She's Crafty | Have You Ever Wondered?

Have you ever wondered how "they" make some of the common things we use every day? Or, have you ever wondered what you would do if "they" ever stopped making them? I know, my kids think I'm weird on that point, too. But, you never know when the apocalypse is coming and, I've learned how to make and do some interesting things by wondering about this. For instance, I can bake my own bread using sourdough as the leavening. I can, in theory, make my own cheese (well, I've made yogurt cheese before--and the yogurt!) And, I can make children's clothing that looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I can even knit things that sort of fit, as long as it's a scarf (don't ask how my first sweater fit.) Well, along these lines, our blog about making books last week got me to thinking of paper.

Now that we'd kind of know how to make our own books, I thought, what about the paper? How would we make our own paper? The first thing I did was look up papermaking (make sure it's one word) in our library catalog.

There were some interesting titles:
Trash to treasure papermaking, by Arnold E. Grummer
Book making and papermaking, by Deborah Hufford (there's even one for kids!)
Papermaking techniques book, by John Plowman
Step by step papermaking, by David Watson 
The paper maker's companion, by Helen Hiebert


This list took us back to a publication date of 2000, and there were several older titles as well. A pretty respectable list for our library system, I thought. These will keep me busy for a while. I'll start with Trash to treasure paper making because that one will show me how to make recycled paper. That way, if the apocalypse never comes, I can at least be green. And, maybe being green will actually help with the apocalypse thing too...

Then, I expanded my search to Link + and hit the mother-lode of papermaking books! There were 174 "most relevant" titles! Some of the first few of these were:
Arnold Grummer's complete book of papermaking, by Arnold E. Grummer
300 papermaking recipes, by Mary Reimer
The encyclopedia of papermaking & bookbinding, by Heidi Reimer-Epp
The ergonomics of hand papermaking, by Peter Thomas
Papermaking for the first time, by Rhonda Rainey

Wow! Imagine recipes for paper--three hundred of them. I had thought some of the instructions I had seen in Trash to treasure papermaking looked kind of like recipes, and now here are so many I probably won't ever use them all!  I'm also intrigued by The ergonomics of hand papermaking. I'm not sure how this will affect my papermaking, but I'd better find out before I hurt something by not doing it properly!

Now that I have all this great information from the libraries to draw from, I think I need to figure out what kind of paper to make first. I mean, there seem to be many kinds of papers to make, and I have seen some of them. Some are so beautiful, you'd want to hang them somewhere, like art. Then, there are the papers in which you would wrap a very special gift. But, I think I'd like to start with some paper I can write on, preferably in as light a color as I can make it if I can't actually get white...you just never know about that apocalypse and when it might be coming.

If you have ever wondered whether it would be a good idea to make some common everyday thing like paper, leave us a comment and let us know about it. As you can see, we kind of like to be prepared.

Until next time, stay crafty, apocalypse or not ~ Kaye & Malia

Just Life | Too Tired To Read

Sometimes I have a hard time getting my child to read. Some nights she says, "Mom I am too tired to read."

So, we try to compromise and take turns reading. Although, I think I am still doing the majority of the nightly reading.

Last month, I came across these children books that are life savors. They are the perfect books for those nights that you don't have any energy to read a long book. 

They are full of funny, but grotesque facts. These books are published by the National Geographic Kids. Here are a few of these books:

That's gross!

Weird but true! 5 : 300 outrageous facts

Just joking 4 : 300 hilarious jokes about everything...

Kids really dig reading about yucky stuff. Here is an example of what you find in these books:

My daughter and I laugh uncontrollably reading funny factoids from these books.

I wonder if I look this like this Batfish when I use too much lipstick in the morning.
 

So, check out these great books on your next visit to your local library. Here is a link to other books by the National Geographic Kids:

National Geographic Kids

Signing off until next Monday- Panteha 

Books On Film | Teen In '14 (The Fault in Our Stars/The Giver)

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is a book about two teenager, both with a different form of cancer, who meet and fall in love while attending a weekly support group.
 

The movie adaption is schedule to be released in June. It stars Shailene Woodley, who will play Triss in Divergent.

The movie poster (right) was recently released to the public.

The Giver by Lois Lowry is about a twelve year old boy named Jonas who is chosen to be trained as the next "Receiver of Memory" of his perfect utopia society. The Reciever of Memory is responsible for holding all knowledge of the society before their conversion to "Sameness." 

The knowledge Jonas receives from "The Giver" (his predecessor) causes him to question whether the rules of "the Community" are the best way for people to live.

The movie adaptation is scheduled to be released in August. It stars Jeff Bridges, Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood), Meryl Streep, and Taylor Swift.

 

Covers courtesy of LibraryThing.

Book Bucket List | Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

A while ago, I was asking for books to feature in a post for Valentine's Day.  A friend recommended Jamie Ford's Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet and I added it to my "romantic books" list.  It's been awhile since I wrote the post, but I never forgot that book was one I wanted to read.  So this weekend, I finally picked it up and gave it a go, and I LOVED IT.  It had history, featured my favorite city (Seattle), and had a wonderful, and at times heart wrenching, story about two people living in a tumultuous time.

The story is told from the perspective of Henry, a young Chinese-American boy attending an all-white prep school in Seattle in 1942.  He hates his school, but attends because of all the trouble his parents went through to get him into the school on scholarship.  However, things are looking up for Henry when Keiko, a Japanese-American girl starts at the school and begins working with him in the cafeteria.  They start spending time together, which Henry's father absolutely does not approve of, and you can imagine what happens next.  However, with the war developing in the East, American hackles are up and before they know it, Keiko and her family are facing deportation to Japanese Internment camps.  The story focuses on how far one is willing to go for the one they love and how much people can change and adapt to their circumstances.

Jamie Ford released Songs of Willow Frost this last year and am reading it as soon as I can get my hands on a copy.

So as a thank you to my friend who recommended this wonderful book to me, here is a picture of some turtles, because she does indeed love turtles.

Learning | Bibliographies at the Lieberry

Ouch! The title of this post really bothers me.  I hope it bothers you, too.  I hope you say the word library correctly.  

Library comes from the French word, librarie (bookshop or bookstore,) which in turn came from the Latin librarium (chest for books.)  Would you care to guess what the Latin root libr- means? It means book. 

Library Defined, By the American Heritage First Dictionary,
 Lester Public Library, Two Rivers, Wisconsin
Photo courtesy of Lester Public Library's photostream on Flickr.com.
Some rights reserved.

Libr- originally meant the inner bark of trees (paper or parchment.) It's also related to the English word leaf. Sometimes, the pages in a book are referred to as leaves.

Since the word comes from libr-, it is very important to keep that r sound when pronouncing library. Checking out books has nothing to do with lies or berries!

In English, we use the word library to mean a place for books--usually the kind of place that lends books, rather than selling them.  Other countries have a word for the same thing, but since they still use words like librarie or libraria for establishments that sell books, they call lending libraries by a word like bibliothèque, Bibliothek, or biblioteca.

Bibliothèque de l'université de Caen.
Photo courtesy of Karl Dupart's solcarluscaen photostream on Flickr.com.
Some rights reserved.

Bibliothèque comes from another word that means book. That Greek word, biblion, is also the source of the words Bible and bibliography.  Bibliographies! Ah, yes, the other part of the post title that bothers me:  The misuse of the word bibliography. Bibliography comes from biblio- (book) and -graphy (writing.)  It usually is used to refer to the list of books cited in a scholarly work.

Bible, Solomon Teaches Youth, Walters Manuscript W.51, fol. 54r from the Walters Art Museum's photostream on Flickr.com. Some rights reserved. Bibliography, from Zoonoses: The Lethal Gifts of Livestock: bibliography slide, by Delia Grace, ILRI 'livestock live talk' seminar, 31 Oct 2012, from ILRI's photostream on Flickr.com. Some rights reserved.

I hear customers asking for a bibliography when they really mean a biography. These words sound similar, so it's easy to make that mistake. But if you remember that the root biblio- means book, maybe you can remember that a story of a person's life is not a bibliography, but a biography.  

Especially since the Latin root, bio- means life. Think of other words that contain the root bio-, like biology (study of life) or antibiotic (a medicine that destroys or inhibits the growth of microorganisms.)

Speaking of biographies, I hear another mistake frequently. Many people ask for the autobiography section of the library, when they really mean the biography section. An autobiography is an account of a person's life, written by that person.  So, if the author of a biography is the same person the book is about, it is an autobiography. 


These are a few of my favorite picture books in the children's biography section:

Stone Girl, Bone Girl: the Story of Mary Anning

Bon Appétit!: the Delicious Life of Julia Child




The following autobiography by George Carlin is most decidedly not for children, but he sure knew his way around words:

Last Words

Do you have a favorite biography, or autobiography--or even a favorite bibliography? Tell me about it in a comment below.

She's Crafty | Book Bound

Over the Christmas season I made a few gifts. Handmade books to be exact. I've dabbled in bookbinding before but I kinda went overboard and made my projects more difficult than they really needed to be. Too many pages, too many little holes...if you have to grab a drill to bind a book and it's still too hard, your project may be a bit more ambitious than a newbie can handle. I abandoned my projects and set bookbinding aside, thinking it wasn't my thing.

Recently, I got the itch to try again while looking for a drawing book that would lay flat when opened and stumbled upon THE BEST bookbinding video tutorials EVER by YouTuber, Sea Lemon! Go on, check them out for yourself:

• Click here to make a sketch book that will lay flat when opened.

• Click here to make a book from a Junior Mints box!

• Click here to make a sushi book...or two...or six.

For Christmas gifts, I ended up making three different book projects. The first, a coptic stitch bound sketch book for a friend. I bought a large mixed media drawing pad, detached all the pages and folded them in half, cut the cardboard backing in half, poked a bunch of holes in everything, waxed some thread, followed the video instructions on how to coptic stitch and within an hour the book was finished!

I heart binder clips!

The second project was a few sushi books with a perfect binding. Perfect binding involves gluing the spine instead of stitching the pages together. A few layers of glue and it's surprising how well the pages stick together! It's also fun deciding how to press the books while gluing. I decided to make six, three a piece to two little girls who love to go to sushi with the adults in their lives. It seemed like an easy-peasy project, and it really is, but six is a LOT more work than I thought! They are incredibly cute little books and decorating the covers made the tedious bits completely worth the effort.

 
The third project was going to be a set of small, bright blue notebooks with a perfect binding and gold leafing on the cover. Late, the night before I would be handing over this project as a gift I: got the pages bound together; cut the cover to size and scored it in all the right places following the Junior Mint recycled book tutorial; got what I thought was the gold leaf out annnd failure commenced. Now that I think about it, I believe the gold stuff I used wasn't exactly gold leaf. In the end, I had to purchase a gift, BUT I'm determined to revisit the gold leaf book project and find success.

Gold leaf imposter AKA gold stuff

I'm glad I found the Sea Lemon videos. They helped me bring bookbinding down from some lofty perch I stuck it on long ago with the title of Maybe This Isn't For Me. Dwindling are the days that I can't move forward in my pursuit of learning a new craft because I can't find resources to help me puzzle the problems out. At this moment in time, I may not know how to use a decades old kit of gold stuff with successful results, but I did learn how to make a few books!

And, not surprisingly, the library has many books on handmade books:

Whip up a book in no time!

• Book Making and Paper Making

• The Penland Book of Handmade Books

• The Handmade Book

• Making and Keeping a Handmade Journal 

• Making Books by Hand: A Step-by-Step Guide

• The Book Book: A Journey into Bookmaking 

There is even a picturebook about bookmaking for the little ones!

• Magic in the Margins: A Medieval Tale of Bookmaking  

Until next time, enjoy your crafting endevours and keep at it. You never know, you might find a book or video that gets you going in the direction towards great success!

Kaye & Malia

Still Life| Here Comes The Soccer Mom !

Are you a soccer fan? I am originally from Iran, and lots of Iranians are very passionate about their soccer teams. I was never a fan of any sports until a few weeks ago. 

My daughter is taking soccer and she has turned me into a soccer fan.

I tell you, watching a bunch of rookie third and fourth graders playing soccer is highly entertaining. Her team is called Fire and they are anything but fire. I love watching her play. She has fun playing soccer. She also ducks every time the opposite team kicks the ball very high.

I constantly yell instructions to my daughter from the sideline.

The crazy thing is that, I don't have a clue about how to play this game but that doesn't prevent me from yelling instructions to my daughter. My poor daughter constantly shushes me to no avail. 

 I tell you, I have turned unintentionally into a soccer fan.

I just need to learn a bit about this game and I will be all set.   

I got to read this book I think:

How soccer works


signing off until next Monday- Panteha