Sewing bits and bobs get organized

Crafty hoarder by nature as I am, I love all sorts of tins, boxes and cases for my crafty stuff. A recent visit to a craft shop in the Daleside garden centre resulted in purchasing this lovely set of 3 metal tins :)

I just love the rose pattern on them. So feminine, so romantic, so ...Tilda or Cath Kidston ;) The labels on them are a nice feature too. They will go nicely with my Cath Kidston mug :)

It's high time to embrace that chaos I've had in my sewing stuff. The turquoise metal tin with roses does not belong to the set. I've had it for a year now, from Aldi ;) It nicely agrees with the overall rose theme

The sewing threads scattered around in various random jars and containers have all been moved into the biggest tin and already filled it up up to the brim.

The oddments of cotton threads I use for cross stitching ended up in the middle-sized box and the pins will live in the smallest pin tin.

From my past magazine subscriptions I've had these two twin wooden boxes :) Tidied them up as well.

One will hold all sorts of needles - sewing needles, tapestry/cross stitching needles, beading needles, crewelwork needles, name it all. Now it's my challenge to remember which box contains which needle type! Usually after a tidy-up, I don't remember where my things are! LOL 

Undoubtedly, I have a weak spot for the cute little tins for bits and bobs :)

The long doll making needles won't fit any any of my needle tins so they will be stored in the box compartments. Although I have never sewn a doll in my life, I came to find them so useful when I was knitting the "julekuler" balls. They will go right through the knitted ball carrying the yarn to make a hanging loop. Fast and easy and so convenient.

In my second box I arranged all my measuring tapes and row counters and some strings :)

All this tidying up and rearranging things in my boxes reminds me of my childhood. As a child I loved to rummage in my mum's two-tier wooden sewing box. It was always full of interesting objects like shiny buttons, round pearl beads, crochet hooks and sparkly embroidery threads. Actually my mum owns this box until today. The only difference is that some of thosebox items, with mum's permission of course, relocated to my boxes :) Like mother, like daughter.

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Woop, woop! Just started my 2 week Easter break and I'm planning 15 blissful days of crafing. Will keep you updated :) Hope you all have a good weekend x

Chunky crochet: my first basket

Hi everyone. More crochet update from me :) I have been so keen to try out my new Boodles textile yarns so on the day I came back from my crafty shopping, I sat right down to make my first planned "chunky" project: a crocheted storage basket :) This is a proper xxl crochet and I used size 10.0 mm crochet hook on it. It felt so much different to crocheting with a small size hook. Less precision, more bulk. The texture, the hardness, the thickness of the crochet made me feel a bit surprised but nicely surprised. It also feels heavier in your hands when you hold your work while crocheting. And it grows fast!

Here's a storage idea :)

The basket was crocheted with half treble all the way through. The finishing white edging is double crochet. The basket is about 20 cm in diameter, 10 cm in height and 66 cm in circumference. 

I've used about 3/4 of the Boodles spool to make this basket.

My original inspiration was this project: Storage basket from Ros Badger's book: Hook, Yarn and Crochet. I only used a slightly chunkier yarn and a bigger crochet hook than it's recommended in the book.

Due to its "chunkiness" the basket was coming on very fast. I didn't want it to be too high so I deliberately skipped 3 rounds of crochet :) Overall, not bad for the first time, eh? I'm pleased with myself and I'm going to create some more of these baskets.

My cotton Lerke yarn looks so nice when stored this way. But like I said, I need another basket for storing my sewing bits and bobs and another one for some embroidery cotton yarns too! Oh! And I need one for my knitted Easter eggs too! So more baskets coming soon! I'm having fun with this noodle'y yarn! 

Thank you for your visits and feedback you leave. I really enjoy reading your messages. :)

Ordnung muss sein. Ribbon Love.

Ordnung muss sein. There's got to be order. When I was thinking of the title for this post, I had this German phrase going on and on round my head. Why in German? Perhaps because from a stereotypical point of view, order is a quality attributed to the German nation and I, though not German, subconsciously must have been longing for one. For a while I kind of have felt I need to sort out my ribbons. There was a massive tangled THING in my ribbon box and it was just getting on my nerves whenever I wanted to pull one out to use on a card. So time for ribbon taming! I sat on the floor and for the 2 consecutive hours I was untangling the messy ribbon ball, chucking away remaining cardboard spools and placing my ribbons in a colour-coordinated fashion in the glassy jars. Voila! 

I've had a few empty jam jars put away for upcycling (read: in my case, glass painting) and they just came in handy for this kind of thing. It is my ambition and I've had it in my plans for months to paint and decorate those jars with glassy stones and glass paints so they look funky just like the content inside. However, with autumn and Christmas coming, they may have to wait a little more for their turn :) The two kilner jars at the front had already been done decorating and I've been using them to store some ribbons for a while. I blogged about them HERE - if you're interested. 

I just love ribbons. I could have hundreds of them :) My favourite ones are ginghams, tartans, stripes, dots and chevrons, ric-racs plus of course any ribbons with a Scandi-look :) Both satin and organza. Funnily enough, I'm surprisingly stingy with using them in my crafts - I just want to have them, collect them, keep them stored, look at them, admire them... LOL

Well, these 3 ribbon batches have joined my collection recently. Not at one go of course. It took 3 separate shopping excursions to the same place to collect them. They are American Craft ribbons - beautiful colours and designs. Could I resist? Hell, no! They still remain unpacked, untouched ;) too nice to be used at the moment and they need to "mature" a bit, me thinks ;) I'm particularly happy about the batch in the middle - it's something I haven't had before - natural dyed string. So funky and a nice change from a usual macramé string! 

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Topic change. Guess how I spent last Sunday evening? Chasing an alive mouse around our living room! While I was busy cutting my bf's hair in the kitchen, one of our cats got in through an open window and brought in her prey with her. Not until I had heard something squeaking, did I realize what we had in our house. Was just about to shoo the cat outside hoping she would take the mouse with her when she actually went further in the room and dropped the mouse to play with it. The rest you can guess... the mouse ran away and hid itself somewhere under the old bureau. Great! With all the heavy furniture around it won't be easily found. The cat which brought the mouse (actually to be correct, it wasn't a mouse as such, it was a vole) quickly lost her interest, turned her back and left, probably for some more "lovely prezzies". Our Stinky just kept on sleeping on the sofa, not bothered at all by a running vole! So much for the cats' help. Bf suggested going to town the following day and buying a mouse trap. I spent a long time stressing and wondering what's gonna happen to that vole. Some time later I caught a glimpse of the vole running along the wall under a radiator. Up and running. Healthy and not wounded at all. I started tracking it but it was far too tiny and too fast to be caught. It tried to nibble at a plastic wrapping for the oaty (!!!) biccies it found on the floor. I could hear it rustling every so often. At 1.30 am I was still up trying to catch that vole and it started to move to another parts of the house! Finally I manged to cover it with a plastic blender bit (!!!) when it was running confused to and fro next to my cat's litter tray. I slid the paper underneath and transported the little vole outside. Back to its natural grassy home. Phew! <sighing with relief>

Here's the photo of the little culprit just after catching it. Teeny-tiny cute vole :) I was glad I didn't have to set up a mouse trap for it. Not the best quality photo but there was really no time to play with the camera settings! 

Yay! Happy Ending! :)

Crafty Storage Jars

Hi all. Hope you all had a good weekend. Mine was very crafty, busy, full of craft shopping and I really enjoyed it - I've got a lot projects running on at the moment and many are unfinished so they will have to wait for the future blog posts. However my craft creation stars of the week have been for me my two crafty jars :) A while ago I showed you the two little cross stitch designs and here is what I've done with them:

2 storage jars (I used the kilner brand) for some of my craft stash - ribbons, in this case. The cross stitch I made forms a nice padded pin cushion and needless to say is the central attraction of the jar lid :)

 A close-up of the stitches :)

I loved both designs and I kind of regret the Cross Stitcher magazine didn't have a design for a pink/purple option either! I may alter one of these designs in the future and adjust the chart for the purplish colours, if I find some time to do it, naturally :)

Here, the jars have been filled up with colour-coordinated ribbons :)

Since I love combining craft techniques I couldn't resist glass painting the jars too! More "vitrail" pics of the jars below:

In my (still imaginary) craft room these two will find their place somewhere on a shelf among the other crafty boxes :) Such is the vision, at least ;P I shall be making more of this type of storage jars in the future :)

Now with the jars being finished, I moved on to glass painting some acetate fronts for my "vitrail" cards. These are both Scandinavian motifs and some occasional patterns. I haven't made this technique for cards for ages and I missed it. I thought it would be nice to have a set of festive cards like these for Christmas. 

The photo shows them being outlined with a relief paste and drying up. Now the fun part lying ahead - filling the outlines up with colours, putting the pieces together and embellishing! Can't wait! 

In the meantime I also knit. My 35th knitted ball :) currently finished and waiting to be stuffed.

If you ever wondered what glass painting looks like, here is a reality behind it :))) Well, stuff scattered all over the table - half painted drying glass, printed patterns, cutouts, paint pots, brushes... and only 15 cm of free space to paint! Dear me! Is it just me or do other crafters practise that too?

Glass painting isn't only about painting with paints, it involves a great deal of squeezing the tubes and dabbing with the relief paste too! In fact the beauty of the painted vitrail glass depends largely on a professional artistic relief application. The more precise, neat and artful, the better!

It's time to join up the blog linking party Hand-made Monday at Hand-made Harbour. Head over there to see some other fabulous crafty creations. I missed my last Hand-made Monday blog hop which is a shame cause I had had quite a lot to show. Thought I could link up on Tuesday morning but it turned out we had to be cut off the electricity for most of the day. So no laptop, no telly, no even a cup of tea! How dependent we are on electricity these days!!!

If you wanna have a peek what I had for show last week, here is the post ;)

Thanks everyone for their visit and comments left behind. x x x

Getting organised

Right. Ordnung muss sein! I'm getting my threads organised :) No more tangled strands, split skeins or confused colours. Yesterday I got myself a plastic Anita's Crafts organiser to sort out my loosely stored stranded cotton for my cross stitch projects. I also bought two lots of plastic bobbins but it looks like I'm gonna need many more! I've already spent over 2 hours winding or rewinding my threads and it's just a beginning! It's a big job to get all my stranded cotton sorted out but hey, look, it's getting neater and neater...