Craft Gossip

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Rowenta Focus Iron {Review & Giveaway}

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In celebration of National Craft Month, Craft Gossip is offering its readers 2 chances to win a Rowenta Focus iron! A good iron is an essential tool for a wide variety of crafts, so I was happy to receive one of these irons to review. I use lots of fabrics, trims, and ribbons for my mixed media art, so I gathered a pile of vintage lace trim, a variety of ribbons, along with a piece of freshly laundered cotton fabric and started ironing!

The Rowenta Focus has several crafter-friendly features:

A non-auto off function that allows the iron to remain on for extended periods of time at the same temperature. This is very helpful if your project takes a little extra time or has lots of details.

An extra large water tank with a covered filling inlet: a great feature that allows for plenty of steam, while the covering prevents water from being spilled on delicate fabrics or other craft materials like paper. Best of all it uses tap water, so it’s very easy to refill!

A high precision tip that makes ironing tiny details incredibly easy.

One of my favorite features of the iron is the precision tip. It proved very effective for smoothing out even the most crumpled of my vintage trims and restoring them to their original beauty. The burst of hot steam helped remove stubborn wrinkles from cotton fabric, but there were no problems with leaking when I turned the steam feature off to iron some delicate silk ribbon. I found the Rowenta Focus to be a valuable addition to my crafting tools. For a chance to win your own iron, please visit the giveaway post on Craft Gossip for all the details. The giveaway ends March 31, 2011 so enter soon!

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Fun Facts About Flags

Whether you celebrate Flag Day (June 14 in the United States, it honors the day in 1777 that the American flag was officially adopted) or just want to do a flag unit study, there are lots of interesting flags around the world that you can talk about.

For example, did you know there’s one flag that isn’t a rectangle? The flag of Nepal is the only national flag that isn’t quadrilateral (Switzerland and Vatican City both have flags that are square). Nepal’s flag is shaped like two stacked triangles, which represent the Himalayan Mountains, as well as the two main national religions, Hinduism and Buddhism.

Several flags feature animals, mostly lions, bears and eagles. Two flag feature dragons. The flag of Bhutan has a representation of a Druk, a mythical thunder dragon, while the flag of Wales has a Welsh dragon.

Paraguay is the only country recognized by the United Nations that has a flag that is different on the front and back. The flag has red, white and blue horizontal stripes, with the nation’s coat of arms on the front and the seal of the treasury on the back. (Oregon is the only US state with a flag that is different on the front and back. The front shows a seal with an eagle, 33 stars for its number in the union, and the words “state of Oregon” and the date it was admitted, 1859. The back has a picture of a beaver.)

The flag of Denmark, known as the Dannebrog, is the oldest continuously used flag in the world. Legend has it the flag fell from the sky during a battle in 1219 in present-day Estonia, helping the Danish to an unexpected victory. Because of that, it was adopted as the national flag and has been in use for more than 800 years. Denmark’s flag is celebrated on June 15 each year, called Valdemar’s Day after the king leading the crusade where the flag allegedly appeared.

Purple is a rare color on national flags because it was historically expensive to produce. The only flags that use it (and it’s sometimes hard to see) are Dominica, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Mexico and Spain. The Wiphala flag of Bolivia also contains purple.

There’s a fun page on Wikipedia that shows different flags arranged by design, so you can see all the tricolor flags, all the flags with stars, triangles, people and more. You can also look at flags by color.

If this has piqued your interest, maybe you’ll want to learn more about vexillology, the study of the history, design and symbolism of flags.