I pulled out a bin of fabric today to look for something completely different, but came across a piece of lace. It had a tag on it that read “Piece of fabric, 50 cents”. It doesn’t seem particularly old, but old enough the background has turned a darker shade while the flowers are still white.
A forgotten find. Add now it has been stitched up to be a decorative scarf.
I really like it when friends send me ideas for Thing-a-Day. If I have the materials I like give them a try. A few days ago, a friend sent me this link.As luck would have it, I had a bag of roving in my stash (thanks to Terri) and had been looking for a way to use it.
I’ve finger crocheted a chain stitch before, but this was my first attempt at trying a real stitch. It is also the first time I’ve crocheted with roving. This is done in rounds of single crochet and it took a couple of rounds to get the rhythm. Not using a hook makes it feel at first like you are wrestling with the fiber. Eventually, I figured out how to keep the yarn on my hand while still grabbing the feeder piece.
The roving is acrylic and is actually the roving that would be used for one of Lion Brand’s Homespun colors.
It is a rainy, dreary day here today. Rather than put a large pot of something on the stove, I made some honey bubble bath. I’ve found when I cook, I use recipes more as suggestions than law, and such is the case when mixing up care products too.
The original instructions called for baby oil, but I substituted mineral oil. I also did not add any vanilla extract to this since the soft soap I used already had a nice scent to it. Normally I would rather eat honey than use it for something like this, but an old jar of it had completely crystallized in the back of the pantry.
Now if I just had a personal maid to come in and draw me a bath…
My grandmother used to have a brick doorstop that was covered in needlepoint. In the summer, they kept all of the doors propped open to get a breeze through the house, and every door had some sort of doorstop since breezes can also lead to slamming doors.
While I love the look of the needlepoint versions, this one worked up much faster. The instructions and template were found here. I used woven strips of fabric since I had a jellyroll in my stash. It doesn’t really match the colors in my house, but the fabrics are fun.
I tried a different TAD early this morning and it was a big craft fail. I had seen cute votive holders on Pinterest made out of old CDs and since I have several of those ancient AOL CDs they used to give you pretty much everywhere, I thought I’d try it.
This was the result:
Not the look I was going for
I suppose I could count it as my thing for the day, even if it is a horrible botched thing, but I still had time, so I made something else instead. Raiding my stash of champagne corks, a tic tac toe game was created. The original post where I got the idea had the corks decorated as a snowman and reindeer inspired by the Frozen movie. I may be the last person in America who has not seen the movie, and decided to just paint them in solid colors.
They do need a second coat of paint, but the cats got too curious and I figured if I tried today there would be purple paw prints all over my house.
When I first started needlepoint, I would buy those cheap little kits at the craft store. I enjoyed working them up, they went quickly, but I never did anything with them when they were done. They live in a bin with other swatches and small finished projects.
Today I dug one of them out, and then in a further “use it up” idea, I backed it with the other half of the purple patchwork square left over from making the lavender sachet. It’s a tiny pillow, purely decorative in nature, but it means this early needlepoint project is finally seeing the light of day after probably 20+ years of being completed.
The wings are supposed to be made with Popsicle sticks. Somewhere in my house there is a package of them, but they have wandered away from the bin of wood I have. Fortunately, a package of wooden plant markers was in the bin. The pointy ends got cut off, and the wings of a small wooden airplane were born.
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.
Yesterday this arrived with my mail.
A friend of mine has packed up some assorted craft supplies she was not going to use and sent them to me. (I have to say this is a foreign concept to me…supplies you KNOW you are not going to use??)
There are tiles, beads, grommets, pom poms, and some stickers. I wanted to make something with one of the items right away so I could show her I appreciated her generosity. Although it only uses one of the pom poms, this little hat ornament was quickly made up. I tried twice, but could not recreate the perfectly smooth top from the original instructions. It is also hard to hold a bundle of yarn perfectly straight and tie it without it getting lopsided when you are working alone.
I made one of these last year and it had become my favorite place for stashing thread and yarn snippets while I work. The texture of the yarn and clothesline keeps hold of all the snippets so they don’t end up travelling around the house like they have done when I’ve used other bowls for the job.
Because I like to keep that first one next to the spot where I usually crochet, I wanted a second that could live by my sewing machine. I added handles to this one just to play and see how they would work out.
alookatthelittlethings 