Make a Wood Burned Stick Plant Marker

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World.

My favorite plant markers are the simplest ones you could make--they're just wood burned sticks! I've experimented with more decorative and elaborate plant markers over the years, and some of them ARE really fun to create and display, but I haven't found anything more eco-friendly, easier to make and use, or sturdier than wood with a wood burned label. 

These wood burned stick plant markers have no paint to fade, no glue to lose its adhesion, no sketchy materials to worry about leaching into the ground, no artificial substances that will sit around forever if I neglect to collect them from the garden! A nice, thick stick will stay serviceable for several years, it will never lose its contrast with its wood burned label, and when I'm done with it, it'll happy decompose wherever I leave it, benefiting the soil as it does.

Supplies

To make your own wood burned stick plant marker, here's what you'll need:

• Stick. Look for a stick that's around 1" diameter, and cut it to lengths approximately 8"-10". If you find the stick somewhere other than your own property, you might want to also bake it using the same method that you use with acorns. I might be the garden version of a helicopter mom, because I worry about introducing random fungi, parasites, or insects to my plants from outside sources, but baking will kill anything that grows.
• Carving knife. You don't need a full-on set of wood carving knives (although my kids and I use ours all the time!), but you do want some sharp knife that you can do a little whittling with. Don't be scared, because it's easy and fun!
• Wood burner. Wood burning kits are easily available and fairly inexpensive, but if you don't see yourself using one often, it's worth it to ask around among friends and family to find one to borrow.

Directions

1. Prepare Your Stick

 Cut it to size, if you haven't already, and peel the bark off if you prefer that look. 

  2. Carve The Stake 

Choose one end of the stick to be the bottom, and use your carving knife to begin carving that end of the stick into a point. It's pretty messy, so do this outside, and it's somewhat slow going, so I highly suggest working your way through an audiobook or becoming obsessed with a podcast to help the time pass. 

Eventually, though, you'll have shaved that end down to a nice point. You don't have to make the tip sharp, of course, unless you think it might be helpful to have some vampire-slaying stakes disguised as plant markers. I, personally, do find this helpful.

3. Flatten One Side For a Label

 

Use your carving knife to shave away one side of the top half of the stick, creating a flattened area for your plant marker's label. This is a little trickier than carving the stake, but the good news is that this flattened area does not have to be at all perfect for you to be able to wood burn the label. If you get really frustrated, you can cheat by using a palm sander and your most abrasive sandpaper to even out the surface. 

 I warned you that wood carving is messy!

4. Wood Burn the Label

Follow the instructions on your wood burner to attach the appropriate tip and heat it up, then use it like you would an unwieldy sort of pen--it's really that easy! Going slowly helps, and don't be afraid to go over the same line a couple of times to make it deeper and darker. Try not to let the tip just sit in one spot, however, as that will add a large, burned blot to your work. 

When your label is wood burned on, your plant marker is ready to go to work! Unlike most projects that you use outdoors, you don't need to seal these plant markers; wood ages well and each plant marker will easily last several years in its spot before it needs to be replaced. 

I like to place these markers next to my perennial plants, especially the ones that I don't have confined to garden beds. My milkweed, for instance, tends to pop up late and likes to spread out, so a permanent marker to remind me where it keeps me from trying to put an annual on top of it. 

In the photo above, my brand-new sunflower plant marker is going to help me remember that I transplanted some of my perennial sunflowers into that narrow bed this year. They LOVE it there, but until they get tall and start to bud they tend to look kind of weedy, the poor dears, so that nice sturdy plant marker will (hopefully) keep me from absentmindedly pulling them next spring. 

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 Made Rainbow Fibonacci Placemats, Because It's My Pandemic Hobby

 

I've been obsessed with rainbows (it's like alphabetizing for colors!) and math (so many patterns, so many puzzles, so many correct answers that it's possible to suss out!) forever, and teaching myself how to make my niece's Sierpinski triangle quilt also got me obsessed with how satisfying it is to sew absolutely perfect seams and angles and iron them just so and end up with a creation that's gloriously precise.

Add in a nice long podcast, preferably in the true crime genre, and nowhere else to be and nothing else to do but sew and listen, and I'm as happy as a clam can be while remaining socially isolated and terrified of the ongoing global pandemic...

And we actually DID need placemats! I Googled around for a while trying to find a pattern I liked, but I don't like anything floral or cutesy or too curvy, I'm not in the mood for something novelty or pop culture, and the only color schemes I really like are galaxy and rainbow, because I am ten years old. I was about to just put the whole project on the back burner when I suddenly thought, "Ooh, I could sew the Fibonacci sequence just like I did when I made my Fibonacci quilt, and stop on a number that's the perfect size for a placemat!"

"Let's see... how many different squares would that give me.... OMG SEVEN?!?!?!?"

And the rainbow Fibonacci placemat is born!

Don't those squares, sewn so precisely and ironed nice and sharp, soothe that tense pit in the bottom of your stomach?

And don't you find that concentrating on cutting and pinning the layers together and matching everything up just perfectly requires so much focus that there's no room for any actual original thoughts in your head?

So pretty! So orderly!

And isn't it nice to quilt such nice, straight lines while listening to the behind-the-scenes story of the Chippendale dancers?

And doesn't it make your kid's ravioli soup, ripe peach, and half a homemade pumpkin chocolate chip cookie look elegant instead of the result of you 1) cleaning out the freezer and 2) foisting off the last of the canned goods you panic-bought almost exactly one year ago today because it was practically the only thing still on the shelves at THE HARDWARE STORE (stay classy, Midwest!)?

Also, both that placemat and table are kinda dirty. I'd warn you not to look too closely, but I suspect you already knew I'm not landing on the cover of Good Housekeeping anytime soon...

I'm so happy with how these placemats turned out!

I wanted to make more, but we don't actually *need* anymore (especially not if I'm going to make myself a whole other set out of rainbow prints, ahem...), so I made a rainbow Fibonacci placemat listing in my Pumpkin+Bear shop, because making them for other people is just as fun!

Anyway, I suppose that mathematical rainbow-themed quilting is as good of a pandemic hobby as anything else!

P.S. The Fibonacci Sequence makes a great homeschool math unit!

February Favorites: Apollo, H.I.V.E., and People (Who are Hopefully Not Me) Dying in Caves

This was a February Failure. The kids and I LOVE Supernatural, but we could barely make it through just a few of these episodes, yikes.

 Syd told me that I would love the Trials of Apollo series. She encouraged me to re-read the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and then to read the whole of the Heroes of Olympus series so that I would be caught up. She reassured me that no, we didn't ever have to talk about the Kane Chronicles; we can just pretend that they don't exist, blech.

She even waited to read the final book in the Trials of Apollo series so that I could read it at the same time, even though it took me months to get there.

And it was so worth it when in February, I dove into this series and read it all, the final one together with Syd:

Riordan's series sometimes take a while to pull together, so I did agree with several of my Girl Scouts (who offered their opinions after seeing me reading The Lightning Thief during our fall campout--THAT'S how long it's taken me!) that the first book, and arguably even into the second book, isn't the greatest or most compelling. But if you hang in there, which I did at Syd's encouragement, it suddenly gets REALLY good REALLY quickly. And although the series is solidly for children, I was surprised at some of the gritty, realistic themes that it explores. The handling of child abuse, from both the victim's perspective and from the perspectives of peers, felt real and important, as did the pervasive issue of parental neglect. And the books contain my absolute favorite type of character, the solid anti-hero who we love anyway and we hope he's good at heart even though he's terrible on the outside, but wouldn't you know it, he grows and changes and becomes awesome on the outside, as well. BUT he never forgets how terrible he used to be and he still has to continually deal with the ramifications of his prior behavior, while figuring out how to feel about the rest of his toxic family who behave the same way but definitely won't be growing and changing.

Here's what else I read in February!

Here are Will's favorite books from February:

I love how Will's mind slips seamlessly between children's sci-fi, vintage fantasy, and the classics. She's no snob, and although she does have distinct preferences, they're never decided by what genre or reading level a book is.

Here's what else she read in February!

I'm randomly obsessed with caves again, as writing lesson plans for a speleology study for Will reminded me of this long-held obsession. It's probably not the healthiest field of study, since at least half of my obsession actually revolves around cave disasters and how people die in caves. Remember Floyd Collins?

Yeah, that's what I'm mostly obsessed with. There are loads of local, incredibly dangerous caves near me, and I've spent a lot of useless time that I should have been spending doing something productive instead reading reports of people having disasters or near disasters in these caves, including one kid form our local university who got left inside a cave for something like three days after his caving club forgot him, and another nearby cave that yet more university students drowned in back in the 1970s. For the past three or so decades, statewide cave conservation groups have been encouraging local landowners to shut down casual trespassing into their caves, and some conservation groups have even been able to take over ownership of some caves. There's one local cave in particular that a conservation group bought the property for; I was curious about its exact location, so I got on Google Earth. On Google Earth, you can look at historical views, and it was so interesting to see a comparison between a 1991 satellite view of this location, in which the trail to the cave site is easy to see because the ground cover is completely beaten down to dirt and there are cars parked everywhere, to a view from this year, in which the trail to the cave and the area around it is now invisible, as green as the rest of the land. 

So along with my Google deep dives, and the literal college textbook on cave geology that I'm currently reading, I'm also revisiting the Thailand cave rescue story (for the THIRD time), with this awesome podcast series:

If you've read any of the books written by the rescuers, none of the information in the podcast is particularly novel, but the storytelling is very good. I usually listen to podcasts via Bluetooth speaker when I'm working with my hands AND the kids aren't working on school, and Will, especially, will occasionally pipe up with a comment from another room, where she's apparently listening as hard as I am. It's riveting!

The kids are a little less invested in this caver's YouTube channel that I keep watching, but I am not going to stop until I have seen every one of his practically narration-free cave videos!

My interest in speleology is kind of contradictory, as I have absolutely no interest in exploring caves myself. I'm claustrophobic, one of the many curses of an ill-spent childhood, and I have no desire to be the subject of a podcast or book about my ultimately unsuccessful rescue attempts. 

Do you remember that I'm also afraid of drowning?

So that's why it seems pretty obvious that of COURSE I'm taking my Girl Scout troop on a cave tour via kayak this weekend...

If you don't hear from me next Monday, Google "Cave Rescue Indiana" for the latest updates!

How to Sew an Easy Strip Quilt

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

Denim quilts are about the warmest, snuggliest quilts you'll ever nap under. They're comfortingly heavy like those weighted blankets that people love--so heavy, in fact, that you'll find you can skip the batting altogether when you're making a denim quilt! 

Denim quilts also tend to be super soft, since they're most often made from well-loved and well-worn blue jeans. They tend towards all cotton, so that's a plus for those of us who prefer natural fabrics. And if you put it out into the world that you'd like to have some old jeans to craft with, old jeans WILL come to you--I have relatives I don't even remember who call every now and then to ask me if I want their old jeans! What an awesome way to save on new material AND save some great aunty once-removed from tossing her ripped jeans in the dumpster! 

You can make some marvelous quilt creations from this upcycled denim, but my favorite type of denim quilt is also the easiest: a strip quilt is super quick to create, and when you sew it entirely from upcycled denim, you can achieve a really cool ombre effect.

Supplies & Tools

To make your own strip quilt out of upcycled denim, you will need:

• Blue jeans. Using a random collection of gifted jeans will generally result in a good variety of blue tones, perfect for making an ombre quilt. I tend to break down my jeans for crafting and storage, and for this project, I use just the jeans' legs. Save those back pockets, zippers, and bulky seams for other projects!
• Cutting/measuring supplies. You'll want a self-healing cutting mat, a meter stick, chalk, and scissors or a rotary cutter.
• Sewing machine with jeans needle. My sewing machine does NOT love sewing denim. One thing that I do to make it easier on my machinery is install a sharp jeans/denim sewing needle, one designed specifically for helping home sewing machines muscle through all that thick cotton.
• Flannel fabric matching your quilt top's dimensions. To keep this quilt quick and easy and not too hard on my poor old sewing machine, I am NOT binding it--gasp, I know! This means that the backing fabric just needs to match the dimensions of the quilt top.

Directions

1. Do the Math To make your own quilt top, you first have to make some decisions:

• What size do you want your quilt to be? I, for instance, am sewing two quilts that will match the dimensions of a Twin XL mattress, and one quilt that will match the dimensions of a king mattress.
• What seam allowance do you want to use? I'm using 1/2."
• What width do you want your strips to be? They can be any width, as long as it's uniform.
• Add double the seam allowance to your strip width to find the total width that you should cut each denim strip.

2. Cut the Denim Strips 

 As long as your strips are the same width, each one can be a different length--in fact, it adds to the fun of making a strip quilt to have a lot of strips of different lengths! You can also decide if you want to cut your strips so as to avoid worn knees or holes, or if you want to keep them. I'm cutting out grass stains and giant rips, but I'm actually keeping a few worn spots in my denim strips. It's not hard to tack a small hole so that it doesn't continue to unravel, and it adds character to the quilt.

3. Begin Piecing the Quilt's Rows 

 Because I want an ombre quilt, I first arranged my denim strips into light, medium, and dark piles, each of which will take up an approximate third of the quilt. You can arrange your tones anyway you like, or make it random! Sew denim strips together at the short sides until their length matches the desired width of your quilt, ironing each seam open. Piece together another row out of strips, then sew the two rows together, again ironing the seam open. You can continue to sew each row onto the quilt as you make it, or sew all of your rows individually before piecing them into the quilt top. My sewing machines hates sewing thick fabrics and therefore sometimes feeds unevenly, so I also have a little trick: I cut each of my denim rows too long. I line them up carefully at one side, but I don't bother to trim the other side until my quilt top is finished. At that point, I can trim it to size and it looks as if I had everything matched perfectly from the beginning! 

4. Pin the Quilt Top to the Backing 

 Iron the quilt top and the backing fabric. Lay the backing fabric right side up, then place the quilt top, right side down, on top of it. If you have trouble keeping the backing fabric taut and smooth while adjusting the quilt top, consider that I sometimes will literally tape the backing fabric to my floor with masking tape while I'm working with it. 

 It does not help when the cat decides that the quilt top is his personal playscape and takes a running dive at it with his claws out, but it helps in other, non-cat scenarios. 

  5. Sew the Quilt Top to the Backing 

 Use a 1/2" seam allowance to sew around the perimeter of the quilt, leaving an opening in one short side, about a third of its length, unsewn. Turn the quilt right side out through the opening (this is also known as binding a quilt "pillowcase style"), then iron the seams to set them. Fold the raw edges of the opening to the inside, and iron to crease them. 

  6. Edgestitch and Tie Your Quilt 

 You don't have to edgestitch around your entire quilt, but you do need to edgestitch that opening closed, and so if your sewing machine can possibly stand it, it does look nice to edgestitch it all the way around. 

 Technically, we're not making a quilt but a tied blanket here, since instead of quilting it, you're going to use embroidery floss to knot together the quilt top and backing at intervals. Here's the detailed tutorial for how to tie a quilt. 

What you've got now is a very warm, very soft, VERY heavy denim and flannel quilt. Whether its made from your partner's (or your great aunty's!) beloved jeans, or simply old jeans that you've scored from the thrift store, it's gone from trash to an heirloom, thanks to you! Now go throw it down in some quiet field tonight, and lie on it and look at the stars. You deserve it!

P.S. Want to know more about the books I'm reading, the quilts I'm sewing, my adventures in life, and my looming mid-life crisis? Check out my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Tent Tidy from Fat Quarter Quick Makes

 Here's another thing I've sewn for spring camping!

I used this book for the project--

--although I stopped referring to it after getting the measurements, which is why the hanging loop isn't centered (frankly, I'm lucky that it's as close to center as it is, because for no earthly reason that I can determine it didn't even OCCUR to me to attempt to center it!). 

I did, however, also sew interfacing into both the body and all the pockets of the hanging organizer, something that the tutorial didn't call for, and I'm really pleased with how much structure the interfacing gives the finished product:

I think this tent tidy IS actually going to be very useful for tent camping. I am forever not remembering where I've put my car keys, my pocket knife, and my phone, and losing my lip balm, and every morning I wake up dreading that perhaps I've rolled over onto my glasses and crushed them, and look! This organizer has exactly the right number of pockets for all those things!

My poor children are also still sleeping in their same IKEA bunkbeds of a decade ago, however, and absent the nightstands that better-maintained children all own, Syd requested a hanging wall organizer for herself. She also requested a room of her own, which... it could happen, but definitely not while Matt is busy doing graphic designs and Zoom meetings all day in the playroom.

A hanging wall organizer in the fabrics of her choosing, though? THAT is something I can make happen!