Making Christmas Shrinkles & Felt Stockings

Each of the girls made, or mostly made, one of theses.

Not as easy as it looks as the snowflake needed sewing on and there was some route planning involved in doing that (reminded me of some maths we used to do in school involving nodes and the crossing over of lines but it never seems to be in the books now) and then some careful thought on how to attach all the pieces and sewing things on the right sides so the stocking opened, the snowflakes were on the outsides of each half, the heels and toes were attached but not over stitched. Bigs helped Littles admirably while i sat back and threaded needles and watched their planning and organising skills unfold.

That was followed by colouring in Shrinkies

and considerable fascination at what happened when they went in the oven. Spent ages talking to the Little ones about that and trying out the concept of the same amount of something being large and thin or small and thick, plus the reasons for the colour deepening as it shrunk. We used Fimo to explore it a bit further and then talked about the Shrinkies and the Fimo both being plastic but with very different properties. Colouring in and education – who’d ‘ave thought?

Took everyone dancing, made dinner, collected people, helped Max at work for a while and oggled our links on our felty friend’s blog. Bless her for making a fuss of us all!!!

Fran very happy after gym last night as she mastered a front somersault on the floor (running and then doing a forward roll in the air and landing on your feet), nearly has her round off-flic-tuck back (the tumble in her routine with a backwards somersault at the end) and did a free round off off the beam (no handed cartwheel like thing into the air). So she was happy.

I was vaguely glad i wasn’t there to watch.

Apparently she is going to get to do some gradings next year, which is making her inordinately happy.

Also – music lessons yesterday – Josie is now joining in on her little guitar my mum gave her and Amelie is currently the big star – her violin has come on loads and she has started third finger. She actually sounds tuneful quite often now. Must do videos.