It’s been very busy here at the CraftSanity headquarters. Between family illness, loom-making, writing deadlines, and travel and prep work for a series of handmade holiday workshops I’m teaching across the state, I feel like I need to run off to a quiet place and knit for a while. I need to just  be for a bit, you know what I mean?

I’m catching up on a variety of things this week, including posting about Friday’s “Take Five” craft TV segment that previewed my Sunday newspaper column about Sally Berry, director of Turning Pages, The Grand Rapids Reading Institute.

She contacted me after she started using scrapbooking supplies to transform beat-up kids books into reading aids. I love the idea and have since started working on a couple with my kids using those great sticky-backed foam letters.

Sally also gave me some great ideas about how to help my daughters practice writing using those plastic sleeves sold at office supply stores. (See top photo.)

I printed out some writing worksheets I found on the web, slipped them in the plastic sleeves and gave each child a dry erase marker and a peg person eraser. Sally makes erasers out of blocks with a piece of felt glued to the bottom, but I decided to make peg people resembling my daughters and glue felt circles on the bottom of those.

The peg people erasers were a hit and my girls who are having a blast writing with marker, erasing and starting over. This method is so much more fun for them than writing with pencil on regular paper. It also saves trees which is fabulous, too.

Sally also makes dry erase and felt boards by covering cardboard with tin foil and gluing it to another piece of cardboard covered with felt.

I made the foil dry erase and felt boards separately. I decided to handstitch a felt board pouch by folding a piece of felt and stitching up the sides and across the top flap to create a sleeve for a piece of cardboard.

This way the cardboard can be easily replaced when it wears out and the felt letters and other cutouts can be stored inside with the board.

Below you’ll find the video clip of me demonstrating how to make some of these projects.