Melisande, Or Long and Short Division

Melisande, Or Long and Short Division, by E. Nesbit, is a literary fairy tale that incorporates mathematics. Perhaps when I made Princess Division for my Royal Math Gnomes, I unconsciously had this story in the back of my mind. Lucia enjoyed it very much. While you can read the story in its entirety, I read the story aloud from a collection called Stories for Eight Year Olds. When I was in second grade, I had a book from the same series called Stories for Seven Year Olds, which I enjoyed very much. Sara Corrin, the editor, and I seem to have similar tastes in stories, so I am going to look for her other collections available in the library.

Math, Music, and Marie-in-the-Garden

Here at last are the dolls I've been working on. The Royal Math Gnomes have been a project long in the making (and briefly halted when I wasn't able to sew), but are now finally listed in the shop. The hypertext links below the photos will take you directly to the shop listing:


Royal Math Gnomes

I'm thinking of the Royal Math Gnomes as a showcase project. As promised, I've made a singular Accounting Wizard Math Gnome:


Accounting Wizard Math Gnome

I had a lot of fun creating the Music Elemental. The hood is embroidered with fermata symbols, and the cape has both a segno and a coda. The bottom of the cape has notes that portray a simple waltz. I made a guitar for the elemental, and then realized that the guitar needed a stand. I reined myself in from sewing an electronic sound system:


Music Elemental

Last but not least, here is Marie in the Garden. This past summer, a Waldorf teacher saw one of my dolls and said, "She reminds me of the song and game 'Marie in the Garden'." She sang:

Marie in the garden, the garden, Marie,
She is as tiny as she can be.
Marie in the garden, the garden, Marie,
Open your eyes, now where is she?

In the game, the children hide their eyes while the teacher tucks Marie away in a pocket. When they open their eyes, they have to guess where the doll is hidden.


Marie in the Garden

I'm quite pleased to be a brand new member of the Etsy street team called Natural Kids! It's an active promotional team with certain rules for qualification, one of which is that a person has to have been an active seller for 3 months prior to application. I'm glad to be finally on board.

This post was updated on August 24, 2009.

Crafty Thursday: Math Gnomes

I know, it's Friday. Between having my daughter with me all day long until French camp begins next week and preparing songs for French camp, I've had a full schedule. I've also started getting up early in the morning to exercise. That means going to bed early. Here and there, I've had some time to sew, and thus I finally created a set of royal "math gnomes" inspired by the Waldorf tradition of math education. While many math gnomes sets have the four processes of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division as subjects of King Equals, my mom told me about the story setup of the royal math gnomes: King Addition loves to collect things, Queen Subtraction likes to give away her wealth, Prince Multiplication likes to do things fast, and Princess Division is a staunch social advocate who wants the resources to be divided fairly. Lucia came up with the idea of Equals as a Jester. Here is Lucia's drawing of the Royal Math Gnomes:



Here is the set I've made for the family:





If you do a search for "Math Gnomes" on Flickr, you'll come up with some other lovely representations like this one and this one. Two nice sets I've admired on Etsy are by julieblanchette and mamaforearth.

If I post a set of math gnomes in my shop, it would definitely be a big-ticket item. (August 21, 2009 Update: here they are.) I don't really know what the market is for math gnomes. Of course people admire the sets, but chances are that the people who need math gnomes the most are probably working with small budgets. I've joked about branching out into having different singular math gnomes be available to provide encouragement for teens working on Algebra, Geometry and Calculus homework: