Foil the Boredom

Sitting in the bleachers watching my daughters’ 6th grade basketball games, it’s guaranteed the stands will be run amok with bored little basketball siblings. One Saturday I was completely distracted from the game while watching the results of a genius mother who had come to the game prepared with a simple box of aluminum foil and a pair of kid-safe scissors for her younger son.

As he created his own action figures by molding the foil, the bleachers around him began to fill with other little boys that wanted a piece of the action. Ultimately, there were aluminum sword-yielding super heroes fighting an army of foil army guys. These kids were so preoccupied, thinking creatively, sharing and having such a good time that when the buzzer indicated “game over”, they were actually bummed!

So if you have little ones and need to keep them preoccupied, be sure to keep a roll of Reynolds in the car! A 50 foot roll runs about $5. Of course, depending on the ages of your kids, you have to be careful with the sharp saw-tooth cutting edge on the box. And before you hand over the foil, be sure to tuck in the side tabs to keep the roll of shiny stuff from taking off across the floor!

For the sake of this post, I made my own little action figure: Shiny, The Super Blogger!

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Unique Pincushions

I found this darling little wrecker-tow truck at an antique shop over the weekend for only six bucks. There’s some mechanism missing, disqualifying it from any serious collector’s purchase, but the second I saw it I thought “pincushion!”If you look hard enough around your house, you’ll find many little unique things just begging to hold your sewing pins. Here are a few other things I found that could each hold a little pillow of fluff & fabric. The shorter the piece better, as when pinning, I find that taller pieces are a bit less ergonomic.

To make the pin pad for my truck, (ONE) I scanned an old ad from a 1954 Farm Journal magazine -the same era as my toy truck. I shrunk it down and printed it out onto the same ink-jet fabric sheet I used to make the luggage labels in the previous post. At this point you may choose to launder the printed fabric to soften it up.(TWO) I cut a stack of felt to the shape of the bed of the truck to help retain the pad’s final shape. (THREE) I then used one of those pieces to gauge the trimming of the fabric pad cover.

(FOUR) I cut out the fabric and rounded the corners, (FIVE) & (SIX)

sewed around the folded edges of the cover and filled with the felt and poly-fill stuffing. (SEVEN) & (EIGHT)Then I gathered the cover around the fill, moving the gathers to the corners and knotting the thread once my pad was to shape. If you’re making a round pad, just even out the gathers or cinch all gathering tight to create a ball.(NINE) Once I was happy with the gathers, I oozed E6000 glue around the inside of the truck bed (careful to avoid any open areas that would cause drips,) and placed the covered pad in place.(TEN)And here’s my finished pincushion!

To see more recent truck pin-cushions, click here!

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2-Sided Luggage Tags

Our family will be heading out on a vacation soon, so I dug up an old file I’d created years ago for luggage tags. You know how everyone’s suitcase looks the same as it turns the corner on the airport luggage carousel. It’s good to tie something distinguishing to your bag. The first time I used this graphic for tags I printed them on cardstock and laminated them with Scotch Bag Tags, which works great and can be found at a drug store chain and in office supply stores.

But today I changed them up a bit. I found a free old canning tag image on The Graphics Fairy and using my very weak Photoshop skills, erased the printing on the tags, lightened the background a bit and left the cool hole-reinforcement graphic, which I filled in the center to avoid any white area when hole punching later. (Ok, that was a VERY weak erase job, but when reducing and covering with text, it’s not noticeable at all.)

I added my graphics (changing a few personal numbers for the sake of this post,) and printed two per tag onto a printable ink-jet fabric sheet. Only peeling the paper backing from one piece to keep the final tag a bit sturdy, I lined the two up pieces back-to-back using my high-end light table (sliding glass door) and taped them together.

Then I sewed through the labels in a couple of places and all around the edges and trimmed them out.

I added a brass grommet and looped it with a piece of left-over gold elastic cord from the holidays then frayed the edges of the tag a bit.

Now with a nice note to the luggage handlers printed on the tags, surely our personal belongings will arrive safely to our destination…eventually.

Feel free to use any of the images from this post. Be sure to pop over to The Graphics Fairy for more great images and projects!

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