March 21st we learned about weaving. I think it is so far, next to the musical instruments week, one of our favorites and something we are going to continue to do on a regular basis. I keep finding crafts and other great things we can do with weaving even though it was over a month ago that we initially did the theme. Here are the books we used!

~The Books~

A Tale of the Navajo The Magic Weaver of Rugs by Jerrie Oughton. This book was wonderful, one of our favorites out of all of them. A Navajo tale of how weaving started for their culture. It shows their history and introduces a strong idea of female characters. 
Weaving the Rainbow by George Ella Lyon Illustrated by Stephanie Anderson. This is a beautiful book that illustrates where wool comes from and the process it goes through before you weave it. A different kind of weaving is also exampled, art weaving, not a blanket or scarf but a picture/tapestry. The illustrations are lovely. 
The Weaver by Thacher Hurd. The weaver is a little girl who lives above the sky and weaves out happiness, sadness and days activities. At the end of the day she throws her weaving out onto the world. 
Aneesa Lee and the Weaver's Gift by Nikki Grimes. A whole book filled with different poems about weaving and the process of weaving. It is wonderful for introducing more poetry within the theme. I always get excited when that happens.  
Seven Spools of Thread by Angela Medearis. We didn't actually read this one or do the project that came with the book, but I wanted to include it, since the craft did look so cool. Here are some pics.

Basically you use straws and thread to make a belt. I think this would be wonderful for elementary school age kiddos, especially when the kids are old enough to make friendship bracelets.
Here are the non-fiction books we read.

Kids Weaving was the perfect book for this whole theme. Some of the things in the book were a little beyond our ability, but everything was explained so clearly, it was ultimately a necessary edition to this week. Here are some of the neater things we found in the book.

First off (sorry my daughter has been listing things a lot recently and it is rubbing off on me), the book did a great job explaining what warp and weft was. Warp, is the strings/threads/lines that make the base of your project, they are vertical. These lines do not move, you move around them. The Weft are the lines that you move over and under the lines of the warp. These lines are horizontal.

Now this is where it gets really cool. Later in the book, after many projects that were fairly simple, it dove into more intense projects, for the more serious weaver. These pictures are the step by step instructions to make your own pipe loom. On this loom you can weave anything from belts to blankets, scarfs to purses. It is awesome! I kind of wanted to make one for myself, but I thought better of it. It doesn't look like it would take up much space, but I am sure it would take up more then we have to offer. Maybe later. Anyway, after you make the loom, there are a ton of different patterns and techniques included for boys and girls. Lots of really, really neat stuff. When my daughter is a little older we will definitely be revisiting this book.

The next book, Make it by Jane Bull was pretty handy also. It has a ton of great projects, all of them using recycled material. Great book if you are learning about recycling or needing those sort of crafts. The applicable ideas we took from the book were paper weaving and cardboard weaving. We didn't get to actually do any paper weaving, but we will. They make beautiful cards, if you use old photos or magazine paper. Our cardboard weaving project didn't quite work out, but we will try it again.

Here is a picture of their beautiful paper weaving! It would even be great as wrapping paper, if you did a piece big enough.

~The Crafts~
The main craft we did was weaving a rug using a hula hoop for a loom. You can find the detailed craft here. Thankfully I waited so long to post this theme that family fun posted the craft, that had been featured in their magazine on their website. First you start with a lot of old t-shirts, we didn't have any, so we went to the Volunteers for America store, they have lots, for cheap.

Look at that cat, right at home, little did we know he was laying claim on those t-shirts. These are all of the t-shirts before we washed them. Depending on size of the t-shirts you will need about a dozen. We ended up getting around 15. Some we just couldn't resist. For example. This was my favorite.

(A couple weeks later I saw a woman wearing a yellow button with the same symbol of African on it. She was a part of the group of students who made a difference in Uganda a couple years ago!)
These were my daughters favorites.

Anyway, once you wash all the fabric you will need to cut  a ton of 1 inch strips. But you will need 11 loops to start, for the warp.

Tools!!! Someones old bright pink Michigan shirt. We are in Michigan, by the way. For now.

ALSO, I found it very useful to discard the hem of the shirts. They were a little too thick and didn't fit well with the rest of the fabric. I didn't find this out until after I had tried to use a couple already. Once you have your 11 loops you can start building your warp.

(Aimee and I are the ones in the picture :) of course. She is often in dress up clothes, or pajamas, but I think I have mentioned this once before).
Once made you can start weaving. Now are you ready? It is time for a learn from my mistake moment! #1. Again this could have been prevented with a through analysis of the directions, but I was too excited and misread multiple times. When you start weaving, you treat one loop as one strand. So the whole loop both strings of it, you weave together. UNTIL your rug is eight inches big, in diameter, start treating each loop as two individual strands. You will have a lot more the weave through at that point. My mistake was I never started treating the strands separately. After eight inches we kept going over and under both strands on each loop. This is fine, however, our rug is a lot looser then it should be and also a little flimsy on the outside. It would be very easy to undo. HOWEVER! Due to the age of Aimee, 3 1/2 and her little/big hands, I was happy we did this mistake. It made it a lot easier for her to weave by herself. Mistake #2. Do not pull your weft too tight. Your rug will buckle and bump on itself. I thought it would be better to have it tighter, but no. Our rug is fine and will flatten out, eventually. We have a big cat who is helping. 

 

In the mean time keep weaving and weaving. 

 

When you get to the point where you are ready to stop, you can't make it closer then 8 inches from the edge of the hula hoop.  Start to close it off. You do this by cutting 1 spoke at a time and tying them closed.

 

In the end ours looked like this!! 

Look at that big cat being helpful!!! Oh Sir Purrs-a-lot! Yes even you can have a great rug for the cat in your life. 

 Overall we were very happy with this project! It is very easy for a preschooler to do! It is great for pattern learning and repetition. Also very fun to say over-under-over-under-over-under over and over again. Or you can see how fast either of you can say it. We were both giggling. 

The next question is, what to do with the rest of those t-shirts? There is a second weaving project you can do with t-shirts. You will need a 12-inch embroidery hoop for this one. Here is the official link!  Take the remaining pieces of the shirts, turn them inside out and add some tacky glue to the seams of the sleeves.

Once dry, cut the sleeves into 1/2 inch loop strips. Start the same way you did the rug, only this time when you get to 4 inches across, start weaving through all the strands. Then to make/form the sides start pulling the strands tightly. This will buckle the weaving and form the basket. To finish it, just go until you are close to the edge but still able to tie the ends. Here are some pics

Mistake #3: Again this one is due to my negligence in direction reading. I wove this basket like the rug. I made a second basket and over wove the entire thing. Sigh. My baskets turned out fine, a little round, but probably because I didn't weave it correctly. I'll get it one day. 

~Field Trip!~

Aimee and I decided to take a trip to a local knitting shop and see what real looms looked like.  Aimee loved it! The real looms looked fabulous and I think we are hooked. They had ones that were all different sizes and even had people weaving on a couple of them. We really enjoyed seeing the spinning wheels. At this particular shop they sold wool that you could buy and then spin yourself. Aimee, again, had a really good time, she loved looking at the different looms and yarns and especially the giant stuffed animal sheep they had. Now she consistently asks me when we can get a loom. I agree. We want some alpacas and then we can get a loom. 

 Aimee and I had such a fun time with this week! It is great, we both learned so much and I am so excited to keep weaving. We will be trying to weave a doll blanket with a cardboard loom eventually. My advice there, (we actually started too, but it was so bad I undid the whole thing and cut it out of this post) the finished product of the weaving will be smaller then the loom. Take that into account. 

Last note, I also learned something very important myself from the Kids Weave book. If you are not happy with how your project is turning out, there is no harm in un-weaving or taking out some of your weaving. In fact it is a good thing to do, so it turns out just how you like it. Just like in the Odyssey and life. 

Happy Themeing everyone!

Ireland & St. Patrick's Day Week!!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!! We did a lot of stuff this week and I got a little overwhelmed trying to decide how to do this post, so here is the order for the week and possibly forever; books, crafts, then food. With the possibility of field trips and other facts thrown in.

We had a really good time this week. There is SO much you can do to learn about Ireland and St. Patrick's Day.  Here are the books we used, with pictures.

One book The Prince of Ireland and the Three Magic Stallions I omitted from my review, we didn't end up reading it, it was way too long. St. Patrick's Day is a non-fiction book and reviewed below. 
Fiction
The Leprechaun who lost his Rainbow by Sean Callahan (This one was my daughter's favorite of all the books we read. It is a beautiful story about a girl who has to help a leprechaun find all the colors for his rainbow, so the sun can shine on the St. Patrick's Day parade. A book with good lessons in sacrifice and giving, it was a great read and educational about all the colors too).  
Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potato An Irish Folktale by Tomie Depaola (I personally love any kind of folktales, this one in particular is adorable. About the laziest man in Ireland, Jamie leaves all the work for his wife. When she is put to bed with a hurt back he knows they will starve as he is too lazy to tend the garden himself. He then tricks a leprechaun and in the end is well fed for the rest of his life. Not exactly a story with a huge moral, but tons of fun). 
Brigid's Cloak an ancient Irish Story by Bryce Milligan (This is a more religious story about the first religious experiences of Brigid. (Brigid would later become a saint in Ireland and they have a day to celebrate her). Very interesting story I had never heard before, the book is beautiful and written clearly though.)
King Puck by Michael Garland (This is super cute about a man and his goat and how the mans loneliness brings pity from the fairies and they gift his goat the power of speech. The goat goes on to win a big Irish festival, where a goat is proclaimed the king of Ireland for one day and granted on wish. Happy ending in this one).
Favorite Fairy Tales Told in Ireland Retold by Virginia Haviland (This one was great, with five lesson learning tales, they are a bit long though and we could only read about one a day. I think I might have lost her on more then one story. The illustrations are wonderful but only every couple of pages.)

Nonfiction 
St. Patrick's Day by Gail Gibbons (This is a fabulous book for the younger age range, 3+. Written very simply with tons of pictures to accompany it tells the story of St. Patrick's life. It is not overly religious though, more matter of fact in its approach it also covers the symbols used for Ireland and St. Patrick's day. 
I can eat a rainbow by Annabel Karmel (A common symbol of Ireland is rainbows, this book was perfect for one of our food projects later in the week. Very informative and fun, my daughter now constantly refers to having to eat her rainbow everyday). 
 A True Book Ireland by Libby Koponen (This was my favorite of the nonfiction books that we used. Lots of fun pictures of kids and organized effectively so you could learn as much or as little as you needed). 
Ireland by Joanne Mattern (This was the other nonfiction book we used. It was a ton of information, a little much for us, however they had a great section about learning to speak Gaelic. This would be a great book for an elementary report on Ireland). 

Books are always extremely helpful in learning about something new, especially with little ones. The Internet is a great add on. But I would rather start with books, then videos and then the Internet. For example, in one of our books we learned about Irish Step Dancing, we then went online to look at videos and find pictures of the different dresses.

 The first craft we did was just a print out from the Internet, here is the link.  It is a leprechaun on a popsicle stick that jumps in and out of his pot. Aimee had a great time coloring hers (we made a couple, the one you see is mine) and thought it was hilarious that she could make him jump around. 

The next craft we did in celebration was rainbow colored pasta to make a necklace out of. (Though to this point we have yet to make the necklace. It was hard to find something child friendly to fit in the pasta. Once we do though, I will post pictures). 

Learn from my mistake moment!!!! When making colored pasta: 1. follow the instructions too a T. The instructions!  When it says use 70% rubbing alcohol, please do, not any higher in percent and definitely not 90%! My whole kitchen/house smelled like rubbing alcohol to the extent that I was worried about my ability to light a candle, (worried that the air in my house had become flammable). Also, it takes that much longer to actually dye the pasta. 2.  Use artificial food coloring. We use natural, due to allergies I have. However I will show a photo of what natural food coloring does in rubbing alcohol. 

This is the food coloring, it is by India Tree. It is wonderful, has three colors, red, yellow and blue. Very very hard to make a good green though. Every other color is achievable, though they are more pastel in tone. 

I will leave this one big for you. On the left we have green artificial coloring, I had to buy some, the natural green wasn't working for my and I can handle the artificial green. See how it mixed beautifully? On the right the natural, in hindsight I probably shouldn't have tried red first. Had I known it would clump up like blood clots, trust me I most certainly would have gone for a blue lumpy ocean scene. We dumped this red fail out and sent the husband to the grocery store. Which made this:

Look at all the colors!!!! Blended perfectly!!! Depending on how your rubbing alcohol is doing, you may need to add more food coloring. We added more and more, but we also had the strongest rubbing alcohol you could buy. Learn from me mistake #3; It is really hard to dye pasta yellow, it is already yellow in hue, trying to make it more yellow doesn't necessarily do anything! You could probably even just skip the whole yellow glass. Finally mistake #4, (this is the last one for this blog, but trust me, there are so many more to come). Please, for the sake of your sanity and your child's patience, please use regular sized pasta. A while back Barilla came out with a tiny pasta they like to call, picollini.

It is adorable MINI versions of their pasta and we fell in love! So in love that I didn't hesitate not to use my cute little pasta to make this project. It does not work. It dyes just fine, but how in the world are you suppose to string it??? Real needle and real thread. Not what I was going for, I wanted child friendly yarn. So unless you have an older child who can handle a needle and a thread and think it would be adorable to have a tiny pasta necklace, go for it. Otherwise I suggest to everyone, go and get the cheapest, most blanched in color, pasta you can find that is a regular size and use that. Don't forget to get some that already come with holes. Here is our finished product.

Starting from the top we have, green, purple, yellow in the middle, red, blue and orange. It looks better once it dries.

Alright the last craft project we did this week was a castle. They have a lot of historical castles in Ireland that we talked about. I had my husband in charge of this while I was at work and he did a fabulous job! So good in fact we couldn't take it down for a while, or at least not for more then a night and moved it's location every day. Anyway, it was also so good that we had an impromptu ball that night.

We put on some music and danced the night away! Though, I don't really know how often the hold balls in Ireland. 

On with the rest of the week! Which consists of the food we made and oh did we make a ton of food. First we made some cutout cookies. Shamrocks and umbrellas, because it is so rainy in Ireland.

 

We, urm, used pink for the icing, because I hadn't gone to the store to get green and my daughter is a pink lover, possible aficionado in fact. 

Next food item was brown bread. I do not suggest it, unless you really like Irish food. It was a little plain for use and I wasn't a big fan of the texture. Overall good though. Here is the recipe. It is possible to went wrong for us, due to the use of homemade vanilla soy buttermilk. I cringe at the thought now. If you feel so inclined you could try it with regular buttermilk and get back to me. 

My daughter is counting the sections in the first photo. Next we made a rainbow of fruit.

Fruit; strawberries, clementines, pineapple, grapes, blueberries, and plums. With whipped cream clouds for the rainbow to rest on. Now, about this rainbow. Aimee and I started eating it together, but then I had to make dinner. So I left my daughter on the picnic blanket we had made in the living room. Alone. With all the fruit. By the time I came in to check on her, the rainbow was gone and in her belly, all but a small quarter of the arch and all that remained of that quarter was pineapple, grapes and plums. So I sat down to have some more fruit, what does the little fruit monster do?? She starts quickly piling fruit into her hands against her stomach, worried that I will eat it all! Um, I don't think you, little girl, should be the one worrying about that. I decided at this point it would be best to go back to making dinner. So I did and left her to her fruit. 

The last food item we made (besides corned beef and cabbage, which I figured everyone has seen enough of that at this point) was rainbow cupcakes. These were a lot of fun! Here is this recipe! These are a lot of fun and so so good. We made our cake from scratch, just the yellow cake recipe from the Better Homes & Gardens new cook book, but you should use whatever cake recipe or mix you like. Then color like crazy, for this project we did use the natural food coloring, except for the green.

They were delicious by themselves, but if you want something extra we put whipped cream on the top. Remember that story about Aimee eating all that fruit, I just told it to you a paragraph ago. Well I forgot I took a picture. 

Remember she ate almost the whole thing by herself, I had an 1/8th, maybe working on a 1/4th of it. Now what I forgot to mention is we made the rainbow fruit and cupcakes on the same day. I sat them down for her to eat both, while I ravenously had three cupcakes in the kitchen.

See her reaching eagerly for that fork?? Anyway, not only did she eat all of that fruit, look at those cupcakes, guess how much she had off that plate??

One bite. I had one of the halves when we started our picnic, but she choose to have a bite. Do you see it? It is there, that little corner missing. I was pretty humored by this whole thing.

A great week to you and happy themeing!