Michaelmas Week

"I give to you this cape of light,

to give you courage, strength and might."

We had a wonder-filled week preparing for our Michaelmas celebration. This was our first time celebrating a truly Waldorf festival and I must say that everyone thoroughly enjoyed it. Early in the week we felted shooting star balls, then dyed them and our silk capes with sunflowers from our yard and tumeric. Even my big girls had fun with their capes, and wore them to school on the 29th. They quite happily explained to thier friends why.

On Friday, my sister and her daughters and Gramie joined us for our official Michaelmas Festival...

All the kids made thier own cute dragon breads using Tasha Tudor's White Bread Recipe (made with half whole wheat flour, and goat milk of course!)

They really were too cute to eat! But we did eat them, with delicious Daddy-made potato soup.


Robin spent two days making an amazing dragon pinata. He used a rocket balloon, paper mache, paint, and tissue paper. All the kids took turns fighting the dragon with Saint Michael's sword, and upon it's demise were showered with golden butterscotch candies.

The field for the shooting star throw was carefully marked in 20 foot increments.....

...using stakes artfully adorned by Jesse with sunflowers.

Finally the courageous angels were ready (just look at those characters!)

Stars were flung, capes swirled, and everyone cheered!

After all the outdoor excitement, we were treated to an exciting rendition of "St. George and the Dragon" starring Jesse as the noble St. George, Robin as the ferocious dragon, Elsa as the brave princess, and Jill as the wise queen. We then sang "A Boy's Resolve" and happily agreed that Michaelmas is definitely an awesome festival!

(P.S. You can read my sister's version with a few different pictures on her blog here.)

Natural Dye

We have a ton of beautiful sunflowers in our yard. They came up voluntarily, apparantly from wild seeds washed in through the irrigation.

No, really, I mean a ton! Enough for a whole sunflower forest, complete with secret tunnel...and that's not even showing the huge sunflower plants that have grown up in my garden and various other places in the yard.

So...Michaelmas is coming, and we have been charmed by the idea of dying our own golden capes. Trouble is, we don't have any marigolds. Hmmm. Would sunflowers work? We decided to experiment. We started with a whole bunch of whole sunflower heads...

which resulted in this lovely yellow-green, but not really what we were going for.

Then we tried sunflower petals mixed with Mexican Bird of Paradise blossoms and buds.

The pot looked beautiful, the water was kind of murkey, but turned a lovely orangy-pink when I stirred in a sprinkle of citric acid. But when we added the wool, it just didn't seem to be holding the color. We boiled for quite a while, but it just turned out light beige....hmm...

Finally we decided to try just sunflower petals. Just the petals! Nothing else! So tons more flowers were picked. This time we decided to put in a silk scarf too. It was looking very promising, I added a little sprinkle of Tumeric for some intensity....

Now that is color!!! Wow! I couldn't believe how bright it turned out! Now, I don't know how much is sunflowers and how much the Tumeric, but I had a whole pot of sunflower petals and maybe a 1/4 tsp. of tumeric, if that. Anyway, the result is definitely sunflower yellow!

Here are the results, left to right: Sunflower petals and tumeric; onion skins (I only had a tiny bit, so we just did one little pot. It turned out a gorgeous golden color!); sunflower petals and Mexican bird of paradise; sunflower heads.

All the wool and silk was pre-boiled in half water and half white vinegar with a teaspoon of alum added for color fastness. We pre-boiled for one hour, at the same time pre-boiling the flowers for one hour. Then we strained off most of the petals and added the rinsed wool and silk. We then boiled this mixture for about another hour. With the onion skins, though, I just added the pre-boiled wool into the pot with a handful of onion skins and boiled the whole thing for about 45 minutes.

We are thinking that this weekend for our Michaelmas capes, we will do the sunflower petals and tumeric with a few onion skins added for a deeper yellow...All 5 kids demanded to be a part of it! I didn't think the older 3 would want yellow silk capes, but I thought wrong! They still love dress-up!