Our family got to be a part of a project done by Anvil Knitwear (http://www.anvilknitwear.com/.) By the way, if you watch the intro on their web site as it changes pictures you will see a picture of one of my daughters out in one of our cotton fields.

So, let’s get back to the really neat project that they did at Anvil. Anvil has a program for kids to learn about where their t-shirts reeeally come from. Children or just people in general tend to think that the things that they buy don’t have any history before the store that they bought the shirt from. Similar to the thinking that says that milk comes from a carton and not from a cow or a goat. A child buys a T-shirt from a store, and he starts to think the store is where the shirt originated from. People sometimes just don’t realize how much effort goes into that shirt before it even reaches the store.


With Anvil’s program, the child takes their new tee home with a “tracking” number on the hang tag to enable the child to see their tee’s journey. Now you really need to go buy an organic Anvil t-shirt for your child to make this a really full learning experience, but if you can’t make it to the big city and a store for a while, try using 730058i08 as a tracking number. To make it clear that tracking number is all numbers except for the small “i” stuck in there. So, that would make the “0” zeros. Got it? I hope so.

There are tons of information to explore on the site, by when you get around to choosing to look at an organic farmer you might just get a look at our family. If you don’t, you will randomly see another neat organic farm family. It might be Carl Pepper and his family or Jimmy & Susan Wedel.

If you happen to get our family this is what you see –

This is just an adorable site with all of the hang tags and pictures.

As interesting as my little family is, you will want to look around for the lessons plans and all kinds of learning on the different pages. Click on cotton gin and see a running diagram of how a gin works. The learning plans have class ideas and additional information such historical information on Eli Whitney and images of the original cotton gin courtesy of the Eli Whitney Museum and Workshop (www.eliwhitney.org.) There are more pages on Textile mills and cut & sew operations. I haven’t even looked at all the information, but I plan to with my children.

There are neat pictures in the Texas Farm image gallery. Towards the end there is a picture of “farmer Bingham standing in front of a module of organic cotton.” That small town southern gentleman would be my children’s grandfather, Dandy.

Notice the organic peanut butter jars at the bottom of the screen. If you click on those, you will see the Wedel’s and see Susan’s recipe for organic peanut butter cookies. Hmmm, makes me want to go make some right now.

If you click on our family, you get a note card of details about us. We do need to update their information a little. Actually the children have grown a little. They now range in age from 6 to 25. And sadly not all our wine is organic any more. The Caprock Viognier is and is labeled that way (with our grapes, click here for my post about it). Really all of our grapes made into wine through 2008 were certified organic. Most of the 2009 is not. But if we get enough consumer support for wine made with organically grown grapes, we will have it certified again in three years. Basically our practices for farming the grapes is quite a bit the same.

Click here to see this very fun and educational site for you and your children – www.TrackmyT.com . TrackmyT.com won a FWA site of the day.

You might want to check it out during the holiday break.

Blessings, Betty

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