I've made a quilt!

Many moons ago I started a quilt.  This is a brand new craft for me because looking around my tiny unit, I thought what I really needed was another craft!

Well I've been slowly plugging away at in off and on, and I'm happy to say it's finally done- including quilting and binding it (which I was going to do using this great method I found only to goof and sew the binding on the wrong side first so I had to hand stitch the binding instead.  D'oh!

Overall I think I'm pleased.  I can see flaws, particularly in the quilting where stitches are not all the exact same size (free motion quilting is not easy!) but it's not too bad. Plus it's nice to see the difference in the first square I quilted (the middle one) and the last ones.  If you were thinking of getting into quilting, I think this was a great way to learn some different techniques to see what things you enjoy for future projects.

Front of the quilt- if you look closely you can see the patch borders are sometimes different widths to fix the different patch sizes.  I like to call this a unique style feature :P

Back of the quilt.  I liked the idea of the back not being a boring single bit of material, plus it meant I could use fabric I already had since I didn't have any one piece of material big enough to form the back.

I've been making the most of the last of my holidays (plus it's been too hot to do anything productive outside!) so this is the first of a couple of posts that I've got queued up.  I'm aiming for a once a week schedule until I run out of things to post about (unless you want to read about my exciting stories of marking once school's back).

Knitted Bag Part 2

Many moons ago I posted a pattern to make a simple knitted satchel bag. I always intended to show how I finished it off and I'm sorry it's been so long!

These methods could in theory be used for any sort of bag, particularly one of a soft material that will stretch when the bag is filled.  Unfortunately though, the photos I took for the first steps have disappeared.  I blame goblins in the camera deleting them from the SD card.  It is, after all, the only logical explanation...  So apologies, but you will have to cope with me explaining what to do.  I would suggest though you read through the whole thing and sketch out a design to work out quantities of materials.

Materials for bag liner

• Felt- amount will depend on what you bag size is.
• Plastic canvas (the hole size doesn't matter- I used it because it is a lightweight, flexible material that can be cut easily)
• Ribbon (a little narrower than the thickness of your bag)
• D rings
• Sewing thread and either a sewing machine or needles to hand sew

Method

Note, the sizes I give throughout are only for an example bag so you can see what I mean with dimensions.  You will want to measure your own bag and work out sizes based on what you want!

The first step is to cut two pieces of plastic canvas to about 1cm smaller than the interior of your bag.  For example, if your bag is 27 x 15cm , you want your canvas to be 26 x 14 cm.  Then cut four pieces of felt to the exact size of your bag interior (27 x 15cm in the example I'm using).

Centre the plastic canvas on one piece of felt and lay a second piece on top.  Sew around all four sides to secure the canvas inside.  This will give your bag its structure.  Do the same for the other side.

Now for the design part.  The exact style of the bag liner is entirely up to you.  At the most basic level, what you are aiming for is to make a simple box, open on one end.  But you can customise it however you like.  In the picture below, you can see that I've added some pockets (sew these onto the felt before you sew the piece to the plastic canvas if you want to machine sew things together).  I've also added a large piece of felt to act as a large pocket.  Just remember that if you are making a pocket for something thick (pen etc) that you take that into account.  For the pen holders for instance, I sewed one side, then moved the felt so there was extra material on the pocket side to have room for the pen.  It's hard to explain, but basically just don't have both pieces of felt flat against each other or your pocket will only be able to hold thin objects.

When you have a idea of what you want, you'll need two small rectangles to act as the sides of the bag (the same height as the bag and however wide you want the bag to be.  15 x 5cm in my example.  Another piece of felt will be the base and be the length of the bag by the width.  27 cm x 5cm.

Sew all the sides together to make the liner (see the picture above).

Now to put it into the bag itself.  There are two options.  You could just place it inside the bag and secure it with a few stitches if you felt like it.  But I felt that this would place all the weight against the bottom of the bag when filled, and the stitching would stretch out. Instead, I've done something a little different.

Take the ribbon and wrap in around the outside of your liner.  What this is going to do is support the weight of the contents.  You can secure the ribbon with a few stitches at each seam if you wish but I didn't bother.

Now place the liner into the knitted bag and bring the ribbon up to each side.  Thread the ribbon through the D ring and stitch securely.  All the weight of the bag is now going to be carried by the ribbon into the D ring (and strap/handle) directly.  This means, no stretchy bag!  I also stitched (seperately) the sides of the knitted bag to the ribbon to hold things together.

Now all you have to do is the finishing touches.  I made a handle from left over yarn using a lucet, but the options are endless.  I also stitched the knitted bag to the liner all around to prevent the knitted edges from curling away and looking messy.

The finished bag

Hope you find this useful. Do let me know if you try this.  Comments make me happy :D

Sugar geodes

What does it take for me to post again?  Being trapped inside after the 4th day of 40+ C temperatures!   Hello everyone, hope you are surviving the incredible heat or incredible cold depending on what part of the world you are in.

Today's post is thanks to an activity I did with my students in Science Club (a lunchtime activity for students between Grade 5 and Year 8).  We did this over two weeks to great acclaim from the students.  This tutorial was written for someone doing this in their kitchen (since I this as a test run at home) but if you are a teacher and would like any advice for trying this in a classroom setting, let me know in the comments.

The goal is to make sugar geodes.  This basically uses the same sort of process that makes any crystal you might find in the ground, the only difference being the materials are edible and the process is nice and fast compared to typical geological processes!

Materials needed

• Sugar
• Water
• Food dye
• Flavouring (I used vanilla essence and peppermint essence but that's only because that's all I had in the pantry!)
• Aluminium foil
• Small bowls or similar (I used a muffin tray)
• Measuring cups
• Small saucepan and wooden spoon
• Stove

Method

First take the aluminium foil and fit it into your bowl.  Geodes are not typically a perfect symmetrical shape so feel free to scrunch it into a bowlish shape that pleases you.  Add a drop or two of food dye and ONE drop of flavouring.  

Now to make the sugar solution.  The exact amount is up to you.  The important thing is that you use a ratio of three parts sugar to one part water.  I used 3/4 cups of sugar to 1/4 cups of water to make four small geodes but it is entirely up to you!

Place this over a low heat on the stove and stir continuously (this is the part where careful adult supervision is a must if you are doing this with kids).  Initially it will be a whiteish sludge due to most of the sugar not dissolving.

But this is where the magic of science happens.  Why?

SCIENCE DIGRESSION SCIENCE DIGRESSION SCIENCE DIGRESSION

From www.biologyjunction.com

Well when a solid like sugar dissolves in water, what happens is that each individual sugar molecule gets surrounded by water and escorted away to do a tour of the container.  Alright, the last bit I made up but the point remains.  As long as there are water molecules looking for a friend, the solid will continue to dissolve over time.  But the water is moving at a certain speed (because it is 20°C) and eventually all the water molecules are busy escorting the dissolved sugar around and if there is any more solid sugar present it will sit at the bottom of the container.  In science, this is called a saturated solution.

But if we heat the water, those water molecules are moving faster.  This means they can now deal with more sugar molecules and so it can now dissolve that abandoned sugar at the bottom.  We call this a supersaturated solution.  When we cool this solution it is like a person holding a very very large and precariously balanced set of fragile materials.  There is really not enough room for those sugar molecules now so all it takes is a tiny bit of undissolved crystal or a flaw in the container to act as a nucleation site (place were a crystal can start to grow).

END SCIENCE DIGRESSION END SCIENCE DIGRESSION END SCIENCE DIGRESSION 

Carefully keep stirring your mix until the mixture is clear.

Then carefully pour this mixture (while still hot!) into your prepared containers.

It will take several days for the crystals to grow but you will probably see them start to appear in 5-10 minutes as the mixture cools.

Three days later...

I found that I had a 'liquid centre' with crystals on the surface of the liquid as well as lining your foil.  The easiest way to deal with this is to gently press in the top middle of your crystal to make a hole and then leave the geode upside down over a bowl to drain.  It's best to leave it for a few hours at least to dry as if the sugar crystals are still damp you may find them breaking slightly when you peel the foil away.  If they feel a little damp, leave them in a cool dry place for a while.

Now for the fun part- adding the matrix.  No not the movie. The matrix is the geology term for the rock that we find crystals in.  For example, in the picture on the left you can see some rather pretty samples of amethyst.  These are from round geodes (the green rock) that have been broken open to reveal the pretty purple amethyst inside.  Since the goal is to keep things edible, we can't use rock so instead there are two choices.  I've seen some instructions that suggested using fondant.  But I went with chocolate, because... hello... chocolate!!!!

Ahem.  Adding chocolate is simple.  Just melt some white chocolate and spoon it over your geodes.  Place in the fridge to set the chocolate.

Then, add some milk or dark on top so you get that multiple layer feel you often see with crystals like amethyst. 

And that's it!  Because the crystals are lots of individual units in this method, I found that they were crunchy but not one solid block of tooth breaking terror (but be careful on that first bite- your results may vary!).  Very very sweet- not really my favourite but very popular with my Science Club kids!