crafters lunch

Kym organised a lunch for all the crafters that put things in her shop, my parents came too so I think there were 11 adults in all plus a baby, a 10 month old and Ebi-kun. We went  to a lovely Italian place for the lunch, I had gorgonzola penne which Ebi-kun loved, he ate about half of mine! I was surprised because it has quite a strong taste, the boy likes his food, he announced that he wanted to go to a nice restaurant for his dinner too.  The lunch was good fun, I didn't get to chat with everyone and my voice was nothing more that a croak anyway, chatting was quite hard going. Some of the ladies speak English and were keen to practice so my parents had a fun time too, Yoshiko-san has travelled quite a bit and is very funny so she had us all in fits of giggles. Kym has decided to have a closing down week and within that week to have workshops and a crafters flea market. Somehow I got roped into doing a workshop in English! I will probably make felt brooches something like these...

 

I have some other designs I am working on, I think they need to be fairly easy ones for the time limit aspect so I won't be doing the peacock and the mushroom looks too much like a lot of the Japanese kawaii stuff around such as Decole, I'd rather make something that has my 'stamp' on it as such. I might make some up as kits to go in the shop...when I get some free time that is.

Yesterday morning we managed to fit in some Montessori work, Ebi-kun picked maths based work, first he used this little magnetic board I picked up in the ¥100 shop, it is for simple addition and subtraction, using pictures of fruit, he had to pick the right numeral too, he is getting better with them.
Then he started a number book for more number practice. Each page has a flower then he sticks butterflies to the page depending on the number at the bottom of the page, he did 4 pages before getting bored so we put it back on the shelf for another time. We are going to the ¥100 shop today so I will have a look for some autumn inspired bits to make up some new activities.
Then he got the world map out, he worked with this for a while, then we played a slam game with the matching cards,  mom called out the continent and Ebi-kun and I slammed the cards - it was great fun and a good review. I used to play this game A LOT when I was teaching.
The final thing he did was sticking pins in a board. I have seen this on a number of blogs, I'm not sure whose idea it was first. Anyway I used the metal insets and traced a couple of shapes onto construction paper then taped them to pieces of thick foam. He then used a push pin to make pin pricks all along the lines. It took a lot of concentration but he loved doing it. He did managed to stick the pin in his leg twice, I think I should use thicker foam next time :o). When he had finished we got the torch out and climbed under the blanket to look at the shapes, all good fun.