End of term report: June 2014

It’s not quite the end of the week – but it is nearly the end of term.

And you can bet that, come mid August, all those bright wee things will have sprouted extra inches of leg and new hairstyles and far more in-depth knowledge of whatever it is they’re keen on.

So maybe it’s time instead to take stock of where things are at now – because assuredly it will all be different when the new term comes round.

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Like many other places, Edinburgh schools have been overtaken by loom bands. In some places, they are the reserve of girls; in others, boys are working away with the best of them to create whatever the latest plastic bangle look is coolest right now.

Mums chat in huddles, identifying the best deals and the new equipment to make the things on…and others just get fed up with lots of little coloured rubber bands everywhere.

Small D returns home with an aquarium. Think paper plate, blue-ish scene behind, clear film on the front to look like the glass. I rather like the two (actual) shells – and the carefully inscribed lines to show that they are falling down through the water.

Sports days are on and off and happen in the rain and sometimes even happen on good (bright, sunny) days.

There are end of term discos where everyone emerges dripping with sweat and clutching an ice lolly.

I think there may be the great ceremonial pile out off to the park on the last day of term, to play, eat a picnic lunch, play some more. Some of that gradual leave taking before parents batten down the hatches and engage the hard-won Long Holiday tactics.

There are coffees snatched, and parent conversations indulged in before the holidays begin, and an actually still heated beverage becomes but a happy dream.

There are calculations about rate of hair growth and the possibility of hot summer, and decisions to be made about summer haircuts.

There is the counting down of final packed lunches, and snacks, and school uniform washing loads. And there is the complicated deliberation about teacher presents/cards at the end of the school year.

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Life becomes a little bit more complex at this stage of school – but not too much so yet. Not too knowing yet. Thankfully.

Boys and girls both engage with creating their own little worlds online (mainly through Minecraft).

There are Brownies activities, and judo competitions, and a hundred and one other ways to signal the end of scheduled time for a few weeks.

Playdates involve more requests for (computer) screen time – but messing about outdoors is still high on the list of entertainments.

Swings, and hide and seek, and monkey bars at the park. Even a hammock to try out at a friend’s house, if you’re lucky.

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We have this stretch of several days of good weather. (For those used to one day sun, one day sea mist in Edinburgh, that’s unusual.) Prolonged grass cutting ensues. The new picnic bench is ready for action in the garden.

There is a scurry for sun dresses and skirts and lighter tops and sunscreen. Wearing shorts to the office (if there’s no visitors that day).

I hunt around the attic for those items that can actually come back out for use: inflatables. Games to play outdoors on the grass.

I work around the other items tucked away, those ones for rainy days and cold days and miserable days.

Not just now. Who knows how long the sun may last, but for now, we’ll live in hope of a little more summer to enjoy.

Making: reusing fabric

I don’t know if the moment has passed, but there seemed to be a stage at which you were besieged with eco bags at every turn.

Supermarkets sold them to you; conferences pressed them on you (to hold all the paper that you then didn’t need anyway. Hmm.)

I started into eco bags a while back. They were quite often souvenirs of trips to Germany. I still have a couple which I love (and which have the frayed handles to prove it).

One is for a children’s book publisher, and has a very nice illustration of a cheery frog on a motorbike. The other has the Ampelmaenner (traffic light men) of East Berlin – you’ll see the ‘Go’ version as the little icon at the top of this webpage.

Eco bags are a nice idea, but they don’t really hold a lot of shopping. They’re fine if you’re off to the paper shop to collect your weekend newspaper, they’ll do a few bits and pieces, but not a great deal.

Cue my next use of them: for putting dirty washing in when on trips away from home. And when you’re home and doing the washing, stick the bag in as well, and it’s ready for next time.

But still. There were bags I liked, and ones I really didn’t care for any more. So I decided it was time to get the material back, use the blank bits (maybe more quilt activity?), keep the bag designs I did like, and ditch the rest.

And then I was able to justify getting a new sewing toy. The terribly sharp, terribly exciting rotary cutter.

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You can use strong scissors to cut fabric, of course. You can even have pinking shears to make sure the edges don’t fray. (Though the main use of pinking shears, as I recall, was to reuse old Christmas cards and turn them into tags for next year.)

Once I’d read the quilting book a bit more, as well as a bit of looking at sewing sites, I realised that a rotary cutter could help things along nicely.

It basically looks much like a pizza cutter – but deadlier. (A pizza cutter doesn’t have a guard for the blade. This does.)

Lest it seem too dangerous for words, I have been practising cutting, carefully, on little scraps of fabric, to get the feel for the thing. Turns out it’s very nice to use – very smooth.

You do need to have one of those cutting mats to use them on – I think they call them self-healing mats.

The kind you can use for cutting out card designs with a Stanley knife. (We did some Christmas cards a few years ago, with lots of cutting, so we have the mat already.)

So the stitch ripper and the rotary cutter have been working together on taking apart these bags. A few are even coloured, and may make it into a different pile for a larger-scale quilt idea (if the first one works out).

I don’t quite know what I’ll do with the picture bits I’m saving yet. I don’t think they are quilting squares; most of them have words on as well, and I don’t want a quilt that’s too busy to look at.

They might be interesting cut into quarters and moved around a piece of fabric, as it were, so the effect is less immediate on the eye.

I do now have a lot of nice strong handles from the bags, though, which brings me to another idea: a scooping things up blanket.

(A blanket with handles, basically. I’ve seen things like this for sale online. Play on it, then pick it up by the handles at the end, and scoop up whatever’s inside, to make tidy up easier and quicker.)

I think the blanket might work for all kinds of small playthings – but I’m principally thinking the Lego collection. More on those plans another time.

Updated: the bits of fabric with words on turn out to be just fine in a rag rug. And more on that on a separate occasion.

Am I using up almost all the fabric? You betcha.

Friday phrase: I said them but I lied them

Dr Seuss seems to be going round my head at the moment.

And really, why not? For all of the famous restricted vocabulary, to help beginning readers, he also worked incredibly hard at making the stories effective.

Even when they seem unlikely choices.

Some time back now (lost in the mists of parenting time), Junior Reader was very fond of the story of The Pale Green Pants. (In case of any uncertainty, pants here means trousers, for anyone concerned about where the story was going.)

It runs a bit like a classic ghost story. Our hero is out in various places at night – and keeps coming across a ghostly pair of pale green pants ‘with nobody inside them’.

(I know that it’s a while ago, because Junior Reader would tend to say ‘no-der-ee’ instead of nobody.)

Understandably, the hero gets more and more scared by the pants, and tries various means to deal with them, including trying to convince himself that he isn’t really scared. (This is where today’s phrase comes from, which you can read below.)

In fact, when they do meet again, the outcome is not that scary – but I will leave you to read the story, and find out.

I think we all have these points where we are trying to be brave, and not quite succeeding. Part of us believes that positive thinking will win the day – and part of us recognises…not quite yet.

Whatever your day is like, whatever you are being brave about, take heart that others are not necessarily that brave either. (And, if you’re lucky, that what you are scared of may turn out to be less scary than you thought.)

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Dr Seuss, What Was I Scared Of?

“I said, ‘I do not fear those pants

With nobody inside them.’

I said and said and said those words.

I said them. But I lied them.”

The story belongs in this compendium, The Sneeches and Other Stories. (Undoubtedly more on that another time.)

Making: a teeny tiny quilt

Long long ago, it seems, I acquired a book on quilting. It’s a good one, including a mix of photos of the real thing, and lots of projects to try out.

Even further ago, I found myself teaching in Poland (second time around), again at a point where my hands needed something to do in the evenings.

(English teaching in the day meant that it was very hard to do anything words-related at night. So I ended up doing some sewing-type things instead.)

Fortunately, my teaching position came hot on the heels of an American family who had been there for three years before me. The mum seemed to have been into quilting, and left a box full of lots of odds and ends of fabric.

I made a few little bits of patchwork. The colour combinations were good. One became a kind of table runner for the low table in the room where I was staying that year.

Another made steps towards being the size of a cushion cover. It never got to those lofty heights, but it does now get more viewing time, as it were, by going over the top of a rocking chair.

I never wanted to fill the house with patchwork thises and thats. Part of me admires it, the colours, the shapes. Part of me also wants to avoid too much busyness on the eye.

But with some offcuts from my clothes-adjusting activities, I thought I might try to find a use for them. Cue: the teeny tiny quilt.

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The point of this is that it’s a place to learn. It will probably end up the right size for a teddy or other soft toy, which is plenty big enough to work on, but not so crucial that I feel bad if it doesn’t work out.

I’ve kept the notion of the teddy quilt a secret from Junior Reader, but I hope that it will go down well, once I feel like it’s at a point where I can hand it over.

Part of the current attraction of the quilt is that it also gives me a chance to use up the inners of the pillows we recently parted with.

(I discovered that you can’t recycle them – they just go into landfill – but some online searching suggested things like using them for making soft toys or quilts.)

So far, we have simple squares. A bit of leftover red curtaining material (Granny R has been hard at work on new curtains for Junior Reader. Respect.). And the offcuts of those jeans I mentioned.

24 squares, and a colour way of red and grey. So far so good.

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So I’ve learned to look at the useful book before beginning the project. (Turns out you shouldn’t create strips of 6 squares, but just do them in pairs. Back to the stitch ripper for a bit.)

I’ve just started combining the pairs into sets of 4. That took a bit of trial and error to work out how to match them so it looks (as best I can) like the seams actually line up.

Hopefully I’ll complete the 24 squares fairly soon. Then I need to think about what to put on the back, and how to tease out the pillow material so it forms the filling (or batting) of the quilt.

There is also adding some kind of binding around the outer edges to hold all the elements together. And after that, you get to do stitching through the different layers (the actual quilting), which I understand can be decorative if you want it to be.

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So that’s all going fine. But then I discovered a set of fabric that was doing nothing, and decided to add to my material stash by cutting up: eco bags.

Lit Kid: folk tales from around the world

I’ve written about folk tales before. Mostly in the ‘fill the gap between chapter books‘ kind of way. And that’s good.

But with Junior Reader somewhat more of a seasoned traveller than before, and a bit more aware of different countries (thank you, Olympics and Commonwealth Games), folk tales from around the world now have more impact.

And of course, at least in part, I read them aloud because I loved them myself. Less well travelled than Junior Reader at the equivalent age (although I’ve tried to make up for it since), I travelled by reading.

The bonus being, you can board the plane at any time. (And get off in time for tea. And reboard afterwards.)

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I find it interesting the way that different countries attract us. Those attractions are different for different people, and that’s good too. (Junior Reader shows much more interest in Japan than I did, but then judo helps on that front.)

Sometimes, particular countries and their mindsets captivate us. We take them on, they become part of us.

I remember reading, in my teens, a biography of C. S. Lewis. Part of what resonated for me was discovering an unrealised similarity: that he too liked Autumn, and the North.

(By this I do not mean ‘anything above London’, as certain road signs would have it, but a much broader notion of northness – with quite a lot of focus on Nordic countries.)

You probably won’t be surprised at my liking a collection of Norwegian folk tales – nor various collections of Scots ones. But there are others that sneak up on you too.

I have a fondness for a particular collection of Indian folk stories – partly the lovely pictures accompanying them. As well as the anthropological discoveries that come in the reading (like the chewing of betel nut. In my case, just the learning, not the actual chewing.)

And although I am not best friends with spiders, by any means, I also feel friendly towards Anansi the Spider Man, the main character in Ghanaian folk stories. (Now there’s an anti-hero. Or is he really a hero after all? Discuss.)

So I’ll be fitting those in over the coming weeks. If I can find myself a decent collection of Brer Rabbit stories, I rather fancy including those too. (Brer Rabbit is another trickster character, with stories told in the Southern United States and also among Native Americans.)

Looking over those, I feel I should make an attempt to find some South American stories, just to spread out the readings over the different continents. Let me know if there’s any you think I should try.

In the meantime, I think I’ve got Junior Reader hooked on Askelad, hero of the Norwegian folk stories. More on him next time.