4-H Friday

Today is the first Friday of the month and at our house during the school year, that means 4-H and Cloverbuds!

My oldest daughter is starting her 2nd year with 4-H and has chosen sewing, photography, and community service as her primary areas of focus this year.

We're getting started this weekend with a sewing project that will carry us into most of next week - sewing items to sell at a local Farmer's Market Harvest Festival on 10 October. The proceeds from the items that are sold will go into our club 4-H fund, primarily to help pay for the Forestry Team to go to the State Competition in a few weeks. We'll be making tons of cute items to sell and I'll be sure to show you how some of them turn out here.

New this year, I'm leading the monthly craft activity for our 4-H group. I have 2 teen leaders who are helping me - I essentially have gone through and decided on a craft activity for the group for each month and made a supply list. I purchase the supplies, get the components ready, then make an example of the craft. The teen leaders are then supposed to lead the craft at each meeting.

I chose crafts for each month that would qualify to be entered in our annual 4-H Craft Fair next July. The categories are very similar to those for our local county fairs in the fall; this gives our students an opportunity to make neat crafts that they can enter into several different fairs if they want.

Today our craft was leaf magnets: I took posterboard and cut out various leaf shapes that were about 3 inches in diameter. We hot-glued a magnet button to the back of each one. Then, the students covered the front with glue and wound a strand of variegated yarn in fall colors around the template, working from outside edges into the middle. They ended up with a really nice looking fall magnet for the refrigerator - from a distance the yarn almost looks like a velvet or felt. I'll post pictures when I can get them downloaded.

I'm leading the Cloverbuds group again this year as well - my middle daughter is participating in this group. Cloverbuds is for children in K-3rd grade and is an introduction to 4-H type activities.

In Cloverbuds today we learned what 4-H is, the 4-H pledge and then studied about pumpkins and where they came from. Then each Cloverbud was able to spend the rest of the time on their craft for the month: Pumpkin Painting!

The Cloverbuds had a great time - I have a large group so far this year - about 30 students. As invariably seems to happen though, by the time Christmas passes, we seem to end up with a core group of about 8-10 students who stick with us to the end.

Late this afternoon, the girls and I painted our pumpkins for the house. They turned out really nice and I'll have pictures of those sometime this weekend!