My name is Jess and I’ve been sewing since I was about 6 years old. I started with hand sewing but now I love to combine this with work on my vintage hand turned machine and new electric model. My sewing projects include gifts for family and friends, free motion stitched artwork, clothes, soft toys, dolls and cushions. Some months my blog will include step by step projects suitable for beginners upwards, sometimes I will share a project I am working on at home or focus on fabrics and techniques. In this first blog entry, I’m going to share with you a simple project that can easily be personalized. I’m going to show you how to make a book cover than can be used on a notepad or storybook. I will be using felt for this project as it is easy to sew and doesn’t fray at the edges. Book Cover Materials: Felt (2 sheets large enough to cover your book. They can be different colors if you wish.) Hand sewing needles and thread, or a threaded sewing machine. Scissors Pins Fabric chalk or pencil (optional) Materials to decorate (optional) Instructions: Place the book you wish to cover onto the felt with the cover facing down. Cut the felt around the book cover leaving a ¼ inch extra around each side. Cut another piece of felt (It can be a different colour if you wish) the same size as your first. Fold one of the pieces of felt in half to find the centre, and cut down the middle. Do this again with the resulting felt pieces so you have four strips. Discard one strip ( or save it for decorating your finished cover.) Lie your first piece of felt down flat and place two of your strips onto it, one on each end. Stitch the strips in place along three sides as shown. You can do this by hand or on a machine. Slip the cover of your book back into the pockets you have just made. Close the book. Take the third strip of felt and place it on the felt where you want the spine to be. Pin in place or mark with chalk. Open your cover again and remove your book. Stitch the spine in place using hand or machine stitches. Remove pins if you used them. Decorate your book cover as much or as little as you like. You could use spare felt, cross stitches or scraps of cool fabrics. (Alternatively, you may find it easier to decorate the cover before stage 4 if you wish to do a complicated or machine stitched design.) Place on your book and enjoy. I hope you enjoy having a go at making this book cover. I’d love to see your finished pieces and to hear what you’d enjoy reading about in my sewing blog.
Stone Soup Magazine for young readers, writers, and artists
Saturday Newsletter: October 14, 2017
“Just then the Rose appeared with her rosellas” Illustrator Cameron Osteen, 13, for Fort Cuniculus by Ralph Kabo, 11. Published September/October 2005. A note from William Rubel Well, this week has been a strange week. I was supposed to go to Napa to give a talk on the history of bread. The conference was to begin on Tuesday and I was to speak on Wednesday. On Monday, only vaguely aware there was a fire near Napa, I was surprised by a call from the conference organizers saying the conference was cancelled. The speakers were then asked to go to San Francisco to meet for a couple of hours to at least talk. The city was covered by a haze. The smoke was dense enough to make one’s eyes sting. One of the speakers had been staying with friends and on Sunday night, a couple of hours after the fires started, was awakened by his friends who told him he needed to pack up and leave. By the time he got to the bottom of the country road he was driving through fire on both sides of the road. Yes. Scary. Today, Friday, there is a haze and distinct smell of smoke where I live, in Santa Cruz, 130 miles from the fire. Strange and even frightening times. If any of our readers were evacuated, lost houses, or live in the San Francisco Bay Area and know the area well we’d like to read your writing about the fire, whether non-fiction or fiction, or see your art. Writing about conflict My colleague, Jane Levi, sent me a link to an article about Bana al-Abed, an eight-year-old Syrian girl who tweeted about her life in Aleppo. Now as a refugee in Turkey, she continues to tweet about the war in Syria. I recommend this article from the New York Times that introduces her to the many of us who have not been following her twitter feed. Her book,Dear World: A Syrian Girl’s Story of War and Plea for Peace was just published and is available in bookshops and at Amazon.com. If you read the book, then please submit your review to Stone Soup. We would like to read and publish art and writing by children who are caught up the many conflicts around the world. If you might be interested in helping us to give a voice to children who are living through difficult events in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Sudan, or elsewhere, please reply to this newsletter. This goes for Stone Soup-aged readers or adults. I am flying to London on Monday to work on my book for three weeks (I plan on writing most days) so I will not promise a prompt response, but please write, anyway, and I promise I will get back to you. Several of you answered our call for young bloggers. Thank you. We should have several new blogs up and running to announce next week. I also received a letter this week from Ruth Nakazibwe, who lives in Uganda. She who wrote a wonderful story, ‘The Magician and the Birds, that we published in 1997. It is always a pleasure to hear from Stone Soup authors. Do keep writing to us! So, until next week, William Using objects in place of dialogue La fille mal gardée – Pas de ruban from Act I (The Royal Ballet) 188,665 views La Fille mal Garde is a wonderful comic ballet. It was first performed in the 1780s which makes it one of the oldest ballets that is still performed. The scene I include here is a duet between Lise and Colas, the man she loves. They dance with a ribbon. They wind and unwind the ribbon tying and untying each other. The scene takes place very early in the ballet—very early in the story as their relationship begins to take a more serious turn. As a ballet is a story told without words, this ribbon can be thought of as taking the place of dialogue. I want you to imagine what they would be saying to each other if this were a story told with words rather than a story told through movement. I feel pretty certain that they’d be having a fast moving, flirtatious conversation. You can tell the same story in many different ways—for example, through images, words, music, dance, and video. I am including this here today to get you thinking about how you might tell the same story differently as you shift from one story-telling format to another. From Stone Soup March/April 2000 A Puzzling Story By Erin Brock, 13 Illustrated by Nikkie Zanevsky, 13 Rachel loved puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles. Thousand-piece clear-blue-sky and flowery-meadow puzzles. Cute little puppy-dog-face puzzles. Any kind of puzzle suited her fancy. She loved the challenge of putting one together, piece by piece. Discovering the piece that fit was always thrilling and a small victory over the manufacturer who had labeled the puzzle “difficult.” For her thirteenth birthday, Rachel received a package in the mail from her Aunt Lola, who shared her passion for puzzles. When she ripped open the box, she found a one-thousand- five-hundred-piece puzzle with a painting of a colonial farm and the surrounding forest on it. It was very detailed, with a mother working in the garden while two girls hung up the wash and a boy led the cows out to pasture. A farmer worked in the fields and a large wooden barn stood off to the left. At the edge of the field was a forest and a gravel road running through it. The farmhouse and various animals were also included in the busy scene. Rachel sat working on her puzzle: “Colonial Farm: A Painting by George Smits.” She put together most of the puzzle pieces and was working on the forest. Being the imaginative type, Rachel thought the girls didn’t look like they were having much fun. She wondered if those colonial girls could ever have fun like she had, perhaps in the forest. She thought, That
Saturday Newsletter: October 7, 2017
“Ligiri’s only comfort was a fifty-foot baobab tree, which reminded Ligiri of her kind grandfather” Illustrator Rita Rozenbaoum, 10, for Ligiri, a Dogon Cinderella by the illustrator. Published November/December, 2001. A note from William Rubel What a dramatic painting! Intense! A tree and a person in silhouette backed by a glowing orange sky. Like the poem we feature today from our archive, it’s highly evocative. It makes me think of heat, of sunsets, of Africa, of times and places where women carry baskets on their heads. The silhouettes seem simple, but every line is carefully considered: there is no room for mistakes in the deep black outlines. What does it make you think and feel? Submissions & Contests Firstly, there is never a deadline for most issues of Stone Soup. Just upload stories, photographs, poems, reviews, music—whatever you have created—whenever you like at our submissions page, and your work will be considered for publication. However, contests and special issues do have deadlines. The December issue is closing this week so this weekend is the last minute for the Food Issue. We have some very good material—some wonderful stories, recipes, poetry, art, and photographs. But, there is always room for more—so, if you have something to say that involves food in some way, then please say it and submit it by Monday. Several contributions have come in for the Selfie contest and the deadline is still weeks away. You can work with the selfie as a self-portrait but you can also, of course, include friends, family, and pets in the picture, too. As you can submit up to three images you can also create a set of linked images that tell a story. Author interviews—for teachers and readers We have just re-edited our dozen or so interviews with Stone Soup authors. One of the changes we made was to take off the background music, which we were finding a bit distracting We have also decided to show the question that our authors are answering on the screen, so that if you are a teacher showing the videos in class and look away from the screen, when you look back up at it you will still be able to see what question is being answered. If you are a teacher, please check out the videos. I think you’ll find them useful in your classroom. If you are an aspiring Stone Soup writer I think you will find what these Stone Soup authors have to say of value for your own writing. And, if you are a current or former Stone Soup writer or Honor Roll recipient, and after looking at a couple of our existing videos think you’d like to be interviewed, too, then please reply to this Newsletter letting me know you are interested. I’ll pass you on to my colleague Sarah who will get you set up. This week’s poem from the archives I’d like to say something about the poem that is included, below. I think that it is unusually beautiful and powerful. It is definitely one to read aloud as well as to read silently. The non-English words are evocative. Without knowing what they mean they bring us to this other place—this lost home. In saying these words we can feel the poet reaching out to this place she loves and has left, and as you read on you feel in the language her longing for family and, especially, her dead father, left behind in the old land. This poem works even if you don’t know what attieke or aloko are, or who are the Baoule. But the power of the internet is that you can find out. The author, Soujourner, is writing about the West African country of Cȏte d’Ivoire. I don’t want to present this like homework—but I will say that if you want to both get deeper into this poem and get to know more about Soujourner’s influences, then spend a little time on the internet reading about Cȏte d’Ivoire and looking up some of the poem’s references. You can also use her work as inspiration for your own poetry. Imagine yourself having moved to a different country, no longer speaking your native language outside of your house. You write a poem in the language of your new country, but you include a few words of the old one to express the link between who are now and where you came from. See how evocative you can make your own writing with just a few well-chosen words. Until next week, William School Site Licenses and donations-in-kind This last couple of weeks teachers have been signing up on our website for trial subscriptions to Stone Soup in the form of site licenses, and some generous donors also contacted us to purchase licenses for their local schools. We are very encouraged! Thank you! Site licenses allow anyone in a school to use Stone Soup. The license also allows students to access Stone Soup from home, just as they can access other school resources. If you are a teacher please request a trial subscription. If you are the parent of Stone Soup-aged student, please introduce Stone Soup to your child’s teacher, or contact us to discuss how you might help us get Stone Soup into your local classrooms. From Stone Soup May/June 2006 Homesick By Soujourner Salil Ahebee, 10 Leaving my dear country made me sad, made me miss all that was worth remembering the food like foutou the food like attieke the food like aloko. Leaving my African country made me mourn, made me long for the people like the Baoule the people like the Senefou…/more