Book review: Weaving Unloomed

weave In case you’re new to this needlework/ Internet thing, let me tell you: Diane Gilleland is brilliant. I got so excited when I heard about her ebook, Weaving Un-Loomed: Simple Ways to Weave Cool Things, that I posted the news right away, sight unseen. Now that I’ve had a chance to spend some quality time with this publication, I can give you an unequivocal recommendation: You have to have this book.

In her usual warm, chatty style that we’ve come to love on CraftyPod blog, Diane walks us simply and clearly through the basics of weaving, giving us the vocabulary we need to understand the intructions that follow for five must-try techniques and projects. She keeps her promise that we’ll “maximize the meditative part, keep the measuring and figuring as simple as possible, and generally have a great time.”

And she delivers projects that will satisfy your thrifty and green urges while exciting your imagination. I mean, look at the project featured here: beautiful jewelry woven from old magazine pages. (Guess what all the women and girls in my family are getting for Christmas!)

For just US $10.50, you get an instant-gratification download of 60 pages of crafty delight. Go get the book now!

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My daughter’s school has project-based finals instead of tests in the spring, and in her geometry class last year the students constructed a scale model of a town complete with three-dimensional buildings.

Of course building a paper town doesn’t have to include a geometry lesson (they also calculated the volume of their buildings) but it is a fun way to get kids to express their creativity by decorating the buildings and talking about the things they would want to include in their own town.

Putting buildings together is a test of fine-motor skills, and if kids are working on a town together they’ll need to negotiate what goes where and why.

Get started with the house printables from Kids Activities Blog. They’ve got a “plain” roof house and a “fancy” roof house to choose from. Just print, color, cut out and assemble.

You might want more than just houses in your little town, though, so I went hunting for some more printable templates you can use to make different kinds of buildings.

Brother has printable skyscrapers, cars, people, trees and lights (shown above) that are meant to be printed in color buy you can do them in black and white so kids can color them in if you want.

Printablee has another colorized set of paper buildings including different kinds of houses and something that maybe looks like a church or school.

If you’re willing and bale to pay for printables to use in your paper town, there are lots of great ones available on Etsy. Ludlow Prints has a collection with a school, grocery store, bakery and other buildings, while Paper Fun By Yumi includes things like a hospital, fire department and police station (essential if you’ve done a community helpers unit!).

Tiger Bee Learning has a printable set with 20 different buildings, including a bank, library, museum and zoo to name a few, as well as a blank template for kids to design their own buildings. Once you have the basics of making a piece of paper into a 3D building down, kids are sure to want to make their own buildings to add to the town.

Older kids can also write about why they picked the buildings they did, and littler kids will have fun building their town over and over again.

[Photo: Brother]

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Have you read?