One Inch World

I was throwing out all my old makeup – I never wear makeup anymore, and besides, old makeup is gross – and I thought, being sadly unable to throw *anything* away, that the twisty mechanism was a good thing to put into some kind of Montessori-esq tactile activity. So I cleaned them out, and then they twisted, but there wasn’t anything left to show that they went up and down, clearly they needed something inside them, and hey, wouldn’t it be cool if it was a crayon?? At first I was thinking of hot glueing in some regular crayons, but then I realized that fat crayons were more lipstick sized. They were too big to fit though, so I started whitling them down with a butter knife, until I could cram them into the little veined cups, and they stayed in just fine!

And they twist up and down, and they draw, and they are so cute! So, now we have four lipstick crayons, and I’ve only found *one* in the washing machine so far…

Once we were done making them we used the wax shavings – yes yes, couldn’t just throw them away – to make sun catchers. I’m sure that’s why it’s been raining for the last two weeks…

So, I’m sure, being moms, that you have some lipstick languishing in a drawer somewhere that would be so much happier as a crayon!

Basic Instructions:
Clean out lipstick with a paper towel, and maybe a q-tip. They don’t need to be washed, just mostly clean.
Take half a fat crayon, and whittle it down until you can jam it into the lipstick holder. You shouldn’t have to hammer it in, but it should be tight.
Done!

I think these would make great little valentines day presents too!

What to do with tiny fabric scraps from your stash? Cut interesting shapes out of them and add them to a felt board set. It will be more fun to build with because there will be more textures and patterns to play with, not just felt. You can use any kind of fabric for this, cotton, corduroy, velvet, linen… You can even use paper, and although nothing will stick on top of the paper shapes they can add a lot of interest too. The secret to using all these different materials on your felt board is to bond them to a layer of felt.

First you need a felt board though, perhaps you already have one, or they aren’t difficult to make. Just take a large piece of felt or flannel and back it with thick fusible interfacing for a roll-able board, or wrap it around a board and tack or staple or glue it for something sturdier. Here is a great and super simple travel felt board tutorial by MaryAnne at mama smiles, and a really cute felt board in frame posted by itty bitty love.

I think the fun part, and what I want to talk about here is making all the shapes. The traditional way is to cut them out of felt, which is great because it’s cheap and it doesn’t fray. But with a little craft glue or fusible interfacing you don’t have to be limited to just felt. The steps are super simple, demonstrated here in part by my three year old assistant.

Smear glue on the back of the fabric or paper. Use a craft glue that says it is flexible when dry, or I’ve also used glue sticks before to glue felt. If you are using liquid glue try to spread it quickly and thinly so it doesn’t completely saturate the fabric and felt.

Stick the paper or fabric down on top of a piece of felt.

Fold inside an ironing cloth to protect your iron from the glue and iron it flat and dry. Then cut it into an interesting shape.

If you have some fusible interfacing scraps around that have a fuzzy felty back you can skip the glue step. The thin kind of fusible interfacing I have is slippery on the back and won’t really stick to the felt board, but the thick kind I have is fuzzy on the back and works great. Just test what you have, and see if it sticks. Or you can use double sided fusible stuff, with fabric on top and felt on the bottom, replacing the glue above.

Just cover your fusible interfacing with tiny scraps, or big scraps, cover the whole thing with an expendable ironing cloth, and iron it. You will have to peel the ironing cloth off, but as long as there aren’t too large gaps between your tiny scraps it isn’t a big deal, the fusible glue isn’t that strong, especially if you peel it while it’s warm. Or you can cut up your fusible interfacing before hand to fit under your fabric scraps. If you have a lot of really tiny scraps though I don’t think it’s worth the fuss.

Then you’ll have a fast pile of interesting shapes to cut up.

Slice them and dice them into triangles, squares, circles, squiggles, splots, lines, wiggles… Oh and of course these fabric scraps make great felt person clothes. Here is a simple person pattern for making a felt doll, there are extra lines on it suggesting where to cut for shirts and short and pants, follow the outline from the waist to the hips and then flair out for a skirt, or just cut a trapezoid, felt boards are the land of imagination after all.

There are so many directions you can go with felt boards, geometric shapes, animals, people, story-boards… mama smiles has a lot more patterns for sets of felt shapes if you search her site for ‘felt board’, and there are also some cute felt shape ideas at Dundee Writer: Flannel Making Frenzy, and Chasing Cheerios: A Felt Jack O’Lantern Game.

Rebecca had as much fun cutting up the new shapes as playing with them later, so if you have a little one be sure to involve them in both kinds of play!

Felt lollipops for Halloween, or anytime you need play-sweets. Start your own lollipop sweet shop with dolls (you can even twist the pipe cleaners around their hands so they can hold them if you make them long enough), or engage in some trick-or-treat play drama, or maybe you just need something cute for the middle of your table. These are so simple you don’t need a tutorial, but the dimensions and pictures are useful, right?

Materials:
Half a pipe cleaner,
two 1.5″ circles of felt,
embroidery floss,
2″ wide packing tape or clear contact paper.

(I used wool felt, but craft felt should work fine.)

Twist one end of the pipe cleaner up in a spiral that is a little smaller than one of the felt circles. Fold about half an inch of the bottom end up so that the wires at the bottom won’t poke anyone.

Stitch around the edge of the circle with contrasting (or matching) embroidery floss, trapping the pipe cleaner inside. I used all six strands because I wanted the stitching to really stand out. To make it easier to sew with six strands you can divide it into three strands, thread it onto your needle, pull all six of the ends together and knot them. Then you aren’t trying to pull twelve strands of floss through the felt with each stitch.

Cut three pieces of packing tape or contact paper:
* One 1.5″x3.25″ piece for the inside of the wrapper, cutting this without getting it to stick to itself is a little tricky!
* Two about 2″x3″ pieces for the outside. Don’t worry about the exact size – just big enough to cover the inside wrapper and hang over the edge by at least 1/2″, but more is fine.

Take the narrow piece of tape and fold it over the top of the lollipop, sticky side out – you don’t want the tape to stick to the felt. The folded tape should be just a tiny bit bigger than the lollipop.

Place the larger pieces horizontally and sticky side in on the front and back, lining up the bottom edges as best you can and letting the other sides hang over. Press it all together and smooth it out with your fingers.

You should now have a wrapper that slides on and off. Take it off and trim up the edges. You can cut them all flat or cut some of the edges with pinking sheers – for a traditional lollipops from a roll look trim the top and bottom edges flat and the left and right edges crinkly. I decided to pink mine around the top three edges, because crinkly is cute!

These are really fast, so make a bunch! Time for play!

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 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?

Eggs eggs eggs! I’ve been experimenting with soft hollow eggs to stuff for Easter, I don’t like plastic eggs. If you don’t like plastic eggs either, then whip up a bunch of these to hide around your house, or just make a couple to put in a basket.

I can’t say I’ve gotten the pattern quite right yet, but it’s almost Easter, so *ding* time’s up. Maybe I’ll work on these some more next year. The two main caveats are they are pretty crushable, and the opening is small.  They will hold their shape fine if you stuff them with paper grass and candy, but if you just want a couple jellybeans rattling around  you can squash them flat if you don’t treat them gently. I’d also like the opening to be larger when I redesign them, but the larger the opening the less stable they are.  My friends tell me the small opening is an advantage for entertaining little children anyway.

So there you go.  There are lots of variations you can make with these, how many different prints do you have in your stash?  You can practically fit this pattern on a charm square, actually, you probably can.  The initial instructions call for embellished felt, but at the end is a variation for (heavy) interfaced fabric, and the button is also optional if you’re in a rush and you want to make a lot.

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