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I have sent out our most recent edition of the Pogglers Crafty Kids Newsletter so if you would like to receive one too then please fill in the contact form on Pogglers, and I will send you a copy.

In this edition you will find out how to make a whizzy whooshy streamer toy (shown in flight above), some pine cone gnomes and some fantastically easy to make juggling balls.

All using things easily found in the home or outside.

And if you have your own idea you would like us to include then please send it to Pogglers and we may include it in the next issue. If you make any of the things in the newsletter then please do send us a picture as we would love to display a gallery of the images on the website with your permission.

Happy poggling!

Recycled Dolls and Monsters

We have been getting quite a few enquiries about our Recycled Dolls and Monsters from the article in Junior Magazine. We are mentioned in the article on page 51 entitled Bye bye baby written by Alice Beer and are at the top of the list of recommendations for what to do with your old baby clothes.

So if you have old baby clothes that you don't know what to do with then send them over to Pogglers for a brand new toy! Even if they are stained or full of holes we will be able to find a way to make them into a beautiful keepsake. And we are always happy to go over design ideas before hand.

Happy poggling!

Baby Playmats coming soon

I am currently working on some new organic cotton Baby Playmats for Pogglers. It will probably be a week or two before they are online but I have a blue and purple version and a pink, red and yellow version. The blue one has brightly coloured stars on it and I have still to decide about the girly one. I am thinking about stars again or hearts or simple flowers. Any opinions are gladly received.

They are about the size of a cot quilt, so bigger than most baby playmats. Small ones work fine until babies start to move a bit and then as soon as they roll over once they are off, so I decided to make these a bit bigger. This also means that you can continue to use them as a quilt for the bed when the babies are over 1 year, which makes them well worth the money as they will be used way beyond the first months.
It is recommended not to use a quilt to cover a baby under one year as they may overheat.

Happy poggling!

Pogglers in Junior Magazine!

Although I haven't seen a copy yet I have been told that Pogglers is mentioned in the June 2008 issue of Junior Magazine (UK) in an article on what to do with old baby clothes. So hop down to the shops and get your copy now!

If you do have an old item of clothing that you can't bear to part with then we can make it into a doll, Funky Monster or other soft toy for you. Either let us create a design for you, suggest some ideas yourself for us to base the design on or send us your design or drawing along with the item and we will work our magic. You could even get your child to draw a doll or monster and we will base the design on that for a truly unique toy.

Visit Pogglers for recycled dolls and Funky Monsters.

Happy poggling!

Green Holidays

We have just come back from a lovely holiday in Italy which we booked at the last minute. We have driven to Italy once or twice a year for the last three years, not so easy if you live in the UK, but from Switzerland it is a days driving. We usually stay on an Agriturismo, a farm which either rents out holiday apartments or has rooms on a B&B basis. Some farms also have an on site restaurant or have other activities that you can do, such as horse riding, or tours around the farm. It is a great way of supporting smaller farmers and can be very informative and interesting whether you have children or not. The farmers have always been very welcoming and interested in us too, so perfect for practising our Italian. And there are usually wonderful products to buy to take back home with you.

This time we stayed in an apartment on Agriturismo Fiametta near Rimini in Emilia Romagna. They are an organic farm producing 6 different wines as well as olive oil and a liqueur made from nuts which is particularly delicious. They have a new swimming pool, but unfortunately it was too cold to be open. The farm buildings are perched on the ridge of a hill so there are fantastic views over the countryside and out to sea on one side, and to the vineyards and rolling hills on the other. There was a big garden area with a little castle and slide for the children to play in which they enjoyed. The only down side was that the house was right by the side of the road, which although small, could be quite noisy with Italian drivers zooming along every now and then. However the shutters did shut out much of this at night, and we weren't in the house much during the day, and the gardens were well enclosed by a wall and robust gates so we didn't need to worry about the children running into the road.

We found some wonderful caves at Onferno about 20 mins drive away. They do guided tours through the caves which are home to 6 different species of bats. The children had great fun and loved wearing the hard hats and we saw 2 species of bats in the caves.
We also visited Montefiore Conca, San Leo (village pictured left), Gradara and San Marino (pictured above) with their wonderful castles, as well as Rimini, which must be teaming in Summer, and Urbino a beautiful walled town.
We also found a brand new organic Gelateria (ice cream parlour) which opened in Marciano on our last day there. Probably just as well or we would have spent far too much time in it!

If you are interested in an organic farm holiday in Italy then Bioagriturismi.it is the place to start looking.

Recycling clothes

In our increasingly consumerist society we seem to buy an awful lot of clothes, especially when it comes to our children. Before clothes became so cheap and easy to get hold of it was natural to keep clothes from one child to the next. Dresses and trousers were made with large hems which could be lowered when the children grew, socks were darned and rips and tears were mended with patches. Now it is much easier for many people to go out and buy new ones, especially for families with larger disposable incomes and little spare time to do the mending. There was a question posted on a parenting forum recently asking how many people kept the clothes from their first child for the next one. I was astounded to see that most of the respondents bought a whole new set of clothes for their next baby. Even if the first set were sold it would still mean a considerable outlay to clothe the next child from scratch. Plus we have to consider the energy, water and raw materials used to make all of these new clothes. This all adds up to create waste of one sort or another.

Whether you make do and mend or buy new clothes, there will come a point when even the youngest child outgrows them, or they become too stained or too full of holes to be wearable any more. You cannot sell these ones or give them away to charity, but there are some things that you can do with them.

• Duvet covers and sheets: if you are replacing these big items there are many things that you can do with them. Often the fabric at the edges will be the best preserved even if the centre is wearing very thin, and because the items are so big you will be able to make an outfit or two from them for children. Even with very little sewing experience you can make great elasticated skirts and trousers.
  
• Jeans: jeans and other trousers are great because they are made with thick material. I have two pairs which are just wearing through on the bum and crotch, but the material on the legs is still in very good condition. This sort of fabric lends itself very well to bags which need to be quite sturdy. For a small bag simply cut off a section of leg and sew one end together, turn the edge under on the other end and then add handles. For a larger one use pieces from two legs. Cut each piece open down the outside leg seam, lay them on top of each other (right sides together) and sew them together at the raw edges down three sides. Turn the seam down at the top and sew in place. Add handles. When you turn it the right way round you will have the inside leg seam running down the middle of the bag which looks quite funky.
  
• Tops and shirts: a large man's shirt will give you enough fabric to make something for a young child if you are careful with cutting out. Alternatively mix and match fabrics from two or more shirts to make some really funky clothes for little ones. Either make each piece of your pattern from a different fabric (four colour trousers!) or if you have time cut into squares and sew together to make on big piece of patchwork fabric and use this to cut your pattern from. Unless you spend a long time zig-zagging all the edges though you would be best to make something with a lining to prevent the raw edges from fraying.
• Stained baby clothes: these will be small and light fabrics can have some nasty looking brown stains on. You can either turn these into little toys and sew the eyes and mouth over the worst of the stains or cut them up to use as bottom wipes if you have a child in nappies or general cleaning cloths for around the house or kitchen. Have a look at my How to Make a Monster page on Pogglers for instructions on making a toy.
• Other bits and pieces of fabric: you can make little draw string bags for gym or dancing shoes or party bags. Instructions here on Pogglers. Pencil cases out of an oblong of fabric with a zip to close. Even the smallest baby clothes can be turned into even smaller doll's clothes and your children will still be thrilled if your sewing skills only allow you to make a scarf for their favourite toy. I made a teeny tiny hat out of a couple of very small offcuts for my daughter's favoured Eeyore nearly two years ago and he still gets to wear it to bed from time to time!
• Off cuts: you can use your off cuts from various projects to add details to bigger items. Cut out simple motifs like flowers or stars to sew on to bags or even the middle of a childs top to cover up the stains!
  
• Fleece jackets: cut out the best bits to make children's mittens. To make a template simply draw around their hands leaving a gap of about 1-2 cms all around in order to give their hands room to move inside the glove. Make sure to draw right down to their wrist or else they will be too short. Use the template to cut out four pieces from your fabric leaving another 1.5 cms all around for your seam allowance. Sew two pieces together for each mitten, stopping short of the edge on the thumb side so that they can get their hand in.
  

If you have a favourite item of clothing that you want to keep but know will not get used again then turning it into a toy is a great way to preserve the fabric and give continued joy and fun to the child who receives it. If you are not confident with doing this yourself then I can do it for you. Simply send me the item/s of clothing and I will contact you to discuss what sort of toy, doll or monster you would like before proceeding. This is a really great way of preserving those precious items without leaving them languishing in the cupboard or a box in the attic. To order a Pogglers Recycled Doll click here.

I hope you find these suggestions useful. If you have any of your own ideas then please add a comment.

Recycling

Well I think just about everyone now has got the hang of recycling household waste, or at least we know we should. Actually putting it in the recycling container is where some of us slip up! There is a debate going on in the UK at the moment over how rubbish should be paid for. Should it carry on being part of the Council Tax or should there be some new way of measuring household waste?

When we moved to Switzerland we just presumed it was the same as the UK until someone told us we would have to buy the appropriate colour stickers for our bin bags according to the capacity of the bag. If they didn't have a sticker they didn't get taken. Things have changed slightly now in that you actually buy the official bags so they all look the same, rather than having to buy different stickers for different bags and working out if you had put the correct one on. So in effect we pay for the volume of waste that we put out to be collected.

This immediately made us much more careful in what we threw out and what we collected to be taken to the recycling depots. Our rubbish went down enormously when we moved here. Part of that is due to the fact that we buy almost all of our fruit and vegetables from the market, reusing bags from the last time. But mostly it is down to the fact that it is blatantly obvious that if we didn't recycle what we could we would have to pay for about 3 times the amount of bags that we currently do.

We use 35 litre bags and usually put out only one a week. We have a compost bin in the garden for all our raw food waste. I used to put cooked food in it too, but someone told me that wasn't right and also no dairy. Please correct me if I've got that wrong!
We have a big green bucket for garden waste which is collected 1-2 times per month depending on the time of year. We have a paper collection every 2 weeks which has to be bundled neatly with the right sort of string! There is also a metal collection 2 times a year for everything from tin cans to bike frames.

Most supermarkets, even the tiny local ones, have a glass, PET plastic, milk plastic (white bottles) and battery collection point. And in the last year or so local recycling points have been springing up consisting of what looks like pedal bins in the ground with a huge underground container. The children love watching these being emptied as the lorry lifts them right out of their hole and high into the air to be emptied into the lorry.

I must confess that it did take me a while to get used to the idea of taking some recycling with me every time I visited the shops, but when it started dramatically constricting the floor space in our hall I found it easier to remember.

There are also regular clothes collections done by charities. There are not so many charity shops here as in the UK so perhaps this is why the collections work so well. I remember when we used to get one of the bags put through our door in Scotland we hardly ever put anything in it and didn't notice many on the streets on collection day either. But here most houses manage to find something to donate.

Something else that happens here is that if people have things that they no longer need, and perhaps not enough, or not good enough quality to sell, then they just put them outside on the wall with a sign saying 'GRATIS'/'FREE' and people can help themselves. I've seen bookcases, books, chairs, kitchen implements, crockery, ornaments and all sorts of other oddments. And they all get taken eventually.

When we left the UK there were no door to door recycling collections. We could take paper to the supermarket to be recycled but cardboard was not allowed. Glass was pretty easy to recycle, but I had never seen a metal collection and only a few places for drinks bottles, but no other sort of plastic. I believe it has changed a lot in the last couple of years and I would love to hear how it compares to what we have in Switzerland and how people think it could be improved. Please leave a comment!