Knitting!

A while ago I bought a book on Amazon called Knitty Gritty (Knitting for the absolute beginner) by Aneeta Patel, and a set of bamboo knitting needles.





I haven't had much spare time for crafting recently, but I have been trying my hand at knitting, when I've found a few minutes to spare, and I've become a bit obsessed.

The book is really simple to understand and has loads of photos which are easy to follow... And I have managed to successfully make a scarf and some baby booties!  I am ridiculously proud of myself and have even had an offer from someone to buy the baby booties!

 For the scarf I probably made it too wide, but the extra stitches made for good practise (and I can now use it as a small blanket if I want).  I didn't follow exactly what the book suggested as I wanted to practise purling as well, so I used 3 balls of XL cotton (made by DMC).  I did normal knit stitches (with 6.5 mm needles) for the first and third ball, but for the middle one I did purl stitching.  It looks quite nice, I think, and the purled part of the scarf is stretchier and feels somehow softer which is great as it's the part that touches the back of the neck.

Then I tried my hand at the booties... I was really surprised how easy I found these to make and managed to do each one in an evening, so having made a nice little set of booties in just two days felt very rewarding.  With this one I learned how to decrease, how to do a garter mattress stitch and practised the backstitch, which I had only done with thread and material before.  It was also an opportunity to use smaller sized needles too (4.5 mm).

And speaking of the needles, I really like the bamboo ones I got.  I tried knitting years ago when my mum showed me how to do a basic knit stitch, but I never managed to make anything.  Back then I used metal knitting needles and I can really see that bamboo is easier to work with.  The wool doesn't slide off as easily which I think is really helpful for a beginner, and I just prefer the way they feel, with a little give in them.

So all in all my knitting adventure has been a good one so far!

I've now got my hands on some crochet hooks and a book on crocheting, but so far my efforts haven't borne any fruit. I also want to try some sewing, but I need to invest in materials and am going to wait a while to start that project.

So I'll leave you with one recommendation if you want to try your hand at knitting for the first time (or have forgotten how to since the last time you tried), buy Knitty Gritty... It's an excellent book!  And invest in some bamboo knitting needles.

Painted Picture Frame

I decided to paint a picture frame to send to my dad for Father's Day last month.  

 I bought a simple wooden frame and painted a base coat of white around it to begin with.

 I wanted to experiment with blending acrylics so I mixed a very small amount of blue in with white paint and started spreading the blue paint across the frame from one side and added a second coat of white paint from the other side.  Brushing in one direction from the blue side I was able to blend these two colours quite easily. Since I was working with a small surface area the paint didn't have time to dry out during the blending and I was very pleased with the result.

 I then decided to decorate the frame a little more with some black shapes; hearts and tall flowers to go with the decoration in my dad's living room.

 The frame seemed a little bland so I added some colour and placed a photo of myself and my dad inside.

This was a very easy and quick project with satisfying results.

I have been experimenting with blending colour with larger surface areas and haven't been quite so successful, but I will share my experiences with that soon.

ESL Kids Craft - Paper Fortune Tellers

Today I'm going to give you some advice on how to use paper fortune tellers to teach English as a second language to children.

I have found that these are a great icebreaker to use with small numbers of children, excellent for teaching specific vocabulary, useful to review vocabulary your students have difficulty with or just a fun game for advanced/bilingual students.

First, I've explained how to make one with pictures below.  Otherwise there are loads of great tutorials on Youtube that you can watch, such as this one.

 

 You'll need a square of paper, so to make one from A4 paper: fold over a neat triangle and cut off the excess paper.

 
 Unfold the triangle and fold a new triangle from the corners that haven't yet been folded to make a cross through the middle of the square of paper.

Then fold the paper in half one way, open up and fold in half the other way to make a cross through the middle of the square.

 



Fold each corner into the middle of the square.

 Turn over and again, fold each corner into the middle of the square.

 On the back of the square shown in the picture above you will have 4 small squares. Fold over the paper to make creases between these small squares so that you can open and shut the fortune teller.

 Fold the fortune teller.

To decorate the fortune teller, unfold it so it's flat.

Et voilà!

You can play with them in one of two ways.  Either, have the children spell out the words as they open and shut the fortune teller, or, have them count how many letters are in the word and have them open and shut the fortune teller that many times.  Adapt the way you play with the fortune teller according to their age and language ability.

I recommend making these with no more than 12 children at a time as you will need to be on hand to help them with the folding and supervise what they’re doing so that they don’t make any mistakes.

I don’t advise making fortune tellers with children under the age of 6 as folding is a difficult skill for children to grasp; even older children will need very clear instructions and you will have to check their folds as they do them to make sure the fortune teller can open and close at the end. 

If you have a group of mixed ages, buddy up the younger children with an older child who can do some of the supervision for you.  Older children will probably have made one of these before and remember how to make it once they get going.

However, go ahead and use a fortune teller you have made with your younger students: just use pictures and numbers that they have to name instead of words and questions!  You could even use pictures which represent something or someone they have to mime, such as animals:

To use your fortune teller as an ice-breaker, decorate it to ask basic questions and review basic vocabulary such as colours and numbers.  Do this by writing colours on the outside of the fortune teller, numbers in the centre and basic questions such as “what’s your name?” under the flaps inside the fortune teller.  When the children are confident at answering the questions you can hand over the task of asking the questions to them and role-reverse, or have children interacting with each other under your supervision.

For specific vocabulary:

Chose the topic you want the children to learn or review.  For example, the weather.

Use the seasons as the 4 options on the outside of the fortune teller, put weather vocabulary in the centre and put tasks such as "draw and umbrella" or "mime putting on a coat" inside the fortune teller, under the flaps. 

 To review difficult vocabulary:

Some words are hard to pronounce, some are hard to remember, some phrases and questions are hard for children to understand (for example the difference between “how are you?” and “how old are you?”)

These difficulties are really specific to each child or group that you teach, so your ideas of how to use a fortune teller in this case are going to be very specific to the needs of your students, but here’s the idea of how fortune tellers can help:

Some children can be very self-critical or become shy when they find something difficult, so finding fun ways of over-coming a language obstacle is essential to help them get through their blockage.  Playing with a fortune teller is a one-to-one activity that you can have children do in pairs.  This means they’re going to have an opportunity to practise the vocabulary they find more difficult with fewer pairs of eyes staring at them as they do so.  Also, most children love playing with fortune tellers and want to play over and over again.  This means they’re repeating the difficult vocabulary a lot, and hearing difficult questions again and again before gaining the confidence to try asking those same questions themselves.  Trust me, they will want to role-reverse after they have answered the questions a few times.

Areas of language I've found my French students have difficulty with are things such as:

Big numbers, and pronouncing certain numbers (I'm thinking of you, fifteen), correctly, as well as pronouncing the teens and the tens in different ways (“sixteen” “sixty”), getting the rhythm right with certain questions “how old are you?” (Having a word starting with “h” followed by one starting with a vowel seems to be a pitfall), asking longer questions: “how many brothers and sisters have you got?” and making full sentences. (“I am 6 years old” instead of just “I'm 6”).

Taking into account the challenges I've listed above, I would then decide that I need to make a number specific fortune teller, including some similar sounding numbers 18, 80, 14, 40, and the number 55. Why?  Because 55 helps the children to understand that 15 sounds different to 5 with its two different sounds and gets them practising both sounds in one go.

Remember language learning is about training the muscles in the mouth as well as the ear!

Inside I would write long and similar questions (how are you? how old are you? what do you look like? what’s the weather like today? what do you like? how many brothers and sisters have you got?

For bilingual and older children it’s a great writing exercise too.  Children often find the writing and reading part of language learning the most boring.  But when creating a game to play, it’s suddenly a lot more fun!  Bilingual children can be creative in what vocabulary they choose to include in their fortune teller, and why not make traditional fortune tellers with cute predictions such as (you’re going to find some money).  Let their imaginations run wild.

So will you be using fortune tellers in your class now?  Let me know how it goes!

Birthday Keyring Book

This is a home-made gift guaranteed to let a loved one know how much they mean to you.  It's ideal for a birthday, an anniversary, Christmas, Valentine's day or mother or father's day.

For my keyring book I chose the theme "reasons I'm glad you're in my life".  You can choose any theme you want for the book, such as "reasons I love you", "precious memories", "our first year together", "funny moments" and so on.

For birthdays or anniversaries you could number the book by age or how long you have been with the person you are giving this gift to.  I did exactly that, choosing 29 pages: one for each year of my boyfriend's life.

You will need a set of old playing cards that you no longer need, a hole punch, a keyring*, scissors, glue, card or colour paper, colour pens and bits and bobs to decorate your book with, such as stickers, print outs of photos and memorabilia of your life with the person you're giving the gift to such as cinema tickets, airline tickets, cards you've kept from them and so on.

*If you're using a lot of cards, ring binder rings are probably better.

Since I had chosen to make my book 29 pages long, I used 16 cards in total: 15 ( for the pages of the book and the back cover and 1 for the front cover and title page).

I've seen people do similar projects on various websites using a pack of playing cards which they stick things directly onto.  That is certainly easier, but I wanted to make my book a bit different and I didn't have proper playing cards, so I decided to glue colour card and brown envelope paper onto my cards instead to give it a unique look.  

Depending on the person's taste you could make your book look very different using gift wrapping paper with different patterns; just make sure that it properly overs up the playing card underneath.

 First I traced around the edge of the playing cards on different pieces of card and paper, cut out the outlines and glued them down using a normal glue stick.

I placed each one under a heavy book as it dried. 

Then I made a hole at the corner of each card, making sure the holes were all placed in the same spot by using the size guide on the hole punch.

I have seen other people make two holes and use ring-binder rings instead for a more conventional book look but I liked the look of the one hole at the top, and it was easier to make sure all the holes were in line.  

 I carefully attached each one to the keyring, making sure not to rip any of the paper as I did so.

I made sure that I wrote down a draft of the 29 things I wanted to write before starting so that I could make sure not to make any silly errors in spelling. It was helpful to do this to be clear exactly what I wanted to write.  This was also really useful in deciding what order to write everything in and where to place the pictures I had printed out.

I scanned in to my computer cinema tickets, train tickets, photographs and drawings which I associate with the 29 reasons I'm glad he's in my life (such as "we share a love of books" and a picture of him browsing a book market).  I copied the pictures into a Word document, using that to make some of the photos a little brighter in colour, cropping them and shrinking them all down to the correct size.  I made sure I had the page at 100% size to get a good idea of how big the images would be once printed and held up the cards to the screen to make sure non of the pictures were too big.

I then set about decorating the book with the printed pictures and stickers.  I numbered the pages too.

 As I had one too many sides for the book I made a front cover and then the title page on the back of it.

 To finish off I made an origami box big enough to wrap it in and cut small pieces of crepe paper to fill out the box.

Painted Mini Chest of Drawers

Today I'm going to share with you my before and afterwards attempt at decorating a mini chest of draws which I got at a craft shop.

I discovered my love of painting boxes when I redecorated a sewing box I received for Christmas last year.  Since then I have developed an addiction to painting the wonderful range of wooden boxes you can find in hobby stores.  I like finding boxes which are useful, and this lovely set of drawers is certainly that!

My mistake with this project though, was that I didn't plan ahead enough.

When I decorated my sewing box it was my first box-painting project so I was weary of starting and doing something wrong.  I drew some different designs and asked the advice of others to decide on the best design for the box before even buying the paints for it.

With the drawers I had an idea in my head but didn't do a drawing of it first and didn't mull over my options.  I picked bright colours that I really liked and just went for it.  The result wasn't bad, but it just didn't feel right and I knew I could have done better.

Here is how I first painted the box:

I loved the colours, but I hadn't considered what I was going to use it for or where I was going to put it.  These are very important questions.

Even after realising that I wasn't happy with the outcome of the box it took a few weeks to find the inspiration I needed to find a design I was happy with.

The inspiration came in the form of a little bottle of buttons!

I bought a little bottle of buttons because they were just too cute not to give a home to.  It was then I realised that the mini chest of drawers was quite obviously a buttons and thread container and then I thought it would be nice to decorate the box itself with buttons as a visual for what was inside the drawers.

I played around with the buttons, seeing what patterns I could make, and with the help of my wonderful man decided on the new back-ground colour for the chest of drawers.  Obviously I needed one which complemented the button colours, and cream seemed like the way to go.

So, I set about taking most of the paint off by sanding down the box (wearing a dust mask, of course).

 And using acrylic paint, I painted it in just the one uniform colour for both the box and the drawers.

Next, I played around with different patterns with the buttons and took some snaps to choose which I liked best:





















Next I plugged in my glue-gun and practised the best way to glue buttons with a couple of spares I had on a scrap piece of material.  This was very useful as I discovered it was better to use a pair of tweezers to apply the glue directly onto the button rather than place a blob of glue where I wanted to place the button.

Remember to always be extra careful when using a glue-gun and read the instructions thoroughly before use.











I had to be careful not to press directly in the centre of the button when securing it on the box as the glue could come up through the holes of the buttons, but pressing the edges and using tweezers worked really well.

I was very happy with the finished project and finally feel that I got it right.  I am pleased I did the first attempt anyway because I think the bold colours would work really well for future projects, such as decorating a box for a child; and now I have the photos of my first attempt to draw on for inspiration.

Here's the finished project:

So what do you think?  Was it better before or crafterwards?