Dyeing a Playsilk

At the beginning of the month, we tried our hand at dying silk with Kool-Aid. To make a nice, autumn-y colored silk, we decided to try the Peach Mango flavor.

Can I just say that this smelled fabulous?

Anyway, I had found several varying and often contradictory accounts on other blogs about the correct way to dye silk with Kool-Aid. So we just decided to wing it. This may not be the best way to do it, but it worked for us.

After mixing one part distilled white vinegar with three parts water, we brought our liquid to a boil and added the silk.

When it was thoroughly soaked, Vance added the Kool-Aid and stirred it in.

Edward took a turn stirring too. The water turned bright, yellowish-orange, and did I mention it smelled heavenly?

We simmered it for an hour, then washed it out. And washed it out again. And washed and washed and washed some more. At long last, it stopped bleeding, and we were left with a pale, shimmery silk that couldn't decide if it was orange tinted yellow, or yellow tinted orange. It's been gracing our nature table all month long, providing a beautiful backdrop for our bits of October loveliness.

I didn't have the best lighting for this shot, so the color isn't exact, but since I'm just about finished catching up with the October highlights, I'm not going to wait around for the opportunity to get a better photo. And since the month is drawing to a close, this particular playsilk will shortly retire from tablecloth duty and join the other playsilks on toy detail. I'm sure it eagerly awaits its freedom.

Autumn Leaf Cookies!

When I was a little girl, I loved making Christmas sugar cookies and painting them with colored egg wash. Well, it's the wrong season for Christmas cookies, so we made autumn leaf cookies instead. Even more fun, my mom was visiting and helped - grandmas make the best baking buddies!

It was a little difficult to take turns cutting out cookies, but we managed, mostly because Edward didn't get too upset that Vance kept "helping" him.

Both boys had a lot of fun painting autumn colors on the leaves.

One quick trip through the oven, and we had the tastiest leaves we'd ever seen.

Then there was nothing left to do but enjoy the sweet fruits of our labors! (Well, and also clean up, but why spoil a good story?)

Later, we hung some from a branch on our nature table.

Those cookies remain surprisingly uneaten, though the rest of the cookies were happily devoured over the following days.

Boats!

In our most ambitious project yet, we made boats!

Mostly, this project reaffirmed my desire to own a scroll saw. As it was, we used a coping saw to cut these out, and when I say, we, I mean Wazi. I tried, but arthritic hands are apparently not meant for this sort of work. Luckily, I have a very dedicated husband who sawed tirelessly, and a dremel, so I could help a bit with the shaping.

Anyway, eventually we had two lovely, if still somewhat rough, boats. I figured Edward and I would share a boat since he wasn't particularly likely to want to do much work on it himself, and we (Wazi) had had enough sawing for a while.

This is where the boys came in. They had watched the initial cutting out, but Edward had no desire to try sawing himself, and Vance's attempt (very closely supervised; no need to worry) was of shorter duration than even mine. Vance did, however, find that he could help sand the boats down.

Once the boats were sufficiently smooth, it was time to decorate them! Out came the beeswax crayons! Edward decided to color for just a minute,

but quickly lost interest. He returned to the table later, though, to build a floating wall out of the block crayons.

Vance had more staying power, and very carefully and particularly colored his entire boat.

Afterward, we melted the wax in the oven, and rubbed in a bit more polish, to make them good and watertight.

At long last, we had two lovely boats, ready for fun!

They float quite nicely, though I don't have a picture of the boys playing in the sink, and we're looking forward to sailing them in puddles next time it rains.

Pumpkin Patch

Field trip! We visited a local farm to collect pumpkins from their pumpkin patch and enjoy their autumn carnival and corn maze!

We played in the hay bale maze,

then rode out to the pumpkin patch on the hay wagon.

We searched the patch for the perfect pumpkins,

and pulled them back to the hay wagon in the pumpkin cart.

Once our pumpkins were loaded into our car, we played around some of the other carnival games and toys for a bit,

then finally headed into the corn maze.

Such a fun day!

October Playdough of the Month: Nutella Dough

Well, I certainly let myself get behind. October has been a fun and busy month! We've been doing a lot. I just haven't blogged any of it. As October is almost over, I'm going to try and cram in a few quick posts with some of the highlights of the month. Let's start with playdough!

What with it being October, we could have made a pumpkin playdough. But that would have been too predictable. Also, we're doing that next year. So what to do instead?

One of the books we used this month was the adorable Woody, Hazel, and Little Pip by Elsa Beskow.

Amongst other characters, this book has little acorn people and hazelnut people. Hmmmm, hazelnuts....oh, look what I just happen to have!

Several years ago, when I did preschool childcare, we made a Nutella playdough recipe. It was a simple recipe, just powdered sugar and Nutella. I was positive that I remembered the ratio.

Edward was quite interested in the Nutella jar,

while Vance wanted to play with powdered sugar.

Eventually we managed to combine our ingredients and start mixing them up.

Because I was silly, we just dumped everything into the bowl at once. This might have worked if I had remembered the correct ratios, but alas, my memory had doubled the amount of powdered sugar needed. Instead of one part sugar to two parts Nutella, we did TWO parts sugar to one part Nutella. Oops. The resulting mess was rather crumbly.

Not that the boys didn't have fun with that. And we got to play with different textures.

Eventually, we added more Nutella to our crumbly dough, and achieved a silkier, squishier texture.

We wound up with quite a lot of playdough, even accounting for the boys nibbling some. All in all, it was a success, even if we took the roundabout way of getting there. Even knowing the right recipe, from now on I'm adding powdered sugar in small increments, as it's a lot easier to correct mistakes that way. We've had a lot of fun with this playdough this month, and if you're the kind of person who can handle "ruining" Nutella, I highly recommend it!