DIY Sewn Finger Labyrinth

 

I originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

This finger labyrinth is a satisfying (and SILENT!) fidget toy.

And you can sew it completely from stash!

If you or someone you love also loves fidget toys, then you are going to be thrilled with this finger labyrinth! It’s a totally silent fidget, hallelujah, that’s also super portable and delightfully fidgety. And depending on whether or not you’ve got a spare marble lying around, you can sew this finger maze entirely from stash.

Here’s what you need:

• 1″ graph paper or ruler/stencil. I thrifted a ream of this ages ago and its been endlessly useful, but you can also simply print a 1″ graph paper pdf. To transfer the maze pattern to your fabric, a clear gridded quilting ruler will come in VERY handy, but you can also do the work with a regular ruler and an eye for accuracy.
• fabric, 2″ larger than your planned maze by length and width. If you’ve got sensory particulars, pay attention to your fabric choice here. I, for instance, ONLY like this finger maze in flannel, but one of my teenagers refers to flannel as, and I quote, “a sensory nightmare.” Ahem. Whatever fabric you choose, a novelty print is a fun choice.
• matching/contrasting thread. I like to sew the maze lines in contrasting thread to add interest to the toy, but you do you.
• fabric markers. I am obsessed with Pilot Frixion pens for marking on fabric. The ink irons away, which makes it, for me, even more convenient than wash-away ink. You DO have to be careful using it on darker fabrics, however, as sometimes after you iron there will be a light mark in its place. When in doubt, do a test first!
• marble. I’m steadily stealing the marbles from my kids’ old marble mazes. Hungry Hungry Hippos is also a good place to find marbles, or swing through your local thrift store.

And here’s how to sew your maze!

Step 1: Pre-test your marble vs. stitched channel setup.

Before you dive into maze-making, double-check that your marble will fit through the maze you’re planning. To do this, sew a few short stitched channels, perhaps in .75″, 1″, 1.25″, and 1.5″ widths, then pass your marble through each to see which feels the best. I’ve found that I vastly prefer a 1″ channel for all the standard marble sizes, which vary by only a millimeter or two, but you should make your maze the way that YOU want!

If you do decide to change the width of your maze paths, change all the other measurements, too, to match. You can even customize your graph paper grid size to make drawing the maze pattern easier!

Step 2: Draw your maze pattern.

Technically, these are labyrinths, since there’s only one path from beginning to end and the task is just to get the marble along the path. But if you want to make it a maze with dead ends, go for it!

Have fun drawing your maze just the way you want it, making sure that you use up all your maze space and that you’ve left openings equal to the width of the maze path whenever you turn a corner. That’s where working with graph paper really helps!

Step 2: Cut and sew the maze base.

Cut two pieces of fabric that are 2″ longer by both length and width than your maze pattern. In the image above, you can see that I cut my graph paper, which is in 1″ grids, to the overall fabric size so I can use it as a template. Or I could have just cut my fabric to be 8″x10″ to accommodate my 6″x8″ maze.

If you’re using novelty fabric, it’s fun to fussy cut it to make sure that any especially cute elements will be prominent.

Put your two fabric pieces right sides together, then sew a .25″ seam around the perimeter, leaving a hole in one side for turning.

Turn the fabric right sides out, use a blunt pencil or similar tool to push out the corners, and iron flat. Fold in the raw edges at the opening to match the rest of the seam, and iron to crease. You’ll close that hole later.

Step 3: Draw and stitch the maze.

Center the maze pattern on one side of the fabric–here is where your quilting ruler will come in QUITE handy!

I find it easiest to draw the perimeter of the maze first directly onto the fabric with my heat-erasable pen, then use the quilting ruler to draw in the lines that make up the maze path. Measure and draw the lines as accurately as you’re able to, because it would suck if you mis-measured and ended up with a path too narrow for your marble.

Speaking of that marble–pop it inside the maze through the opening as soon as you’ve finished drawing out your pattern! Technically you can leave it until just before you stitch the opening shut, but I just know that if I do that, then I’ll forget it entirely. I’d rather sew around the marble a bit while also reassuring myself that it’s there!

Step 4: Edge stitch to close the opening and add a second barrier.

Edge stitching around the perimeter of the fabric is enough to close the opening, but I’m paranoid about kids and marbles, and I also like this step because it adds one more stitched barrier to keep that marble from escaping.

If you really want to go ham on making that barrier, you can even do a zigzag or other decorative stitch there. I did this on the finger mazes that I’m giving to my four-year-old niece, but I did plain edge stitching, in a thread color to match the maze path, on the ones for my teenagers. The straight line in the maze path color looks a lot nicer, too.

These sewn fidgets turn out quite well for something so simple! I like the 6″x8″ maze to give you something to really fiddle with, but I also make these as small as 4″x4″ and they’re still satisfying to play with.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

I Finished the Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet (and the Dolch Sight Word Cards!)

 

Once upon a time, waaaay back in January 2023, Past Julie thought, "Ooh, I have the perfect idea for a cute Christmas gift for my niece! I'll hand-sew her a moveable alphabet out of the rest of my stash of wool felt. I'll just sew, like, one letter a week and she'll have SO many letters by Christmas!"

June 2023 rolled around, and Past Julie thought, "Hmm, no big deal. I'll just start stitching a couple of letters a week."

During the October meeting of my mending group, I happily cut out letters and burbled to my fellow menders that "I just need to sew one a day and they'll be done in plenty of time before Christmas!"

During the November meeting, I said, a little more grimly, "Just two a day and I can squeak them into the mail just in time for Christmas."

Those last couple of days in December, it was more like six a day while binge-watching Chicago Med DVDs, but look at the glorious result!

I am SO pleased with them! 

Here's a rooster for size comparison, because the entire flock could not get it out of their heads that these colorful nuggets were perhaps made of delicious chicken food:

My favorite part of this project is that even though yes, it took a lot of me-hours to accomplish, the materials are ENTIRELY stash!

The felt is a really nice merino wool felt that I bought long ago for projects with my own kids (it's this exact set, but I bought 8"x10" cuts instead of the 4"x6" cuts shown here). I blanket stitched the letters with basic-grade Amazon embroidery floss and I stuffed each letter with snips of that same felt, and won my own personal game of wool felt chicken because after the very last letter was stuffed, I had less than a handful of little wool felt snippies left. 

I even had all the colors left! I managed a complete rainbow to start the set--

--and also had enough grey, brown, black, and white to make a nice variety and multiples of every letter (except for X and Q, ahem):

My partner handled creating all the Dolch sight words in the same font and size, and I backed each one in pretty paper and laminated it so my niece can use them as templates to make words with the wool felt letters:

Wool felt has such a lovely feel, though, and the colors are so pretty, that I'm hoping that the letters alone are a fun sensory experience. Sensory experiences build intrinsic knowledge and increase one's love for a topic.

It's clear that the chickens, at least, appreciate the sensory appeal!

Even though this project took a loooong time, it was not hard at all, and I actually would recommend it as a beginner-level hand-sewing project for absolutely anyone. Over Thanksgiving break my college kid sewed a perfectly acceptable "I" after about five seconds of instruction, and it's now mixed in there somewhere with the rest of the letters, completely indistinguishable from the lot (well, *I* can distinguish it, but definitely nobody else could)...

Best. Christmas. Yet. Now, to figure out something even more unwieldy to make for next year!

P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Bleach-Painted T-shirts: A Tutorial

 

Twice in the past few months, I've wanted to make some kind of custom fan apparel, but I didn't want to devote a ton of time, energy, or money to it. The first was for a Mother Mother concert, and the second was a present for all of the children dancing the (kind of shitty, because you have to wear a fat suit and giant mascot head that's apparently hot, smelly, and hard to see out of) role of Mouse in our local university's production of The Nutcracker. 

You can do this project a lot more nicely than I did it, with super clean lines and really even tones, but here's how you can ALSO do it quick and dirty-like, whether it's for a concert tomorrow or you've got to make six in a row and you're already bored.

To bleach paint T-shirts, you will need:

• black 100% cotton T-shirt. The best shirt is obviously a thrifted shirt, and for my Mother Mother shirt I did find the perfect black T-shirt at Goodwill. Speaking of... y'all have the Goodwill prices gotten absolutely RIDICULOUS in your area, or is my town the only one in which the local Goodwills have decided that not only do they no longer need to offer any sales or discounts on the crap they're literally given for free, but they've also just absolutely jacked up their prices to Jesus? I'd long more-or-less abandoned the little indie thrift shops around me for more than just the occasional browse-through, because their selection is the pits compared to Goodwill, but 2023 is the year that I rededicate myself to their cause. Anyway, I picked up the six Medium Team Mouse shirts that I needed via a Black Friday Doorbuster from one of the big-box craft stores. I feel like those shirts have a reputation for being cheap in quality as well as price, but 100% cotton shirts are nothing to sneeze about these days, when pretty much every shirt and its dog is infused with polyester!
• backing material. This will need to be thick enough to keep the bleach from bleeding through to the back of the T-shirt. I used a brown paper grocery bag.
• bleach. Get the cheapest, and don't get it on you.
• cotton swabs.
• glass dish.
• paper stencil.
• glue stick (optional). 

Step 1: Prepare the stencil.

Both of the stencils I wanted to make were word art, so I just did them in Google Docs. Because I am basic.

But at least I printed them as outlines to save ink!

Cut out the stencils and save the widows, since you'll need to place them back on the shirt before you paint.

My Team Mouse stencil took up two pages, so I taped them together with the spacing that I wanted.

Step 2: Paint!

Place your backing material inside the shirt, making absolutely sure it will cover where you'll be bleach painting. 

You can either just set your stencil on the shirt, if it's fairly short and simple--

--or you can tape it down with more masking tape.

I even took the glue stick to the back of those fiddly M and U sticky-outy bits to make sure they stayed put, and I also glued down the widows. I was able to reuse this same stencil for all six Team Mouse shirts, gluing the bits and the widows each time and pulling them up afterwards.

Then, put on a podcast and start painting within the lines!

I found it easiest to first draw the outline of each letter, then color in the center. It made them look wonky as I went, since the bleach activates right away--

--but I think it evens out pretty well by the end:

I'm disappointed in how much the edges bled, but none of the recipients of these shirts seemed to notice, and you also can't really tell when you're standing a normal distance from the human wearing it.

Below is the first shirt I did, though, and for that one I just painted away and it also looks fine:

Step 3: Rinse and Wash.

After I finished painting, I gave the bleach a few more minutes to even out the last couple of letters, then I rinsed each shirt very, very well under cool water and then tossed it into the wash. I washed each individually so nothing else would accidentally get bleach stained, but fortunately my washing machine has an eco-friendly quick wash, so I'm not the cause of the nation's water shortage.

I haven't tried it, but this TikTok recommends a hydrogen peroxide rinse to deactivate the bleach:

Might be worth a try!

Step 4: Show off your beautiful work.

Here's what happens when you ask your husband to photograph you in your beautiful shirt in front of the theater where Mother Mother is about to play:

Seriously, it's a cell phone camera. You have to really try if you want to get your thumb in the way of a cell phone camera.

And here's one particular member of Team Mouse, coincidentally the one who walked by as I was finishing up and asked if she could use the rest of the dish of bleach to customize her own shirt. Since "her own" shirt is inevitably the shirt that I messed up on (can't give a flawed shirt to someone else's child, gasp!), I happily let her also make her shirt the most elaborately cutest:

It's very likely that I'll do this project a few more times this year, because it's SUCH a quick, easy, and cheap way to customize a T-shirt. I would like to get smoother edges, though, so next time I'm going to play around with thickening the bleach first so it can't run away from me.

The Best Homemade Christmas Present: Painted Building Blocks

The putting away of childish things is progressing, but it is a LOT harder than I thought it would be. The existence of the kids' playroom has allowed me to ignore all the once-beloved but long-ignored toys that they possess, since they're all stored tidily on shelves and not in the way.

But with one teenager headed off to college very shortly, I've promised the other teenager that we can remodel the playroom into a private bedroom just for her. It's long overdue, since the kids have shared one small bedroom for their entire lives without (much) complaint, but even I admit that I can no longer expect two nearly-grown adult children to continue sharing their decade-old IKEA bunk bed in their single tiny bedroom during college breaks.

I want to shrink these children back down to ages four and six just for a few hours, just so we can play blocks again while listening to Amelia Bedelia books on tape.

Anyway, we've already handled picture books and toy animals--

--we organized the LEGOs back during the pandemic lockdown, around the time that Matt got rid of almost all of the Barbies and their stuff (and no, I still haven't started speaking to him again...), and a couple of weeks ago, with a present idea for my toddler niece in mind, I decided to take care of the blocks.

The kids have a vast, well-loved, much played with building block collection. They wouldn't even be embarrassed to tell you that they played with blocks well into their teenaged years, because blocks are freaking AWESOME. Included in our collection were lots of scraps and seconds, though, so, first I sorted through all the blocks to cull the ones that the kids had had fun playing with, but weren't worth saving. Then, Matt helped me wash the blocks that we were keeping--and WOW, was that water gross!

We put most of the squeaky-clean blocks into storage bins--and I even separated the marble run blocks from the building blocks, a chore I'd been wanting to do for the entire time we've owned the marble run and yet somehow never got to--but first each person in the family picked out several blocks for a very special project:

Matt and Will each painted a few blocks, but Syd and I got VERY invested in our individual block-painting visions and spent most of the weekend just like this:

Syd designed her block set to resemble the work of one of her favorite artists, Mary Blair, specifically to mimic the Disneyland It's a Small World aesthetic. Here's how her blocks turned out!

I love how her blocks allow one to connect a line or continue a color in interesting ways.

I wanted to paint a set of triangles with a connecting rainbow on one side--

--and a complete color wheel on the other. Here's how that turned out!

I like how you can mix them up:

These are the ones that Matt and Will painted:

Obviously, we couldn't pack them up and mail them to our favorite toddler until we'd made sure that they work properly!

They work great!

Not gonna lie--I am VERY likely to dig some more building blocks out of storage so I can repeat this project, either for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop or just for fun. It was QUITE satisfying, and I was left with the feeling that there's lots more to explore regarding block painting and pattern building.

Upcycled Hair Accessories: Stashbust a Scrunchie

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

My favorite stashbusting projects are the types of useful accessories that you can never have too many of. You can never have too many zippered pouches, cloth napkins, fabric baskets, or pillowcases, and once you're used to making them, you can whip them out quick as lightning without having to refer back to the instructions. 

Scrunchies are one of my favorite stashbuster projects. Like the other projects that I mentioned, scrunchies are very forgiving, so you can fudge fabric dimensions as needed to fit your scraps. Scrunchies look cute in a wide variety of patterns and prints, from the classic to the novelty. And, for those of us with long hair, scrunchies are EMINENTLY useful! Toss a couple in every bag you own (bonus points if you store them inside a zippered pouch!) and a couple more in all your glove boxes, and you'll be set for any scenario. I lead a Girl Scout troop, and I keep spare scrunchies in my troop first aid kit and my troop campfire kit, too. Long hair will never keep MY Girl Scouts from adventure! 

To make a scrunchie from your stash fabric, you will need the following:

• fabric piece, approximately 24"x4". Remember how I said that you can fudge fabric dimensions as needed with this project? I did not lie! I've gone as short as 18" to use up the last bit of Halloween print, and as narrow as 3" to squeeze one last project out of a favorite dinosaur print.
• elastic, approximately 1/4" by 7". Again, though, use what you've got! I've made scrunchies using everything from FOE to 1/2" elastic to buttonhole elastic. You may need to adjust the length of the elastic if you've altered the length of the fabric piece. If your elastic can be tied by hand, reserve an extra inch for knotting it. If your elastic is too wide to hand-knot, you'll use that inch to stitch the two ends together.
• measuring, cutting, and sewing supplies. Don't forget the safety pin!

Step 1: Measure and cut your fabric and elastic pieces.

Novelty prints are the best for scrunchies! My teenagers think that scrunchies are so silly (I lived through the 1990s, and I know that they're right!), and they're happy to lean into the silliness when I surprise them with scrunchies made from the last bits of their favorite novelty prints. But other types of fabrics also make surprisingly successful scrunchies. I adore using thrifted sheets to back quilts, and the folded and hemmed top of a thrifted sheet makes an excellent scrunchie. Dress shirts and skirts are other good fabric options. 

My favorite dimension for the perfect scrunchie is, as I mentioned in the Materials section, 24"x4". But I'd go as short as 18" to use up a good scrap, and I'd absolutely rather go longer than toss a couple of inches of fabric in the trash. 

Cut your elastic to about 7", which allows for a .5" overlap on each side to either tie or sew the two ends of elastic together. I'm using up the last of some stash FOE for the scrunchies in this tutorial, but any elastic approximately 1/4" wide should work well.

Step 2: Make a fabric tube.

 Fold the fabric in half lengthwise, and iron to crease.  Sew the open long edge shut using a 3/8" seam to create the tube.  

Iron the seam open.  

Fasten a safety pin to one end of the tube. Use the safety pin as a bodkin to turn the tube right side out, then iron again so that your tube is tidy and flat.

 

Step 3: Insert the elastic.

 Fold one end of the tube to the inside about 1/2", and iron to crease.  

Fasten the safety pin to one end of the elastic, and use it as a bodkin to pull the elastic through the tube. Scrunch the fabric as you go so that it's scrunched into the middle, leaving both ends of elastic clear. 

If the elastic is narrow, you can sometimes get away with tying an overhand knot to connect the two end pieces. Otherwise, overlap the two ends by .5" and sew them together with the stitch of your choice.

 

Step 4: Close the tube.

Overlap the two ends of the tube, with the cuffed end on the outside. Sew them together with a sturdy straight stitch. 

Fluff up the scrunchie until all the scrunches are evenly distributed around the circle. 

DIY scrunchies make fun additions to Christmas stockings and Easter baskets, and care packages to your favorite young adult. Out of the six scrunchies that I made in this short afternoon's work, two are for my teenagers to wear as Halloween accessories (in my family, Halloween season starts in September!), two are going into their Christmas stockings, and two are going to hang out in my secret bin of presents, waiting for a special occasion yet to come.