Tuesday, December 9th, 2013

Playing with clay at the end of our day. The kids finally won the battle on "Nephite Facepaint" today. Thanks, church activity. Now my kids think this is ok. Ah well.

S spent most of the morning tearing through a money math activity book.

 He really loved the pages that gave the cost of an item, and he needed to decide what coins equaled that amount. 

Six months ago, he didn't want anything to do with this type of math so we shelved it. Now, it's like cake. His brain just needed those few months to develop the synapses for money math to make sense. 

We also spent quite a bit of time on Spelling City and another app dealing with money.

Mom was feeling under the weather, so we phoned it in on science and watched a Bill Nye you tube on the properties of air. We've done quite a bit with gases so it just reinforced stuff we've learned previously, but there's nothing wrong with spiraling occasionally. 

Heres another Nephite playing with clay. 

And a kitty saying, "cheese". 

Can you tell I learned how to blog from my iPad? My only complaint is the horrible pictures, but since that's no different than before, I decided to roll with it. 

Sewing Machine Saga

Sew I have this friend who very generously gifted me her grandmother's sewing machine.
(I know, TOTALLY sweet).

 But it didn't work.
My other awesome friend, who sews for a living, offered to take it and make it work.
But she couldn't.
Sew then I took it to a place that repairs such things and they charged me $180 and I got back a working machine. That is, until I started to sew on it. Something was off. We packed up for Idaho and I took it to the sewing center here and they repaired it. I started sewing again, and it broke again. Back to the shop.  The one gear the original repair shop DIDN'T replace totally broke all to heck.
This is the part where I started to cry.
You see, I WANT to love sewing. My mama is SEW good at it, she made my wedding dress. I know. As I said, a totally awesome seamstress. And she likes it, to boot. Sewing that is. Probably she liked my dress, too.
Mama and I went to the repair guy, and he said my poor, poor machine had bit the dust but for $100 he could get it running again. However, there was no guarantee of how long the new gears would last.
There was some more crying in there somewhere.
My sweet wonderful mama offered to buy me a new machine that comes with lessons.
You see, she wants me to like sewing, too. Or at least to be proficient at it.
Husband and I talked it over that night and agreed we couldn't let her buy a machine, but that a new machine would be best.
So the next day mama and I headed back to the sewing machine store.
And we came home with this:


Which I totally didn't buy because I don't believe in committing violence against one's mama, and that's the only way I could have beat her to the cash register. I'm going to pay her back somehow. Probably not in home-sewn goods, since even with a decent machine it turns out my hems aren't all that straight. :)
Ah well. At least now I can practice without my machine falling all to pieces.

PS HOW did I live without the needle threading option? I have NO idea. It's amazing.

Felt Food: The Pictures

 A while back I wrote about making felt food. This weekend was General Conference for our church so I had several hours of (quasi) uninterrupted time in which to craft while I listened to the words of the Lord. (YAY!)
And I have about 15 minutes until the dinner rolls are out of the oven so...
Here are the pictures of the kids' Christmas Presents. I'm still in awe of how cheap the materials are for such CUTE toys!

This ear of corn was my first attempt (hence the need to tell you what this is). I'm super excited that the kids can shuck this ear of corn since that's one of their favorite summer-time activities! You can't tell (because I'm really awful at operating a camera) but I stitched on kernels with embroidery floss.

Next were eggs. Eggs are easy. VERY easy. 

 Yesterday and today I made Ravioli.It's SUPER easy.  

 Bread and swiss cheese. 

 An ill-conceived attempt at a carrot. 

And for dessert...

CAKE!