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.

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That Time I Made Everyone Play Senet With Me

The set we're playing is from the university library (because of course it is, lol!), but this is it.

This might have been my quickest speed-run through a Special Interest yet, but for a very little while my entire mind was fixed on learning how to play Senet, teaching everyone else how to play Senet, and then wheedling those people into playing Senet with me.

It was fed by a couple of other low-key Special Interests, that of Historic Games and of Reskinning/Redesigning Games. I just think it would be really cool to pick a historic game like Senet, reskin it to look more like something that would be a family interest or family joke, and then construct it and give it out for, like, Christmas or something.

Part of that is that I like the historical time periods of my favorite games, Ancient Egypt for Senet and Mesopotamia for the Royal Game of Ur, for instance, but also they're always so pretty! Look at some of the beautiful Senet games in the Met!

I also like how generally simple the games are to learn, and how satisfying they are to play. Do you, too, get weary of trying to learn new games with a billion fiddly rules? Senet is SO much simpler to learn, but there are all kinds of interesting strategies to figure out. Also, we don't really know the actual rules, so my family and I like to make up our own rules. 

Playing Senet in 2013 at the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, California, and DEFINITELY making up our own rules!

Here's the most accepted way to play Senet, with a bonus link to a printable Senet board and instructions.

Here are some DIY Senet board games:

• 3D Senet. This one is the biggest score! This public library's website links to a pdf for a cut, color, and assemble cardstock Senet game. It's got the graphics printed on it, as well as helpful fingers pointing the directions you're meant to go at every turn. If you didn't want all that detail, you could use the pattern as a template and draw your own designs.
• cardboard and painted figurines. Cardboard is my favorite, most accessible crafting supply! I love the use of miniature figurines, all of which you could probably find in your nearest toybox or thrift store.
• chessboard Senet. This is such a clever idea! I LOATHE using the Dollar Store as a source of craft supplies, but a thrift store would be just as cheap and easy.
• kid-made Senet. I don't think the fabric worked out great, but otherwise it's a lovely example of how even younger kids can DIY board games. And they're all so creative!

I think I'd want to make one on a nice sheet of wood, perhaps woodburned and watercolor stained or full-on painted in acrylics. The traditional game only has a few decorated panels but I think it would be fun to decorate every panel, maybe keeping to a storytelling theme like illustrating the progress of our England family vacation or the travels of Frodo Baggins.

I also kind of want to make a 3D one, box and all, out of Perler beads, though. Or maybe a quilted one that could also work as a placemat? How about one that masquerades as a book until you open it to see the game, with room to store the pieces inside?

Brainstorming a project is my favorite part!

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Homeschool Time Fillers That Aren't Busy Work (Even for High Schoolers!)

My high schooler would be horrified to know this, but I do sometimes assign her work that's more of a time-filler than it is a substantive assignment.

Sometimes, it's because she has a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to her stress.

Sometimes, it's because *I* have a busy week and I want to keep her on schedule but not add to *my* stress.

Sometimes we've finished up a big unit of study but it's not the perfect time to start the next one, or one of us isn't feeling 100%, or we've got an appointment or some other thing that would interrupt her flow, but I still want her learning that day.

Essentially, time fillers work well for all those times and gaps when you want your student doing something educational, but you also want it to be low-stakes for both of you. The student is using her mind but not wracking her brain, and YOU don't have to review, edit, correct, or evaluate!

Here's some of my favorites from my collection of high school-level time fillers that are educational but low-stakes:

Board Games

Sometimes teenagers just need a break from book work and screen work. Reading textbooks and solving problems and filling in answers is also just one limited, specific type of learning, so I don't like that to be all my high schooler does for school all day. 

We don't have a formal logic study currently, but logical thinking is an extremely beneficial skill, so I encourage a lot of logic games that I file as math enrichment. We play word games, association games, and creativity games for English credit, and historical games like Senet, Mancala, and Go for history/geography credit. Occasionally, I'll even find a game that we can play in my high schooler's target language.

Here are some of my favorites:

We've got some made-up games that we can play anywhere, as well, most notably the Wikipedia Game and Dictionary Definitions, and once in a blue moon I'll go to the trouble of downloading and printing an online-sourced game like Phylo, especially if it fits into a niche in a subject that we're studying. 

Documentaries

I already see the public library as my personal streaming service, so it doesn't feel like a big deal for me to do a quick catalog search whenever I'm planning the next few weeks' studies and just go ahead and request any documentaries that are on-topic and look interesting.

Documentaries about a topic of study build depth and context, and now that we're all such ipad babies, focusing on a piece of content for a whopping one hour really is something that we need to do every so often to stay in practice!

My immediate go-tos for documentaries are anything PBS, National Geographic, or BBC. Independent films and documentaries produced by news publications are also good, but I usually avoid anything else you might find on cable (TLC is most definitely NOT!) as being less in-depth than I want for a high schooler. The teenager and I are currently in the middle of a two-part PBS special on uranium, which I'm counting as enrichment for her Honors Chemistry study, but here are some other documentaries we've watched for high school:

Although they aren't quite documentaries, there are also a ton of lectures, presentations, and streams available on YouTube. Q&A sessions give me secondhand cringe, so we don't watch that part, meaning that the actual run-time is shorter than listed. This is also a good place to find performances that enhance liberal arts or language studies; my homeschoolers and I have watched lots of plays on YouTube, and lots of TV shows performed in whatever target language they're studying at that time:

Podcasts

We listen to a lot of audiobooks for the teenager's English credits, mostly while she works on her studio art and I do a handicraft and we chat. I don't want to give up that precious stitch-and-bitch time even when we're not burning through a 14-hour tome, though, so in between books I'll often fill in that space with a podcast. 

You can usually find a dozen different podcast episodes on any topic, so it's not hard to find something that fits into the teenager's current studies, but vetting new ones to see if they're good or if they're trash can take some time. We've also got favorite podcasts that are educational without necessarily being on-topic; here are a few:

 

Puzzles and Solitaire Games

We loooove our puzzles, with my teenager spending as much time working sudokus as my partner and I spend working crossword puzzles. Just in the last year or so the teenager seems to have mostly grown out of (or just mostly completed!) all of our in-house hands-on logic puzzles, but here are some of the favorites that she particularly enjoyed from childhood through the first couple of years of high school:

These days, if I want to assign her a short time-filler puzzle that's something fun, I'll have her do the daily Wordle, Murdle, or Set online. All three update daily, so there's always a new puzzle!

Process-Oriented Projects

I think that sensorial knowledge is still important to continue building, even into these older kid years. It's also important to continue building one's creativity and to remain comfortable with play, experimentation, and the concept of doing something simply to experience the process. 

To encourage my teenager to stay creative and experimental, I'll sometimes surprise her with an assignment like finding a new cookie recipe to bake, or creating a sticker design based on something we've been studying, or flipping through a stack of books I got from the library with her in mind, etc. Basically, I just want to stretch her out of her comfort zone of what she normally likes to bake or draw or read. Or maybe I'm just craving cookies but don't want to make them for myself! 

The art/math combo is my favorite focal point for building sensorial knowledge and experimenting with process. Over her high school years, the teenager has been compiling a portfolio of geometric art, and adding to it is a great way to bake some low-stakes math enrichment into the school week. Making things like mandalas, polyominoes, and tesselations put sensorial math knowledge into use, and build on geometry process that she's learned. 

Also, I'm obsessed with the spirograph!

In the lead-up to a holiday, there are all kinds of sneakily educational, mathematically sophisticated holiday crafts to create. There's a lot of beautiful math involved in wire-wrapping beads to make stars, or folding precisely symmetrical paper ornaments, or stitching felt mandalas or snowflakes. 

When there's not a holiday on the horizon, sometimes we'll just do something random like check out an origami or paper airplane book, or buy ourselves a DIY kit and decide to learn how to crochet. I'm currently low-key obsessed with a friendship bracelet loom that I made out of corrugated cardboard, so there's a lot of weaving going on around here.

As we move into the Spring semester of the teenager's Senior year, I can't decide if we're going to be doing more of these types of assignments, or less. On the one hand, I'm not opposed to ending one's high school career with a whimper rather than a bang, so as the teenager starts to finish her last units of study one-by-one, I don't want to necessarily replace them with equal amounts of puzzles and documentaries. But on the other hand, I do think that most of us need a goodly amount of productive work most days, so I definitely don't want a teenager to finish up all her learning and then sit around on my couch for several months actively not learning, ahem. 

Perhaps I'll see if there's a larger, more culminating-type project that the teenager would be interested in working on during those increasingly free school hours further into Spring? Or perhaps we'll get very, VERY good at crochet!

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DIY Corrugated Cardboard Tower of Hanoi

 

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

Tower of Hanoi is a super simple, surprisingly fun logic game suitable for early elementary through adults.

I have a weakness for solitaire games, especially logic puzzles. I’ve built up a respectable collection thanks to thrift stores and yard sales, but there’s always room for one more puzzle in my life, especially one that’s NOT made from plastic!

This Tower of Hanoi is NOT made from plastic! Instead, it’s made from that likely-looking piece of corrugated cardboard hanging out there in your recycling bin. Cut it up, add some decorations, and you’ll have yourself a brand-new version of a 140-year-old logic game.

Here’s everything that you’ll need to DIY your own Tower of Hanoi:

• corrugated cardboard. Since the pieces are manipulatives, I prefer the thicker, sturdier corrugated cardboard over the thinner kind for this project.
• measuring and cutting tools. You’ll need circles of varying diameters to use as templates for your Tower of Hanoi pieces. Look around, and I bet you can scavenge these circles from your existing bottles, cups, caps, etc.
• embellishment supplies (optional). You don’t *need* to embellish the pieces, but since when did that stop anyone from making something pretty?

Step 1: Measure and cut the pieces.

You can play Tower of Hanoi with three or more pieces, but I think seven or eight pieces are a good total number to have. You can always subtract pieces from a larger set to make a round easier!

To make the complete puzzle look like a lovely tower, select circle templates with different diameters, ideally ones that will give a nice graduated look from smallest to largest when you stack them. As you can see from the above photo, you should be able to find all of these circle templates around your house. My smallest circle template is an eensy SodaStream flavoring bottle cap, and my largest is the top of a plastic drink cup from my favorite pizza place–I also used the bottom of the cup to make a different circle!

Trace all the circles onto corrugated cardboard, then cut them out by hand with sturdy scissors.

If you like the way the undecorated Tower of Hanoi looks, you’re done! However, I think the game looks a LOT cuter with some embellishment…

Step 2: Decorate the pieces.

With seven pieces to my puzzle, how could I NOT make a rainbow?

One of the many amazing things about corrugated cardboard is that it takes all kinds of embellishment like an absolute dream. I painted these circles with Liquitex acrylics, but Sharpies or even Crayola markers all show up well. Use Mod Podge to decoupage scrapbook paper, or paint plus paint pens to make more detailed artworks on these tiny canvases.

Step 3: Play!

The rules of Tower of Hanoi are simple:

1. Start with the tower stacked with the circles in descending order, smallest to largest.
2. You have three total spaces in which you can work, and you start with the stacked tower sitting on one space. Younger players might benefit from having a play mat on which you’ve drawn out three spaces for them, but it’s unnecessary for older players.
3. The objective of the game is to reassemble the tower on another space. The reassembled tower must again be stacked with the circles in descending order, smallest to largest.
4. You may move one circle at a time between any of the three spaces.
5. You may NOT stack a circle on top of a circle that is smaller than it. Circles can only be put on empty spaces or stacked on top of circles that are larger than them.

The above photos illustrate a few different moves in the game. I don’t want to give you too many moves so that I don’t spoil your fun, but you can see from the photos the three working spaces, and the circles that are placed on a space or on top of a larger circle.

Remember that you can’t move an entire stack of circles at once–you can move only one circle at a time!

If you want to see the game in action, check out this online playable version.

If you’re a mathy kind of person, there IS a mathematical solution, and a pattern, to this puzzle. Figuring out how to record your moves is also a great introduction to analog coding, for those of you interested in STEM enrichment.

Want to give someone you love a sneakily educational gift? A beautifully embellished Tower of Hanoi inside a lovely little carrying case is just the thing!

Know a kid who’s high-energy and always seems to need more gross motor activity? Upscale this to a giant 3D version that they have to use their whole bodies to stack! Exercising their brain will make them just as tired as exercising their body, so you might even get a full night’s sleep!

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