Swell Goods: Vintage Modern Craft Supplies & DIY tricks

The kidlet and I took a Montessori parent-child class, which mostly succeeded in teaching her how much she likes to put stuff in stuff. Not a day has gone by where she hasn’t put her montessori skills to work dumping the cat food into the cat’s water bowl. I decided to push her interest in this towards something less messy, and made a coin box out of materials we had laying around the house. Quick & easy, and significantly cheaper than buying the legit version.

We used an empty Happy Baby Broccoli Munchies tin for this, though any tin with a lid will do. I covered the outside of the tin with Elmer’s X-treme Glue Stick (whoa! extreme! it snowboards, too!) The fabric piece was cut just larger than the tin, both in circumference and height. I lined up one edge along the top of the tin, pressing all the way around. Then, I used my hand to flatten out the entire outside. To get a clean line at the bottom, I ran my rotary cutter along the ridge to remove the excess.

Depending on the type of coins you plan on using (we have poker chips, but wood discs would also work well), slice the top of the lid with an exacto blade a little bit larger than the coin itself.

Besides just being a great tool to help with fine motor skills, the filled tin also makes an excellent noise maker.

Five minutes might even be too generous – this came together so quickly that I smacked my forehead for not doing this sooner. My mousepad had gotten all grimy and gross over the past year, so I called on my old friend for this refashion: Wonder-Under. If you haven’t used Wonder-Under before, prepare to have your world rocked. It’s a double-sided fusible webbing that lets you turn pretty much anything you can iron into fusible fabric. Make friends with it, and fast.

For this project, set your iron to hot. Cut a piece of Wonder-Under and a piece of fabric slightly larger than your mousepad, and iron the non-paper side to the underside of your fabric. Once slightly cooled, peel off the paper backing. I’ve found it to be the easiest to remove if you score the paper (just through the paper layer!) with just a single stroke using your scissors. You can then bend at this score and peel off the paper. Lay the fabric (print side up) on top of your mousepad and iron to affix. I went around the edges at an angle to make sure it was well sealed at the edges. Trim off the excess fabric, and you’re set!

The baby has recently discovered a love of coloring, which means that she has been going through paper faster than diapers. I tried to remedy this by using one of the long rolls of drawing paper, but she just preferred to tear these to pieces. Instead, I printed out one sheet with some open coloring space and her name, and then covered this with some clear Contac paper.The Contac paper can be wiped clean of crayon marks and reused again and again.