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Intro to basics of hand sewing

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Hand sewing is a useful skill for repairing clothing and creating handcrafted items such as stuffed toys, curtains, and pillowcases. To get started with hand sewing, you need a few essential tools: needle, thread, and fabric.

It’s important to choose the right needle for the fabric you are working with, as different fabrics require different types of needles. For example, lightweight fabrics like silk and chiffon require sharps needles, while heavier fabrics like denim and canvas require stronger needles like tapestry or upholstery.

The thread you choose should also be appropriate for your fabric, with strong thread recommended for heavier fabrics and lighter thread for lighter fabrics.

While hand sewing may take some practice to get the hang of, it’s a worthwhile investment of time and effort. Not only can you use your hand sewing skills to make handmade items, but you can also use them to repair clothing and other items in your home.

Additionally, hand sewing can be a relaxing and enjoyable hobby that allows you to create unique and beautiful items with your own two hands. So whether you are an experienced seamstress or just starting out, there’s never been a better time to learn the basics of hand sewing and stitching!

Craftbits has a full article on the basics of hand sewing that might be useful to bookmark.

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Build a Paper City with Free Printables

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]