Green Options

Sometimes you gotta shop online. Maybe you live somewhere a little bit country, like I do, or maybe you have two little kids who would rip apart a bead store in the time it took you to pick out a single package of 3mm crimp beads, like I do, or maybe you have a favorite independent craft shop that you discovered on a vacation a couple of years ago and every now and then you have to have a fix, like I do.

Whatever your reasons, there’s no reason to necessarily shop at a big-box store’s web site; not only are there tons of sites for Fabulous Fabrics and Yearn-Worthy Yarns, there are loads of awesome craft stores, some selling supplies and some selling handmade goods, who would looooove to have your business:

My girls and I are homeschooling a unit on art right now, inspired by the Artist Trading Cards they’ve been making and swapping with other kids around the country. We’ve been doing a lot of art in a lot of media, looking at a lot of art books and books about art from the library, and visiting some art museums within a reasonable drive from our home.

Two problems, however:

1. We live in Indiana, so we’re not exactly rife with art museums over here.

2. My girls are VERY young, and when we do visit an art museum, we’ve got an hour, tops, before we need to move on either to another activity or a double meltdown.

So how can a couple of little Indiana kids utilize an entire world’s offerings of art?

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:

The leaves are falling from the silver maple trees today, and it’s my favorite time of the year. Autumn is a terrific season for experiencing with children, especially. Unlike the slowing down of winter and even the dawning of spring, sometimes, the seasonal change to autumn is an abrupt and vivid one–it’s so easy to remember summer, still, but so easy to see the turning and falling of the leaves and feel the nip in the air.

Because autumn itself is so tactile and sensorial, I take extra pleasure in exploring and celebrating it with my girls with some hands-on activities and projects. In accordance with our green crafting manifesto, we try to work primarily with natural and recycled materials, and to support a sense of ourselves as members of a global community; here are some things that we’ve done, that we like to do, and that we’re going to try this autumn: