Girl Scouts: Drawing Badge

Quick troop update: K's been to 3 or 4 troop meetings now. They have decided to work on the AMUSE Journey and Archery Badge first. The high energy level has cause some problems and its been slow getting started but I think they will get there.

The last meeting had to be canceled due to illness so instead of the troop meeting K and I decided to work on her Drawing Badge. We gathered the guide binder, her medium of choice (pencil on sketch paper), a still life object (an unlit pillar candle), and found a comfy spot with pillows.

Like all badges this one has 5 steps:

1. Experiment with different materials

2. Learn how to add shading

3. Get some perspective

4. Use your imagination like a graphic artist

5. Make your masterpiece--and show it off!!

K has always had an interest in art and has just about every medium you could want in the house so I was surprised when she decided to go with basic charcoal pencils. She loves color and uses it in everything so I guess she just wanted to practice with black and white so she could focus on the drawing itself. I have a very good quality set I use for sketching so I let her pick one of those. She pulled out her drawing book, found a fresh page and then started to draw the candle we had set up on the side table.

I found it interesting that at first, she barely looked at the still life, instead trying to draw from her memory.  What resulted was an image that was more what she thought the candle should look like and less like it really did. I pointed this out to her and after a few more stubborn attempts to draw from memory she finally started to look at it with a critical eye and try to represent what she saw, not what she imagined, on the page. She tried that several times, each time capturing more detail and less solid outline. She wants to come back with other mediums but was ready to move on to shading.

I had saved a bunch of examples of shading on Pinterest, some of the techniques (like hatching, crosshatching, smudging, blending), some teaching images (like shading around a ball or face with the light at different angels) and some just really cool images that used shading to create the effects.  we looked at them and talked about how the effects were achieve, what the use of the different techniques did to the style of the artwork and then started to practice.  At first we just used one technique at a time to create a shaded spot on the page but K quickly decided to put her last candle in shadow by making the background shaded. Once I showed her how to smudge, that became her favorite method so she spent a lot of time figuring out how to move the color around and achieve a haloed effect on the edges. 

Perspective is something they've been working on in both her art class and the drawing after school program shes in so she jumped right in to showing me how they used lines to draw buildings and right angle objects along a perspective. We pulled up a few more Pinterest images of perspective and since she had that down, I challenged her to look at a different type of perspective, from a bugs-eye view. This was much more challenging and she had trouble imagining what things would look like but she gave it a good effort.

Next we took a look at the world of graphic design...logos, branding, symbolism, and style.  We borrowed an idea from the blogs to have her design a logo with her name. This was very hard for her to do, both to come up with an ideas and to try to execute. Her perfectionism got in the way of her creativity her and she became quite frustrated so we called it quits. I think she wants to come back to this and try drawing a comic instead to finish this step.

I asked her to think about how she would like to complete step five. Once she decides and completes it she'll be done with the badge but this project was so fun it sparked may more ideas of things she wants to try and create. It also helped her understand that she doesn't have to "get it right" the first time, and that that are always many ways to draw the same object. I had fun drawing right along with her, challenging my creativity in ways I haven't done in a while and also getting outside my comfort zone by sharing what I was doing with her as I was doing it. I tend to draw just for me so it was good to let her see my struggles and missteps too.

Girl Scouts: Junior Journey

K has been with Girl Scouts since Kindergarten; first as a Daisy, then a Brownie and now a Junior. Some years she was really into it, others not so much but has continued to ask to be part of a troop to be with her friends and get to do cool stuff.  This year we spent some time talking about what she liked/disliked about being part of girl scouts and particularly part of a troop and what she really wanted to do this year. It was good to hear her talk about how she liked being part of the group and how much she wanted to belong to something. However, she also expressed frustration at the meetings not always going the way she wanted and how long it took to earn badges.  Though it's never predictable, among the "I don't care"  and "go with the flow"attitudes she expresses most often she regularly goes through periods of self-starting, competitive and motivated behaviors where she will want to do things herself, do it to her standards and be in control.

When she started asking about doing more badges I got the idea to offer her the chance to decide what, above and beyond what the troop would be doing, she wanted to accomplish in girl scouts. We started by pulling out her guidebook binder and started reading through the descriptions of what different badges required, what other things (like my my promise, my faith) there were to do and what it would take for her to complete the activities. I think she was a little overwhelmed at first with the amount of steps and pages that went with each badge but when we broke it down and talked about what steps/things she would actually need to do it became more palatable.  We also pulled up the council events homepage and looked at what kind of badge or patch earning activities were being offered came up with a few things she wanted to register for.

She decided that she wanted to work on the Drawing badge first and then join some workshops that focused on Jewelry and Sew Simple. I also talked to her about learning a skill that she could then take back to teach her troop to earn a build your own badge. She's thinking about it.

I'll be posting more of her Journey here.

Summer CSA Week 2 - Lost Corner Farm

Picked up our half share box this week and somehow the wonderful farmers at Lost Corner Farm managed to pack even more yummy greens into that box than last week.

A huge head of lettuce, another smaller head of lettucea giant hand full of asparagus, a pint of red ripe strawberries, curly kale, the biggest chineese cabbage you've seen, and some rainbow chard are repeated from last weeks share. In addition we got a bag of spinach, radicchio, collard greens, spring onions and a different variety of pok choi. 

I've got all kinds of yummy dishes planned. 

One Local Summer-Week 1 Recap

A number of years ago I tried playing along with an idea hosted by the blog Farm To Philly http://farmtophilly.com to eat at least one meal a week totally (with exceptions for stuff like salt, pepper, sugar and oil) from food grow or raised locally. Over the years there were several different definitions of local and several levels of exceptions made, some of which I've chronicled here, some that I did on my own. Unfortunately, as the scales of balance tipped in the wrong direction, cooking anything, not to mention cooking healthy, sustainably sourced, locally grown meals fell off. And I've been worse off for it.

But no more. I'm back with a CSA subscription to a new local farm just 24 miles down the road, a farmers market that host only vendor-produced foods grown within 125 miles, and a commitment to make this my summer to back on track. 

One of the reasons I let go of this before was all the rules of what and how far and the guilt of including something "not approved". It made what should have been an educational, inspirational journey into a comparison of who was "really" being local and who could afford to source more expensive meats and exotic veggies to eat well. In an effort to avoiding all of that I'm playing by my own rules this year and celebrating even the little steps as success. 

My rules will be:

Cook at least 3 local meals a week

A local meal is a meal that contains at least half local foods and no exotic items that could not reasonably be obtained  locally. The point is to eat things in season, not how creative can I get at stretching the rules but I will note the non local items. I will also feature things like pickles where the primary ingredient that is ultimately eaten is local even if the liquid and spices are not. 

Local is anything grown or raised within 150 miles. 

I will endeavor to find sustainable, environmentally friendly, economically feasible alternatives where possible but will hold no guilt if I use store bought items or a cheaper product if it results in the ability to provide a healthy, home cooked meal to my family. 

I will source and meal plan from my share first and do my best to fully utilize all the yummy stuff.

I hope to see a gradual transition from partially local to mostly local as I use up non-local ingredients and replace them with local sources. Things like butter, flour, herbs should be easy but I wont just toss usable food to buy new local versions, I'll use up the old and replace with the good. Things like oil, salt and some sugars probably wont be replaced at all but either reduced as I make healthier meals or simply kept as my exlusions.

So for the first week, here is my recap:

Thursday evening I picked up my share and started meal planning but didn't get any cooking done as it was too late. I also still had a few few things left from my last farmers market trip like grape tomatoes, pasta, and carrots.

Friday I cooked a batch of kale (share) chips using a non-local drizzle of oil and dash of salt and pepper following this recipe at http://www.beardandbonnet.com/how-to-make-crispy-kale-chips-gluten-free-and-vegan/.

Then I took half the asparagus from the share and made a jar of refrigerator pickles using this recipe http://shesimmers.com/2010/03/quick-and-easy-refrigerator-pickled-asparagus.html. My BF, the pickle expert in the household found them quite good. 

For the main meal I used all the curly kale (share), a pint of grape tomatoes from Ticonderoga (fm), some fresh linguine noodles from Caravan Pasta (fm), and non local garlic, oil, and feta to make a delicious one pot pasta dinner. We enjoyed the incredibly fresh juicy strawberries plain for dessert.

Saturday I had previously prepared store bought chicken to use up so for local content I made a quick salad out of our lettuce (share) and some shredded carrots (fm) and braised some pok choy (share) in non-local soy sauce to go with the lemon chicken and rice.

Sunday I made a mostly local fritatta from the last of our Lancaster Farm Fresh eggs (share). This version had some non-local feta and paremsean cheese and some commercial lunch meat ham slices but also used up the leftover pok choy (share) and some sauted asparagus (share).

The rest of the week was filled with veggies too but none met my feature conditions. Chard warped salmon with sautéed asparagus, chineese cabbage and carrots in an Asian chopped salad, and kale and carrots in soup used up every last bit of the items in the week 1 share. 

Summer CSA Week 1-Lost Corner Farm

We started a new CSA this week. Lost Corner Farm located in Leesburg, Virginia.  We originally had thought to just stick with Farmers Markets this summer as there are so many changes coming in our household but when we heard Lost Corner had made arrangements to deliver direct to our apartment office and had a chance to meet and talk with the wonderful farmers and taste their fresh asparagus...well, it was too good to pass up.

We are signed up for a weekly half share of veggies and fruit for 22 weeks and added the delivery of a monthly whole chicken for 5 months. Their prices seemed competitive and reasonable, if like many other CSAs, rather high on the initial output but taking a look at the first week, we are certainly getting our moneys worth. 

In the week 1 box there were some of the best stuff of spring including substantial bundles of several types of kale, rainbow chard, a giant head of Chinese cabbage and an even bigger head of butter leaf lettuce. There was another type of lettuce, a nice sized head of red pok choy and a brown bag full of asparagus. You cant tell by the picture but that's more stalks than I can fit both my hands around. There was also one basket of the sweetest smelling strawberries.

I'm not sure if we are going to be able to make it through all this so I have plans to make refrigerator pickle with some of the asparagus and some kale chips. In addition I'm looking to make several soups, salads and sautes to try to use up ingredients. My menu is looking rather Asian inspired with fresh ingredients like these so I picked up some noodles and sauce components from the store.

2015-Week 19 & 20 & 21

In week 19 & 20 & 21 of 2015 I start a bunch of stuff despite getting further behind on everything else.

First Steps

Recently I've been spending a lot of time trying to catch up on older projects so of course I feel the need to start a bunch of new stuff.

First is a beaded 1.5" wide piece of knit called the Dew Drops Lariat for K. I'm doing it in a very magenta yarn with sparkly thread twisted in and beaded with pink beads. I think that it will probably be a belt or wrap tie for a dress.

Next I cast-on the provisional edge of what will become a pillow with an adorable intarsia robot on the front in my nephews colors.

Then on Mothers Day I cast on a shawl just for myself, the Glenridge Shawl in some formerly de-stashed and recently acquired The Unique Sheep Sushi Sock in Candied Apple. Its a fairly simple patter and moving very quickly when I get the time to work on it.

Finally, I cast-on a preemie hat out of the leftover yarn from my mom's shawl.

Along the Path

I finished sock #1 and am still working on sock #2 for the My Cup of Green Tea socks and the beaded Dew Drops Lariat .

Final Destination

I can't show you any more than this teaser yet, since I'm so behind on gifting it but I finished my Mystic Cuppa shawl, all I need to do is block. So instead I'll show you a glamour shot of my Captain America shawl wet blocking by gravity following a triple washing due to bleeding in both the red and blue yarns (which made for the most beautiful unfortunate purple water).

2015-Week18

In week 18 of 2015 I spent time on the water, got some goodies in the mail and finished a nerdy shawl.

Packing my Bags

This weekend was the local Spring Festival at the Nature Center and in addition to all kinds of good educational nature fun, music, plant sale and nature walks the local association rents kayaks on the lake. I took one out for a hour of hard paddling interspersed with a few moments of nature appreciation. It was good to get out on the water and enjoy the nice day.

This week I received my Bar Maids Quarterly Subscription box in the Knitmore theme and in addition to some wonderful body products like their Lo-Lo Bar this box came with a skein of Abstract Fiber Super Sock in the Danger colorway and a complementary shawl pattern. I can see this becoming something fun for K, maybe socks or maybe this shawl, well see.

First Steps

Cast on some Kroy self-striping yarn for a pair of Fork in the Road socks to see if this style fits BF better than heel flap construction socks.

Along the Path

Still plugging away on the My Cup of Green Tea socks, and the Mystic Cuppa and Solar Flare Shawls. I'll post pictures when I get to the next yarn change or significant progress point

Final Destination

After several days of marathon sessions my Captain America Shawl was finished. It was done in time to wear it to opening night, but it wasn't blocked. Good thing the theater was dark and no one knew. I'll post more pics when its blocked but here it is posed over the steering wheel in my car, which was where I finished the bind off during lunch that afternoon. I loved doing this, both for the nerd factor and because of the new stitches I got to try.