As always, when making something, start by observing the original.

And then dissect it and over analyze it in as OCD a manner as possible. The Magenta petals are all the petals from a single rose, along with their position number with #1 being the most exterior petal, and #18 the innermost. The more purple petals are single petals from other roses annotated with the number of petals that that rose had. I think. It was a year and a half ago. I wanted to collect more samples, but my schedule (required for Halloween of 2010 I think), trumped my OCD desires.

Then summarize your findings.

And here is a PDF for printing:Labeled Petal Shapes Hopefully that comes out at the right scale, the petals should be roughly an inch and a half tall I think.

And finally construct a model.

On to the tutorial. Which is really just me looking at my step by step photos from a year and a half ago and guessing what I meant by them. Woo! I feel like such a consummate professional, but I feel like this little flower wand deserves to get out into the world, and this is the only way it is likely to happen!

For the wand you will need:
• About a foot of dowel painted green and the means to drill a hole in the end
• A green pipe cleaner
• Some green, yellow and rose colored felts
• Matching rosy floss
• A sprinkle of seed beads
• A profusion of ribbons

Cut out your bits, one green star shape for the bottom, a yellow circle for the center, whose real purpose is to give you something to sew the petals onto, and some number of petals. For this rose I made three each of the inner, middle and outer petals, in two shades of rose. If I were going to do it again I’d probably use at least 5 for each ring. Or doubled the number of rings. Unfortunately you’re on your own for the exact size/shape of the sepals (the green bit at the base) unless you want to trace this jpg. Wing them and they will come out beautifully! Every flower is different after all.

Where the petals are split at the base (or all along the mid line) whip them together with matching floss and finger press the seam open flat. These are basically darts that give the petal a lovely curve. Duplicating that curve was the main goal of my slicing so many of them open. I’m not sure I quite got it, but then you can’t really perfectly duplicate a rose petals curve with just one dart.

Tart up that little yellow circle with seed beads, so it looks more like the stamen cluster it is meant to be.

Sew the inner petals too the back of the stamen cluster. Try to make your stitches invisible from the front. And use more petals than I did. (^_^)

You know what comes next. Sew on the middle petals underneath the inner petals, trying to offset them artistically. Or exactly in-between like an engineer. I’m not admitting anything! I also think a glue gun would be a great alternative here. d(-_^) (Thumbs up if you aren’t used to Asian smileys.)

Then sew on the outer petals. Same deal.

Right about now you may be feeling that your rose looks a bit wilty, all your petals passed out in a little circle, flat on their backs. I know I was. So squint at this picture, or better yet click through to the higher res one. Cheat. Okay, there is no cheating. Get creative, and tack your inner petals together. This will make the inside perk up into a more blown bud type of shape. The exact overlap you use will depend on the number of petals you are trying to fit in. Maybe you want to keep the rings of three petals and just make 6 tiers, whatever, it will be beautiful, because we started with a real rose! I am a true believer. Also, if you go to Google images and look at pictures of roses, there is a mad variety of flower and petal shapes. I, ahem, don’t even know what kind of rose I started with. The neighbors rose. Which I stole. Good thing they like me.

Moving on to those sepals. If you are making a flower wand for the kind of fairy who likes to bash everything in sight with said wand, you will want to reinforce your sepals, or they will get torn off. So I took a running stitch all the way around the edge. Maybe it would have been fine either way, but these sepals (this collective sepals shape, I am running out of good grammar), are going to be the connecting point between the rose and the wand. So reinforce it. Probably a good idea. Or, you know, go with the glue gun plan and don’t worry about a thing! d(^_^)b (I should obviously be in bed.)

Next up, fold your pipe cleaner in half, and cut two tiny tiny little holes in your sepals, and cram that green pipe cleaner through.

Now sew the sepals onto the base of the rose. I assume I sewed it. Oh yah, looking at the very fullest resolution picture I can see tiny green running stitches going around in a circle around the pipe cleaner. I probably went around a couple times, filling in between the first row of stitches, since it is hard to get your stitches very close together in thick close quarters like that. Or, uh, that glue gun. Do they sell glitter glue sticks yet? This would totally be an application for glittery glue sticks. I’ve seen glow in the dark glue sticks, if they don’t have glitter ones yet Martha should get on that.

This unnecessary picture shows the hole in the end of your painted green dowel. I think it is a 1/4″ dowel. But you might want to go beefier depending on the age of your recipient, ours broke several times before I pointed out, after re-glueing it repeatedly, that fairies did not actually BASH things with their wands. Deaf ears.

What this picture is, sadly, NOT showing you, is: stick both ends of the pipe cleaner through the hole at the end of the dowel in opposite directions, and pull it until there is a small open loop of pipe cleaner left, through which you can stick the profusion of ribbons. Since our wands don’t actually emit fairy dust we make due with shimmying ribbons. Then pull the pipe cleaner ends until everything is tight.

Now at this point if you pulled on the ribbons they would slip out. So lets fix that. Tie each of the ribbons in a knot, some on one side of the dowel, and some on the other, balancing things out.

Finally lets take care of that pipe cleaner. Knot and twist it around the stem, under the ribbons.

Pinch the ends double so they don’t poke anyone and/or tuck them away.

Frolic!!!

She hardly looks like she’s about to start bashing her sister over the head with that thing, does she? With the best of intentions of course…

I’m going to bed, let me know if I messed anything up too badly.

And let me know while you’re at it, do you like to dissect things to figure out how they are put together? Ever cut anything really cool up?

This turned out to be a me-too project, in that I made one for a friends little girl who was turning two, and then both my girls said “me too! me too!”. So I made two more. They didn’t take very long.

The silhouette could use a little bit of work, I don’t like how it doesn’t mound roundly at the top, which has to do with how tightly I stuffed it to be sure that the candle would stick up, but I do like how the frosting sticks out over the edge of the cupcake base, which is partly the obvious increase and then decrease, but also that on the inside of the cupcake I stitched the bottom of the increase row loosely to the top of the decrease row to keep it from stretching too far up and loosing its shape. But, maybe I was being to smart for my own good with the internal stitching, and the shape would have been better without it? It would have kept that dip out of the frosting silhouette…

Also, I put cardboard in the bottom to keep it flat, but I should have added a weight also, because they are still tippy. Next time. But isn’t the flame cute? It would make a nice sparkler I think.

In other news, I survived my spinning class yesterday. It went pretty well, there were a couple of kinders and first graders who needed more hands on help than I could give them, but really everyone managed it, in the end I think there was just one kinder who refused outright to spin, and one first grader who in the end had to hold the end of his wool up while I gave his drop spindle a few mighty spins and we twisted up the whole (3′) length at once. Sometimes you just need to move on to the next project. Out of 23 though, that’s not too bad, I think that means I made my 90% success goal. (We used this method if you’re curious.) It also means that there were several kinders who with a few minutes of personal attention actually did manage to successfully use a drop spindle with pre-drafted combed top. I learned it’s not actually called roving, unless it has some twist. But I need to be further educated there. So many new words! Diz, hackle, noil, long draw, short draw, rolag, woolen vs worsted, drafting, combed top, roving, sliver (rhymes with diver!?) so many words! If you are curious there is a lot of great information about spinning at the Joy of Handspinning. But like the snap of fingers, now I am on to weaving, because that is what I am teaching *next* week. I am learning SO much teaching this class! And weaving, it is so cool! Go read/watch this introduction to backstrap weaving! Now I want to make a backstrap loom, but my living room is currently full of a bajillion different table looms from school that I have to figure out and warp, so I don’t think I’m going to be doing that! At least, not this week.

I scored an old Wowwee Robosapien v1 at Goodwill for $20. With no remote.. There were two of them and no remotes, as I was just about to the check out a nice employee said, “Oh, are you buying that?” um, yes? (No, I’m just clutching it to my chest on the way to the checkout…) “Did you get the remote?” No! He thought he had seen it somewhere but then couldn’t find it, and Rebecca, Penelope and I turned the store upside down looking for it with no luck. So in the end we brought white robot home with no remote, and thought maybe we could program a universal remote, or maybe we would have to buy a replacement since it was looking kind of tricky, what was I thinking buying a robot with no remote?? I was thinking hacking… But I have too many projects already… Anyway, I was feeling lucky the next time I went by Goodwill, and thought, maybe they found the remote and stuck it back to the other robot. It could happen. No, there was a *third* Robosapien, in special shiny red, with his remote still packing taped to him. Cue me grabbing the second robot of the week and clutching it to my chest. Score! (For robots they are strangely huggable, I think it’s their narrow waist and curvy war mongering figure. Um.) So now we have two robots and one remote. Perfectly workable! Why did they have three robots in one week? Conspiracy.

Getting back to the point, lost so long ago, White Robot was too scary! So we made it a frilly skirt and some shoulder bows. Scandalously short skirt, but I needed to make sure it wasn’t going to get caught in any of its joints. Now White Robot is less scary, and Penelope will sit in my lap (the safest place) and push the buttons to get Robot to walk around in circles and kick balls. I heart robots! And I need to make sure the younger generation is indoctrinated! Robots! Sushi! だいすきです！ (Did that hiragana finally work?! WordPress after three years I have finally defeated you! Hopefully?) Robots! Woo! Maybe with some paint and plastic surgery we could convert White Robot into a Maid Cafe girl? Should have bought all three of the things!

This project was so much fun! Jesse and I wanted to build something interesting for Penelope’s birthday party, and I came across this while flipping through an issue of Make Magazine. (You can see some of it online here.) It worked great. We tested it at our Art Playgroup on Friday, then ran it at the birthday party.

The basic design is a 2″ PVC chamber that is pressurized using a bicycle pump, then the pressure is released with a switch hooked up to a garden sprinkler valve, releasing the compressed air into your rocket and shooting it satisfyingly up into the sky.

The rocket construction is pretty basic, just a rolled tube of paper, with a pointy nose fashioned somehow at the tip. You can go fancy and add fins for stability, and the pointier the nose the better, but even the ones that just have a bit of tape at the bottom and top and a flat nose cone still fly. So this is really accessible to any age. Plus you get to experiment with air resistance and drag and pressure and (loudly) counting backwards before pushing the launch button. (Important for warning people they are about to get pelted.) Educational AND exciting!

And of course stickers [don't] make your rockets fly higher! More stickers!

The kids could pump it up themselves, so this was awesomely self-running once it got going. Our bicycle pump must have about a 1″ cross section area, because the kids seemed to be able to pump it up to about their weight in PSI, which was great, their rockets went 20-50 feet into the air, and we didn’t need to worry about them blowing anything up, unlike their parents who also had a great time pumping it up until the solenoid started leaking around 80-120PSI and blasting their rockets several hundred feet into the air.

Or intentionally making their rockets out of wet napkins just so they would explode…

Which leads to the total devolution of ‘rockets’, here is Rebecca shooting off her stuffed rocket by jamming the tail into the end of the launch tube. They totally flew. You can launch anything from this, and we did. Candy, glitter, water, and, um, falafel. Go Spencer, you know how to party…

The glitter was really beautiful, but the water was equally squeal worthy and much easier to photograph! The party ended with the adults sitting in the shade and the kids running back and forth pouring water down the launch tube, pumping it up, and squealing as they made it explode into rain all over themselves. Luckily no one was electrocuted by wet batteries. The next revision to the design is to seal the batteries (for the solenoid) in waterproof tupperware…

All in all it was an awesome Yashfest 3 / Penelopalooza 2. Heck if I know what we’re going to build next year!

We celebrated Penelope’s 2nd birthday yesterday, along with her friend Yash’s 3rd birthday, Penelopalooza 2 / Yashfest 3. Good times. These rockets are what we gave away as our thank you presents, because I realized that I did not want to give money to Oriental Trading / Diddams. Hate them. Love these rockets! I think they are so cute, but hey, I made them. I thought I was making 15, but at the end there were 16. Hmm. I think it was the first prototype that didn’t get counted. Can you find the first two rockets that don’t have flames? Penelope appropriated the very first one as it was finished, and when she got to pick out a rocket from the 16 lined up at the party, she unerringly found that specific one and grabbed it. Not what I was expecting! Clearly not going to pull a switch over on her without her noticing. Hmm.

May turn these into a pattern, and it may jump over the pattern in my queue that has been completely stalled for the last two months. Because I am scared of finishing things. Woo. But I finished these rockets. 5 minutes before the party. That counts, it does! *Before*. Heh. Deadlines help a lot. Possibly I need more of them.

Texture Blocks. I brought home all these interesting leather samples in different textures and finishes, I think originally I was planning on doing something Montessori-ish, like texture matching cards, or perhaps I was going to make a book. I don’t remember, and that’s for the best, because I came up with something much simpler, that I actually finished!

I have a bunch of wooden craft blocks that I was using to make little houses, which incidentally is where the name for this blog really first came from, (you can get them here) and I cut up the different leather scraps to the same size as a block face, and glued them on with a paint brush and some ModPodge. I could have cut them so that the edges of the leather overlapped, so the block would come out as a perfect cube, rather than a cube with all the corners missing, but I wasn’t confident I could pull that out without it looking like a mess, so I went with the corners-missing ‘style’. I’m a total cheater.

All of the textures are fun to investigate, especially the hairy one. It’s hard to see, but the sides in that black row above is actually covered in stiff, flat, cow hair. That’s the real deal! The other textures are embossed, I’m pretty sure, but still very cool to touch.

These bags have been really useful, especially since my husband has started collecting rocks like a mad man! He can fill a bag up with dirty rocks and leave it in a creek to wash off, hanging off one of the many fallen logs around here, and then sort through his clean-ish rocks before carrying all (five pounds of them) home. Really that just lets him find the right five pounds of rocks to carry home. Good thing orange bags are sturdy. I love you sweetie!

These will be fabulous for carrying our sand toys to the park too. (The sand toys do *not* come in the front door, they live outside in a plastic basket.)

Materials:
• one mesh (orange or other) produce bag
• a foot or more of canvas strapping or salvaged car seat belt
• 8″ x (length around top of bag + 1″) piece of fabric for top binding –
  or duct tape, brief alternate discussion at bottom.

Start by stretching your bag vertically, this will compress it horizontally. Decide how long you want the mesh part of the bag to be, and trim it straight across. Look, I’m being good and using my paper scissors not my fabric scissors. I probably shouldn’t admit how may pairs of scissors I have. I gave one to my husband and he immediately wrote ‘no cutting fabric allowed’ or something like that all over every surface. I was impressed with how many places he managed to fit it in, both blades, each of the handles possibly more than once, three star job. If I wasn’t in Vermont I’d go take a picture. But anyway. Trim your bag, or not, either way give it a vertical stretch though.

Gently flatten the opening out without stretching it much if you can, and measure the width. If you stretch the bag out too much before you sew the binding on it will go all lettuce-y around the top edge when you try to carry something heavy in it. It doesn’t much matter structurally though, it’s just an esthetic thing.

We are going to make a 2″ wide binding next, I went with the grain of the fabric rather than cutting it on the bias because I am cheap and we aren’t going around any curves. Since the binding is going to be double fold we need the fabric to be 8″ wide by the circumference of your bag + 1″ for rough seam allowance.

Cut your fabric 8″ x (width of bag * 2 + 1″)

So if you measured the width of your bag at 6″ you would cut your strip 6*2+1 or 13″ long.

Press your fabric flat. I hate ironing too, but you can’t make clean double fold binding without some ironing.

Fold it in half (hot dog bun style!) so that it is 4″ tall and press the fold.

Unfold it and fold one edge up almost but not quite to the middle crease and press the fold (don’t press out your center fold.)

Fold down the other edge almost but not quite to the middle crease and press that fold. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.)

Re-fold it in half and give it one more press all together.

Unfold all your careful creases and pin the two short (8″) edges wrong sides together. Sew together with a 1/2″ seam.

Open up the sewn seam folding it open or to the side with your fingers, and then re-fold the outside edges of the binding to the center.

Slip the binding into the opening of the bag, lining up the top edge of the bag with the middle of the binding. (It’s hard to see the purple on purple, but there is netting over the lower half of the binding in that picture.) I found that pins didn’t work very well to hold the bag in place, so I used removable scotch tape. Whatever your device secure the bag evenly around the binding. Sew the binding to the bag 1/4″ to 1″ above the bottom edge of the binding – it will only be visible from the inside of the bag, so pick where you want the extra seam. Remove the tape as you go, if you sew through it it will get your needle gummy. I learned my lesson with the duct tape…

Fold the binding over the outside of the bag, along your handily pre-creased fold line.

Stitch around the binding 1/4″ or so above the bottom edge for structure, and 1/4″ from the top for pretty.

For each end of your strap fold the edge under and pin on the inside of the binding.

Stitch a square with a cross through it over the end of your strap for that ‘I know what I’m doing’ kind of look. Preferably do not use a needle covered with duct tape goo, because it will skip stitches. I’m hoping I don’t have to clean out the inside of my machine now…

and play!

For the duct tape version, the instructions are pretty much the same, except instead of making a binding, wrap (gently) one piece of duct tape around the outside of the top edge, one around the inside of the top edge, and then one folded over the top edge. I sewed the strap on the same way, but frankly that was a dumb idea because I trashed my needle, I cleaned it, but I still couldn’t get the tape gum out of the eye, and there may be some inside my machine. If I made it with duct tape again, (which was great and quick and really satisfying) I would probably give it a tape handle too.

The end! And I can’t wait until I get back to the land of internet, where I can actually open multiple pages simultaneously in links, rather that one every five minutes! Ironically, DSL is finally coming to these sad lands, due to be installed three days after we leave!!!

I got the idea for these from this picture of ‘Felt Wool Cute Zakka’ from FeltCafe’s photostream. Theirs are cuter, but mine are still cute! Even if the green one looks more like she is wearing a parka than a shawl…

Rebecca insisted that since it was ‘Children’s Day’ last week (okay, so officially it was the 5th) I needed to make her a present, since she’d gotten me a present for Mother’s day. Which technically I both suggested and bought. But we are politely ignoring that. I’d just been perusing FeltCafe’s photostream and picking out my favorite inspirations, so I flipped through them and suggested a few possibilities. The smaller one is Rebecca’s, and then I had to make Penelope one so she would stop stealing Rebecca’s. I’m pretty sure that Penelope lost hers at the library within a few hours of getting it though. We’ll see if it turns up. :-/ I have learned, you see, that I need to photograph things *before* I give them to my children, or it’s all over.