Sand bag paper weight

  I took a thick cloth and made a bag [see picture], filled fine sand and stitched it close.  That is, in short[est], about this little project!

Lo, it is a soft paperweight , a very essential item on the office desk covered by glass. Visitors to the desk pick it up and ask me what it is!  My paperweight does not crack the table glass now.

I must tell  a bit about that sand.  

From my younger days, I had seen two large bottles [a foot tall] in the kitchen in which cooking oil was kept. I remember one of them had a leak because it had a fine crack. It was discarded for storing oil and dumped in the store room.  The next I remember was sand in it, may be it was transferred from a tin can for some reason by my mother who also later told that the sand was brought from the beach of Rameshwaram, the sacred coast town near the southern tip of India. I still wonder what was the purpose of its being brought here. 

With the changes in the house that came along over the years, it was kept here and there as it was actually useless at it were.  The last stop for his sand bottle was my garden.  It was kept under some stone bench along with some other junked items.  One day when I was clearing up the items, there it lay cracked, pieces and sand spilled.  Reason is a mystery.  This is very fine sand, like powder.

I shifted some of the sand to a PET bottle and thought of using it for some purpose. There you saw the sand bag paperweight. 

Since that sand is so fine, I also plan to make one of my favourite things - an hour glass!  I have it on my to-do list since many years.