It’s done now, this spectacular display that happens in view of my front door every March. I look forward to this performance every year.
The petals have mostly succumbed to time and the rains. They’ve fallen to the ground.
But while they were here, they were admired.
Now the magnolia leaves are coming out, fresh and green, promising.
Yet lovely as they are, they do not hold a candle to these flowers
with this sky.
This last is the subject of my next painting. Wish me luck!
Last year, while we were dyeing Easter eggs, we also dyed some plain white wool batting. I am so pleased with the results. In the photo above are a wool colors from both natural and artificial dyes. I’ve saved this wool all year and now I’m making goodies for my boys’ Easter baskets out of it. I doubt that they’ll appreciate the cyclical nature of this, but I do. And don’t forget, this is science! So by all means, get the kids involved.
Materials
Tutorial
Really, this is totally simple. While you’re dyeing your eggs, add in a good handful or two of wool. We found this was easy to do with the natural dyes as we had a big bowl full of each color, rather than a mere mug full of color.
Onion skins turn wool a pale, golden yellow.
This is the red cabbage dye. It will turn both eggs and wool bluish.
This is beets. It turns the wool a warm light brown. The eggs and wool at first are a beautiful mauve color, but I think they then oxidize and end up brown.
If you are using kit dye or food coloring to dye eggs, you probably have your dyes in mugs or glasses. (Right? That’s the way we always do it.) So you can just keep the dyes for a day or so after dyeing eggs and dye wool in the mugs. You can do handful after handful if you like. We used about a 1/4 cup of distilled white vinegar in each cup, added the dye, and then added water.
Our yellow dye bath was completely exhausted by the wool. None of the color was left when we pulled the wool out. It makes me wonder if the other colors might have done that if we had left the wool in longer.
I suggest keeping your wool in the dye for about 24 hours. When your wool is the color you like, squeeze out the extra dye into the cup, then rinse it in cool running water until the water runs clear. Set it on a wire rack or pin it to a clothesline outside to dry.
Here are the wool colors we got. I’ll name the colors of food dye baths starting with 12 o’clock: purple, dark red, pinkish brown, blue, yellow, dark green, blue green, and yellow green. It seems to me like the blue should be darker and brighter. It may be that my sons sneacked extra green drops into the blue? In any case, I consider this experiment to be a success because it means any frugal crafter or artist can get a wide range of beautiful, bright colors without breaking the bank, using standard McCormick brand food dyes. I love buying new colors of wool to use in projects, but this is a simple way to get many colors cheaply!
Wool batting doesn’t spin into yarn all that well because the fibers tend to be short. It works very well for needle-felting or wet-felting, however. Wool roving, however, is great to spin or felt.
I’m thinking that a rainbow of simple wee bunnies made from wool we dyed ourselves might be just the thing for Easter baskets this year. What would you make with Easter wool?
It is spring, and this makes me very, very happy. (This post was started yesterday and not finished in time. And that’s OK.)
This is my first lilac flower of the season. My lilac bush doesn’t have many flowers on it this spring. I don’t know why.
Sing, World, Sing!
Now in chilly places
Where the snow had been,
Wood and field and hollow,
Easter flowers begin.
Now a bud is opened,
Now a leaf uncurled;
Spring is in the sweet wind
Walking down the world.
Snowdrops in the garden,
Violets on the hills,
Cowslips in the meadow,
Dancing daffodils
Seem to lift their faces,
Softly whispering,
“Easter’s nearly here, now—
Sing, world, sing!”
These are our 12-day-old chicks. We have yet to decide on names for them. Ian, Lucas, and Asher all insist that they have the right set of names. (I happen to like Asher’s names best.) They just insist on using their own names for the girls.
New leaves are unfurling all around us. This is my beautiful Chinese Elm tree. Right now its leaves are the most gorgeous new green.
Here is the neighbor’s yellow wood sorrel (Oxalis europaea). This stuff glows! The kids eat it and call it sour grass.
This is my own sorrel (Oxalis articulata), AKA shamrock, sleeping beauty, sour trefoil. The shamrock I bought at the nursery for St. Patrick’s Day is also an Oxalis with white flowers. So all these years that I’ve been refering to this plant as our “shamrocks,” I was right!
My irises have increased!
This lovely azalea won’t be pretty for long. So I make sure to admire it every day that it blooms.
In honor of the equinox, I refreshed our nature table. With Easter just a couple of weeks away, I pulled out our bunnies and eggs.
I hung our blown eggs and egg ornaments on a huge branch that fell in a windstorm. This huge branch is frequently in Ian’s way. I feel he would like you to know that, and that he is patient with my weird hanging artworks all over our home.
Lucas dyed this handkerchief—at school? at camp? I don’t remember. I didn’t realize how lovely it was until yesterday. The spring maiden was a gift made by my friend Parnassus.
This is a mosaic Ian made: perfect balance between night and day, dark and light. I love it.
To me, our nature table conjures plenty, delight, joy, and light. It reminds me of carefree days and celebration. The spirit of the season of Ostara is enormous potential, growth, striving, peace, and fullness. I’m ready for it all.
I heard Asher singing a song: “It’s almost Easter. It’s almost Easter.” So I guess the nature table has done the trick. I think it’s lacking some spring tulips, though. I’d better get some.
We are sick. Well, Lucas and I are, and we spent the day at home. This afternoon we rallied a bit and managed some impromptu crafts for St. Patrick’s Day. So, these kid-friendly St. Patrick’s Day paper ornaments were born. I offer these in the spirit of using what you have on hand for some low-key fun.
Materials
Tutorial
Insert your scissors into a paper plate and cut along the outer ring and cut out a shamrock shape from the center of the plate, leaving the bottom of the shamrock’s stem attached to the outer circle. I cut out a three-leaf shamrock and a four-leaf. If you get ambitious, you can cut out the figure of a standing leprechaun, leaving both feet and one hand attached to the outer circle. This is harder to do, but give it a try. You can choose to draw your design on the plate first, or just eyeball it, start cutting, and see what happens.
Now get your kids to paint your design. Painting is such a great activity when you need to rest or cultivate calm in your home.
If you have the type of paper plates with a coating on them to make them less absorbent, then you will probably also want to paint a circular background on watercolor paper. Do you know where your compass is? If you have one, it makes this step a lot easier. Draw a circle that will fit inside your paper plate. I painted rainbows on some circles to use as backgrounds. I love rainbows.
Your children should also paint the back of a second paper plate. Be sure to wait until all the watercolor painting is completely dry before you assemble your ornament.
With hot glue, glue your circle background into your bottom plate. It will cover any design on the plate and compensate for that water-resistant coating.
Like so. The design that is still visible around the edges won’t be visible in a minute.
Now stack your front cut-out design on top of the bottom paper plate. Using hot glue, seal the outer edges together. Press them firmly to make them stick nicely. You might have to apply glue in six or seven spots around the circle.
Finally, punch a hole in the top, thread a piece of ribbon or yarn through the hole, and hang your ornament.
I have a deep and abiding love for mobiles. Holiday decorations that hang can be very festive without taking up too much space or cluttering your nature table. Here’s a St. Patrick’s Day leprechaun mobile that is easy to make and quite whimsical.
Materials
Money-Saving Alternatives
Tutorial
To begin, tie two pieces of yarn or string (each about a yard long) to your twig, approximately 8 inches apart. Hang the twig from the two strings more or less horizontally (adjust the position of the two ties on the twig as needed). Then tie a knot in the two strings about 8 inches up from the twig. This will make a triangle of string above your twig. Tie your twig to something so that it hangs freely at shoulder level so that you can work on it comfortably.
Lay your ribbons over the twig in rainbow order. Their two ends should be even at the bottom. Make sure you like the position of each ribbon before you affix any glue. (You can use clothes pins to hold them in place while you decide on their optimal positions.)
With your glue gun, put a dab of glue on the inside of one layer of a ribbon and pinch the other layer over the top of the warm glue to fix the ribbon to itself. Repeat this for each color. See the photo above.
Now, take your gray or black wool roving, felting needle, and foam pad and needle-felt a pot. This will be your pot of gold. Mine was about 2 and ½ inches in diameter. If you wish to have a sleeker look for your wool pot, you can first shape it with your felting needle, then wet-felt the pot in hot water with soap. Gently rub your pot inside and out with soap until the fibers mat firmly together. Rinse it in both hot and cold water.) Shape it carefully into a pot and let it dry. You may still want to apply your needle again to perfect the pot’s shape.
With your green and skin-colored wool roving, needle-felt a leprechaun. No wire skeleton is needed for this project and since this figure will not be played with, you can attach head, hands, legs, shoes, and hat by simply needling the fibers together. Start with a torso and arms. Add legs. Add a ball of skin-colored wool for a head.
Your leprechaun can be as traditional or as unique as you like. Mine was a kind of Waldorf-inspired figure dressed in several greens, with a jaunty hat and dark green vest.
Stand your leprechaun on top of your horizontal twig. With needle and thread, sew your leprechaun’s hands to the yarn or string hanger. (Feel free to adjust the knot above the leprechaun‘s head as needed to make it possible for the hands to hold both strings.) Finish off the two yarn/string knots on the twig by tying them securely and cutting off the excess.
When your pot is dry, crumple your gold ribbon, foil, or tissue paper into a mound of gold and place it into your pot. You might want it to heap above the edge of your pot. With a long thread, sew up from the bottom center of your wool pot, through your gold, and back down a couple of times. On the way up again, extend your long thread all the way up to your rainbow-covered twig and tie your thread securely to the center of the twig. You’ll probably want to tie it in between the yellow and green ribbons. Cut of the excess thread tail. Your pot of gold should hang a couple of inches below your twig, at the end of your rainbow.
Find a nice spot in your home to hang your St. Patrick’s Day mobile with leprechaun and pot of gold, perhaps in front of a window, where fresh spring breezes will make your rainbow ribbons flutter.
* This article was originally published in the Little Acorn Learning March Enrichment Guide.
Are you excited about Saint Patrick’s Day? I am because we can do anything we want to celebrate. I’m a big fan of “minor” holidays for this reason. We can be creative and silly and spontaneous, and even do something different every year, if we want.
I thought I would share this with you. I made up this shamrock window transparency, building on what I’ve learned from Magical Window Stars by Frédérique Guéret. Although there is a beautiful clover leaf design in the book, this is not it. This design that I’ve created uses the square kite paper that is most commonly available. The basic point I teach below is Guéret’s invention, but the configuration and the assembly of the shamrock was my idea. I hope you like it. In any case, I fully recommend this book if you love window stars like I do.
Materials
Tutorial
Fold your square into diagonals.
Now fold opposing corners to the center line (photo above). The top is now a horizontal fold that is parallel to your horizontal crease.
Unfold the bottom corner; the crease you made will be used later. From the top, folded edge, fold the right side down to meet the center horizontal line (photo above).
Do the same to the other side. Now you have a point at the top again (photo above).
Fold the bottom corner up to the horizontal crease line (photo above).
Now fold both sides in to the center vertical crease. This step looks like an airplane or maybe a sailboat. Do your best to keep the top point crisp.
Open those sides out again.
Now fold the bottom sides up so that the flat bottom edge aligns with the center vertical crease (photo above). Unfold those bottom sides again.
Now fold the left top side in again, allowing the corner to touch the horizontal crease you made in the previous step. Your top point is becoming more acute.
Above is a detail of this step. See where the left edge folds in and meets the crease? The corner touches the horizontal crease.
Now do the same with the right side.
Open out the innermost flaps of the top point, allowing their “wings” to extend beyond the edges of the sides.
From the bottom center, you have two diagonal creases. Fold the very bottom edge on both sides up, aligning the bottom edge with the diagonal creases.
This photo above is a detail of that final fold. Congratulations! You’ve make one point. Now— sorry about this part—you repeat that process five more times, so that you have six of these points. Two points will make one lobe of your shamrock.
Once you have six of those points, you can make the stem. Take another square of kite paper and fold and cut it in half. Now fold and cut piece in half again and cut along the fold. You should now have a skinny, rectangular strip that is one-quarter the width of the original square.
This long strip is the stem of your shamrock. Fold the bottom of the strip like the photo above.
And fold the top of the strip in the opposite direction, like so. This makes it kind of curve. You now have all the pieces you need and you can assemble the shamrock window transparency.
For each lobe of the three-lobed shamrock, you’ll need two points. The sharpest point—what I was calling the top in the photos above— goes in the center. The front side of each piece is the side with the points. If you run your fingers across the front, they will catch on the little triangles created in the folding process. The back side is smooth; your fingers won’t catch on any part. Turn one of the two points over so that the back side is up, as in the picture above. Run your glue stick along the right edge (where the glue end of the glue stick is in the photo above).
Align the points at the bottom as close together as you can, hold your two points up to the light, and align the darkest edges side by side, as you see in this photo above. They make a very dark upside-down triangle in the middle. The broad (formerly bottom) end of your two points will be overlapping. You now have one lobe of your shamrock done. Do the same thing two more times to make two more lobes of your shamrock.
If it helps, hold up each lobe to the light before gluing them together. You should see a medium green triangle in the center when all three points are aligned. Now put all the center points together on top of your stem. Glue them to the stem with your glue stick so that the points of the center are just barely touching and the three lobes are almost touching halfway up, just beyond the edge of that inner triangle. The stem should extend down in the gap between the left and right lobes of the shamrock.
Now you can hang your shamrock in the window. Make three or four loops of tape and put at least one on the back of each lobe to stick it to your window. Perhaps your window shamrock with bring you good luck!
The Dear Little Shamrock
There’s a dear little plant that grows in Ireland.
‘Twas Saint Patrick himself sure that set it.
And the sun on his labor with pleasure did smile.
And a tear from his eyes oft-times wet it.
It grows thro’ the bog, thro’ the brake, and the mireland,
And it’s called the dear little Shamrock of Ireland.That dear little plant still grows in our land,
Fresh and fair as the daughters of Erin,
Whose smiles can bewitch, and whose eyes can command,
In each climate they ever appear in:
For they shine thro’ the bog, thro’ the brake, and the mireland,
Just like their own dear little Shamrock of Ireland.That dear little plant that springs from our soil,
When its three little leaves are extended,
Denotes from the stalk we together should toil,
And ourselves by ourselves be befriended.
And still thro’ the bog, thro’ the brake, and the mireland,
From one root should branch, like the Shamrock of Ireland.—Andrew Cherry
Or, What I Did on My Vacation
OK, I admit I’m completely obsessed with window stars lately. I think I mentioned that here a little while ago. Anyway, we had some time off last week and I took all my kite paper and window star books along with me to the mountains. I was determined to challenge myself to make some of the more complex stars. While I was there, in between working, eating, and playing outside, I made eight new stars.
I also accidentally wrecked one, but shed only a few tears about that.
The more you make them, the easier it becomes. I guess I got into a kind of flow.
Lucas helped me make this beautiful multicolored star. He did most of the white center. I’m hoping he’ll want to make some more with me. I think stars like these may be our birthday gifts for everyone this year.
I love the way the light shines through them and I confess I’m crazy about the colors.
My boys wanted one for their room in their favorite colors, blue and green. Now that we’re home again, the stars have all found spots on our windows here, sharing space with the Valentine window transparencies I made last month, which are still up because I adore them.
I’ve also been experimenting and will share my results very soon, if it all works out the way I think it will.
We were on a school vacation last week, and Ian carved a few days off his work week. So we were able to leave town for one of our delicious, infrequent snow vacations.
We had a new family member along with us this time. I fell even more in love with Solstice. What an intrepid snow dog he is!
I love to see my children roaming, to see them march off on their own mission in whatever direction they choose. I love to see them free.
We had plenty of time for games and new hobbies, and that was enchanting, too.
What more can I say? It was perfect.
We all enjoy watching the signs of spring emerge out of the season of winter. The ground warms, birds return, and bulbs begin coming up. Some plants seem to feel the coming spring before others, like these flowering quince blossoms that were my inspiration for this project. I spot these everywhere I go these days because they are among the first bushes to bloom.
This wreath makes a perfect way to count down to the spring equinox, with small blossoms added day by day (perhaps one added by each child in the family) until March 20, the first day of spring. As you observe the days lengthening, you can make your wintery wreath bloom in your home. Or, if you prefer, do it all at once and enjoy the promise of spring it brings.
Materials
Children of all ages can help with this project. Even the littlest ones can help you gather twigs, tear tissue paper, crumple the paper into buds and blossoms, and even glue (if you‘re using craft or tacky glue). Older children can use a low temperature glue gun with supervision.
Choose small pruned twigs and insert them into your vine wreath base, one at a time, with the tips ―pointing‖ around the wreath in a clockwise (conjuring, waxing) direction. Keep inserting the twigs, and endeavor to anchor their thick ends deep into your wreath.
Your wreath should start to look something like this. Keep adding twigs until your wreath base has twig ―rays‖ running all around the circle.
Here is a wintery, bare wreath. Doesn‘t it seem to ache for spring?
To decorate your wintery wreath and make it bloom, tear your tissue paper into small pieces, no larger than about 2 inches square. Your tears don‘t have to be precise, and you need not waste any tissue. Even the smallest pieces can be used in this project. Grasp the center of the back side of your torn tissue piece, pinch, and with your other hand to help, twist the center. The edges of your tissue piece should flare out a bit like the petals of a blossom. Crumple or twist until you‘re happy with the way your blossom looks.
Now make lots of these! Make as many as you like, or make 20 per child, or 20 per person in your home, if you plan to add one blossom per day to count down to the spring equinox. Even the tiniest pieces of paper can be crushed and rolled tightly into buds for your wreath.
Now begin gluing your buds and blossoms onto your twig ―rays. Often, flowering bushes and trees bloom from the base of the branch to the tip, so if you‘re going for realism, glue your largest blossoms close to the vine wreath, and your smaller blossoms and buds nearer to the tips of your twigs.
Add blossoms day by day and watch your wreath bloom! Add as many or as few as you like.
How cheerful it will be hanging in your home, perhaps above your spring nature table, or on your front door!
* This article was originally published in the Little Acorn Learning March Enrichment Guide.
—Painting by Edith Holden, naturalist, artist, author, and art instructor (1871-1920)
Well, hello March. It’s been so long, and I’m delighted to see you back again. February and I don’t get along as well as I would like, but we’re making progress and our relations are more comfortable in recent years than they used to be. But you, March. You are lovely, a breath of potential that stirs me up and fills me with a yearning for adventure and romance.
Spring Signs
Everywhere the wind blows
There goes spring—
Red kites and blue kites
Are tugging at the string.
Walks have hardly dried
Until marbles roll about
Long before the colored flowers
In the fields are out.
Maybe there is frost yet
And a touch of snow,
But there are little spring-signs
Where the children go.
—Mildred Bowers Armstrong
