Cardboard Telephone

More unChristmasy crafts!

This past weekend, Emily decided she wanted to make a cardboard office as a gift for someone. She made several things out of cardboard and paper, including a name tag and lanyard, a computer and a clipboard. She then attempted a telephone. I was very impressed by her wedged-in-slit method of joining cardboard pieces: 

Here she became frustrated because she couldn't visualize beyond this stage, what the phone would look like and, therefore, how to make it. I typically like to leave the kids to their own making unless they invite me to interfere, because I know I can be very annoying with cardboard, what with my hoarding and being possessive and not sharing and behaving badly in general. But here was Emily in a cardboard funk, so I came to help.

"Show me your sketch." I said.

"I don't have one." She said.

Well, now we knew what went wrong.

I thought she (and the other two girls) would enjoy playing with a rotary-dial type phone, so we sketched one out, and made that instead. 

I did most of the making, because Emily was so tired of the phone idea that she drifted off to make a computer (scroll down for photo) instead. But she checked back every now and again and helped a little bit.

See the rotary dial in action here:

To the engineers who are reading this: apart from some light natural damping caused by friction, the oscillations are not damped at all. So the dial swings like a pendulum to rest. It did make me sigh slightly, but well, the kids don't care, so I let it go.

I didn't take a photo of all the materials because I don't work that way with cardboard. I start out with half an idea in my head, and more ideas (and thus more materials) come to me as I assemble my structures. So read through the whole tutorial before you begin, and make your own list of materials.

Here is the layout for the phone body. The vertical blue line down the center is to help you make your measurements symmetrical. If you have never made a shape like this before, just draw a vertical line like mine, halve all the black numbers (so 6.5 becomes 3.25, for instance), and measure those distances on either side of the vertical line, see?

Obviously you don't have to follow these numbers. They are just what I used to make a phone body that was a good size for the dial.

The dial is a standard round cheese box cover. I only used the cover.

I didn't want the phone dial to be a cheese advert, so I covered it with some construction paper.

And then I cut ten small holes in it, with my craft knife. I left a biggish gap between the first and last hole, so I could weight the dial (see next photo).

To weight the dial, find a heavyish object that is flat enough to sit inside the dial without protruding out (otherwise it will obstruct its movement later). I used two flattened marbles and glued them in the space between the first and last hole. I also made a small round hole in the middle of the dial,

for attaching the dial to the phone body. I used one of Makedo's fasteners rather than a paper fastener because it has a longer stem. You could also use a bolt and nut.

I found that adding a cardboard washer (little cardboard circle with a hole poked in the middle) behind the dial, kept the dial away from the phone body, and moving freely.

Then you stick the nib of a marker into each hole and write the numbers. 

My numbers are not quite in the right configuration for a rotary dial phone, and I left out the stop-guard thingy that prevents the dial from going all the way around, but we needed to leave the gap between "1" and "0" at the 6 o'clock position for the size of the weights we had in the house.

Here is the cradle for the receiver. I twisted a piece of wire into this shape:

Then I made a second one and stuck them both in the top of the phone body, separating the ends of the wires under the cardboard, like a paper fastener. To keep the wire structures in place, I masking-taped down their ends on the other side of the cardboard.

Here's another angle, from which you can also see how the dial is not actually touching the surface of the phone body.

To make the sides of the phone body, just lay the phone body on its side on more cardboard and trace around it.

Before you glue the sides on, make a slit in one of them and stick the end of a bit of curling tape through it from the outside. Tape that end down on the inside (i.e. so it is inside the phone body when the side piece is glued on).

Then the two sides were glued onto the phone body to complete it.

Here is the receiver. I made it entirely out of cardboard because anything made entirely out of cardboard is lovely.

I won't describe the process - you can tell by looking at it, how it was made. I left it hollow and didn't seal the ends because it is so much fun to talk into the mouthpiece and and hear your own echoey voice in the earpiece! The kids loved it.

Make a slit in one end and insert the other end of the curling wire into it, taping the end down inside the receiver.

Finished!

Here is a simpler version of the receiver:

Use a narrow cardboard tube - not a paper towel roll, which is too wide. Mine was about 1" wide. If you can't find a narrow tube, roll up thick paper in several layers to make a stiff tube. I also used both halves of one of those plastic easter eggs that everyone has in their house.

Cut the tube to the right length to fit the phone body and your/your kid's own face. You can either hot-glue the eggs at either end to complete the receiver, or make holes in the eggs and use a fastener. I used a couple of those nifty Makedo fasteners.

Here is Jenna doing QC on Emily's office set, or at least part of it. The desktop computer is made from a graham cracker box speared through with a paper towel tube, and with dry-erase-board contact paper stuck on for a screen for writing on. 

Tomorrow (or whenever) I'll share photos of an actual Christmassy craft we did! 

Raglans for Emily

Long ago when I made myself those raglan-sleeved baseball tees, Emily would, from time to time, give me strange looks. Eventually, I figured out what was going on in her head and asked her if maybe she wanted some shirts like those, and she said "yes!" So I promised her that after the mad rush of Halloween sewing, I'd make her some for school. 

The advent season is probably one of my favorites for sewing, because there is absolutely no pressure at all to do handmade gifts. I'm recovering from the lunacy of Halloween costume-making-cum-birthday-partying, so this is my time to do whatever I want by way of projects. It doesn't mean I'm immune to the joys of gift making - it's just that, having worked myself into a handmade stupor some Christmases back, I've decided that I'm better off buying everybody stuff. Every now and then, though, I relapse - just last week, for instance, I had to talk myself out of sewing lunch buckets for all the kids' teachers. Went out and bought myself a four-pack of Baileys instead. Did you know they came in four-packs of minis for $10? I didn't. Hurrah! This advent I'm making Irish Creme truffles. And drinking slightly-spiked hot chocolate, like in the old days before motherhood.

How I do go off-point!

Anyway, so instead of sewing gifts for people, I'm doing seasonally-inappropriate things this advent season, like writing about alterations and tailors, and making school clothes for the kids (Jenna has asked for knit winter dresses next). 

Last Saturday, I sat on the floor and drafted Emily's raglan block. Very hit-and-miss, raglan sleeves are, so I knew from previous experience with my own raglan shirts, that I'd be doing a few muslins to get them right. Here's one of the muslins:

And when I say "a few muslins", I really mean "the same practice garment, with wide seam allowances, that I sew-and-unpick-and-resew and mark-and-remark-with-my-black-Papermate-Flair-pen until I get the shape right."

Emily's shoulders have changed so much in the last two years -they used to be slopey and narrow, and now they are wide and bony. Most of the adjustment for this shirt was made at the neckline, to get it to properly hug the throat area but without threat of strangulation. Those shoulders of hers! After the first muslin, I figured I should have just shaped the raglan line into an obvious curve, as is popular in boys' and mens' raglan shirts, to accommodate for them. I didn't, though, because this was her first raglan block/sloper and I've always liked to keep first blocks of anything precise and basic and not tinker too much with them, design-wise. So I left the boring diagonal raglan line as is and made her six shirts.

Can you see that I was still shaping the neckline as I made the shirts? The blue shirt (the last one I made) has a narrower, lower-scooped neckline than the purple (the first one I made). Notice also that the neckline on the pink shirt is a bit wobbly - that's the only shirt I didn't have ribbing in the appropriate color for, so I used the shirt fabric itself. However, I forgot that I meant to bind the neckline (like the sleeve) instead of making a collar. Too late now. Silly me.

"Make the sleeves long, Mum." was Emily's only request. "I like them to cover part of my hands".

She was very excited about the blue shirt, because it is exactly like mine. How I shall miss these days when she still thinks it's cool to dress like her mother. Years from now, when she's a teenager, I shall wonder if this seven-year-old Emily was just a dream.

Isn't it funny how girls this age are? They ask you to make their clothes plain, plain, plain and when you suggest a fashionable stripe, or polka dot, they say "eeeew, no - that's too detailed." But when you disobey them and make the stripes and the dots anyway, they squeal with joy when they see them and say, "I love it! My favorite!" and hug you. I restrained myself from rolling my eyes and saying "I told you so" because I remembered that I was exactly like that as a child. Are your girls like this? If so, take heart - you'll have your revenge when they become mothers.

Alterations - Making Choices

And now we come to the most important part of alterations - 

making the difficult choices.

Suppose you have a shirt that needs its sleeves shortened. Its presenting problem, if you will, is that its sleeves are too long.

Everyone knows that presenting problems are very seldom the real (or full) issue. There is always something else, something more. Suppose the shirt is a proper tailored shirt, with beautiful seam finishing - there is not a single bit of serger stitching anywhere. It has beautifully sewn cuffs

and perfect flat fell seams at the armscye

that look as perfect on the inside (pictured below) as the outside; interfaced, and with chain stitching.

After measuring and fitting the client, you realize that to shorten the sleeves by the needed 3", you will lose almost the entire button placket at the cuff and have to create a brand new one that looks as perfect as the original.

It's a rock-and-a-hard-place scenario, so you call your best sewing friend (the one who's a professional tailor) and ask her. Then you call your mother (the one who sewed her-which-became-your wedding gown) and ask her. Then you fret some more because you don't like what you hear (is there really a choice between rocks and hard places?).

And then, because the shirt has already been sitting under your sewing table for 9 months, you ask the client an important question.

"Incidentally, is this shirt also too loose overall?"

"Yes."

Indeed. And while we're at it, the shoulders are too wide, too. And the sleeves themselves are too loose. 

There is the answer. 

I take a deep breath and unpick the perfect flat fell seams. 

Those around the armscye and those along the side seams.

I also unpick the bottom hem, to accommodate the new side seams.

I take in the side seams. I take in the shoulder. I cut off a chunk of the sleeve cap.

And I shorten the sleeves. Without even going anywhere near the cuffs. 

On the outside, the top-stitching looks as if the shirt was never touched. 

But on the inside........ there is serger stitching, and there are faux fell seams because I was so tired that I couldn't bring myself to re-stabilize the armscye and do real fell seams around a curved edge. When I finished the shirt, I wanted to weep because I had desecrated a beautiful garment. I felt as if I should never, ever be allowed to touch a sewing machine again for my utter disrespect of good workmanship. 

It fits now, though. And that's what alteration is for. 

But what is alteration about?

And on as sombre a note as we began it, we come to the end of the mini-series on alterations. My aim, if your remember from the somewhat-noir introduction post, was never to pitch you this wonderful, money-saving, new sewing technique to magically turn all your hideous clothes into fits-like-a-glove wonders. Instead, I wanted you to renew your appreciation for the work that tailors do (the good ones, anyway) and be willing to invest in a job well done - whether by yourself, or by a professional that has every right to charge the moon. 

All that said, let's look back at the simple alterations that can be done at home, and which are useful to learn:

• Tucks -shortening shoulder straps, raising necklines.
• Darts - for waistband adjustments and other localized reduction of ease.
• Seam Realignment - for reshaping garments.
• Hems - for changing lengths of garments.
• Combination alterations

Also remember that, in the introduction, we distinguished between alterations (on finished garments) and adjustments (changes made to patterns BEFORE being sewn into garments). Alterations are not something everyone should choose to do, but making adjustments is a skill that every dressmaker should aim to have. So here is link to a useful pictorial summary of the kinds of adjustments you can make to your paper patterns before sewing them into garments, so they fit you better and, hopefully, reduce the need for alterations later.

As a side-aim of this miniseries, I also wanted to share with you the Whys of alteration, rather than the quick-fix Hows. In a modern sewing movement that rides on fast, feel-good, miraculous and fun, alterations are something right out of the dark ages. If you've come away from these posts thinking, "Ooof. I'm demotivated to do anything other than the very simplest take-ins and let-downs." I have succeeded. Forgive my wet-blanketness, but what your mother said was true afterall: we'd much rather sew a brand-new garment from scratch than alter one to fit. Do the simple ones, but leave the others to the professionals - find one whose work you like, and pay them. Pay them well. Without complaining.