Bubble, bubble, no toil, no trouble - how to make your own bubble solution

We are going through a lot of bubble solution in our house and thought there must be a better way to keep a good supply than buying tiny bottles for between 2 and 5 dollars each that are simply poured on the ground by little hands. After an easy web search turns out there are easy ways to keep ourselves in soapy film at what looks like cents per gallon. A great selection of recipes is on an online shrine to bubble blowing devices and machines.  Here is a distillation of them.

All involve water, dishsoap, and either glycerin, cornsyrup, or sugar. Glycerin is the more popular choice but I guess the others serve the same purpose of extending the life of the water layer. For more on the science of bubbles click here.

Dawn and Joy seem to be the leading brands.  Looks like you can’t go wrong with these recipes.

2/3 cup Joy dishwashing soap
1 gallon water
2 to 3 tablespoons of glycerin

1/2 cup of dishwashing liquid (Dawn or Joy)
2 cups of water
2 teaspoons of sugar

For hardcore bubbling, the kind you might do dressed in tie-dye at a festival or get paid to do, you should check out a link to Big Bubble Magic for variations and adjustments for climate variations. They have a recipe for one with beer.  If you do master this contact us and perhaps we will hire you for a party. I say perhaps because these people seem to also be the type who would have bumper stickers that say “Big Bubblers for those that have discovered that size does matter” and we just don’t have room in our garden for your unicycle too.

There is also a lot of advice on making your own bubble wands and bubble makers.

• use pipe cleaners bent into interesting shapes
• cookie cutters
• yogurt lids with the centers cut out
• tin cans with the top and bottom cut off and edges smoothed
  
• For giant bubbles a string and a dowel. Instructions here.
  

Dutailier Glider makeover

Not much to say about this one in terms of instructions. A very ugly, though admittedly comfortable chair, was the focus of much disagreement in our household. Throw it out or keep it. Finally Bryony recovered it with fabric from Ikea and it is now a really welcome piece of furniture. Willa likes to sit in it and rock back and forth as well as lie on the ottoman. The new fabric sits like a slipcover over the original with new velcro strips to hold things in place, and we got rid of the padded armrest/pocket things.

15 Things To Do With Old Sweaters - felted sweater projects

“What can you do with a shrunken sweater? What can you do with a shrunken sweater? What can you do with a shrunken sweater, early in the morning? Cut it into pieces and make some projects, cut it into pieces and make some projects…”

Felt, according to the Wikipedia, is the oldest fabric known to man. And the art of felting and its relation boiled wool surely go back to the first time someone accidentally put a sweater into a kettle of water. So it is nice to know that when I inadvertently shrank some sweaters last fall I was drawing on a millennium of tradition and craft. Some of the sweaters were better for it, shrinking just enough to give me a corset-like trimness, and their tighter weave made them warmer. Others were much too small and have been lying around just waiting to get cut up into projects.

One of the great things about felted sweaters is that they don’t unravel when you cut them, so you have a lot of options to make things without spending all of your time preparing all the edges of the pieces. I’ve been looking for a scarf for our daughter. It’s a tricky thing to buy a scarf for a toddler because you don’t want something that can get caught and choke them, nor do you want something that they can fling off. I had in mind a small scarf with a button hole (or velcro) closure that fit over her coat to keep out a draft. I couldn’t find one anywhere, and when I did track one down it was thirty-five dollars which seemed a bit high.

Here is my solution: a shark sleeve collar. It is easy to make, all told it probably took me about an hour.

Step one: Shrink a sweater. Put a sweater into the washing machine using hot water and a little bit of soap. Dry it in the dryer. You should have a sweater that is about 20-30% smaller than before. (repeat?) Here are some tips.

Step two: cut off the sleeve at the seam. The dip at the bottom gives it a little shark like profile.

Step three: sew the edges of the seam shut at the ends. I used yarn, but you can also use thread, lanyard, embroidery floss, or even dental floss. A whipstich works really well. Here is a link to a tutorial on how to hide the knots:

Step four: find a nice black button like a shark’s eye.

Step five: figure out where you want to put the buttonhole and sew a small
rectangle with stitches, leaving a space in the middle that you can slit with
a small knife or scissors (or a seam-ripper is ideal if you have sewing supplies, but you don’t need one).

Other things you can do with felted sweaters are: felt monster dolls, coffee sleeves, water bottle covers, hot water bottle covers, tote bags, sachets for popurri, christmas stockings, baby pants and skirts, and sweaters, bicycle handlebar pads, ipod cases, messenger bags, quilts and blankets, and coasters.

Once you start looking for inspiration you’ll find that you’ve stumbled into a vast world of online links and photos. A great place to start is on Flickr, where there is a Flickr Recycled Sweaters Pool and a Made from RecycledSweaters Pool. Etsy has a lot of merchants making nice things as well.

You will be recycling, making nice, soft and warm things while being thrifty and crafty.

Things we like:
If you are inspired but would rather just buy something beautiful that someone has made out of recycled sweaters then take a look at Crispina.com. She has been making beautiful blankets (we have one and love it) and whimsical animals for over twenty years up in the Berkshires.