One Inch World

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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Do you know a little girl who needs more places for her dolls to sit? Maybe you? We had four place settings for our doll tea time, but only three chairs, so I made up the pattern for these chairs to fix that tragic shortcoming. Really tragic, one of the dolls had to sit on the sofa. Oh noes. But now, now they all have chairs.

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Step 1: Research! (actually step 0 was make a bad tomato I think…) Have you ever really studied tomato slices before? They are surprisingly not that symmetric. Do you slice your tomato through the stem? I slice mine through their equators. If they are squatty tomatoes. If they are lumpy heirloom tomatoes I cut them in chunks and them slice them any which way. I had a point somewhere. It was that tomatoes look so many different ways that you have a lot of freedom to play with the inside shapes. Don’t think there is some ‘right’ tomato slice or that they have to be perfectly symmetric.

I did make some funny looking tomatoes that no one could tell what they were… so there *is* room for bad tomatoes, but there’s a lot of leeway. And you could tell what they were if they were part of a sandwich set, but the first guess was ‘flower?’. I originally made the flesh red and the pulp pink and I left out the seeds. They were okay, but not very convincing I guess. The pulp of a real tomato is actually darker than the flesh, and the seeds seem to be pretty important. Here’s what I finally came up with:

This tomato only uses two felt colors, if you wanted to go for extra realism you’d have to make the mushroom-y bits that the seeds stick to a lighter color than the rest of the flesh. [There's an example of that at Akiyo's amazing gallery in the lunch section. If you want to read the text you can use Google's translation, it works pretty well.] But since I was needle felting the whole thing together I didn’t want to deal with the overlapping and shrinkage calculation of two ‘top’ layers, and I didn’t want them to overlap. Onward.

First cut out four circles, two large circles in the tomato flesh color, and two pulp colored circles 1/8″ smaller all around. If you want perfect circles you can trace a drinking glass or something, but tomatoes aren’t really circles anyway, so just cut them out freehand. Mine are pretty lumpy, aren’t they! But I trim them at the end.

Do make sure the two large circles are the same shape, and once you have everything cut out and lined up, mark the circles near the edge so that you can line them up again. While they are lined up mark one on the front and one on the back, one on each side so that you can put the marked sides inward and you won’t see them on the finished tomato. (Or use a water-erase marker, I -shockingly- just used a permanent marker.) Mark the smaller pulp pieces in the same spot too. You want to be able to put the whole stack together so they fit neatly. If you do cut out perfect circles then you can skip this step, because they will line up no matter how they are turned.

Next cut out holes in the larger tomato flesh circles for the pulp to show through. Decide how many holes you want, 3,4,5… then use a pen to divide the circle into sections and draw a C shape for the pulp hole into each of them. Make sure to leave a 1/4″ border around the outside of the circle with no holes, so that it will overlap by 1/8″ with the pulp circles. Otherwise you will have a hole through your tomato. Cut out the marked holes with a sharp pair of scissors. Once you cut out one side you can match it back up against the other large flesh circle, marked sides together, and use it as a template to mark the holes for the other side. Then cut the holes in the second tomato flesh circle.

Put together each inside pulp circle with one cut out flesh circle, lining the marks up. (You should have two pairs, don’t put the whole thing together yet.)

Either needle felt the flesh cutout to the pulp circle or use a running stitch or applique stitch around each of the cut out holes to join them together. Or, heck, you could use fabric glue if you’re in a rush. I needle felted mine.

Now that you have two hopefully solid tomato sides it’s time to add the seeds. Scatter them around, try not to space them too uniformly. I used two methods here, lazy daisy stitches in an ochre thread and green-on-the-inside clear seed beads. I’m not sure which I like better, what do you think? Looking at them now I think there are too many seeds and they are too small, but some varieties of tomatoes have lots of small seeds, so that’s okay. (^_^) I think it would also be interesting to try painting the seeds on with acrylic craft paint, but that might be more likely to be eaten off? I haven’t tried painting felt yet, I’ll have to add that to my imaginary list. Does acrylic stick to wool felt, or do you have to use acrylic or polyester felt? Questions to research.

After you have your seeds on line your tomato sides up back to back so that the flesh patterns match up. At this point you can needle felt them together, being careful to only go through the flesh sections so you don’t mess up your embroidery or break a needle on your beads, or you can stitch them together around the edge. After you felt them or before you stitch them trim around the outside edge to neaten it and make sure the two pieces line up perfectly.

Yum! (And am I glad to be done, this tutorial took forever to write up for some reason, and I’m not that happy with the pictures, I really had to force myself through this one and not wait for nice light. But moving on into the new year, let’s be more positive.)

So what do you think, embroidered or beaded seeds?