Warmth of Denial.

If you follow me on social media, you will have seen the photos I've been sharing of the shawl I hooked specifically for an Exhibition in January by Ecocreate.  It's all submitted now, so now I wait to find out if it gets selected.

If you haven't seen the shawl - here are photos showing it's progression.  I do still have the ends to sew in, and finish the edging off.  This shawl is also the largest freeform project I've hooked to date... and I loved doing it.  So, I now have lots of ideas swirling around my head for new shawls.  I'm also happy to consider commissions, as always :D

I really like the idea of a Cerwiden Shawl, made in time for Samhain.  I shall be sketching later some ideas :D

Anyway here's Warmth of Denial - hooked in response to the brief "Time or Tide waits for no man", submissions are to be related to climate change, and use materials/techniques that are in keeping with Ecocreate's ethos.

The shawl is largely made from indie dyed animal based yarns, a little hand spun, some left over yarns I've bought from charity shops and also used some novelty yarn I have in my stash.  I've also incorporated the lids from plastic bottles, beer bottles and tetra packs into the piece.

I make functional art, hence the shawl.  We wrap ourselves in shawls to keep warm, in this case we are wrapping ourselves in denial about climate change, the melting icecaps, the abundance of our seas, which we plunder at an unsustainable rate, which, if left unchecked will lead to our seas being barren...

The shawl is so big, I had to work in our communal living room because it didn't fit in my work area in my rooms.

Shawl hanging in our Events Room.

July 1, 2, 3

Hello!  Busy bees here at Rose Howey.
I've started up a science club again, and an outisde organisation is coming into the house to do creative writing with the kids and other home ed kids.  Its great!

Rose Howey has also started a new venture:  The Rose Howey Cooperative Gallery, in conjunction with the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool.  We are hosting our first exhibition on Friday - July 1, 2, 3 :D  It's all about the artists' political desires, expressions and inspirations.  I'm creating a piece to display too, using freeform crochet as my medium.  If you're in Liverpool and would like to come along to the exhibition, leave me a comment and I'll let you know the address.

Weekend Catch Up.

Those pesky tubes that run around my eyes and connect to my ears, are experiencing congestion and ickiness.  Friday was the day of copious painkillers until sweet relief descended, followed later by the sweet relief of cider and smokey whiskey.

Life in the co-op does make down days much easier.  There's plenty of other adults who can ensure Rye is fed and looked after, and of course, there's 8 other children he can play with - tho that does mean when his friends are away he mooches around and seems to think lack of play mates means 24/7 access to a screen... er no!

Screen time is pretty relaxed; mornings Rye can use a screen for learning time, and I usually reward him with leisure screen time afterwards, and he usually has the option of screen time on an evening after dinner - though he does often choose to play with his friends.  Screen time is a tad weather dependent - after all this is the British Isles!  So when the sun out, the rule is "no screens" - well, at least not until after dinnertime.  We also have movie / favourite shows screenings on the projector several times a week - a movie, Saturday it was Jurassic Park, and through the week a documentary, Dr Who and in his leisure time, Rye often watches Clone Wars on the Ipad; the current favourite.

Learning time is relaxed at the weekend, Saturday I showed Rye Nessy - after finally managing to log in - seriously don't ask, I'm feel a bit dim at the moment - it's taken me weeks to get in!  Anyhoos, Rye loves Nessy and finds it hilarious.  And I think the boy has finally cracked single phonemes.  He had a spelling test, and the phonic three letter words he spelled correctly, and had he remembered which letters made up "ch" he would have spelled "lunch" correctly too (he forgot the "c").  Really proud of him - he's working really hard.

Rye spent a good hour on Nessy, really proud of his progress.  Definitely need to work on diagraphs, it will improve his phonological fluency massively; and also rhyming words - he still struggles with this a lot.  Perhaps I'll dig out some old nursery rhyming books - ooh and Dr Suess and read those with him for a bit.  By the way, check out PopArt Home Education facebook page for fantastic discounts on Nessy, Maths Whizz, Literacy Planet, and much more. (UK only)

Sunday, is lazy-bum day.
It's one of those days when the "sun shines no screen" rules is relaxed.  Rye woke me to ask if he could go on the laptop and play Nessy.  One hand chuffed to bits he's enjoying it so much, on the other very grumpy he woke me at an ungodly hour on a SUNDAY!    Kids!
He also watched Dinotrucks.

Once screen was away, the moochiness started - I'm bored was mouthed, primarily because the other kids in the house  are away.  I am rather proud that phrase did not pass his lips until he was about 6 years old - it was a concept he had no idea about.

Naturally, when there are friends on tap, he can quite often be found playing on his own in his room!

Anyway, he decided he wanted to do experiments; so teabag rocket it is then.  Oddly, when I set fire to the tea bag it worked, but not when Rye did, and we had a panic when the bag fell over burning, so he blew it...argh!  Thankfully, tea bags burn out very quickly, so there's just a wee mark on my rug.  Then bugger me, he tried again, and blew the match out, blowing the tea bag on the floor again!  At that point I filled up the long necked lighter with butane and let him use that instead.  He wasn't setting light to the tea bag right at the top, so it burned unevenly and didn't woosh.

 How it works?
Well, its because the hot air raises and as the tea bag burns it creates a thermal, or convention current under the bag, and once the bag has burned to ashes, it wooshes up into the air (if burned evenly).

Afterwards, crafting.  Rye decided he wanted to make spirals.  Why? I wondered and he said because spirals are "awesome".  Very true.

 

  After the spiral has dried, we'll cut it out and he can hang it as a mobile in his room.  Oh, and the other day he drew a portrait of us both.  I love my colourful dreads!

I'm joining in This Homeschooling Life, its where Home Educators/Schoolers share what they have been up to for the past month.  Why not join in too :-)

Wednesday - Fitting it all in!

Wednesdays are beginning to feel a tad frantic!

I run an Arts and Crafts Club, which takes  prepping and setting up for each session; with limited mobility I find it very challenging; I love to share arts and crafts with kids though, and I know Rye thoroughly enjoys it too.  I was a bit sad that only the house kids did Art Club today and no one from our wider home ed community came.   I may drop running the club as an home ed activity, and just do it as and when with Rye and the other RH kids - less stressful and less prep and setting up.  That aside, the leaf prints were great fun!

Wednesdays are also Cubs night; we did have a wee blip last week with Rye being unhappy - further investigation revealed he's also being told off for messing around and that combined with his feelings of being left out of the games resulted in his desire to drop cubs.  We chatted and I told him I'd have a word with his Cub Leader and the advantages of cubs, and how there will always be something that we find difficult and may make us unhappy - the trick is not to let those things ruin the over all experience.  So he's agreed to continue with Cubs for the term and we'll re-evaluate then.

Rye has also asked to do sports; he really wants to do football and the like, despite team games being very difficult for him.  I would love to get him into athletics, because he is a surprisingly fast runner!  Anyway, I decided to see if there was a sports club for children with difficulties and autism, happily there is and it's only a mile away - not so happily, its also on a Wednesday 4-5pm!   

Also fitting in daily reading, writing and maths can be challenging.  Though I do want to shout Rye's praise; he read the Rosie book to me again, while I cut up an old sheet for art club; so he was sat opposite me, and while I had to keep reminding him to "sound out the letters", he did manage to read the book, and figured out a few words completely on his own!

Afterwards I asked him to choose a sentence to copy out in his handwriting book.  Hmm, the muscle memory for letters just isn't there anymore; he's really struggling with copying the words from the book while also trying to remember how to draw the letters, write on the line and keep his letters between the line guides....its all scrambling his brain a bit.

It was a bit of a slog, and I had to keep stopping and chivvy him up, and knock him out of "I can't do it" mode.  I had him telling himself affirmations in the mirror, which he found highly embarrassing and funny - but at least it made him laugh!  I think word formation/copy work  can wait a week or two, a couple of weeks really hammering home and helping to develop that muscle memory of how the letters are formed, will bring on his writing more than making him write out sentences, with letters that are formed incorrectly and not readable.  I'm surprised he's regressed with this, his writing was coming along lovely.  Still, no worries, it happens, we'll just go over it again - I suspect he's on a verge of an "eureka" moment with reading - so I suppose a bit of a regression with the writing isn't totally surprising - this one step forward, one step back thing, is a familiar pattern with him.  

Mind, the sentence he wrote out was terrible, letters all over the page, no clear spaces between words; the words not copied correctly...so I wrote the sentence out for him, so he could see exactly what I required.  He struggled so much with writing an "a" though, that we stopped and for ten minutes I took him through, curve, line and tail, bit by bit, break the a down to "c" shape, then having him draw the line from the bottom of the c to the top, then back down and a little tail... it was a tad excruciating; but it worked, he is forming "a's" correctly, just need to break the habit he has of making the tail so exaggerated it looks like a joined up "au".  Still, we went from chaotic writing all over the page, to fairly neat, within the lines writing!  I think Rye was rather surprised when I pointed out his progress, just how much he'd made - mind, he was probably still recovering, bless him.

I confess I did dig out his mecano, expressly because it requires good fine motor skills and hand to eye coordination and concentration.  I need to try and sort out an area in the flat where we can sit and build models together, floor is not a good option for me.  

Rye independently worked on his space project.  He has a model of the solar system; and he built it all by himself and painted it.  He is very pleased with himself.

And yesterday the boys found the biggest sticks EVER!

Scholarly Thursday.

One of the joys of home educating - doing it in one's dressing gown and a cup of coffee in one hand!

The morning began with me coaxing Rye to use the pencil grip aid - it's a simple enough wee gadget, elastic that goes over his wrist with a short loop that goes over the end of his pencil, so it encourages him to hold the pencil at the correct angle; and then there's a wee football charm that he holds in his fist with his middle, index and little fingers, the pencil itself he pincer grips between his forefinger and thumb. This alongside with reminding him to angle the paper so it was comfortable for him to write, made a massive difference to his writing.

He wrote a page of numbers, then made up his own sums and wrote those down too, followed by writing a page from the Science Encyclopedia on the Sun.

After a rewarding mouthful of chocolate, we went on to review the past lesson on Proper Nouns, and then I read a fable to Rye and he answered questions that checked his comprehension, along with many reminders to answer in a complete sentence.

The Classical Education books, are fabulous and save me a large chunk of time I would otherwise need to spend researching activities and books for literacy and language.
Anyway, that brought us nicely to break time; juice and toast for Rye and coffee and toast for me - I'd gotten dressed while he was doing his handwriting practice.

Once refreshed, Rye read about half of Thor to me.  I think though it's time to move onto some other books for a while - apparently another common dyslexic trait, is using the pictures as a visual reminder of the story; so while he can seemingly read words like "hammer", "beasts", "monsters" seen out of the context of this story, he wouldn't know what those words are.

Still he did do well, showed that he was considering the context of the sentence, and using the pictures appropriately to help him work out words, and trying to sound out words.  Mind, at one perplexing point, he started reading "had" as "did", I kept saying "try again, it begins with a "h""  but he still kept saying "did".  Rye tends to see the shape of word, again a dyslexic thing, so while it seems daft to me that he's mixing up "had" and "did" in terms of  word shape, they are similar.  So, as he had read quite a bit up to that point, I suspected reading fatigue was scrambling his brain.  We stopped at that point.  We had another chat too, about remembering to look properly at the word and the letters that make up the word - not just the shape.  Next was history.

Looking through the History Encyclopedia.

Funny isn't it, we began the Space Project because I had this idea we could incorporate, science, math, handwriting, reading, history, geography, natural studies etc all into one super project, and have lots of interrelated strands.  Rye doesn't want to work just on a space project, even when we are covering lots of different things and he has a lot of autonomy - he is a boy who does enjoy mixing the freedom a project allows with more traditional learning methods.  So, I've dug out our Story of the World Book 1, and read to him the introductory chapter that explains what an historian is and how they learn about people's pasts.








One of the activities in the history work book was to create a family tree.  I'm out of ink for my printer at the moment, so I'll have to photocopy the sheets for building up the family tree later, so instead I suggested he draw a picture of his family.

So cute, see me, with my colourful dreads.  Rye drew his Great Granddad George, Granddad Graham, Rosemary, his dad and me, oh, and of course himself.  Took him a while to get his head around the task, but once he got past being harsh about his drawing skills, he really enjoyed the task.

He worked hard, and he knows he accomplished a lot today, and felt really good about himself.
I had planned to do some maths, but as it was already lunch time, I decided that was enough for now, and he did kinda set himself sums during his handwriting practice.

The afternoon was spent on lego, a video game, and playing with his house friends.  During dinner I read the next chapter of the "Goblet of Fire".  Thursdays is also house meeting night, so after settling him with a screen, to the meeting I went.

This coming weekend is a work weekend for the Co-op, working on the windows to ensure they have a long life, and maintaining the access ramp to the garden.  It does mean I need to do some preparatory work tomorrow.  This is the beauty of home ed, and sometimes the difficultly, juggling various life needs and commitments.   The vague plan I have in my head at the moment is for some math work in the morning for 30mins to an hour, depending on how Rye responds to the tasks, then he can help me with the work I need to do in preparation for the work weekend.  And if not too shattered from that, maybe a game of fiddlesticks - it's a reading game, I'll explain more tomorrow.

Now, its bedtime!

Catch up.

I will get back into regularly blogging again, at the mo tho, I'll be doing catchup posts.

So, what have we been up to?

Well,

We visited friends in Folkestone, and had a wonderful time. We really didn't want to come back as we both miss Folkestone a lot. So we made the most of our visit. We visited the Fountain several times and we also went various parks including Brockhill.

The day after getting back home to Liverpool, we went with the Home Ed group to New Brighton for an end of term picnic. Its the first time we've been there, Rye really enjoyed been at the beach again, and he loved watching the remote controlled boats on the little boating lake.

While visiting my friend in Folkestone, we discussed Home education, and my frustrations around keeping Rye engaged and enjoying learning, without it dissolving into tears (his), and annoyed frustration (me, understand, that's me being polite!). What we were doing just wasn't working, we were constantly bashing heads, and getting really upset with each other.

I realised that a lot of the difficulties we were facing was because of my perceived feelings of being pressured by his dad,because Rye's reading is very basic, and his handwriting is awful. I also strongly suspect that Rye is dyslexic, he presents with a lot of the indications.

We really needed the fun back in home education, and for Rye to be more in charge of his learning.

Cue project-based learning. It is perfect, Rye is really enjoying the learning process, and we are ticking all the boxes of things that I would like him to be practising; crafting, painting, handwriting, reading, comprehension, and working on fine motor skills. We are also doing spelling lists, I confess I never had any intention of doing this but Rye is very good at working out what a sentence reads from the pictures, but without the pictures he cannot read the words on their own. I believe it's because he's not really seeing the words and the letters combined to create the individual words. By doing spelling lists it encourages Rye to see the whole of the word, and it does seem to be helping.

And the project, space of course.

We started by painting a background for his project, which I have stock up on the wall in the corridor outside his bedroom. We are currently learning about the sun.

Background for The Space Project.

 

This is the background pinned to the wall and photographed at night with only purple fairy lights for illumination.

This is what he's done today.

A brilliant morning with so much going on; learning how to make a makeshift compass, so he could draw a large circle for his sun diagram. Cutting the circle out and thus improving fine motor skills, we then talked about the different layers of the sun. So he painted the sun as a diagram showing the core, the radiative zone, the convective zone,and the photosphere. His handwriting is still very shaky so I wrote the labels out for him and he went over them in pen, again practising fine motor skills. We are going to spend the entire week, at least, on the sun, doing experiments, more crafting, looking at history (Copernicus, Galileo, folklore, myths and legends) and whatever else sparks our interest :-)

Oooh, the chronology of this post has gone a bit haywire; we went camping too - a few days after Rye painted the background to his project,

Peace News Camp was wonderful, 5 days in the countryside in Shrewsbury; excellent set up of workshops and activities for the kids, and excellent workshops on, mainly, how to oppose renewal of Trident; there was also singing peace protest songs, which was great fun, life drawing (part of using creativity for peace) and evening entertainment, including a talent night, which Rye took part in, very proud of him.

So there we have it, all caught up on family and home ed life.

 

 

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Puzzle piece CAL

So, if you follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, tumblr, twitter, G+, Instagram! you will know I am currently up to my hooks in these fellas;

The first bunch have been sent. My hook needed a change, something easy to pick up and down as orders demand...

I joined Dada Neon Crochet's puzzle piece CAL. I'm woefully behind most people, though only because it started 13weeks ago. Not to worry, I'll play catch up. To that end, I've created two pieces. The first was a simple circle motif in which yarn, colour and textures changed, this first motif ended up reminding me of a butterfly, so I added antannae.

The next suggestion was drawing around the hand and creating a life size replica. I decide to free crochet my hand, and began with a spiral motif that I then squared off a bit, and began adding a thumb and fingers. After that came a colour change, well, as this puzzle piece will create a blanket, I'm using a lot of my hand dyed stash, as well as the novelty yarns, and scraps.

This is my puzzle piece so far:

Once I've completed a few more suggestions I'll show it off again, and hey, why not join in? Freeform crochet, is essentially painting with yarn, and while freeform can have avery distinctive look with the preponderance of spirals, bullion stitches and bobbles - it is by no means restricted to those motifs and stitches, for example:

This piece was inspired by The Magician's Nephew and created by Frances Covey

Isn't it beautiful!

 

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Exploratory Holiday.

Liverpool was brilliant.  We didn't explore as such, as this visit was all about getting to know the members of the co-op, although one day we did go to the beach.  Such a lovely beach, with fabulously high sand dunes to slide down!

Rye loved it all, and did not want to leave, constantly asking me when we would be back....I can answer him now; mid October.  Lots to do, but oh so exciting!

 I particularly loved the fairly deep (certainly deep for Rye to swim) pools that formed - these will be a great asset for Rye gaining confidence to swim in the sea.

 The sand dunes were a big hit, the girls and Rye all sliding or running down, and then climbing back up, while my friend and I sat and chatted.  It was a very pleasant few hours indeed.
(Sorry no photos of the house.)

After Liverpool, we drove to Hebden Bridge; my sat nav, continuing in it's quest to give me a heart attack.  I've really being down South a long time, I'd truly forgotten how steep and hair raising the roads in the Pennines are.  By the time I reached the campsite, I was shaking - tiny roads next to sheer drops, 90 degree bends, that felt vertical - certainly the road to R's house felt vertical, I was on the verge of a panic attack at one point because it truly felt like the car was going to tip over backwards, the road was sooooooooo steep; thankfully, sat nav told me to turn off, just in time!

I really wish my sat nav had a "follow main routes" option!  The general "fastest route" recommended option seems to constantly take me down stupid little roads that are a nightmare to drive, and honestly I fail to see how THAT is  faster than following the much more civilized main roads to both the campsite AND R's house!!!  (or anywhere else for that matter!)

Hebden Bridge Campsite is a sweet little campsite right next to a pub and the road.  It's really a walkers, stop overnight or two type of campsite, although to my surprise there were a few families that pitched up on the Friday.  It's quite a cheap campsite too, if one has a small tent, however, large tents beware, I was charged a supplement of £10 pn, so it made for a very expensive basic campsite.

Trying out our new camp bed, so nice not to sleep on the floor!

Still it served our purpose, and it was a nice clean campsite, with very friendly campers, plus campfires were allowed.  (although not everyone has common sense, my "neighbours" were squeezed in next to me, and bugger me, they had a fire right next to my tent!)  I will probably use again when visiting Rye's family... though I may check out the C&CC site nearer to R's house next time.

Rye wasn't very well Friday, in the afternoon, he feel asleep on me at R's house, and then suddenly woke up and started puking.  Poor thing, thankfully, that was it puking wise, although he did develop a bit of diahorrea that did require a few changes, because the toilet is a few minutes from the camping field.  Thankfully, that passed pretty quickly too, and we simply curled up on our new camp bed - Rye played on my Ipad and I read a book.  Illness aside, it was really pleasant.

Next day the owner told me there was no rush to pack up and take my time, so I did, which meant, despite the rain and then morning dew, the tent was dry when I packed it away.. and very proud of myself, first time I tried to pack away the tent it was a bit of a fight to get it to go back in the bag.  This time it was a breeze.   I do have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this tent.  When I struggle to pick it up.. I find myself feeling rather negative about the tent - gosh the ultimate really does weight a LOT, then I pitch up and get inside and I fall back in love all over again.  It is soooooooooo easy, despite the weight, to set up and take down, and wow it is such a pleasure to sleep under.

Anyway, a leisurely packing, and then a drive home; which took approx 6hrs, far better than the drive up which took over 8 hours.  The downside to arriving home, is Rye puked again that night, and I then started with this tummy bug - diahorrea for me, not puking.  I had been treating with slippery elm bark; but when I started again at 1am last night, I just couldn't cope with another sleepless night on the loo, so I popped to the garage and bought some medicine - slowed it down that I managed to get a few hours kip between episodes.

Ooh, and look at this lovely colouring in Rye did while I was laid up:

This is the first time I've seen him take such care to stay in the lines - and to be so colourful too - he often only uses one colour at a time.  I so wish I'd taken a photo of his superheroes outfit he made, too.  He used glittery self sticking foam sheets to create a face mask and super hero trunks... which he also stuck tissue paper to, creating a kind of half skirt, and then using his red mamapixie red cloak as his super hero cape.... bless him, very creative and very funny!

Right bedtime :-)

Night night.

Dangerous Yarn Adventures!

 By Thursday most of the snow had melted.  Thursday is Home Ed Group day and we had decided to go to Kidz Planet and I offered to drive over and give a friend a lift... she's only 15 min drive away..... and look; some of the snow was higher than the car!  Haven't seen it like this since I was a kid living in Yorkshire!

 Ahhhh crochet, how I love you.  Above is a baby blanket I'm making for a GP mama, to gift her sister.  Ambivalence has dogged me so far, I initially started using a deep strong teal and a strong dark green.  I wasn't feeling it; that was frogged, I re looked at my colours and chose the above colours; but felt there wasn't balance, I've since picked up a few more greens; a soft green and a lovely soft lime green, which should compliment the above scheme nicely and provide more balance :-)

The owl wall hanging was finished and posted.  I must ask the recipient to take a photo, weather has been so rubbish here and the light so dark, I wasn't able to get a decent photo.  Pleased how it turned out.  I think single motifs on the corner of baby blankets would look lovely too!  I've also been comissioned to make a purse out of these motfis.  Bit of a new challenge for me; adding a zip - not something I've done before.  I really wish I could get one of those sharp crochet hooks, specifically for crocheting onto fabric, that would make life sooooooo much easier - actually my small hooks might be sharp enough to poke through...hmmm will test.  I do love the creative process; being inspired, sketching ideas, adding colours, textures, working out stitch patterns if not using an existing pattern... fun, fun, fun!

Another make was sent out; I'll let you go and have a look on my Etsy page if interested; it was a stripey willy warmer; gosh, I had a giggle fest taking photos; laughing so hard, tears ran down my face!

Oooh and a tale I have for this yarn!  Last September a client gave me a voucher for £20 for a LYS, as a thank you for minding her daughter.  Today, I found it, I'd completely forgotten about it, I needed greens for the baby blanket (yes, those greens; lovely yarn, it's by KingCole, called Comfort, and acrylic/nylon mix - very soft and scrummy), so ideal, and well, while there I decided to treat myself - I love James C Brett Marble Chunky, and the red yarn, is a actually a weird almost fillet crochet ribbon; looking forward to experimenting with it for my freeform projects.

The tale?  Heart stopping - almost literally for me!  The yarn shop I went to is in Dover, and the drive from here to there was wet and very windy, the car was buffeted a fair bit.  On the way back, half way home, this object, out of nowhere was flying straight toward my  head, I ducked, as you do - not that it would have mattered of course had it hit the windscreen.  Phew, thankfully it didn't; but it did hit the roofbox with an almighty thud.  Very proud, I kept my cool and not a swerve in sight.....  pounding heart, stomach in mouth.. but otherwise ok.

Initially, I thought it was a seagull, but the thud I heard had a metalic sound.  Heart sank back down into my chest as it dawned on me.. the wind had blown the grill off the front of the car - and that is why it suddenly appeared from nowhere. Thank goodness no other cars were behind me; it could have caused an accident.  I am very unhappy, you may remember, the grill fell off 24hrs after I purchased the car, and I had a bit of wrangling with the dealership to get them to replace it.....  that it's come off again, has made me an unhappy bunny.  I've now had the nearly a year though, and of course the grill isn't covered by the warranty... isn't that typical.  I shall be writing to Vauxhall and declaring my unhappy bunnyiness!  In the meantime, Zaffy is a bit naked at the front :-(  Poor love.