Bad crafts and good fairies

Last week I received the gift of a milkweed plant from a butterfly gardener. Milkweeds are the host plant for monarch butterflies. They are the host plant for memories of Blue Bird day camp at Roberts Park, too.

Roberts Park had a tiny creek running through it, with reeds and milkweed plants along the banks under the spotty shade of big trees. As a Blue Bird, I learned to make a sit-upon out of newspapers, and a drum out of an oatmeal container. I learned to be very careful sitting on splintery picnic table benches wearing shorts, and that crying wouldn't get my mom to take me home.

When I "flew up" to become a Camp Fire Girl, I got to make far more advanced craft projects that all seemed to require gold spray paint. We glued dry macaroni onto a cigar box to make a sewing basket (and I liked the cigar smell!). When spray-painted gold, and loaded with straight pins and a measuring tape, we young ladies were ready to make quilt squares for orphans, which was a step up from making holiday napkin rings for nursing home residents out of tp tubes. I still have the same strawberry pincushion from 1965.

Camp Fire Girls attended day camp at the more remote, large, and wild Pioneers Park. I rode out there every summer day with the day camp director in the far, far back of her pale blue VW Beetle. We went early and were the very last to leave. Due to a terror of falling down a porta-potty, I was forced to stay dehydrated for ten hours per summer day.

We used a mosquito repellent that resembled a glue stick, and was called "6-12", or something like that. Coated with the smelly mosquito repellent, the bonfire smoke, itchy dried-on sweat, and the camomile lotion on yesterday's bites, avoiding the potties, and afraid to drink the instant Tang (in spite of the astronauts), I spent more days on splintery picnic benches and woven newspaper sit-upons. We hiked around the park collecting leaves to glue onto more oatmeal containers, and sandwiched other weeds between clear Contac paper to make bookmarks. We learned to coat the outside of an iron skillet with Joy Dishwashing Liquid to keep the skillet from turning black over the flames. We learned to not coat the inside of the skillet with Joy Dishwashing Liquid to avoid getting diarrhea. We learned to put nail polish on the tips of wooden matches and store them in metal Band-Aid containers in case of emergency. We learned to put our head between our knees if we felt faint, and to lean back if we had a nosebleed. We learned that "nature" was when you used four pieces of tree bark to make a picture frame. "Art" was making a lanyard out of plastic braid. I've got the beads and patches to prove it!

During the winter months we had weekly afterschool Camp Fire meetings in our basement. The high point of all meetings was having "treats", which were usually Hi-C and cookies or popcorn balls. Each December we made crafts like the classic Reader's Digest angel--again with the gold spray paint. Another biggie was making a pomander out of an orange and cloves. Do you know how many meetings it takes to cover the surface of an orange with cloves at one hour per week when you are ten years old??? I would rather go through induced childbirth than make another pomander in Camp Fire Girls!

The all-time greatest bad Camp Fire Girl craft project involved collecting milkweed pods, cattails, and other weeds in Roberts Park. Then next meeting, our amazing leaders brought LP 33 1/3 rpm record albums that had been baked in some fool's kitchen oven until the vinyl rippled and ruffled out from the spindle hole to the edge. Where the record label was, we glued on a halved styrofoam sphere. Into the half-sphere, we poked the stems of all the dried weeds and milkweed pods. Then the leaders spray-painted this aesthetic nightmare in gold. We were able to take these lovely creations home to use for Thanksgiving table centerpieces. You know, we gather together to spray-paint the milkweed...

I've done some dumb kitchen stunts in the pursuit of children's craft projects over the years, but I can't imagine the bravado and stupidity that would allow a young mother to bake LP's until they rippled. I set a microwave oven on fire trying to melt crayons for a wax resist project. I tinted the wallpaper around the kitchen exhaust fan a lovely blue by switching on the fan at the same time I sprinkled a package of dry RIT dye powder into a boiling pot of water.

If you would like to see a sweet video about fairies, look for "Kristen's Fairy House" at your local library or video rental store.