Ogre Bread and Wild Things

I’m pooped.  Must start getting to bed earlier.  Have been spinning in the evening and just getting into the groove, when not blogging here.  That’s right.  All I needed was another blog to write!  I’m getting rather fed up because my local HE friends have moved away and the other local HE folks seem to be intent on laying low.  I feel like I have no local community worth speaking of any more.  However hard I work to organize events and activities people may want to access (for goodness sake, I used to drive an hour each way for pottery!) … no one seems to turn up.  There just doesn’t seem to be the need for any of it, at all.  Part of me is pleased to just be timetabling some great stuff to do with my kids and a friend, and having fewer people to juggle at workshops.  The other part of me is irritated.  If you don’t use it, it will go away and only then will people say “What happened to all those ….?”    I would like to be nearer to a big city with a vibrant community.  On the other hand, I would like to live in the countryside.  I want the best of both worlds.    I don’t want to have to travel a long way to join others and socialize.  I don’t seem to be meeting people I click with now-a-days.  Maybe I just can’t really be bothered, and maybe I’m just missing my friends that have moved.

Moan over.

My reluctance to travel and the resultant slow down hasn’t slowed anything down.  Lani, this week, has instigated plenty of woodwork (bird house, humane mouse trap and now a doll’s bunk bed), paper making, lino cutting, baking … anything parent intensive [I have to edit this and admit she does it all relatively independently ... it's the possibility of it being parent intensive that makes me stressed.  I don't seem to be awake enough!  Need more sleep!  I seem to have some built in reluctance to take on anything challenging and embrace it the way she does...] and a bit challenging (to add to trying to keep up with doing damage limitation behind at least two people who seem to trash the house as if whirlwinds!  I’m tempted to direct Freya and Miyuki more, just to keep them from unbuckling and mullocking every room in the house!)   It doesn’t occur to Lani to think those things might be worth shying away from … too much thinking, too much organizing, too difficult.  My schooled brain shies away and thinks there is too much planning to do to do all those things in one day even!  Lani is fearless and carefree.  Thankfully, I’m personally contracted to facilitate, and so my  reluctance takes a back seat.    That calls for a trip to the woodshop tomorrow.  Lani is fascinated by hardware stores.  Cute huh?

Meanwhile, I think Freya gets lost in the middle.  I squeezed oranges with her today … but I can’t remember any dedicated time with her apart from that.  I think that may be the usual pattern.  At the moment, she is very intent on making huge fruit and vegetable salads and setting up a cinema for her and Miyuki.   She’s certainly not lonely or bored!  Lani, meanwhile, gets some one on one time with me.  Miyuki will visit me and demand books read and breast feeding at regular intervals.  She hangs out and chats with me and gets involved with whatever I’m doing.  I might need to intervene and spend some purposeful time with Freya.  On the other hand, if it is not broke, why am I trying to fix it?  When she needs me she’ll seek me out.  Her favourite question is “Is 6 up or down?” (6 or 9) … she often sends Uki to ask that one.  I think that is to do with programming cbbc!  Her favourite pass-time is to spin in the Spinny-Round-Chair

The Spinny-Round-Chair from Ikea.

… which gets so much use that we had to have three bowls (for nausea) next to it when we first got it.  I will film them soon, as they have developed some very funny techniques for spinning it.  They are usually making a huge camp of some sort or arranging an enormous convention of teddies and dolls (which requires all the books to be removed from the shelves, it seems, and all the cushions from the sofa and all the blankets from around the house!)  It might be wrong to disturb them!  I might just do it though!

Laura’s first spinning.

We had our lovely friends staying for the weekend and I thought “I must teach Laura [pron the Peruvian/Spanish way] to spin one day.”  Candy and I came back in from the kitchen and Lani had done it already!  I love how kids don’t see any impediment to doing stuff ‘right now’.

Woodwork, paper making and Hama

Lani has been making a humane mousetrap and is now working on a bird feeding table with a roof (her own designs). She is using a manual jigsaw quite a lot and has used her flat-pack assembly experience to good advantage, I noticed! She is finding the workmate bench really useful. She has started to remember to set up something for Miyuki (a piece of wood to saw or drill with the hand drill) to keep her enthusiasm away from her work!

Hama has been flavour of the week so far! Freya wowed me with her abilities to follow a complex pattern rather excellently. Those skills will be very handy for counted cross stitch and goodness knows what other applications. She seems to have no confidence barriers with Hama. We had a long Hama session with friends yesterday at our craft session, since they were as interested in Hama as ours were and Lani and Freya were well underway with it by the time anyone arrived for craft.

Today we made our first home made paper. The kids were fascinated and really pleased with the successful outcomes. We are making our own books and binding them, using marbelling inks to decorate covers, etc. Making our own paper will be a great addition to this.

We also managed some spinning (viscose and wool) between reading Winnie The Pooh and the final Harry Potter book!

Our Spinning Group (link)

Days at home …

Pottery session 22.3.10

Here is a slide show from our home ed pottery session.  Not many people came.  It was cosy.  Not sure why no one is really coming, but I’ll just hang on a bit longer and wait to see if folks will start venturing out as the weather gets warmer.

Playing with natural dyes on viscose.

We’ve been playing with dyeing some viscose that I’m working with. We had some red cabbage water and were dyeing some eggs … and trying out adding bicarb to get a blue colour. It seems to work really well on the viscose when we microwave it wet for about 4 mins.   I burnt a small sample (in the microwave too long) that is now purple and brown and it actually looks pretty good and would still spin. We did a load of (quite scientific) tests (which migrated into kids making bicarb and vinegar explosions, popping popcorn in the microwave, and making George’s Marvelous Medicine out of boot polish and chicken stock cubes! Aaaarrrggghhhhhhhh.)
Lots of small sample, dying tests:

• steeping in cold cabbage water and bicarb 1 minute
• steeping in cold cabbage water and bicarb for hours. (still in there … outcome unknown).
• steeping in cold cabbage water and bicarb 1 minute; microwave 4 mins.
• ———- drying one in the sunlight and one in shade (to check the colour fastness in light).
• steeping in cold cabbage water and vinegar 1 min;
• steeping in cold cabbage water and vinegar hours;
• steeping in cold cabbage water and vinegar 1 min; microwaved 4 mins.

We’ve washed the completed tests in warm water and detergent to see if the colour stayed and it did seem to largely, in the microwaved sample, but not in the 1 minute sample that we didn’t microwave (no surprise there). Microwaving seems to turn the blue to purple and the vinegar and bicarb micro samples came out about the same colour.

I want to see if I can get a variety of colours that will not wash out and are not fugitive in sunlight. Red cabbage is pretty cheap to buy! I’m doing to do some google research too … I’m hoping to be able to get a blue that stays blue when washed. So far it seems to migrate back to purple when you wash out the bicarb.

My favourite so far has been the burned stuff! I’m thinking about making some caramel (burned sugar) and trying to use that for dyeing. I want to knit a  pattern a friend gave me for my mum and I really fancy naturally dyed shades of purple, blue and brown, but I have to be sure they will not fade too much or we’ll end up having to dye the whole garment and that could make it a bit uni-dimensional … unless we used some kind of paint on fabric dyes.

Father-in-Laws: What? Am I gonna get on here and moan about my inability to ignore him and his expectations, again?

Some of his first words to me when he arrived:

“Your poor children are missing out on a lovely disco across the road at that school.”

My ‘poor’ kids shivered at the thought of having to stand in rows in a playground, gyrating to loud disco music with their teaching staff, behind the fences, regardless of whether they wanted to or not. (* edit:  my friend’s child isn’t allowed to join the disco because he gets too hyper afterward!  So, if you would really enjoy it … your not allowed to go!)

True.  It hadn’t been the best morning of their lives, with me melting down round the house, one solitary person trying to undo the debris of 5 in order to meet the high expectations of my FIL, at least to the point where he would not be disgusted and might not say anything really cutting.

He has no idea what miracles I’ve worked, and he is exhausted by tagging along for one of the days in my life!  He spotted the major mess in the garden room (which is too cold to use at this time of year) and said:

“What on earth is going on in here!”

I found myself thinking that I’m so relieved he doesn’t have any legal standing over us.  I think I’d be more comfortable with an LA ‘inspector’ in the house!  I think I’d have somewhat more chance of convincing them I was not damaging and depriving my kids.  He comes from a point of such utter ignorance with it, really, that it is impossible to convince him or reassure him otherwise.  We always seem to go back to the starting point where he assumes they are isolated and set to fail to become functioning and useful humans, and God knows what!  And there I am, standing on the tip of my baby finger with my feet in the air, performing every skill in my repertoire to try to convince him otherwise.

Nope, no chance.  My house is not neat enough.  There is incomplete DIY, which is a sign of failure.  I chose to home educate, which is another.  Our sleeping arrangements are not traditional, so they are unacceptable also.   I even run my heating at the wrong temperature.

I think he’d be horrified if he could step out of himself for any length of time and count the number of negative assessments he makes.  I don’t think he makes ANY positive ones.    He only gets away with it because he is nearing 80 years old.  I really love that man and dread the day he dies … but today I actually found myself thinking that that would be the end of me ever feeling the need to meet someones expectations just in order to retain a sense of self respect.  If he knew what the prospect of his visits did to me, or what the knock on consequences to my kids was, I think he’d be horrified …. but for certain it would be my inadequacy that stuck him at that moment.

I have learned, in the past, to not try to meet his expectations.  However, his commentary is so damning and so full frontal (although not malicious at all, you understand), that I am cut down in the face of it, too soon, again.  It is not like I live in a place where the council are going to come and intervene and pronounce it uninhabitable.  By most people’s standards it is interesting, homely and a bit cluttered at times.  Unless you have great muscles in your dust detecting index finger, it’s not what you would call dirty.  It is certainly lived in.

Kids’ behaviour won’t be acceptable (because they are kids) … but that of the children that belong to the B&B he stays at will be impeccable, as always.

One day he will say something affirmative about something I do/have done.  I’ll probably cry and fall over.  He may even say something affirmative about something the kids do/have done.  Meanwhile, he’ll be loving and sweet to them, mostly.  He’ll try to be helpful and he’ll be generous.  His son will always bring him pride (with his professorial chair) … but the kids and I will always fall short of his expectations.

I’ve been thinking I might say to him, with a sweet smile:

“Save your breath to cool your porridge, David.  We’ve listened to you on the subject for enough years.  It is rude  for a guest to criticize the host and their house!  Surely you know manners well enough.  I set you a challenge that I set myself. If you want to say something critical then you have to find two positives to say first … you’ll soon get tired of  that hard work!”

Whitworth Art Gallery HE Group session.

Today we arrived at the wrong time (10.30am instead of 1.30pm), however, we found plenty to occupy us until session time.
This week’s session was about story writing.  It was well planned and managed (as ever, so far) with ice breaking exercises, and a fair amount of stimulating drama to help you formulate ideas for writing.  We pulled characters and traits from a hat and had to dramatize them so that others could guess who they were and what their trait was.  We then got to see what was in the centre of the circle, under the intriguing shiny fabric.  It was a box of props and each of us took turns to choose a prop and invent a story surrounding it.  Then we went around the gallery to find scenes and settings for our stories, and finally returned to A3 pages printed with various helpful formats: a human outline for character development; a comic strip outline; lined pages; lined pages with picture space at the top; etc.  Lani set to and drew this woman (called Guinevere),

and began to write the story surrounding her.
Lani, Freya and Uki really enjoyed the session and Lani and Uki were very happy to get involved with the ice breaking games and the activities.  Freya was a little more shy, but still was engaged by it.

They have a fantastic playground behind (and to the left of) the gallery!

*(Not entirely sure why it is putting all my pics on their sides!)

We managed to stay there from 10.15am until 5.15pm without any trouble!

We also sketched some embroidery of animals (Bangladeshi I think) … and I took notes of the overall style used … and then designed some more on the way home on the train, whilst also watching a fantastic, Polish animation of Peter and The Wolf.

My first window star.

tutorial here

First Window Star