Tutorial for making a Calculator Wall Mat

As a high school math teacher, keeping track of calculators on an hourly basis in a classroom filled with 30 busy people and 54 distractions per person per minute has been, quite honestly, not at the top of my priority list. Once students figure this out (students in retrospect are smarter than they appear), calculators start going missing at an astonishing rate. I often wonder if there is some sort of underground black market for school calculators ... but until I stoop low enough to start keeping an eye out on craigslist and ebay for school calculators, or start counting calculators at the beginning and end of every class, I have invented an interim solution. 

And once again, necessity became the mother of invention, and thus the hanging calculator organizing thingie was born. With this wall mat, students might take a bit more ownership in responsibly borrowing and returning school property, and I will be able to tell at a glance how many calculators are being scurried off to the black market on any given day. And besides, it's just super cute!




Actually, the inspiration for finding a way to organize calculators merged with my recent obsession with crayon rolls ~ after making a dozen of so of these adorable little things I started dreaming of taking these to bigger and better places. 

Here are the directions for how to make one of these calculator mats for your own classroom (or adapt as you see fit ~ would be great in a craft room, as shoe storage, for toys, etc.).

Here's a picture of the massive amount of math ;) that went into this concoction:

These measurements are for a wall mat that fits 30 TI30-XIIS calculators:

Large background fabric (I used printed duck so it would be strong enough and I could avoid using interfacing to strengthen it: 23.5” x 43” (cut 2 ~ or just fold the fabric in half and cut around the fold line ~ all the edges will be covered with the border, so you get to avoid sewing the edges altogether J )

Pocket strips: 23.5” x 9” (cut 6 ~ these will be folded in half lengthwise)

Border strips: 23.5” x 4” (cut 2) and 43”x4” (cut 2) (These will be folded 4 times lengthwise to create something like wide bias tape, except I just cut them straight along the grain and it looked fine ~ but you can cut along the bias if you buy more fabric J )

(I bought 1.25 yards of the printed duck fabric, 1.25 yards of green fabric for the pockets, and .5 yards of pink fabric for the border.)

I found a roll of brown wrapping paper for $1 at the dollar store and used that to create pattern pieces. I find it easier to measure and cut the large brown paper, since I can trust the straight edges and corners, then pin those to my fabric and use a rotary cutter to cut the fabric out. I haven’t yet bought a big expensive cutting mat, because I’ve found that my plastic foldable craft table from Walmart (for $20?) can be used with a rotary cutter, and it provides a much larger surface and doesn’t hardly show the cuts. Maybe it’s doing bad stuff to my blade?? So far it’s still sharp enough though.

After cutting out the pieces, you will create the pockets strips. Fold each of the 6 green pieces in half lengthwise, then fold the raw edges over about ½” and iron the creases. Then start placing them on the background fabric. I laid the first one about 7/8 of an inch up from the bottom so that the border (1” wide) wouldn’t cut off valuable pocket space but would still overlap. Then I spaced the pocket strips out 7” from the bottom of one pocket to the bottom of the next. The fold will be the top of the pocket strip. The ½” line you ironed in will be your guide line for sewing. Once you have them all placed, flip the pocket strips down and pin the ½” part of the strip in place. (See picture here if these directions don’t make sense.) You will sew along the ironed-crease for each pocket piece, then fold them back up along the sewn line and iron again.

(Note: Since I was trying to save time and effort, I didn’t cut along the fold line. So I had to sew all the pocket pieces onto the left half of the fabric so that the back piece wouldn’t show any of these lines. It got pretty awkward though feeding all that material through the machine; you might want to bite the bullet and just cut 2 separate pieces for the front and back.)

Now to make the individual pockets: Measure carefully on the bottom pocket strip, then you can use those marks for the rest of the strips. I placed my big plastic ruler (18”) against the end of the fabric and marked off 1” for the width of the border, then 4.3” for each calculator pocket.  You will have 5 pockets on each strip. (I like to mark above and below the ruler at each point so that I will get trustworthy straightness when I draw the vertical lines.) Then flip your ruler (or yardstick) vertically and trace those markings vertically up each pocket piece, all the way to the top. A pencil works fine, since you are going to sew over those markings and won’t see them in the end. Now sew along those lines, remembering to backstitch at the top and bottom of each little segment. I start from the bottom, sew the first vertical line on the first pocket, lift my needle and foot to feed the fabric through to the next pocket, and keep going all the way to the top. That makes it simpler, since you only need to do 4 long stop-and-go lines for the entire height of the fabric. (I don’t sew along the 1” marks for the borders.)

Finally, you will sew on the borders. I sewed them just like bias tape, so if you know what that means, you can skip these directions. I folded the strips in half lengthwise, then folded both long edges into the center, ironing each crease firmly. (The creases will be your guideline for sewing.) Then I laid them along the fabric, right sides together, with raw edge of the border matching the raw edges of the background. (Note: At this point I had folded the back and front pieces together, wrong sides facing.) I sewed along the first crease, folded it over, ironed it, folded the 2^nd half of the border pieces over the back of the wall mat, then topstitched the entire length of the border, about 7/8” in from the edge to catch both sides.

To make the “hooks”, I cut three pieces of ribbon and placed them under the border piece on top before I did the final topstitching step. I used three little loops, but have yet to see if that will be strong enough for 30 calculators. (hoping!!)

I didn’t know what to do with the corners, so I’ll leave that part of the tutorial up to your expertise, experience, or research. I don’t like how mine turned out L.

Here's a picture of the back:

That’s all! Enjoy J

Or, if you would rather not make this and would prefer to buy one from me, just send me a message! J

and, just for fun, since I forgot to have my husband take a picture of me working on this project, I took a picture documenting what he was doing while I was working :). pretty cute, huh?

Knitting and Herding Bubbles

An episode in my new tender and tentative endeavor to write …

I spent nearly the whole day yesterday (4 days ago by the time this gets “published”) knitting a scarf. Despite using a technique to make the project lie flat, it still curled up till it was just a long tube. I read in my proudly purchased knitting book about steam-blocking, but the methods were different depending on whether the material was synthetic or natural. I didn’t know what this yarn was made from, since I had thrown away (or “stored” in a scary shoebox) the labels, but I guessed it was more fake than real since I never paid much for any of my yarn. So I went for the “lay-a-wet-towel-on-top-and-dry-iron-it-until-it-steams” method. And discovered 3 things.

           1.     It was real wool. I knew this because it smelled like the sheep barns at the state fair. Wet wool and sheep manure (droppings?) seem like a synonymous smell to me ~ not exactly unpleasant though. It smelled like a world I would gladly exchange for this one – a world, that is, where I envision myself living on acres of raw earth, living (is there a word that evokes a sense of living where every sense is absorbing life to a thrilling degree ... that differs from being merely alive in the medical sense?) … coming alive to life in direct proportion to my cultivation of earth, animals, and offspring. From a detached, journalistic perspective, I realize that this longing for a creative, self-made, natural life also flourishes in direct proportion to the number of moments I spend withering in a concrete, soulless chain-driven city-world. (I choose the word “chain” not only because it serves the purpose of sounding melodramatic, but also to describe the unnatural overtaking of chain restaurants, apartment complexes, theme parks, hospitals, and craft stores.)

     

      2.   (I had to go back and re-read this to remember that I had started listing some minutiae of day-to-day revelations.) The steam and weight of the iron had not only flattened the scarf, but also muted the design I had so laboriously created, using a chopstick as a makeshift cable needle. Discouraging much?

      3.     I have no idea what the third thing was going to be. When I start writing, the writing takes over and it’s all I can do to keep up with it, trying my best to herd coherent bubbles of thought onto the train of … well, point in case. Or case in point. Just in case.

What does “case” even mean??

Unspeakable

I (used to think that I) have a superpower.

When I’m listening to music, I can close my eyes and see a whole world of brilliant, dazzling dancing, choreographed perfectly to the music … the colors of the costumes, the energy in the movement, the spins and swirls and solo acts or arrays of synchronized, rhythmic, human art …

But it’s all mine, trapped in my mind. I can only close my eyes and watch the show. One time it was so breathtaking I snapped my eyes open and said “            “ … nothing. My thoughts caught on my tongue and I found myself literally speechless. I was momentarily shell shocked by the complete frustration at not being able to translate vision to language. If I could only capture this, I knew I could create Broadway-worthy musicals, Grammy-award-winning theatre … but it was always and only a dream – vivid, lucid, perfect, and completely unspeakable.

Which brought me around to thinking again about a question I had spent years and hours contemplating – how do deaf people think? Or more specifically and abstractly – how would a person who was cut off from language of any sort process thought? How much would this isolation limit his ability to observe and make sense of this life? How much are our thoughts confined to formally defined and acquired vocabulary? To what extent are we sheltered from the infinite spheres of thought, just because the right words haven’t been spoken that would unlock worlds of ideas beyond the initiation and creation of our own mind? If someone was locked out of language altogether, need he be stunted in his intellectual thought-processing abilities? Or does the vast majority of our subjective understanding occur without language? While no one can truly exist in an intellectual vacuum, it is worth considering the limitations set by our domain of information.

And yet … surely our mind can access realms unknown to communication – as I realized in that startling moment of open-mouthed surprise, shocked that my words could betray me and leave me so thoroughly alone in myself. Our minds must have a touch of eternity, an element of the infinite; but to access that requires something that can break beyond the standard framework-barriers of language, something that can defy description. I know that music and art can do this, that a rainy day, scented candles, fuzzy blankets and peace with the world can do this. I believe that birth and death, love or hate can trigger this – this connection with infinite spheres of thought, sense, and visceral feeling known completely in oneself but unintelligible in communication.

And to express a fraction of an idea, a flash of a scene, a deeply intuitive sense of something elusively beautiful … this is art. 

Observations in Translation

In my creative writing classes we had to keep an observation journal to help train our brain to notice details and practice pinning down ethereal, visceral THINGS onto paper, recreating them in a medium which could be handed off to a random, literate, passerby (passerby-er?) and in their hands conjure up images similar to what we had seen. I am still dubious as to how effective even the best author-artist can be in this regard, since everyone brings their own back-story to any piece of writing and invariably filters new words and images through previous sounds, smells, tastes, and touches.

But regardless of the effect a description creates, it is still an incredible exercise to fashion a one-dimensional, monotone script of any 3-dimensional object, or multi-dimensional moment, complete with an infinite array of sense and emotions that cacophonously arrived at that point through a fractal-like series of decision and circumstances.

Try, for example, to describe a sunset as it actually looks and feels, while avoiding the pitfalls of overused, underrepresented clichés. Try writing “the sky was awash with brilliant hues of pinks and blues, decorated here and there with pillowy towers of cotton clouds. The red earth smelled fragrant from the cathartic days’ worth of rain and the air felt clean, ready to start fresh tomorrow.” Try writing that in a way that describes the scene purely, rather than uses faux-scenery to advance a plot or set a mood. Let the actual picture set the mood. If words can truly paint a picture, then plot is just a sideline to the story.

But it has to be written in the moment if it has any hope of presenting itself as genuine. I missed that moment last night, so I’ll try, like a photographer waiting for the right combination of light and shadow, to capture it the next time it encounters me.