For the boys' sake, we had to talk about duels during this unit! (Actually, the girls are quite the experts on duels as well. It comes of reading so many Georgette Heyer books.😄)
Here are some resources we used:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8IdfA5fXJs fencing basics
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGLb3sNQpow types of swords
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toi3JY3LLUM rules of duels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHfBCBxdf2M pistol duel
We got some water guns and tried some duelling of our own, strictly following duelling etiquette, of course! I'm sorry to say some of our seconds didn't adequately manage to talk the duellers out of their duels, and in fact, ended up getting into duels themselves!
In spite of our efforts to keep everything civilized, it soon degenerated into all-out war! Tsk tsk!
For the sake of balance, after a spot of duelling, we thought some embroidery would be in order. You can see lots of examples that still exist of embroidery from the Regency Era. (In fact, we had a whole book of them, which I somehow misplaced and had to pay the library fine for. Grrr.)
For example:
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=1881597262599226&set=pcb.1243320060690093 Jane Austen’s quilt
https://curatorscurio.com/2020/02/12/is-this-jane-austens-sampler/ pictures
https://janeaustens.house/news/conserving-cassandras-handkerchief/ handkerchief
The girls are pretty experienced already with embroidery, so I got them some little samplers to work on and practice new stitches.
These had the guides printed right on the fabric, which made it easy. I think they were fun to do; the girls seemed to like them. Junie and Daisy are still working on theirs (Daisy was madly doing some cross-stitch pictures for their bedroom right then, plus crocheting a blanket and making some crocheted things for Malachi, so her time with it was limited), but Goldie finished hers and it is beautiful:
a
I especially like the embroidered flowers, and hope my girls could make a set of napkins like this one pictured above someday! My Nana did beautiful handwork like that and I think she would be proud of how good the girls are getting!
For the boys, who have less to no experience with embroidery, I did what my mom did for me when I was little: drew designs of things they like on pieces of cloth and had them just stitch along the lines. They were very enthusiastic, and even Gus got the hang of it pretty quickly! A few times over a week or so, I walked into a room to find every person in it quietly embroidering! Quite a sight to see!
They were justly proud of their finished work! Here is Gus's Caw (Sam drew the picture)
Teddy's basketball bunny (I traced a picture I found)
And Ziggy's cute fox eating a mouse!
No comments:
Post a Comment