A Summer of Little House Living – Plans for our Mrs Ingalls and her Girls

For all other posts related to our Little House on the Prairie Summer see here

Activities for the female Ingalls will revolve around food and crafting, mainly sewing.  There are many projects to be found in some of the books we own above.  They are all crafts mentioned in some way in Laura’s books and most require some form of sewing.  Add those to our very own Little House projects and we have us a rather good sewing curriculum!
And this is where the fun will start.  L10 and C10 have both been begging me to teach them to sew on the machine.  I want them to learn to hand sew first.  It is a good discipline and it allows them to become familiar with the feel of different fabrics and their properties.  Also, even when you learn to sew by machine, often hand sewing is still required to finish a piece off.  This summer the girls are going to learn to hand sew beautifully on the understanding that if they apply themselves and learn to do a good job I will give them each a sewing machine in the autumn (I own three, one from my teenage years and two which were given to us as the owner didn’t want them anymore).

In addition to the plain running stitch, the girls also want to learn more embroidery stitches.  We did a bit of embroidery this year whilst studying ancient China and they both took to it really well.  We have all been pouring over websites and pinterest for ideas of things we want to make for our house.  We all have so many ideas and the girls really can’t wait to get started.  We’ll be making curtains, patchwork quilts, a mattress, knitting some dish cloths, making some simple dress up clothes for the little ones and many, many other ideas.  I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

In addition (yes, there’s more) C10 particularly wants to learn to make rag dolls (again for her little sisters), whilst L10 wants to be in the kitchen, learning to make the kind of food Mrs Ingalls would have cooked for her family.  My own contribution to proceedings is the suggestion that the whole family try their hand at a rag rug, making it from scraps of material.  This will be used on the ground floor to make our little house more homely.

A4 and B2 will play with the Little House paper dolls, play dress up, cook Little House style with me and also try their hand at making simple crafts as time and skill allow.  We also own most of the younger child’s version of the Little House books which I will read to the little ones each day.

All four girls will have classes using Ray’s arithmetic and McGuffey’s Eclectic readers, with some slate and chalk, just like Mary and Laura would have.  If there is any time left, we will take that opportunity to watch a few episodes of the Little House on the Prairie DVD.  We have the first couple of series, and a friend has offered to lend us the rest.

We’re all set!

Oh, and one more thing…..the girls will be working according to this little poem Ma Ingalls used to say:

“Wash on Monday,
Iron on Tuesday,
Mend on Wednesday,
Churn on Thursday,
Clean on Friday,
Bake on Saturday,
Rest on Sunday.”

But more about that tomorrow….