What a cute fairy! (I’m allowed to say that, right?) This took about an hour, the perfect easy project. And I’ve learned that if you want to make a tiny dot with needle felting, just don’t move your needle, keep jabbing it up and down in exactly the same spot, and the random clump of fuzz you stuck on top of your project will eventually all get sucked into that exact spot. Eyes! And what is that amazing pod she is in?

A Bottle Tree pod! (Brachychiton populneus I think.) These are so cool. Fortunately there is a bottle tree across the street from our library! And another more productive one up the street. Unfortunately they are covered on the inside with tiny cactus like spines that are apparently used for itching powder. Yuck! Luckily they are pretty easy to scrape out with a tooth pick. I am so in love with these things right now. I planted some seeds in our yard before we left, but I doubt they will actually germinate magically all alone while I am gone. When I get back I will have to see what I can do with any of the seeds left.

They make such great bases for needle felting little things! This sprout was a little tough, the first time I tried to make the leaves I totally over-felted the joint in between them trying to make it nicely narrow to join with the stem, and it weakened. I ended up just pulling the leaves off the wonky middle and re-felting them together and to the stem. I need to remember that felt is not clay, and it can get over-worked and fragile. With the do-over this probably took me more like an hour and a half. And I did some random wet-felting of it in the middle. Because if you can’t mix up your techniques… um, that is boring?

And here is a prosaic half hour project, a lavender rice bag, except it is made out of more of that cashmere sweater. I was immediately required to make two more for Rebecca and Penelope (this was for a sick little friend) and they started carrying them around everywhere calling them their snugglies. I need to find another Goodwill cashmere sweater, because this one is starting to run out!

Aren’t these cute? Or at least useful for those shell collecting trips, and the playground. And mostly recycled! Those are orange bags and old car seat belts. (The car seat was in a minimal accident and thus discarded.) I have the photos for a tutorial. But my posting schedule has dropped again, this working for money thing is definitely cutting into my free time, what with not wanting to skimp on the parenting thing, and needing to keep my family in clean clothes and dishes. Have I mentioned that I don’t have a dishwasher? But I think after a year and a half we figured out how to fit a portable 18″ one into the kitchen. Woo! It might involve the occasional bruised hip, but if it works out it will be totally worth it. So save your orange bags and watch this space for a tutorial. I’d say it would be up Friday, but frankly I’ll probably be packing for Maine/Vermont, and I have a presentation for work to do before I can even get to that. So hopefully Monday. I’ll cross my fingers for you. (^_^) I know you don’t really need me on this though, you can figure it all out yourself, it isn’t complicated.

But ah Maine. I need to slow down and do some anticipating or I won’t realize I’m on a (possibly working) vacation until it’s over. Moss, pine trees, boggy forest trails, beaches and very cold water. I made these bags for our imminent trip to a place very like ‘One Morning in Maine.’ We aren’t quite ready for the loosing-teeth part, but after re-reading it this morning Rebecca has requested that we plan on digging clams for clam chowder. Happy to oblige! There will probably be a gallery of fairy houses coming up soon too.

How we made it: Take an empty milk carton and cut a large hole in the side. This hole serves two purposes, it is for quick filling (the girls dump cups of water in it) and it keeps the milk carton from being filled all the way up with water (a full gallon of water weighs 8lbs, and I didn’t want to deal with that much weight on our shower organizer. The further down you cut the hole the less the ‘full’ container will weigh. We made sure to leave enough structural plastic around the handle that we could use that to hang the milk carton. How did we hang it up? With a twist tie. That’s the other reason I didn’t want it full, I didn’t think the twist tie would hold up 8lbs. I wanted to use a metal S hook, but I couldn’t find any lying around, I’m sure I just didn’t look hard enough. I may replace the twist tie when it eventually rusts and breaks, or I may just use another twist tie. Probably I will just use another twist tie, because someone will be crying and I will be in a rush, as always. The ‘fountain’ is made by punching three holes in the bottom with sharp scissors. Easy and free bathtub entertainment!

Right now Penelope is running around with a paper cat cutout she painted yelling ‘Meow!’ and slamming it into the ground. I think it’s pouncing? And what were we doing the last week of silence? The girls were doing a ridiculous amount of throwing up, and I am still not getting to sleep through the night. Rebecca is so excited that I am letting her go back to school today!

Do you live in the SF Bay Area? Do you live near Mountain View? Well, if you do…

Have you heard of FabMo? It’s this wonderful small organization devoted to re-distributing all of the fabric cast off from discontinued designer fabric samples. Apparently after trade shows and product cycles and what not there are dumpsters full of fabric samples, and this local organization gets them, before they go into the dumpster, organizes them and has free distribution days once a month where you can make an appointment and go take whatever you want. Really. They have a donation tube to help pay for their small warehouse space, but it’s free and fun and great for teachers and crafters. Their website explains it better than I did.

But we went, and it’s the real deal. Rebecca picked out a treasure of small mosaic tiles and hand sized leather samples. I picked out a stack of roughly 1′x1′ fabric samples and a stack of doormat sized wool rug samples. Penelope has been falling over a lot lately…

I realized near the end that since they are mostly upholstery samples, even though I was sticking to the ones labeled as linen & cotton, they were probably covered in teflon and brominated flame retardants. And, being me, I sort of freaked out and haven’t really figured out what to do about it. I washed them all, and then started worrying that my washing machine was contaminated and the next load of baby sleepers I put in was going to be poisoned for ever. Yes, at the same time I am quite aware that I am being silly and have a problem. My home is statistically likely to already be full of bromine so, chill mama, right? We do what we can and try not to worry too much. How did we get on the topic of my plastic phobia again? Darn, I need to stop doing that.

Ahem. FabMo! They’re doing something cool, check them out if you live in the SF Bay Area.

Birthday. Mother suggested that she would appreciate play acting props, careers other than ‘princess’. I chose mail man. This hat, other than being too small, worked wonderfully from my imagination to implementation!

The bag, well, it is recycled from a shirt in the rag bag. I got a new serger! Named Sammy. This was practice using it, quite a different thing than I’m used to, it was quite fun! I made the strap about twice too long and tried to just lap it and sew to make it shorter, but that was a disaster, ended having to undo the bag seam, remake a bunch of it, but it was still a quick satisfying project. So what if I did write the letter shapes with permanent marker rather than erasable marker… It is still quite good for play acting, not going to be winning any design comps with it though!

Sometimes just thinking about something seems to move it into the category of things I’ve started that need to be cleared away from my mental workspace. In any case, I saved these birthday cards with the idea of turning them into puzzles, so the cards were cluttering up my workspace. Thus the puzzles had to be completed.

I glued the cards (with Mod Podge) down to 1/8 plywood with a nice veneered back, cut them into rectangles on the bandsaw, and cut the puzzle pieces on our scroll saw. I know, we have tools for everything and I love it, it is our greatest luxury. When we had our first one bedroom apartment we had a shop bench and bench top bandsaw set up in the corner. Of the fully carpeted apartment. And a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. You have to have priorities.

The first puzzle I sanded all the interior edges, and it looks nicer, but really, my daughter went through that so fast that I decided I should just cut them up and throw them at her, she doesn’t mind the white fuzzy edges on the picture, and the scroll saw doesn’t cut rough enough for their to be actual splinters, so whatever. Let’s go! Make!

Somewhere along the line it lost its ears, the eyes had been replaced, and I seem to have added an extra nose button, when it had a perfectly good seam nose. Worse than that, all the seams had rotted since it went into storage. All the seams going through the fake fur anyway, which is all of them except the bottoms of the feet and the face seams. (I think it probably had something to do with the nasty gluey substance backing the knit fur fabric.)

When I first got it out I thought I was only going to have to fix a few seams, but after going through the wash (in a pillow case), with the split seams basted together, it became apparent I was going to have to rip the whole thing apart and re-sew it. Which, frankly, might have been easier than repairing the seams anyway, because I could just turn it inside out and sew it back together on the machine.

Which I did eventually after hand sewing the leg seams back together. I was trying to maintain the delusion that I could get away with fixing only some of the seams, but sewing that fake fur by hand was not much fun, and the whole sheep was coming to bits. Eventually I accepted that if I was giving a toy to a three year old I needed to really fix it, because sturdy is a requirement for stuffed friends.

I made new ears out of a pair of socks from the rag bag, I think they are very stylish! And once the whole sheepy was back together I decided it needed an extra something for the horrors it had been through, and I crocheted a flower chain for its neck. I can’t do a lot about the abraded face, but sheepy is now a functional pillowy friend again.

(Rebecca *wanted* to be in that picture, I have no idea what is up with her expression!)

You can see more of what other people made at the Flickr group. It was a nice little low stress quick project, and now Rebecca’s little people have some more furniture. We can’t really agree whether this is a throne or a mirrored dressing table, but I don’t see why it can’t be both.

I have about five other projects to post about, but they are just going to have to come when they come. This here is a no apology blog. Also, we did container painting (see here and here) for art group on Friday, but it seems unlikely that I’ll get around to posting that. I’m not sure I even got a good picture! Couple more weeks until baby#2 (Which do you think, Penelope, Margaret, Guinevere, Ginger, Elizabeth, Marigold? I could keep listing names, our list goes on… Rebecca says if it’s a girl she’s going to call her Monica, and if it’s a boy she’s going to call him Pit, so maybe it doesn’t matter what we think. Although she has agreed to lollipop as an adequate nickname for Penelope.) comes, and I’m trying to do a little less.

I have been collecting the tops from frozen juice concentrate containers for a while, they are such nice sturdy metal disks I was sure they would be perfect for some art project or other. Mini sewing cards was what I finally came up with. They are super sturdy, portable, and they stack nicely too because of the rim shape. They would probably also make great medallion necklaces, or super sturdy merit badges or medals.

If you want to suggest a shape rather than a more freeform geometric structure, then permanent markers can give you a reasonably lasting line on the metal.

I intended to make this project for my daughter, but what ended up happening was that she made one for herself while I was testing the idea, and was quite excited by the idea of our writing instructions to show other little girls and boys how to make them. So I have a three year old model demonstrating how to punch holes in metal. If she can do it, obviously you can too.

I think this would be a great project to get kids to try sewing if they are interested in pounding. Keep in mind though, that you are working with a hammer and nail, and that the backs of the punched holes will be sharp until you flatten them. Three year olds are (by demonstration) perfectly capable of doing this, but they should be supervised. Also, the younger the child the lighter weight hammer they should be using. This is a project where you need control, not force. I have a lightweight brass hammer for hanging pictures that is a great size for my daughter, when she misses the nail and hits her hand she doesn’t complain about it. I think she would have had a lot of trouble using a standard framing hammer with one hand, and it would have hurt if she missed. So if you only have standard weight hammers, and you want to do this with your kids, be prepared to hold the nail/disk for them, and hope they don’t smash your finger. Or just go to the hardware store and buy one of those lightweight girly hammers with the flowers on the handle. Also, with a young child it’s a good idea to use a nail with a large easy to hit head, rather than a tiny-headed picture hanging nail.

What you need:
• Clean lids from frozen juice concentrate containers
• A large needle and yarn or a shoe lace for sewing
• A nail that is thicker than your needle/shoe lace
• A hammer
• A place to pound that has a hole or slot for the nail to go into
• A small scrap of wood/thick dowel to put beneath the disk to pound the sharp edges flat on.

The things-to-pound-on will make more sense after you read the instructions.

Start by drawing a shape or a set of dots with a permanent marker, showing where to punch your holes. You can carefully plan this, or just go for the random scattering of dots.

Place the spot you want to punch over some kind of crack or slot or hole. You don’t want to just nail into a piece of wood, it will be much more difficult than punching a hole into air. I made a small punching set up for Rebecca using a scrap of 2×4 for the base, and two small strips of plywood and pine that were about the same thickness. You could probably do just as well with the spaces between the boards on your deck or picnic table, as long as you don’t mind them taking the occasional hit from the nail.

The nail hole, perhaps counter-intuitively, will not be round, but will probably be square. That has to do with the shape of the point of the nail, which is usually a square pyramid. If the point of your nail is actually cone shaped then you should end up with round holes. So if you care how the square holes are oriented, then pay attention to how your nail is rotated.

Pound away. You want the point to go all the way through, and the shaft of the nail to be going into the disk to make the hole large enough. If you pound the nail all the way in it will be a little more difficult to pull out, but three year olds can be enthusiastic.

Once you’ve pounded all your holes it’s time to turn the disk over and bang flat the punched flaps of metal. This is where a small block comes in handy. Since the juice tops have a lip that doesn’t allow them to lie flat on a surface (unless you punch from the other side I guess) if you try to pound flat the punched flaps of metal you will dent the top. But putting something small under the top to support it will keep the top flat.

If you want to make a nice jig for a young pounder you can cut a circle slightly smaller than the disk out of 1″ thick wood. I was lazy and just grabbing scraps out of the workshop scrap bin. Luckily I was lazy when I tacked together the pounding jig too, and I only put three nails in it, so we swung one of the sides out and wedged a short scrap of 1″ dowel into the crack. It really doesn’t matter what you use here, a small square scrap of wood would work fine, as long as you turn the disk as you go, so that the spot you are pounding on is supported.

Once you’ve got your juice top supported, pound the backs of the holes flat. Rub your finger against the back when you think you’re done, to make sure there aren’t any sharp edges still sticking up. If there are, bang them some more with your hammer. It isn’t ever going to be perfectly flat, it will be a bit rough, but it shouldn’t feel like it’s going to cut you.

There you go, here’s my daughter’s randomly assaulted juice top that she was quite proud of.

You can stop there, or you can get out the yarn darning needles,

and sew up your freshly punched juice tops.

Questions?

I’ve been meaning to do the tshirt to toddler pants conversion and I finally got around to it. I sort of used the directions in SouleMama‘s The Creative Family, and sort of didn’t. But that’s what got me started finally, someone (I’ve forgotten, oops) mentioned using those directions, and I thought, aha! I have that book! I’ll go do that *now*, which is of course the only way I get anything done.

So I got out a tshirt, and made my daughter stand still so I could measure her, because I can’t remember which of her pants fit to use as a pattern. Not very many right now, she’s been growing. And when I laid her measurements out on my shirt, I discovered that I’m only going to be able to use my old shirts for a couple more months, because she needed the whole thing, from waist to shoulder. Which meant that I had to flip the pants layout around and use the sides of the tshirt for the inseam rather than the outseam, and I had to use whatever shape the shoulder seam was for the crotch seam. But hey, the whole thing worked out okay in the end, although it looks like it would have been better if I could have made the crotch seam a little steeper, because it’s a bit baggy there. The pitfalls of using a women’s fitted tshirt I guess. I’ll have to ask my husband for his rags next, but there isn’t a whole lot of shirt left when he’s done, after downgrading them from work to weekends to shop… Frankly these pants started out with quite a bit of wear, because this is a very old tshirt. We all really wear things out around here.

I also added quite generous patch pockets on the hip, using the sleeves, because Rebecca has no interest in pants that don’t have pockets. Sensible girl.