Discworld Stitch Markers

These are the stitch markers I made for the Ankh-Morpork Knitter's Guild stitch marker swap. I traced images from "The Art of the Discworld" book onto shrinky dinks, which was lots of fun. My mum thought they were very cool when they shriveled up!

The Witches Set

The Watch Set

The Random Set

The Octarine Set

More ebay purchases

So here's some more stuff I bought off ebay - old craft magazines! It's almost all of the first 66 issues of Stitch by Stitch which has knitting, crochet, sewing and a little bit of embroidery and tends to cover techniques and then has projects where you can apply the techniques. It's from the late 70s and some of the projects are fairly amusing. I'm going to post some of the images up so you can all enjoy them as much as I have!

(This isn't all of them but close enough!)

Crafting gone wrong

Up until now I've been pretty lucking with crafting accidents. Other than projects that haven't quite turned out as planned, unfinished projects and the occasional poking with a needle it's all been pretty smooth sailing...or so I thought.

Anyway, I took Deefa in to work for his vaccination and heartworm injections and also some radiographs (because I'm paranoid, and he's a bit lumpy - all lipomas though) just to check his chest and abdomen.


Guess what I found?

Bloggy Competition Winners

The winners of the Bloggy Competition are Librarylass and Sharre and your bookmarks will be heading your way soon (by the way Sharre, what bookmark did you want?).

Is it being mean if I let you know what books I've picked once they arrive?

Masqerade

I had a masquerade engagement party to go to the other day and wanted to make my own mask (although I didn't have a huge amount of time!). After combining a mask base with a fake flower, a glue gun and a bit of embroidery this is what I got...


I was really happy with it and I got loads of compliments, which is always nice! There were a few other hand made mask's there, but most were bought.

12 inch square CAL: June Easy Square + Naughty Tree

I came downstairs on Saturday morning to discover a lot of leaves outside our front door and on closer inspection found this had happened...

Luckily that's not my car...and there isn't really a lot of damage. If you look closely in the picture the branches to the left are going in a different direction and are a slightly different colour...because they're off a different gum tree and came down on Thursday, cutting off the power across the road. After two reasonably sized branches have come down in a week we're getting a tree guy in to look at everything and let us know if we need to take any trees or branches down.

Anyway, I've finished June on the CAL now. Now just for July and August, although there will only be September after that so I've just got six squares left in total. Then I'll just have the TAST and hopefully I won't sign up for any other ongoing challenges after that...I also have a round robin swap and a shop the swap on at the moment...and I did want to take part in a Christmas ornaments swap this year (if anyone else is doing this and sees it come up on craftster, could you remind me in case I forget to look on the swap board?)



The pattern is from here

Craftster Meet

Yesterday I went into the city to meet up with some other Melbourne craftsters. We met up at Max Brenner's (Mmmmm, hot chocolates) and ended up talking about crafting and other random things.

Everyone, apart from me, brought along knitting, (I took some embroidery) and it was great to see the variety of projects. There was a bag, a shawl, a scarf and a blanket (or a block from the blanket). It was really good to be able to meet other crafty people rather than just seeing stuff on the internet (although that's good too!).

Toothpick holder

There are issues buying my mum presents, not because of lack of ideas but because, well, let me give you some examples:
1) Last year I bought her a James Blunt CD (I think it was for Mothers' Day) and brought it to Melbourne a few weeks early because I wasn't going to be in Melbourne on the day, but thought I'd wrap it and get my sister to give it to her. While I was there, she said she was going to the shops to get the CD, so I gave it to her early.
2) This year for Mothers' Day (next Sunday in Australia) I got her some new headphones. Last week, she said she was going to the shops to buy herself some headphones, so once again I had to tell her what I'd bought her and then she got it early.
3) My sister and mum both bought each other Pink tickets for their birthdays this year, so they ended up with 4 before they discovered it and had to sell two.

So as well as the headphones, I've made her a container for toothpicks, because she always needs them when we go out, and I've found a use for an Eclipse mint tin I've had for a while. Because of the location of the lid, it's not as easy to reuse as the Altoids tin, but I'll take what I can get in this country!

It's fairly simple with freehand embroidery and a random tooth, but it should come in handy, and at least it's not something she'll buy for herself!

Birthday Goodies

So these are the lovely goodies that Meshell sent me for my birthday. At least I hope it's all of them, I had to round them up from around the house!



There's a gorgeous card, one of her world famous pincushions (how lucky am I?), a Christmas decoration (that I thought looked gorgeous in her blog, but is even cuter in real life), some shrinky-dink (I've been dying to play with some), a yummy Chewy Choc Chip Slice recipe card(doesn't the name just sound delicious!), some trims and some lollies, (and I may have puffed up the bag just a little to hide the lollies that have already been eaten!), including some caramel apple pops which from the sound of them, I'm surprised Meshell managed to give any away!

So thanks very much Meshell, it's all fantastic!

Edit: The Caramel Apple Pops are REALLY good. It's lucky this is typed because otherwise I'd just be saying "Mmmmm mmmmmm mmmmmmm mmmmmm mmmm MMMMMMMMM mmmmmm!"

Woven belt

I made this, based on instructions from the book Complete Crafts, that I found recently. It was basically an experiment, and I was trying to use up some yarn so the colours aren't my favourite, but I'm pretty happy with the technique. It would probably come in handy for bag handles and stuff (if I was going to crochet a bag), because it's a bit more solid than crochet, and I can make it in the same colour scheme as the hypothetical bag.


Woven belt 

But this is a belt, not a bag handle. To be honest I like the dangly plaited ends, I can flick them around. Hee hee!

topics:

• random

Record earring holder

I've got a house warming party on Saturday and as I couldn't think of any wildly amusing toilet roll holders which would suit this friend I decided to make a record earring holder, as well as that, she's getting a lovely photo frame with a sepia photo of most of my friends.


Record earring holder 

I used the craftster tute posted here by chellovsky except I used a small metal thing so post/stud type earrings will be held in, and I put holes around the sides for hoop earrings. I bought a plate stand so that it can stand up too, as the earrings make it difficult to hang.