Rowenta Focus Iron {Review & Giveaway}

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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I guess moss and lichen are more things that you see in the spring than in the summer, but there are some deep shady parts of our yard that stay mossy all year, and summer is a fine time to look for plants that like to live in shady, wet areas.

Raising Up Wild Things has a really pretty set of printables to use for a moss and lichen unit study.

And just in case you’re like me and don’t really know the difference, moss is a plant that grows in damp wooded areas, while lichen is a combination of fungus and algae that live together. Lichen can live in different environments but are often found in places where you would find moss, too.

The printable includes drawings of some common moss such as sphagnum moss and wood moss, as well as common lichen shapes (crusty, leafy and shrubby). There are good sized images you can print out and laminate to use to compare to specimens you find when you are exploring nature.

There’s also a forest floor coloring page and a printable journaling page where kids can write or draw their observations and there are a few questions older kids can answer.

You can use these when you go on a walk in the woods (or the back yard) to talk about what you are seeing, or combine them with other resources to talk about things that live in the forest. Check them out at Raising Up Wild Things.

This PDF from the Morton Arboretum has a bunch of pictures of different kinds of moss and where to find them, which could also be helpful in your studies. Learn more about lichen, including what they are and what they are not, in this article from the US Forest Service.

[Photo: Raising Up Wild Things]

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