Troop Meeting: Roles

They had another troop meeting this week. Their school principal came and gave a talk about good behavior after school and they explored roles and careers by acting out the things they had brought for their prop box. K took a notebook/journal to be a writer/storyteller. She seemed to enjoy it but I didn't get too many details.

Archery

Back in mid-October, K's Girl Scout Junior Troop took a Sunday afternoon trip to Camp Potomac Woods, one of the GSCNC camps, to participate in an Archery Workshop.

The girls got the opportunity to learn some archery history, learn about the parts of the bow and arrow, learn safety and learn/practice shooting with compound bows. K had a blast and came back excited about her new found ability and how often she could hit the bulls-eye. I'm not sure if they earned a badge or not but it was certainly a positive experience for her.

Sewing Badge Research

K has expressed interest in learning to sew more and in potentially sharing that knowledge with others in her troop and maybe even younger girl scouts. As a result I have been looking into various sewing badge requirements, patch programs and project ideas to find things she might want to try. I could't find any official "sewing" badge at the Junior Level in the new post-2011 badge structure. I'm sure I'll rant about how much I dislike the marketing and branding of this new badge structure but not now. I know there are several ways to incorporate sewing projects into the badge requirements of other badges and especially into the Journeys but since her troop is working on those I'm going to stick to independent projects. Who know's, maybe when she feels more confident in her sewing skills she can help introduce the idea of a sewing related project into her troop.

There are several patch programs and some info on the retired badges like sew simple. There are also service focused programs and many great tutorials focus on beginner learning machine and/or hand sewing. Here are a few I've found:

Cupcakes and Lace. One of the local girl scout partner organizations, they offers workshops that individual girls can register for that teach sewing and crafting skills and some also meet badge requirements. This fall they are offering Junior Jeweler and Sew Simple programs. I'll be keeping an eye on the workshop list to see what's coming up.

Juliette Sews. GSNCA has a Council Own patch that helps girls learn more about sewing by hand and by machine. The link has a list of 29 requirements. Each level has to do items 1-4 and Juniors have to complete an additional 7 steps of their choosing. The patch is listed at $1.50 on the their Council Own Shop page.

Sew Simple Badge. I found a copy of the retired Sew Simple badge requirements along with other retired badges here. If I can't get her into a workshop I can always work on it at home but I'd have to track down a badge myself.

Dress a Girl Around the World offers a patch for those who take pillow cases and turn them into dresses. I stumbled across this patch on Pinterest and after some research decided that this could be a great way to combine service with the sewing. It is a program of Hope 4 Women International, an Arizona based ministry organization. "Dress a Girl Around the World provides patterns, ways to be involved and opportunities for you to deliver or to help fund the delivery of dresses to girls around the world. People from all over are forming" They sell patches on their site for $3.50.

Pinterest inspiration:

A hand stitch, cross stitch card idea

This pin is a collection of 7 simple pillowcase dress variations

Link to a Martha Stewart hand stitch felt tissue cover. I'd make changes to the size, embellishments and order of steps.

A cable keeper-A simple stitched band with button hole and button work

Sock Bunnies-up-cycle some socks and practice softie hand sewing

More advanced, a up-cycled t shirt braided rug

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.