Ancaster Fair

For the last few years, I've taken my kids to the Ancaster Fair.  It's close by, and on one of the days it's free for homeschoolers.  Good deal!

Last year as we went through the School Fair building, the kids oooh'd and ahhh'd over all the exhibits.  Art work, posters, needlework, crafts of every kind.  I could tell that my four were wishing they had entered something.

So this year we entered their mosaics.  Honour also entered a small painting she had made and a ball of yarn she spun and dyed with her Grandma Kent this past summer.  As well as her mosaic, Verity entered a baby hat she knitted with her hoop.  Because Jairus and Afton only entered their mosaics, I hoped their pieces would do well.

All but Jairus' entry received a "Prize winning entry" ribbon, which I guess is fourth place.  The lowest placing was a small sticker in the shape of a ribbon that said "Thanks for entering", so I was glad that they at least got the ribbons.  Jairus' clock received 2nd place, which means he gets 3$ while the girls I believe get 1$ for each of their ribbons.

A satisfactory first showing in the Ancaster Fair School Fair. :-)

Autumn Candles

I'm not on Pinterest, and I refuse to be.  However, I get daily emails from this lady (she's got a good thing going there) and a few weeks ago she had one of her homeschool Pinterest parties.  I didn't "attend" but one picture did catch my eye, so I peeked at it, and followed the links to it's original home.  I thought these mason jar candles were SO beautiful, and they seemed fairly simple to make: a good craft for the kids.



http://gingerbreadsnowflakes.com/node/102

So we went out gathering leaves and pressed them in a pad of paper.  We let them dry there for two weeks, just as the instructions said.

Exactly two weeks later we opened up the notepad and each kid chose out a jar.  We seemed to have amassed a collection of mason jars and other dollar store jars.

We set to work pasting the leaves onto the jars using Mod Podge I had picked up at Michaels.  There was some frustration on most everyone's part trying to get the leaves to actually stick and stay on the jars.  We found that the maple leaves seemed to stick down the best, while the oak leaves were quite thick and would only stick in the centre.  With mason jars being square-ish, it was nearly impossible to stick leaves around the angles.  We tried letting the Mod Podge dry a bit to become tacky, but it didn't make much of a difference.  We ended up holding parts of the leaves against the jars, waiting for them to stay down.

Finally we managed to get the leaves mostly pasted on, and let them dry for a couple days.  I think I'll hunt around for some ribbon to dress up the tops, instead of just putting the rings back on.