One Inch World

I was going to go all fancy pants with this, but then I just went and did it. Textures. No stitched edges or reinforced pages, no textures front to back, no glue, no labels or embroidery to distract, just some rectangles of stuff to touch that is sewn together. I even included some pages that probably won’t last, but that’s an interesting discovery of its own, destruction!

Step 1: Gather stuff. Different papers, different fabrics, whatever you have lying around. Something crinkly, something fuzzy. You can see from this picture that I did have something with embroidery, it happened to be the only linen in my scrap bag, but I might have gone with it anyway because dragonflies are cool, and who cares about rules anyway. Also the wildly mushroomy paper, but that went on the back – I decided I did want the non-patterned side facing forward in the book.

Step 2: Decide on a book size – I chose 5″x5.5″ because of the width of some watercolor paper I had in my stack of stuff.

Step 3: Cut everything the same size. I used my fabric cutting mat and rotary cutter for the fabric, for the paper I used my cutting mat and a box cutter. For some reason it never occurred to me until about a month ago that I could use my cutting mat with razor blades and such. I’m sure it will shorten it’s life, but hey, so useful. I used pinking sheers on the most ravely looking stuff.

From the top left: watercolor paper, blue craft felt, the metallic liner of Annies whole wheat bunny crackers (shiny, crinkly, and sturdier than tinfoil), white denim, hand dyed flannel, some weird woven silver fabric (I have no idea where this came from, but it also happened to be exactly 5.5″ wide, so clearly it was destined), pink fleece, linen with dragonfly, fake suede-y stuff with little metal dots and glitter randomly scattered (who designs this stuff? My husband bought it for me to make a dice bag for him, and it was awful to sew), dark red velvet, doubled up wax paper (not going to last long), and scrap booking paper embossed with a woven pattern. My original musings called for some other things, but the day I made this that was what ended up in the random collection pile. I’m sure you can come up with your own wonderful collection of textures, maybe throw in some wood veneer and a layer of cork!

Step 4: Put them into a nice order, possibly with the papers alternating with the fabrics so they slide flat and don’t stick to each other, but whatever.

Step 5: This is the really exciting one, jam the whole thing under the foot of your sewing machine and stitch down one edge. Use a long stitch, and don’t sew too close to the edge or the whole thing will squeeze out the edge like when you’re trying to eat a melty ice cream sandwich, only less sticky. My first seam is about 1/2″ in. Then sew another line of stitching closer to the edge, and aim to get it straighter than mine.

Alternately, if you have real book binding skill you could stab bind it, or whatever you would do if you knew more about book binding than I do.

Step 6: Find a baby to play with!

There are all kinds of ways you could cute this up, adding ribbons, binding the edges of the fabrics with a zigzag stitch or sewing the more ravely fabrics face together along three sides and then turning them out… But this way I got it finished in the spare moments of a baby filled afternoon.

P.S. I really wanted to get the pattern for my Witch, Imp, Ghost and Bat Treat Hiding Balls into my sad empty Etsy shop before October (tomorrow!) but it’s just not going to happen. Wish me luck and bravery to get it all together by the end of the weekend. I’m making good progress. Here’s a picture of my finished Ghost, does he look a little psycho?

I have been trying to find time to post this all week! Oy!

I finished my halloween candy hiding witch ball, and I like it. The red imp is coming along too. If you stick a rectangular mini-candy bar the wrapper sticks out her mouth, but I’ve decided that’s just fine. I think the square ones will fit in better, but I don’t have any, and I’m not buying any candy to see or I will eat it!

Since we had a witch finished we worked on /w/ activities. Over two separate days actually, and I still never got to making a big W sheet for our alphabet binder. Rebecca didn’t want to, so we’ll just move on without it. W-whatever.

We wrote W’s with soap on the mirror, then w-washed them off.

We did some w-walrus walking (on your arms, dragging your legs like a tail), and some w-wheelbarrow walking (on your arms with mom holding up your feet).

We w-wiped plant leaves with water to clean the dust off. We didn’t stick with this for very long!

We worked with wire and wire cutters to make a wire sculpture in a styrofoam block, wrapping (not /w/) them around markers and pencils to make twisty springs.

We got our DickBlick order, (yay new paint!) so we got to spray liquid watercolors on paper. Also, duh, “cleans up with water” does NOT mean washable! It means you can clean your brushes with soap and water, you don’t need mineral spirits or turpentine. That was for our tempera paint, now I’m going to have to figure out whether I can make it washable with some kind of soap or not. But, the colors are MUCH nicer, and the washable paint has turned many of her shirts into ‘art shirts’ anyway, so maybe we’ve just graduated to student tempera.

Rebecca drew W’s to make w-waves using w-white crayon on blue paper, and we did a couple ‘w’ worksheets.

Also this was our first week of co-op preschool, crazy times! I think it’s going to be great.

We try to make our house as child accessible as possible, but the kitchen sink faucet has been slow coming – she can always walk over to the bathroom, but sometimes that isn’t such a good idea, say when her hands are dripping paint. Because as much as you tell a three year old not to touch anything on their way to the bathroom, their concentration isn’t always there.

So now with a four inch piece of wood and some rubber bands Rebecca can turn on the kitchen sink too. As long as the lever is pointing forwards, and isn’t completely inaccessible off to the side. It’s an improvement anyway, we’ll see if it’s as successful as the dowel-and-plastic-tubing enhanced light switch in the bathroom.

So, hurrah, I made something today. And yesterday I made pizza (including the crust), signaling the end of my I’m-not-cooking-I-have-a-baby period I guess. Really it was fueled by my growing frustration that even living in California, the land of hippy food, I can’t order a pizza around here with a whole wheat crust, and hey, one quarter no cheese for my picky daughter.

I was going to say the letter B, but that would be counter to the way we’ve been working on things. Sometimes I still slip up with the whole phonetic letters vs letter names thing even though I’ve been working on it for at least a year now.

I’ve been feeling like I’ve been falling down with Rebecca’s homeschool activities, and I decided that I would have a much easier time thinking of activities to offer her (our homeschool is strictly voluntary and fun since she’s only 3) if I had a theme to guide me. So today we’ve been focusing on /b/.

Coincidentally I finished making a Bat Ball last night. I want to make a bunch of these little ball monsters with mouths to fill with candy to have a monster hunt, like an easter egg hunt, for Halloween. And if I get them done fast enough then maybe they’ll be my first Etsy pattern. We’ll see if I can get them done by the end of September.

So the first activity of the day was throwing the bat ball around. It’s being quite vigorously play tested.

Then we made a big B and little b out of beans, from Apples and Jammies via ABC and 123. Rebecca is working on her lower case letters first, so I did the capital B and she did the lower case, because she wanted to work together.

After the fine motor skills we went outside for some running on a very large small ‘b’, drew lots of chalk pictures of things that start with /b/,

and examined our blue feet.

Then we did some number work, counting and lining up our counting b-bean b-bags, and walking on the resulting number b-balance b-beam and counting up and down.

Then we did some ‘b’ worksheets from some alphabet workbooks we have, and made an alphabet binder to collect work in. Rebecca enjoyed snapping the rings open and shut, and using the three-hole-punch.

For snack we ate blueberries,

and played with the /b/ miniatures from the phonics miniatures that we’ve been collecting.

What a b-ful morning! Luckily /b/ is a really easy phoneme to do this with, because I didn’t do any planning, I know some of the phonemes are going to be much harder!

Maybe I should suggest lacing b-beads next? Next phoneme up I think is going to be /w/. I’ll get to work on the witch ball.

Inspired to get around to it by Thrifty Craft Mama I put away our set of pattern blocks with pattern cards and got out the thicker set that didn’t have any pattern cards. The pattern cards were too slippery and frustrating for Rebecca, she wanted her shapes to line up perfectly, and they were always getting bumped a little bit, so she didn’t want to play with them anymore. Once we put the pattern cards away she was able to have a lot more fun laying out strips of triangles and making her own stars. Then we started building mountains and little houses, and that was even more fun.

And I like making really complex mandalas too. Most of my creative energy recently has been going to cleaning and organizing, there is much too much clutter and not enough space and I think it’s bad for me and Rebecca. (That and energy going towards taking care of Penelope and not abandoning Rebecca.) So I’m not sure there is going to be too much craftyness around here for a little while. Maybe next week I can take a picture of my refolded and boxed fabric stash, right now it’s gotten to the point of being crammed in on top of the books on the bookcase and in shoeboxes that stick out further than the shelves. I got some boxes from IKEA that actually fit on the shelves, and I’m trying to rearrange everything to be more visually uniform and relaxing. And not covering every horizontal and vertical surface… sigh.