Green Options

Encouraging my children’s independence is VERY important to me. Not only is it easier for me to parent two small children who can pour their own milk and put on their own coats and carry their own balance bikes up and down the front porch stairs, but it’s also a priority in my parenting that my girls see themselves as capable individuals who can handle challenges and perform the meaningful work of day-to-day living.

Because of that, carving pumpkins into jack-o-lanterns can be a really frustrating experience. I do permit my children to cut with sharp knives (with supervision), but not to use them on something as thick and unwieldy as a pumpkin. Although there are around-the-house materials that make pumpkin carving an activity more appropriate for small children (subject for a later post), my girls’ favorite jack-o-lantern craft is something that we call pumpkin pounding.

It’s an old-school way of creating an image, perhaps reminiscent of junior high science projects on one of those lucky days when you got to hold class outside.

Or maybe it reminds you of your undergrad years, spending hours in the darkroom in the basement of the union, a hobby that you gave up a few years later when you got pregnant and the idea of the chemicals started to skeev you out.

Or does it remind you of how you totally want to learn to do gocco or screen printing, but it seems kind of hard and requires more equipment thn you have the money for?

Well rejoice, friends, because this project requires only special paper and the sun, and it can make some surprisingly sophisticated prints. Here’s how:

Um, you’ve probably gotten the idea by now that I like to craft with felted wool sweaters, right? The twenty-pound cardboard box on my study floor full of cut-up wool sweaters tells me that this is true. And you’ve probably also figured out that I prefer to use acrylic felt made from recycled plastic over conventional wool felt (and you don’t agree–I swear, that Wool Comes from Sheep post is the only one I have ever seen on all of Green Options in which a commentor calls a blogger a Bad Name. A Bad Name! Really? Because of crafting? I sort of left the world of academics in favor of crafting to avoid crazy politics, but anyway…).

Ahem. My point, now that I’ve gotten around to it, is that I actually do craft with new wool, but I need to know where that wool has come from so that I can assure myself that the sheep were humanely raised as the happy, frolicsome beasts they’re meant to be (I assume–never having raised sheep myself, they could be fierce and blood-thirsty predators, for all I really know).

And one of the awesomest kinds of wool to craft with, especially if you’re not a spinner or a knitter, is wool roving (just don’t use superwash!). You can felt wet-felt wool roving to make your own felt, or you can welt-felt it around a form. A good project for a newbie is this one, in which we’re going to wet-felt some roving around a river rock. It will be hefty but soft, good for anything from a paperweight to a plaything:

I think it’s the stubborn in me, but at this time of year, instead of getting a jump on the Christmas season and having, oh, I don’t know, a RELAXED holiday for a change, I feel the urge to really dig down into the autumn leaves and embrace the glories of this season. I live in the north, and so the trees are a treasure to behold, the temperature is blissfully breezy and crisp, and I look dang cute in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. So celebrate with me the apple harvest and my casual cuteness with these thematically-appropriate projects taken from some of my favorite Web sites: