TAD 19: Felted wool wreath

When I was in high school, I bought myself a red cape made from wool sweater material. I think I thought it would be dramatic or mysterious or funky in the way an angsty teenager might want. Through the years, it has gotten very, very moth eaten.  When it got too many holes to even consider using, I put it through the washing machine to felt it.

I’ve used larger pieces of it for other projects. It was a nice base for some dry-needle felting, but eventually it hit the point where there weren’t any areas of it that did not resemble swiss cheese. I’ve been trying to make more of an effort to use up the things I have had for a long time. By cutting the remaining parts of material into squares, I was able to get enough to make a wreath out of them.

The moth holes do not matter as much with this since it is the edges that show, and I can decorate this next year either for Christmas or for Valentine’s Day.

This was made using a metal clothes hanger, and it was easy enough to push it through the squares of felt.

 

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TAD 13: Felt rose pin

Another quick and early one before heading out for the weekend. In honor of Valentine’s Day tomorrow, a red felt rose pin. This one is guaranteed not to wilt after a few days.

 

Winter wreath finished

I made the bulk of this wreath back in September. It got set aside with the plan to add a few embellishments and didn’t have them so I figured I’d wait for a good sale and pick them up.

I ended up getting two picks of the balls and curly things and deconstructing them to use.  Until this week, it has been unseasonably warn here, so even though the Christmas decorations came down, the door remained bare.  It may have come late, but winter weather has arrived now, and so the wreath has been completed and hung.

December 3, 2015: One more for good measure

Since I did two days of felt ornaments, I decided to keep going with it and make one more. This time I raided the button tin for a pair of snowmen (snow people?) on an ornament.

When I was going through my buttons for the wildflower bag, I tried to put most of the white buttons into one tin. They are usually small shirt buttons and there are always so many of them in old collections. I realized today that while they might all technically have once been white, they have aged over the years to various shades of cream, tan, and ivory. It was a challenge to find a large 4-hole button and a small 2-hole button that were similar shades of not-quite-white and even more of a challenge to find 2 of each.

Also, do you see the snowflakes? FRENCH KNOTS. In the past I would have stitched little asterisks in place of the french knots, but this time, I charged ahead with confidence. I’m allowing myself to be mighty pleased with this turn of events.

The pattern and instructions are from  Cutesy Crafts blog.

 

December 2, 2015: Felt skates

Since the box of felt was out, I thought I’d keep going with the felt ornaments. When I was cleaning out a drawer today that had inadvertently become a junk/catch-all drawer, there were 2 silver paperclips in the bottom of it which reminded me I wanted to make these.

The directions and a printable template for the skate are found here.

My favorite part of these is the trim. I looked through my trim box and found an old card with the trim wrapped around it that had come from someone’s grandmother’s stash. The notation at the bottom said it was originally sold as 3 yards at 4-1/2 cents per yard. I would love to know what garment it was originally purchased to adorn.

 

 

December 1, 2015: Stacked felt Christmas tree

I love the folk-art look of felt ornaments, but I don’t always have the patience to carefully cut out shapes in felt. Because they are most often done with raw edges, I can’t count on bobbles and jagged bits to get hidden in a seam.

This little ornament was able to be done with a rotary cutter, solving my poor-scissor-skill problem. To give you an idea of the scale, the largest green square is 1-1/2″/about 4 cm large, and the whole tree took less than one half a piece of felt.  I used this pattern, but did not have brown felt, or feel like cutting out circles for the base, so I used black squares instead.

Somewhere in my craft room is a small pack of star-shaped buttons. Sadly, it is not in one of my button tins where it belongs.  If When I unearth them, I will add one to the top. I really need to get better at putting things back in their proper place right away.

November 25, 2015: Felted dryer ball/cat toy

It was a challenge on Thanksgiving eve. The house had been cleaned and all the projects lying about had been hastily stored away.  I needed a project that would not require pulling out a lot of supplies, and one that I could start and finish so I did not have to deal with storing a WiP while company was here for Thanksgiving.

Inspiration arrived while I was folding laundry.

I’ve made felted dryer balls before. One of my cats goes crazy for them, and so when I make them, she usually grabs it and I don’t have the heart to take it away. After they get beat up enough that they are fuzzy, they go back to their original purpose for a while. If I throw them into a load or two being done in hot water, then into the dryer, they return to a smooth shape.

Using felted  dryer balls serves two purposes. It reduces static cling (and the need for fabric softener) and it reduces the time needed for a load to be dried (saving energy).  These can be made with wool yarn rolled into a ball and then tied into an old nylon stocking and washed in hot water. Or, if you are like me and have some extra wool roving in your stash, they can be needle felted.  This may look like it will come apart, but those fibers are bound together. I will put this through the wash and dry cycle next time I do laundry to really get it tight, unless it gets claimed by a certain kitty first.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it on Thursday! May your turkeys be juicy and your hearts (and bellies) be full.

November 24, 2015: Thanksgiving preparations

Let me start by saying I am not a tablescaping kind of person. For one, my table gets set at the last minute because of a couple of curious kitties, and also because I need room for all the food when we have a holiday meal.

Let me continue by saying that I do not own one of those big fancy die-cut machines. They seem amazing, yes. And if someone gave me one I would not turn it down (although I’m not sure where I would store it), but it is not a tool I’ve ever felt the need to own.

Those two things being said, over the past almost 11 months, I’ve made a lot of things I ordinarily would not have. This time it is place cards for Thanksgiving dinner. I wanted to do something Thanksgiving-y to counterbalance the craziness that was the grocery store earlier and I wanted to use stuff I already had.

I ended up with the simple idea of a leaf, and here is where the fun discovery happened. I had a sheet of stiffened felt that I had used once to make a snowman’s carrot nose.  It got trimmed down to letter paper size and I tried running it through my printer using a leaf template page I had found online. It worked! This is amazing for me because I am a bad tracer. No matter how careful I am, the things I try to trace end up looking…awful. There is really no other word. But here I had a nice perfect outline printed onto the felt and all I had to do was sit and cut them out.

For a further cheat, I printed the names onto a piece of terracotta-colored card stock. A few quick pulls of the glue gun trigger and I found I had made place cards. This may be the first and only time you see place cards for my table, but I love the fact that I can use my printer as a new crafting tool.

 

 

November 20-22, 2015: Craft weekend

Craft weekend has come and gone. We were there one less day than usual, which meant less time to work, but we all seemed to be more focused.  There are such a variety of projects that go on. This year included sewing, quilting, scrap booking, crocheting, knitting, macrame, and embroidery.

I was able to finish 3 WiPs, which was part of my goal. The felt mitten ornaments, the ribbon embroidery piece I started in a class back in September, and a scarf which will be a Christmas gift all got completed. I also made a scarf to send home with one of the other members of the craft team to donate to the shelter her church supports.

My final project as starting a hat, but I ended up having to frog most of it because I was busy chatting and didn’t notice that I had missed a stitch a few rows in.

The house we rent is in the mountains, as much mountains as you can find in Pennsylvania, and I was lucky enough to spot a bald eagle flying overhead. We also had many visits from deer who were hoping that some carrots would find their way out of the kitchen.

All in all it was a good break, and a way to hit the “reset” button button before diving into the holiday season.

 

November 16, 2015: Felt mittens WiP

Some more progress was made on the little felt mittens WiP. This proved to be a nice-sized project to take to my Father-in-Law’s house when I had to spend some caregiving time there.

Did you ever have some technique that always gave you trouble and then it suddenly clicked? I faced that with french knots. In the past, they have always been trouble. I’ve gone as far as leaving them off of past projects because I didn’t want to ruin things when I got to the end, and I always put them off until the end. I don’t know what happened, but I was able to make the french knots on these (so far) without any problem. I still have 24 left to go, and am hoping they will be just as obedient.