The Very Hungry Caterpiller Quilt

I started making a 'quilt' for Kit last year. I think I'd planned for it to be ready for Christmas, I can't remember because it was so long ago! It was annoying me to have a half-finished project sitting around, so I pulled an 'all-nighter' the other evening and worked on it until I finished it. I even made a cushion cover to match. I didn't really plan it very well and just made it up as I went along so I'm pretty happy with the result and Kit seems to like it.

I'd collected various versions of The Very Hungry Caterpiller material and it is backed with some lovely fairtrade organic cotton jersey I bought from a lovely local shop The Cotton Store who are a franchise of Gossypium. I find it really difficult to find jersey cotton at the best of times, let alone organic and fairtrade. I love the fact that Kit is sleeping under something that is at least half fairtrade, and that the part that is touching his skin is organic.

Extreme Knitting

Being an impatient person I love crafts which you can finish in an evening or two. When we were at the Knitting and Stitching Show a few years back we saw a lady who was doing 'extreme knitting' with giant knitting needle, I loved the idea. My lovely Mum bought me some giant knitting needles last year from this lovely lady. I've been desperate to use them. I've collected up lots of reels of machine knitting wool from charity shops ready (I think my Mum said she recommended at least 12 more like 24 strands - that's a lot of wool!).

I gathered enough wool, but then I had no space to knit! Now I've cleared some space I thought that I would have my first attempt. Being that I hadn't tried it before I wasn't sure how many stitches I would need, or how it would turn out, I picked a bunch of 12 reels and cast on 15 stitches and I knitted.

It worked out that 15 stitches was a good width for a placemat so I kept knitting until I had a good length and then I cast off. Now I have a lovely new placemat for my dining table.

I'm going to do a much larger version with some more strands as a rug for the lounge, I just have to choose the colours. Maybe I should make myself some dinner first though!

Pipecleaner threading

I've discovered the ultimate in toddler activities. Clean, easily portable, and developing motor skills.

I pinched the idea off of Jennifer's Little World for threading beads onto pipecleaners. From now on I shall always carry beads and pipecleaners as this turned out to be perfect entertaining Kit firstly on our train journey to Bethnal Green, and then whilst we were queueing to get into the Bust Craftacular. Kit has been to this event every year since he was born, it is quite the tradition! We originally went because my friend had a friend who had a stall (and who we now seem to stalk at all the craft fairs we attend!), but it is definitely my favourite of the London craft fairs.

We aren't doing very well with preparing for Christmas anymore, but I think we might do some pipe cleaner threading and bend them into shapes to hang on the Christmas tree. I will post pictures of our tree once we have it finished, but it won't be on the 1st as originally planned.

Wool-wrapped Christmas Trees

I know, I know. Another Christmas decoration post and it is only November - but you see the decorations need to go up on the 1st December so I have a lot of work to do before then!

One of my lovely friends bought Kit a Thomas toy for his birthday back in June, for some reason the box for it had still been lying around when I went to find card for my treasure post, I think I've said before I tend to collect recycling! Well, not only did I want to recycle the card into something, but I also found that it had some of those long wire ties that they use to prevent you from ever being able to remove your toy from the box! I wondered what I could do with them. Well I was thinking about Christmas decoration ideas and I thought I'd use them for christmas tree frames to wrap wool. I'll show you how...

I'm making more with the left over wire, this one will be for our tree, the others I'll hopefully sell at a Christmas craft fair. 

Really Easy Scary Spiders

Halloween may have been and gone, but in this house we are still crafting spiders! As you might have seen on my Happy Halloween post, we'd been making Halloween spider cards. I thought that as Halloween had been and gone I could move Kit on to making other buglike things with pompoms and googly eyes so we made these flower things.

When I popped in the pound shop today and saw a pack of pipecleaners I thought they would come in useful in some crafting with Kit. When he saw the pack of pipecleaners all he wanted to do with them was to make spiders! So we made more spiders.

Apparently spider craft is going to be a year-round theme in our flat. Spiders are for life, not just for Halloween.

Needle Felted Mouse

I've been wanting to try needle felting properly for ages. I had a brief encounter with it at the V&A lates, but I wanted to learn to create lots of lovely little creature for Kit to play with. I bought some felt and some needles ages ago. I stupidly thought that you could just felt with those, but after several holes in my fingers realised that I did need a sponge thing too. So when I popped into hobbycraft the other day and they handed me a 25% off everything voucher, I ran to get myself a sponge so that I could start creating a zoo of animals.

I'm starting simple, so I made a mouse. A slightly oddly coloured mouse. Here is how I did it...

Felt Christmas Decorations

I love Christmas. I want Kit to love Christmas too. But I want him to love it for the lights and the sparkle, not for the presents! I think Christmas should be an attack on the senses.

I know it is early, but I want to make a lot before Christmas, I want a truely handmade Christmas in my flat (and possibly with some handmade gifts to others too), so Christmas is officially underway here. I bought a wire Christmas tree from Ikea (if I can't have a real tree I don't want a plastic one), now I just need some bits to hang on it.

First Christmas decorations...

I want to make a lot of the decorations with Kit as well. I'm hoping that we can make lots of decorations that we can bring out every year, and that Kit can make new things each year.

Fabric Pom Poms

I started to make Kit a quilt tonight (hopefully more to be shared later!). We took the sides off of his cotbed last week, so now it is just a bed! He'd climbed out of the cot one morning and I woke up to 'where are you mummy?' getting louder and louder until a small child appeared in my bed! I had hoped to get the quilt done before taking the sides off but I didn't want to wake up to a thud, so now I am on a mission to get it done asap. First task was to cut out the patches. I had to stop before I'd managed to do the last lot of material because one of the panels is massively creased and I don't have an iron!





From the patches I had cut out I had lots of little scraps of materials which didn't seem good for anything, but I hate to waste pretty material, no matter how small. I remembered that I had a new pom pom maker that you could use with strips of material, so I thought I would test it out.



I only had enough scraps for one pom pom, but I know what I'll be doing with all my fabric scraps now!

Treasure

We missed International Talk Like a Pirate Day this year, slack I know. But we don't need a celebratory day to be pirates. In this household we are always on the search for treasure - although what constitutes treasure differs slightly between the two of us. My idea of treasure is generally something that I can make something lovely with (which is why I have an epic wool and fabric collection!). Kit seems to consider treasure as either something he can eat or play with. Well, I combined the two, and used some of my pretty things (and a few bits from the rubbish bin) to create something that Kit could play with. We literally made treasure.

Firstly we found some scrap card and a bottle top. Drew around the bottle top and cut out lots of circles.

This is the reason that toddlers shouldn't play with scissors...

 'I cut my nose Mummy'

We were lucky because the card we found was already gold on one side, so when we did the next step of sticking two circles together we already had a gold coin, but if you don't (and we had one that the gold was torn on) then you could cover them in tin foil like we did.

We needed something to store the coins in so I whipped up a really simple bag from some piraty fabric I had in my stash. They are basically a strip of fabric folded in half and a flap folded over at the top of each side to create a drawstring. You have to do it inside out and then sew the flaps in and up the sides (but not the flaps as you need to thread the string through there) - sorry I'm dreadful at explaining!

I think my little pirate likes his treasure anyhow.



 

Renegade Art Fair & The Pink Pom Pom Project

A couple of weekends ago London hosted the UK's first Renegade Craft Fair at the Truman Brewary in East London. We ended up going on both the Saturday and the Sunday, the first visit was planned and the second was a quick one following a trip to Spitalfields Market in the search of bridesmaids dresses for a friends wedding.

The fair itself was great, The Make Lounge had tables with crafts to do, and Kit decorated a postcard (which made me feel less guilty about dragging him around to look at the stalls).

Represented at the craft fair were The Pink Pom Pom Project encouraging people to knit hats for breast cancer patients. As October is Breast Cancer awareness month it is a perfect time to support them by getting out your knitting needles and check out there free patterns. The added bonus for you, and the work they are doing with the patients is that crafting can be considered as a form of therapy (something I am definitely an advocate for). So save yourselves an hours pay to your therapist and take out all your worries on a pair of needles and a ball of wool, and help someone else while you help yourself. I'll be sending some hats there way soon.

Leaves (pt 2)

Once we'd tired of running around in the leaves we collected some to take home with us (to join the piles of conkers and acorns!). Rather than 'leaving' (get the pun - I'm a born comedian!) piles of them around the flat like we have the conkers and acorns, I thought we could actually do something with them.

Kit's really into painting at the moment (although slightly OCD if he gets any paint on his hands!). So I thought we'd combine our autumnal fun with our painting session, and we did leaf prints.

This is Kit's step-by-step guide to leaf printing.

Recycling Crayons

I've seen lots and lots of posts on various blogs and websites explaining how to recycle old, broken crayons into new, pretty, lovely ones. What a great idea! Kit is only 2 and we already have a box full of crayons, mainly given to us in goodie bags from various places. I thought recycled, nicely shaped crayons could make a great party bag or stocking filler (especially if you find moulds that are seasonal!).

V&A Lates - Power of Making

I had one of my quarterly nights out (yes seriously the last time I left the house post 7pm was when I posted about the Science Museum Lates - you see a theme appearing!?!) I met up with my lovely friend Zinta to head to the V&A Museum for their Friday night opening. The theme of their lates series at the moment is part of the 'summer camp' surrounding the exhibition 'The Power of Making'. So the event was full of opportunities to learn how to make things. Learning to make things while sipping cocktails = my idea of heaven!

Make Your Own Play food: Felt Pasta

My son loves playing chef. He cooks me strange concoptions of wooden and material play food almost every day. I was treated to a biscuit with an eggy middle (apparently) and garlic on toast today. I'm sitting writing this post surrounded by plates of lettuce on toast. I always see things about making your own play food and I really want to make Kit some. He has quite a bit already but there are some things that are missing. One of the things that you don't often see in the shops is pasta, and yet that is one of most childrens favourite foods. Here is how I made some ...

Button Rings and Earrings

I've been putting my glue gun to good use in the past few days, and have been working on getting together some button rings and earrings ready for sale at a craft fair.

Weekend fun at the Thames Festival

I've been hiding from the blogoshere for a little while. Everything has been a bit manic. We did have a lovely weekend, before all the trauma of this week.

We met up with my lovely ex-housemates to go and explore the Thames Festival. We started off at the We Make London craft fair and were very tempted by lots of lovely handmade things. As we travelled along the river there were loads of kids activities but Kit decided to fall asleep while we were at that point so he missed out on decorating a hat, painting a fish and other fun looking activities.

He also missed out on meeting the baby vegetables, my friend Vicky was given the responsibility of looking after one of them.

We ended up at the Tate Modern playing in the under-5s area, Kit was enjoying the slide lots and lots, and dragging my poor friends around lots - he tells me to go away when there are other people to play with!

Ended the day browsing the Crafty Fox Pop-up market while Kit ate some yummy macaroni cheese from the macaroni cheese stall! Then we headed back home so that Kit could sleep and we could drink lots of wine and natter.