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?

What do you need?

• A wooden dowel, about 12″, (but a pencil will do fine in a pinch)
• An old CD, (or some cardboard cut to look like a CD)
• Some masking tape or two rubber bands
• Some kind of hook – if you have a picture hanging kit look in there, otherwise you can get creative with a paper clip or sewing pin. Or you can ditch the hook altogether and just put a notch into the end of your dowel to hold the yarn, or tie your yarn in a half hitch around the end of the spindle. So many choices!

Wrap masking tape around your dowel or pencil until it just fits through the CD or cardboard. For a top-whorl spindle put the tape about 1/3 of the way from the top, and for a bottom-whorl put it about 1/3 of the way from the bottom. The ‘whorl’ is the thing that whirls around, in this case the CD. I like a bottom whorl spindle because it is more stable, but a top whorl spindle is easier to hook the yarn on the hook because of the way the yarn comes up and over the edge of the CD and then through the hook.

Use small pieces of masking tape to secure the CD. You could also use hot glue.

To do the same thing with rubber bands, wrap one rubber band several times around your dowel to make a lump, stick the CD on, and then make another rubber band lump above it to hold it in place. This is what we did in our class. These rubber bands are too small though, you should use something thicker. Next time we will too. Or we will skip the CDs altogether and use wooden toy wheels.

Screw the cup hook into the end of your dowel or pencil eraser. You probably want to drill a pilot hole, but you can get away without if you are lazy like me and don’t mind a bit of cracking. If you are aiming for a heirloom spindle you probably aren’t going to use a CD, or follow this tutorial at all.

If you don’t have a hook, I would hammer in a pin, then pull it out, bend it into a curve with some pliers, and super glue it back in.

Then tie a stout piece of yarn around the middle of your dowel and start spinning! It is so much fun!

Actually, I think the CD doesn’t quite have enough mass to give you a nice spinning inertia, to make it better I’m going to try taping some pennies on the underside of the CD right at the outside edge. I bet that would give it a nicer feel.

Here are some getting started links from the Joy of Hand Spinning, there are videos over on the far right side of the pages.
Spinning with a Drop Spindle
Basic Hand Spinning Techiques

So much fun! I have no idea what to do with the yarn I’m making though, I’d like to make something special, but I’m not sure what. Any ideas?

Aren’t these cute? Am I allowed to say that about my own work? I was so thrilled with how they turned out, and how really simple they are to make that I had to photograph the construction of one so that everyone else could have fun making them too.

To build these you need some basic supplies, a handful of twigs, pruning shears or other clippers or saws, and a glue gun. It would be nice to make these without glue, I bet they would be really nice with some lashing, but the glue gun makes it so fast! I made six chairs in under an hour, which, given how long it takes me to make most things, is pretty darn fast. Oh seductive glue gun. Also the pruning shears, I’ve done twig work before with a small saw (and 1/2″ twigs instead of 1/4″), and the pruning shears make this SO much faster, snip snip snip and you have three tiny ‘boards’.

So. To start, find a likely looking stick, and clip six twig sections all the same length, about an inch. Four for the seat and two for the back.

Line up the four twigs for the seat, and cut two more twigs that are one twig width longer than the seat depth. These will be the under-seat supports, we are building the chair upside down. Glue them on about one twig-width in from the edges of the seat.

Now for the front legs. Cut two twigs about the same length as the seat twigs, one twig-width shorter is nice. Put two drops of hot glue on the front edge of the chair where the leg will go, one on the bottom of the seat, and one on the outside of the under-seat support. This will give the seat leg glue-support on its top and side and make it much stronger than just glueing it straight onto the bottom of the chair. (Despite my engineering Penelope keeps pulling my chairs apart, no matter your skill, hot glue and twigs do not stand up to a two year old!)

Stick those front legs on. You can see here how the front leg is supported at its top and side.

Flip the chair right side up and measure how long you want your back leg/chair back twigs to be and cut two of them. You can use straight twigs, or forky interesting ones. Put two drops of hot glue on for each leg, one on the back edge of the chair, and one on the side of the under-seat support, again, glue on two sides of the leg is better than one!

Here is the first back leg in position. When you hold the chair on its feet like this it is easy to slide the back leg to just the right height to make the chair seat level. Holding all the legs against a flat surface as you glue the back legs on will keep your chair from being wobbly like an annoying cafe table.

And here is the chair from behind with both back legs glued on.

Lay your chair on its back and glue on the previously cut seat back twigs.

And you are done!

Next up, we make fairy gardens.

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!!!

Shellac. I love shellac. It is non-toxic, and it isn’t made out of plastic. What is shellac?

From Wikipedia:

Shellac is a resin secreted by the female lac bug, on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. It is processed and sold as dry flakes (pictured at right), which are dissolved in denatured alcohol to make liquid shellac, which is used as a brush-on colorant, food glaze and wood finish. Shellac functions as a tough all-natural primer, sanding sealant, tannin-blocker, odour-blocker, stain, and high-gloss varnish.

Yes, foodglaze. You’ve probably eaten shellac, and if you are not a compulsive ingredients reader you probably never realized it. Ever had sprinkles on your ice cream? Yep.

So, hey, it’s an approved food ingredient, I’m okay with using it to finish toys that my
1yo will probably be chewing on when I’m not looking. Awesome!

When I was making some rainbow gnomes for Penelope I was experimenting with shellac so that I could give them faces with sharpie markers. Which are full of horrible solvents. I ended up leaving them classically faceless just because I liked them that way. But anyway the numbers on that picture up there are the number of coats of shellac that I put on the peg people before drawing each face.

No shellac – bleeding marker.
1 coat of shellac – not so much bleeding as gentle blurry haloing, probably as the alcohols in the sharpie diffused through the thin coat of shellac.
2 coats of shellac – hurray! No bleeding!

Right, dissolves in alcohol, so don’t go letting your toddler drop their toys in your drink.

Start with a box. Actually we finished with the box, or maybe it came in the middle somewhere. Really, my husband saved me with the box. I was sitting in the middle of the kitchen, in the middle of a whirlwind of scraps trying desperately to decoupage a shoe box into a nice sewing box. I had a vision, but it was sticky slow going, it wasn’t going well, and I was quickly running out of time. He pointed out a nice box I could re-gift instead, hurray! (Thanks Ma, your gift turned out to be super useful, and exactly what I needed, just not in the way you intended!)

Add some loose woven canvas squares (ours is thrifted, I think it is wool, it is super soft, but serves the same purpose as sewing on burlap, but much nicer.) and squares of cross stitch fabric you have lying around, and an embroidery hoop.

Gussy up an Altoids box with some fancy paper (I love double sided tape) and fill it with buttons. Buttons are great fodder for beginning sewers.

Turn a cardstock jewelry box into a great little embroidery floss box by wrapping it with scrapbooking cardstock to make it taller. (More double sided tape!) The lid still fits on fine, and it is just the right size now, hurray! I think this making boxes taller trick would come in useful lots of places.

Toss in other random bits and bobs because you always go overboard that way. A box of pink beads, because sewing beads on is fun (as long as you make sure the holes of the beads are sufficiently larger than your needle size, seed beads are not fun for 5 year olds to sew with, glass pony beads are great.) A spool of vintage cotton, um, string? Oh, some old fat knitting needles and a plastic baggie of scrap yarn balls. Yes, we are going too far, oh well, it isn’t like we need to keep any of this stuff.

Finish it off with something actually nice, (inspired by Pink and Green Mama’s Felt Needle Book), except for how you are desperately trying to finish it while your daughter’s carpool to the party is waiting, and the ribbon loop/button that holds it shut isn’t quite what it should be. And then PANIC that all of your needles you thought you had have mysteriously disappeared and start tossing things up into the air. Please skip that last part.

Rebecca also made her a bracelet, her first pattern bracelet, she counted 7 small pink beads, then two larger pink beads and repeated perfectly about six times. First time she’s made jewelry that wasn’t a random collection! And I didn’t even get a picture I was in such a rush, shoot!

I hope Anna likes her present, I know I would have loved it!

Okay, so maybe everyone doesn’t have crystal head pins in their stash, if not you can improvise with a sparkly pipe cleaner, or a piece of wire and some sequins or beads, or heck, sew it together with some yarn. Forget the title, it’s not important!

We made these for a few of Rebecca’s friends for Valentine’s day. I was trying to come up with something that she could make for her friends, out of materials that we had on hand. I did cut the hearts out though, and she ended up needing some help twisting the wires together, so the ‘make it herself’ part was only a little bit successful. She pushed the head pins through the hearts and barrettes, and helped with the design though. Also, since I’d started with the design constraint ‘something that a 4yo might be able to do’, they were easy enough to make a bunch without pulling my hair out. WIN!

Am I starting at the end of the story? Well, let me give you the basic instructions in case you haven’t already figured it out from the picture.

Take a heart button, a regular sized barrette, and a couple of crystal head pins or other type of wire. Put the button on top of some felt and use it as a template to cut out a larger heart shape. Stack the felt heart on some more felt and cut out a yet slightly larger heart. Stack the button and the two heart shapes, and (help your 4yo) stick the head pins down through the button holes and through the felt. Slip the pin wires down through the prongs of the barrette at the wide end, and twist the wires around the end of the barrette, making sure that the pokey ends get tucked in between the barrette and the felt heart. Ta Da!

I know, you got all that from the picture right? Did you figure out why there is one set of hearts that is a radically different color of pink? No, we didn’t run out of lovely naturally dyed wool felt. One of Rebecca’s friends is allergic to wool. Do not pass Go, do not go to Waldorf school, do not collect $200. Do get a sparkly barrette anyway!! Very important.

I may be a Californian, organic farmers market produce buying, canvas shopping bag toting, biking the kids to school mom (but not skinny or tan or particularly blond anymore…) but I still have an enormous soft spot in my heart for candy corn. They are utterly at odds with my post-kids value system, but I can’t seem to care. Maybe I should add irrational fruit cake to that first list!

So for the glorious month of Halloween I had to make some candy corn barrettes. I think they are adorable. And look at my model’s nose, isn’t she cute! Mom, yes. These barrettes will make you cute too! And you can make them! Just download the pattern and follow the directions. P.S. I cannot take responsibility for any candy corn binges that may be triggered by these barrettes. (^_^)

Given the pattern pieces you can whip this together in whatever order you want, you really don’t need any instructions, do you? But the order I do things in ensures that you will only have to thread your needle once with each color of embroidery floss, and that the back will be trimmed to fit the exact way you’ve sewn the front.

Materials:
* Candy Corn Barrette Pattern
* Bits of felt (wool is nice) in white, orange and yellow. These colors are easy to find in the craft felt section. I used Holland wool felt from Magic Cabin in White, Pumpkin, and Lemon.
* Matching embroidery floss
* One barrette, the pattern is sized for a 1.5″ long barrette, scale if you have a different length. I use the non-slip ones that have some kind of rubbery sleeve over the barrette’s prong.

(1) Scale your pattern to match your barrette length, and print. Compare your barrette to the barrette in the illustrated assembly diagram to make sure the size matches.

(2) Cut out all the pieces.

(2b) If you want a face, embroider it on now. The one Rebecca is wearing is a simple smiley with french knot eyes and a back stitched mouth.

(3) Take your backing piece, and center your barrette over it. Mark two points on either side of the base of the barrette’s prong. Cut a slit between the two points.

(4) Open the barrette and insert the prong through the slit in the felt backing piece as far as it will go. Close the barrette to hold it in place.

(5) Thread 2 strands of yellow floss onto your needle. Overlap the yellow base piece of the candy corn over the center piece and sew with a running stitch.

(6) Position the center and base pieces over the barrette and backing felt and sew the rest of the way around the yellow base piece of the candy corn. Secure and cut your floss.

(7) Thread 2 strands of orange floss onto your needle. Slide the white tip piece just under the edge of the orange center piece and sew them together.

(8) Continue your stitching along the edge of the orange center piece, slip your needle in between the layers of felt to the remaining edge of the center piece and sew that down. Secure and cut your floss.

(9) Thread 2 strands of white floss onto your needle. Sew down the loose point of the candy corn. Secure and cut your floss.

(10) Neatly cut around the candy corn trimming away the extra backing felt. Done!

Tips: I start my stitching with a small knot hidden between the layers. I secure my tail by taking 2-3 tiny lock stitches right on top of each other, then skimming the needle through the back of the felt and cutting it off very close where it comes out.

Useless trivia: I had to shoot this whole tutorial twice because the first time it looked SO AWFUL! (;_;) I got as far as uploading all the images, starting to look at the tutorial previews and I just couldn’t take it. (>_<) Why are tutorials so much more work than you are expecting? I can’t answer that.

So, I ended up making a lot of these, and I will be giving out TWO, (not the one with a face) randomly, to people who comment on this post by Friday the 15th. I will be rolling the dice and packing things up Saturday morning (16th), Pacific Time for you last minute people. One extra entry if you blog about this tutorial/giveaway, 5 extra entries if you make one of these barrettes and put a picture up publicly on your blog or flickr, or wherever. Because that makes you awesome. (^_^) [Edit: That is silly, why would you want one of my barrettes if you made one yourself? If you do want one, go ahead and add 5 comments for yourself, or you can add one comment that says Monster Ball Pattern, and I will enter you in a separate drawing for one of those. You know, if only one person makes them before next Friday, you are a guaranteed win!]
[Edit: The giveaway is closed, but you can still comment on the tutorial if you have questions, etc.]

Tomorrow (night probably) I will be putting up a couple of these barrettes in my Etsy shop if you just want to buy one. Hand stitched! Natural wool felt!

And remember that cute monster ball pattern with candy pocket in my Etsy shop, if you need to make something extra special to give someone candy in.

This is a simple thing to make, I hesitate to call it a tutorial, so we’ll call it a mini tutorial, but what’s in a name anyway.

Step 1: Collect acorns. We live in a blessed part of the world, California, where there are several varieties of acorns available year round it seems like. Near our house we have the round fat acorns of my East Coast youth, and also long skinny acorns which belong to California Live Oaks. You need some good big flat acorn caps for the fairy plates, and some small deep ones with long stems for the cups. If you don’t live in California you might not be able to find the shape of acorn we used for our chalices, if not, collect some 3/16″ (~3-4mm) twigs for the chalice stems.

Using some heavy grit sand paper, something in the 60-100 range, sand the bottoms of the large acorn caps flat. Rebecca helped me with this, it’s good practice holding things steady while sliding them over the sandpaper. For the chalices just sand the end of the stem flat. If your chalice acorn doesn’t have much of a stem, cut a tiny bit of twig and sand the ends of that flat to use as a chalice stem, or consider yourself to be making tea cups. That was my original plan anyway…

Get out your glue gun and hot glue tiny buttons to the bottom of the chalice/tea cup stems. We put our buttons face down, which made them more stable as cups. If you decided to go with a bit of twig, glue that in between the button and acorn caps.

Have your 4 year old fill your dishes with glue and glitter, or other fairy food, such as small seeds, or beads.

After the glue dries, have a tea party! These are really easy, and I expect them to get a lot of play in the doll house!

I just updated my theme, hand integrating a bunch of changes, so let me know if you notice something horribly broken. I’m trying to get threaded comments working. I know my sidebar is grey, I haven’t figured out why yet… Oh, hey, now it’s not. Shoot. I hate it when things change for no explainable reason. Hrmph. Oh, it’s just grey on the front page… Moving along…

Do you have a cheap glue gun that doesn’t stand up on its lame little stand? I do. Let’s fix them. I want my glue gun to stay where I put it, and not tip over, slide around, leak glue everywhere, and burn me or my daughters. Lame!

This is not a beautiful or complicated project, but I find it extremely helpful. Take a rough 12″x12″ piece of cardboard, and a large empty spool. (If you don’t have any empty spools you could probably use an empty spice jar or toilet paper tube in a pinch. I save thread spools for my daughters to use as threading beads, so I just raided one of those.) Use your glue gun to hot glue the the spool, on its side, into the middle of the cardboard. Cut a deep notch in the cardboard behind the spool for the cord, this is the important part, cheap glue guns always try to stand on their cords which is most of what tips them over. The notch channels the cord’s disruptive energy into extra stability. Take that, cord!

To stand your glue gun up slide the cord into the notch and stand your glue gun on the spool. Woo Hoo!