Green and Purple: longest scarf I have ever made

One of my buddies in the SCA has his house colours as purple and green, so after finding balls of green and purple wool in my crafty box, I decided to make him a stripy scarf as thanks for all the lifts home he gives me.

This is the longest scarf I’ve ever made, as well as being a stripy one - took me about a month overall to complete. I’m actually pretty proud of finally finishing it – it’s longer than me!

New Skill: Adding Beads to Knitted Projects

Since I’ve finally mastered the art of basic knitted scarves, I thought I could teach myself to make prettier scarves by adding beading to them.

It turns out that there are 2 ways of adding beads to knitted wool projects:

1)      Pre stringing the beads onto the wool

2)      Adding the beads using a crochet hook during the knitting process

I find the 2^nd option much more fun to do, especially as I don’t always like planning the finished look in advance.

So I found a really good instructional video on youtube:

 

And bought myself a box of beads for some more variety and a crochet hook – both from Lincraft.

 

Scrapping Paintings Galore - Room Decor

The trouble with my current sharehouse is that the off-white walls are kinda dirty…also ridiculously dull and plain. So one of my favourite ways of making my room look better is to use small panel paintings.

I tend to buy these small square canvas boards on the cheap from the dollar store or in the sale section of the newsagent. I find them very versatile for small art projects and paintings.

During my last trip to Lincraft I found a small bag of paper scrapbooking pieces on sale, which I couldn’t resist getting ‘cos they are so pretty…

As I don’t actually do any scrapbooking, I’ve found them very useful in other ways, like decorating cards…

But the way in which I’ve put them to the best use so far is to make mini artworks out of them to hang on my walls…

Basically I start by painting the canvas boards a background colour, wait for it to dry, then glue the scrapbooking pieces on top. Then a little addition of plastic embellishing gems to make them all pretty and sparkling.

It seems like I really have a taste for boho-style décor….

As there were a few pieces with words on them, which doesn’t really fit with my room theme, I made this extra thing as a small gift for my (former) housemate…

My First Granny Square Crochet

For my birthday about 2 years ago, I got a Patons introduction to knitting book for my birthday.

So far, I’ve only made hats and scarves, so I figured that it’s about time that I actually tried making a ‘real’ item of clothing.

So about 6 months ago, I decided to attempt making the poncho design in the back of the book.

It turns out that knitting squares take a long time, so I thought it might be a good idea to speed up the process by crocheting some of the squares instead…

Which led me to teach myself how to crochet a granny square from lessons found on youtube…

Crocheted Flower Shawl and Scarf

Following finding that crocheted flower tutorial on youtube a while ago, I realized I had some silky grey wool sitting around that I got from charity, so I decided to use it to practice making flowers. 8 flowers later and turning them into a scarf seemed like a good idea….

‘Cos I really don’t like spending a long time sewing pieces together, I figured that I could save time by using my trusty hot glue gun. It turns out that it is pretty easy to stick the pieces together in terms of tough joins as the glue can fuse the fibers together. Also it works pretty well when you run a little along the edge and press the edges of the two pieces together…and so long as you don’t mind the joints being a little scratchy due to the hardened glue…

I’ve also always been fascinated with the idea of wearing capes to keep warm – instead of wearing jackets. It turns out that women were wearing capes during the 1930s rather than coats (as mentioned by Anais Nin in her diaries). So I thought I’d give making a crocheted flower cape a go…

Cross-stitch Evil Eye and Greek Key French Hair barrettes

One of the issues of having perma-straight hair is that you can’t do much with it in terms of styling without using enough hair products to mohawk a horse. Because of this, I’ve developed a taste for wearing French hair barrettes. My fascination with the variety of these that I can wear for any occasion also led me to being rather enthusiastic in making my own.

Due to my love of classical history, I couldn’t resist creating these from my cross stitch kit, pieces of felt, and my trusty hot glue gun. As usual, I used a little nail varnish on the backs to make the threads stay in place. The felt was cut as 2 identical pieces that were glued together as it makes them stiffer in order to make a decent barrette back/base. All these were then glued on top of the metal French barrette base.

I thought it would be pretty nice to try a Greek-key design, but in black instead of the traditional blue….

Ever since I was little, I’ve always been fascinated by the design of the evil eye, when I saw my neighbor wearing one on a pin that she had gotten on a family holiday to turkey. This led into my experimentation with all the ways that you could use this design as a decorative symbol…

DIY Recipe - Chickpea Mushroom Egg Mayonnaise Brinner

It’s such a long time back, but the first time that I heard of the term “Brinner” was on the Scrubs episode My Bad Too during which Turk decides to take advantage of the fact that he has secretly learnt Spanish in order to get Carla to make him breakfast for dinner.

Based on the basic idea of using the ingredients that you would use to make a continental breakfast in a recipe for another meal, I came up with this concoction from various things that I found in my cupboards (bought cheap-ish courtesy of my local ALDI).

Snail Shell Protection in Metal Pomander Case

One of the things that I’ve noticed in high street fashion jewellery shops lately is the popularity of necklaces/pendants that are essentially a hollow ‘cage’ of some sort with a fancy bead sealed inside it. To those who are unfamiliar with the history of jewellery, these ‘cages’ were originally used in the medieval/renaissance period for people to carry fancy smelling things around with them – either to make themselves smell better or to hold up to their noses in order to prevent them from smelling too much of the sewage that lined the streets due to the bad sanitation of that time period.

So anyway, the really great thing about having a dad that loves to travel is that during high school, we got to visit a different place every summer. Given my love of the goddess Aphrodite (the official Greek version from their holy texts opposed to the popular modern myth version), one of my favourite holiday momentos is a white snail shell that I picked up on the beach at Cyprus when we went to check out Aphrodite’s rock.

After letting it sit in the bottom of my jewellery box gathering dust for a long time, I finally figured that I wanted to turn the shell into some sort of necklace. Originally I thought about doing something so that I could turn it into a pendant in the style of the gold one that Ursula wears in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

After googling for a long time on how I could make this possible, I finally realized that I didn’t have the tools nor the skill to do this. So in the end I decided to settle on either using a spiral cage that you often see in new age shops that have gemstones inside or something in the style of a pomander case. 

The issue with getting my hands on a metal case is protecting the shell from getting chipped as it’s really thing. So it was off to lacquering it with several layers of my trusty clear nail varnish. This turned out to work pretty well, although I am a tad disappointed that I now can’t remove it from the cage and use it with something else, due to my mistake in not checking on how runny the nail varnish that I’d put inside the shell to solidify it a bit was, before I put the shell inside the case to check that it would fit.

Very First Crocheted Flower (21 March)

Given my love for lacy things, part of me has always had a soft spot for crocheted items. 

So it’s a bit of a no-brainer that I also wanted to add crochet to my list of things that I could do…

Seeing as I already have a crochet hook that I use with my knitting, some bright multi-colour wool that I couldn’t think of what to do with and that I’ve always loved the look of crocheted lacy flowers, I decided to give this tutorial that I’d found on youtube a go…

 

Procrasti-baking the Cheat’s Way (March 18)

I got it into my head to make the guy I’m sub-letting my room in a sharehouse a birthday cake (partially motivated by the fact that I’d badgered him into cleaning out the oven and not used it for something like 1 ½ months).

As there are no measuring cups or cooking scales, I figured it’d be safer this time round to use a ready-made mix and just eyeball guess the amount of water I needed to add. It also gave me the opportunity to use up some of the marmalade conserve that I pretty much never touch. It also confirmed my personal belief that spring-form baking tins are the best type to use as they make it easier to remove the cake from the tin without breaking it.