The Fix

 I hand quilt.  How many times in 30 years have I cut a thread?  A million?  How many times have I 'slipped' and nicked the appliqued piece?  None, until day before yesterday.  Why couldn't the nick have happened before the whole quilt was layered and basted? 

After giving some thought to what I was going to do and even if I was going to send it out to be machine quilted, I started by outlining each petal.  Then...nick.  No excuses other than I was tired.  So. Stare at it for a day and think what would be involved to fix it.  It wasn't more than a couple of threads but you can't feed a washing machine a weak spot. (The quilting looks kind of clunky here but it isn't in person.)

A bee!  Bees love sunflowers as much as Adelaide does!  I like bees!  I have some fabric with nice bees on it!  Applique a bee over the nick!  It worked.

My reading days at school are over.  The teacher whose class I read to for years retired and rather than find another teacher, she said she wants to do what I did with her grandchildren's classrooms - follow them through as they progress through the building.  Good for her! It was a good ride but it was time to move on to something new.

Before covid my daughter had a program at the museum for tots.  Once a month young moms could bring the littles for a crafty morning. Daughter had in the back of her mind to reinstate that.  I had put the notion in her head of including an appropriate to history story to school groups that come.  We put the two different thoughts together and came up with reinstating the tots craft morning with a story or two.  I told her I'd run it.  

We will start in October.  October is pumpkin time (do you remember our conversations last fall about the difference between what you call a pumpkin and what we call a pumpkin?)  Since our craft morning will be in the very beginning of the month and the holidays are at the end of the month and these littles don't have a sense of time yet I decided to go with pumpkins but not Halloween. 

These are the books I chose and the craft.  Two books, one craft, coloring the pumpkin (which won't have staples) and making a stick puppet.  But you can't do the beloved rhyme Five Little Pumpkins without finger puppets so I made some and got a little carried away.  They are primitive, but so are pumpkins that are carved by a 3 year old.   We are reinstating a program that was stopped six years ago so till word gets out there may be one child or ten. Plenty of pumpkin finger puppets to hand out.

Once I get the flow of working with 2-4 year olds under my belt I will have a better idea of what crafty thing works. I am not even considering this will go smoothly. But all kids like a story and choosing which ones to read will be the hard part.  There are too many good ones and not enough time.