A Digestive Tract or "What-to-do-with-lonely-socks"...

Do you think it is a cryptic title ?  Well, if you knew me well, you'd know that I will go to many lengths to teach my students.  I really like things to manipulate and since I teach the human body, I need some cheap original material.  Why not use my creativity and craftiness to come up with something unique.  And why not use something that we ALL have and do not know what to do with ?  Lonely socks !!!  We all have a sock-eating washer, no ?  Well, I wanted to show my students how LONG our guts were inside so I made a LIFE-SIZE digestive tract, from the esophagus to the colon.  Of course, our guts are all convoluted inside so I sewed an elastic in the middle of the tube to make it curl up.  I looked up the dimensions of every organ and made it the same with the socks.  I even changed the colours for the different organs.  I put the entire thing in a belly-shaped zippered pouch:

It starts with the black esophagus, followed by the dark grey stomach...

And then you can see a white duodenum, a pale grey jejunum and a darker ileum.  The colon is wider and pale grey.  And I even included the appendix.

Can you see they are all men's socks (certainly not mine !)

My students really got a kick out of this (even if they thought I was really crazy to have made this... although I had started KNITTING it at first.  Much faster sewing it !).  

I have too many zany ideas - lots more where that one came from !

Peace

Claudia