Our Own Little Sweat Shop

Last week Zac's class went on a field trip downtown to a "Living Traditions" marketplace. They had booths where people made and sold cultural items. They are having their own market bizarre type thing at his school today. They each get to have their own booth where they get to sell their wares. They each had to choose some type of "cultural" item from a list their teacher had and for the past few weeks in class they have been making these items. Then they get to manage their own booth, set the price, make the sales, close the booth while they go around and make purchases (all with pretend money).

So Zac comes home from school yesterday and says that he has to have at least 20 Chinese lanterns (this was his item of choice) to have a successful booth and he only has 2 1/2 completed and his teacher said he could work on making some at home. So we took Emily to piano lessons, came home and made dinner, ate, took Zac to TaeKwonDo, gave the girls a bath while he was there, picked him up, had Family Home Evening, put the girls in bed, then turned our attention to the matter of making lanterns.

I had seen the lanterns he was making in school when I was in his class last week. In order to make them I would have had to go to the store and bought a ton of stuff and we would have been up till midnight at least trying to turn those things out. So I scrounged around my craft room found some rubber stamps with Chinese letters on them, found the paper crimper I haven't used in about 10 years (it sure came in handy last night) and came up with this lovely design for lanterns. Zac and I turned out 25 lanterns in about 40 minutes. Pretty good work if I do say so myself.