Finish for the Weekend

Hello dear friends and readers!

Welcome to Finish for the Weekend, where we share finished projects this week in an effort to clear up those UFO's! Please see below for instructions on how to join in.

I hope you've had a good week. I haven't. I've had a bad tooth abscess which has knocked me for six all week. I've been to the emergency dentist twice, been on two loads of antibiotics, and even ended up at A&E for an IV dose of antibiotics. As I type its still extremely painful, and still got a bit of a lump on my cheek, it was about golf-ball sized, though I think its finally starting to go down a bit. So I've not done much except pop pills and sleep (or try to) all week.

But I was determined to have a finish to show you today. Its not a very exciting one I'm afraid. I made a cover for our remote-control box. How exciting.
We bought new sofas a couple of years ago, they are electronic recliners, and as such each side moves independently of the other. This means if anything (e.g. a remote control) falls down the gap between the sofa cushions, then it's lost under a heap of metalwork and is bloomin' awkward to get back. We needed a box hat was large and shallow because one of our remotes is super-sensitive and if you so much as breath on it, it starts up the playstation which then hums annoyingly. So we can't just chuck them all in a box because inevitably something sets it off. I found a shoebox lid to be just the right size.

And I decided to crochet a cover for it, as you do. So I started off in a nice soft grey to match the sofa. Well that was two years ago. Seriously, I have no staying power at all, its not a very big project and yet I still got distracted enough to put it to one side and work on something else. So we've had this slightly tatty shoe box lid lying around the front room for all that time holding the remotes.

Today I took one look at the shoebox lid and decided to finish off the cover for it. I wanted a nice inner to the box, so I cut a piece of cardboard (just from a cereal box), glued a piece of felt to one side of it to give it a bit of softness, then covered in this grey and turquoise fabric. I was going to get the sewing machine out but actually I decided that simply turning the edges under and hot-gluing them in place would be easier and probably neater.

The crochet starts off with a solid granny rectangle. I worked out the starting chain length by using the difference between the length and the width of the shoebox lid. I think. Well, it was 2 years ago. I can't remember what yarn the grey was, Stylecraft Special DK, in silver possibly. Anyway, I increased on every round until the rectangle was big enough to fit the base (ish), then stopped increasing to make the sides grow straight up instead of out flat.



After a bit I changed to a sort of duck-egg-green-blue, and as I started that bit just last week I can tell you that it is Paintbox DK in Washed Teal. I love these Paintbox yarns, so soft to work with.

And then it was a question of keeping going until it was big enough. I made the sides high enough so they could come up over the top and tuck down inside, to hide all the cardboard.



I used hot glue to attach the cover to the box, and put a really good blob of it into each corner to make sure it stayed neat.

And that's it. A really simple little make that should not have taken 2 years!

I'm super happy with how it turned out, far better than I hoped :)

And it would even make a rather nice little crochet-work-basket-cum-tray :) I see more of these in my future :)




Til next time,
Jillxxx

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Welcome to Finish for the Weekend, a weekly chance to link up and share with the blogging community some of the projects you have completed this week. The only rule is that your post must be about an item you have finished this week, hopefully to help reduce some of those piles of UFO's!

Here's how to join in:

1. Write a blog post about your finished project.

2. Link back to Finish for the Weekend by adding this text as a link on your post:

http://emeraldcottage.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Finish%20for%20the%20Weekend

3. Publish your post

4. Link back from here to your post by clicking "Add Link" and adding your post's URL

5. Spread the bloggy love by visiting and commenting on the other Finish for the Weekend posts.

The Finish for the Weekend post will open for new links on a Friday at 12noon London time, and it will stay open until Monday at 12noon to allow for overseas bloggers to join in. These times may vary but I will do my best to keep it roughly the same. Looking forward to seeing all your posts !

Happy Weekend

This weekend has been so lazy, slow and relaxing.  Nothing planned, in fact I haven't left the house at all. Sometimes that is just blissful, pottering about enjoying home comforts :)

Yesterday I crocheted for hours and hours and hours and hours. And hours. Everyone else seemed happy doing their own thing so I just left them all to it and caught up on some TV I'd recorded and spent a happy hooky morning. And afternoon. And evening.

The postman obviously knew I was about to run out of Stylecraft Special DK Pomegranate at lunchtime and very kindly delived my wool order in the nick of time. I love how Wool Warehouse package their wool deliveries in these sort of organza bags, such a nice touch.

I know you're thinking I couldn't possibly need more wool, and really you are right. I usually buy acrylic as it's so affordable and practical, but I'd really like to use something more luxurious for some scarves come winter. Trouble is, I just can't justify buying a load all at once. So, to ease the pain, often when I buy a few balls of acrylic I sneak in a ball of delicious cashmerino. My favourite is the Baby Cashmere Merino Silk DK by Sublime. Oooooooh it is SO sublime, it's like stroking a cloud. I'm going for pastels with this collection as I can't get my head round vibrant and silky-soft together. I've a couple of balls of Rowan Pure Wool DK in there too but its quite scratchy by comparison. Cushion covers perhaps.

And while we're on the subject of wool, my lovely lovely crafty friend KC (she doesn't have a sunshine band though) has just come back from a fortnight in Tasmania. As you do. I missed her loads, she is my craft and coffee buddy, and a real shoulder for me to offload onto about stresses with Little Man. She works with children with special needs, a lot of them are autistic so she really understands. Plus our friendship goes way back about 15 years, as my husband and I used to work with her husband, and now all our children go to school together. Anyway, as I said she's just back from Tasmania. (She went with 2 old Uni friends of hers, and didn't take husband or children. Wow!) And bless her sweet sweet heart, she brought me back a present....... some wool of course! Oh my heart leapt with joy! Joy that I have SUCH a Dear Friend, joy that she thought of me at all, and joy that the present was wool. She knows me so well. It's some lovely Alpaca Wool from the Tasmanian Wool centre. Its colours are a really lovely earthy winter palette so I'll be saving it for some gloves or maybe a hat later in the year :)

KC also took loads of wonderful craft-related pictures on her trip, and if she has time, she'll do a guest post here on emerald cottage so she can share her photos with you all :)

Today everyone was quite happy to stay at home, and in the afternoon Little Miss did some baking, She made these biscuits all by herself, I only did the in and out of the oven part. I wasn't even in the kitchen when she was weighing, measuring, rubbing in and so on. Not bad for a 10 year old :) (There were a lot more biscuits but they didn't last long enough to photograph)....

Later we sat round the table doing some colouring. During the Easter holidays we had bought some bargain pound-shop-type-of-shop-felt-tips - £3 for 100 pens, and they're pretty good.  I was kind of expecting them to be a bit rubbish. Look at that range of colours ....

We've got a couple of these amazing colour-by-number books that we bought in Florida last year.  The girls stayed colouring for about an hour, but I was sat there another hour on my own. Very therapeutic :) I love the mosaic style appearance of the resulting picture. I'm brazenly showing off my picture here. The girls didn't finish theirs. No staying power, children these days.

Now. As you know I'm a crocheter, I can knit too, but I always find it slower, and less forgiving in terms of mistakes. But I've had a bit of a knitting itch lately that I need to scratch. I also have some sock yarn that I bought by accident (I know, I know) so I'm going to join in on a Sockalong (such a fab name) with WinwickMum Christine (http://winwickmum.blogspot.co.uk/p/sockalong.html). I had to dig out the bag of knitting needles that my Mum gave me last time I was back home.

My Mum was an amazing knitter but doesn't do it any more at all now really. I think she may have done a knitting needle cull before she gave me her bag, I'm sure she had way more than these. Look how oranised she is, keeping the packs. The wooden ones were magazine freebies in case you're wondering. So I set aside some sock knitting stuff so I'll be ready to start on May 3rd. I think that is sock yarn ? Is it ? Anyone ?? 

One last little job that I did today was button sorting. Gosh if colouring-in is therapeutic then I don't know how to describe button-sorting. Mesmerising ? Soporific ? I find it sooooo relaxing. What is that ? Why is fiddling around with teeny bits of flat plastic or wood sooooo satisfying? I'd found these little spice jars in the charity shop, they were just so cute, and seemed like a full set as there were 8 of them, so I had to buy them really. No really, I did. Thery didn't even smell that spicy. I already had a perfectly good set of random mustard/pickle/jam jars, but they Didn't Match Each Other. And we all know how I don't really do random. And yes, I also already had a perfectly good button tin that even has pictures of buttons on it for heavens sake. But look, I HAD to buy these jars. I mean they were for charity. Look ..... see ?

I hope you all had relaxing weekends too :)

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This week

This week I've been mostly ....

.... loving that my Mother's Day flowers still look gorgeous

.... snuggling under blankets with various under-the-weather Little People

.... enjoying daffodils in my new-to-me 50p bargain charity shop vase

.... crocheting things with my Gillymakes win of Sugar n Cream cotton yarn

.... admiring the pieces I made on my fused glass workshop

.... flicking through my new-to-me craft books - another charity shop find, all 4 for £12 :)

.... loving the latest McDonalds Shawn the Sheep Happy Meal toys (yes I know its unhealthy)

.... ironing Hama bead creations

.... packaging up (finally) my blog giveaway prizes

.... playing with colours for a new blanket :)

What have you been doing this week ?

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ps rubbish photos, sorry - all taken on my iPad, just couldn't be bothered faffing about with memory cards etc!

Craft Room Makeover Part 1

I've been waiting waiting waiting to publish a new post, ideally with great ta-das and exciting reveals of amazingly impressive projects. Or project singular even. Sadly though, this was not to be. I've been really restless this last week or two. Starting things. Not finishing things. Sometimes not even starting things at all. I decided that the root of this, or part of it, at least, is my increasingly disorganized craft room. I'm really really lucky to have a whole room to dedicate to my crafting, it's not a very big room - after all I live in deepest suburbia in the increasingly densely populated south of England - but it's a room nonetheless. The furniture is a mish-mash of bits we've stopped using in other rooms - an old dining table, an unused desk, a bookshelf that someone gave us, a toy storage unit that was replaced by something more grown up. Hubby keeps telling me just to buy new furniture, but I quite like the old bits and pieces. Plus I really can't be bothered trying to decide what else to get, and it just seems so wasteful when there's nothing wrong with any of them.

However I have a really bad habit of piling stuff up and never putting it away properly, not least because there wasn't enough storage space for it all. Plus, my wool storage just wasn't doing it for me. Stacked about 6 balls high it kept collapsing and was generally just a mess. This room was not the restful, peaceful and inspiring place I wanted it to be.

So, for the last week, my spare time (what there is of it) has been spent rearranging and reorganizing. I didn't want the chaos to affect any of the other rooms so it was a bit like one of those square tile puzzles where you can only move one thing at a time then move the next thing into the space just created by moving the first thing, and so on. It's still a bit of a giant WIP but it's getting there. Lots more to sort out - paperwork, fabric, ironing, but lots is looking rather lovely, and the most important bit - my Beloved Yarn Stash - is looking fab-u-lous .... Here's a wee peek (can't show you any more as the rest is still obscured by Messy Stuff) ....

I commandeered 2 CD racks from around the house. We only ever listen to electronic copies of the music now anyway, so the CDs were evicted and are now occupying a couple of shelves elsewhere. They are several disks deep as we don't need to get them much. The CD racks are pretty sturdy and quite tall, so I've laid them on their sides, one on top of the other, along the back of my desk :) Each little CD cubby-hole holds 4-6 balls of yarn. What a happy sight to work/play next to :) I could spend hours just gazing at it. I might even sleep next to it.

I'm also fortunate to have a brilliant embroidery floss collection. My friend's Mum, who was a passionate cross-stitcher, passed away quite suddenly a few years ago. I knew her myself, she was a lovely lady. My friend and her sisters had to sell a lot of their Mum's belongings and add the monies to her estate. My friend sold me the job-lot of all of her Mum's stitching stuff - books, magazines, and threads - and look - one of those gorgeous vintage concertina sewing boxes ......

I thought about painting the box off-white, and doing the whole distressed thing (the box would be distressed, I might too) but actually I'd rather keep it the way its original owner had it. The floss collection was (is) amazing, look at the range of greens alone ....

Everything was numbered and labelled, Shelagh was super-organized. When I came into ownership of the collection, the sewing box was empty and all the cards of floss were in those whitefish plastic flat boxes with dividers ..... which are now in use by the Little People for their equally impressive loom band collection. And the floss cards fit perfectly into the sewing box, as you would hope. Shelagh kept all her spare cards and number stickers in this little original Oxo tin. I think she must have won it in a raffle, you can still the raffle ticket stuck on the bottom....

During my sort-out I found this old cross-stitch that I completed years ago but never got round to framing. I loved making this picture, it the kit was a gift from my Mum, and although it's a bit olde-fashioned for my usual tastes, I do rather like it, so I must get round to finding a frame for it.

As lots of shelves and boxes were cleared up, various random crochet motifs and swatches were unearthed. Maybe they will become a freestyle something-or-other. I had a great idea for them earlier but I seem to have forgotten what it was. Don't you hate that ? I'll just have to wait for inspiration to strike again. It looks like a dreadful jumble doesn't it ...

There, that's a bit better ..... 

My Playroom Thingy squares are multiplying, I'm nearly ready to assemble .....

And I've got a few new little bits on the go .....

Last, but most definitely nowhere near least, look look look look loooooook ...........

Fancy winning those little treats ? Next week I hope to reach my 100th post (I know!!!! 100!!!!), and I'm planning my Very First Giveaway!!! Whoop!!!! That little lot (deliberately half hidden, by the way, in order to keep it a surprise), with the addition of a few bits more, will be winging its way to one of you, my lovely readers, and I'll give you more details in a few posts' time :) Y'all come back now, y'hear ?

xxxxxx

December Days

Is it really mid-way through December already ? Gosh it's really going by fast :) Big hello to my new readers, followers and commenters - it's always good to see a new name :) I'd also like to say that I don't usually leave such long gaps between posts - I think it's just that the light is so rubbish I don't feel terribly inspired to take many photos, and photos usually in turn inspire my posts.

The last week or so has been the annual chaos of school carol concerts, class parties, nativities, and Christmas jumpers for Christmas jumper day.

Little Man didn't have a Christmas jumper (well, not one that fitted him anyway) so I crocheted a snowman and sewed it onto a normal jumper :) He's quite cute, isn't he ?

I've been making scarves for presents ....

... and I rediscovered my holly bauble basket that I made last year ....

.... this little guy made an appearance again ....

.... and I've got a little production line of gift bags, embellishments and washcloths on the go. No photos of those yet, but watch this space.

There's a few more scarves to be completed, and a couple of pairs of mitts too. Over-stretching myself ? Of course! That's when I'm at my best :) Dashing off to complete another scarf now :)

xxxxxxx

Hallowe'en Hands

Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat,

Please put a penny in the old man's hat.

If you haven't got a penny then a ha'penny will do,

And if you haven't got a ha'penny, God bless you!

That's the rhyme we used to chant at Hallowe'en when I was a lass, we didn't have trick or treating back then, and the braver children (of which I was not one) would go round the doors chanting the rhyme, essentially asking for money! The cheek!

In fact we had trick or treaters call at our door here LAST WEEK!!!! 2 whole weeks early, and I'm pretty sure they were chancing their arm for some cash, not just for chocolate or sweets. I gave them short shrift, I can tell you. To be fair though I had just bought pumpkins and had them on display in the porch, so perhaps they thought it was worth a try. It wasn't. 

I usually buy 3 pumpkins - one for each Little Person - at the last minute, carve them hastily, shove them in the window on the 31st, then take them away the next day, and chuck them out. All that effort for one evening. This year I decided to buy them well in advance so I can really enjoy their vibrant colour on the front porch. A Good Move - I'm loving the cheery welcome every time I arrive home. My pyracanthas and cotoneaster are in full berry-bloom too, gorgeous autumnal reds, oranges, and golds.

Anyway, back to Hallowe'en.....  in preparation for next week's (correct day of) trick-or-treating there has been much discussion about costume choices. I have mixed feelings about the whole trick-or-treating thing but that's a subject for another day. Mummy's thoughts on the matter aside, the Little People all LOVE the dressing up that is required for the occasion. There do seem to be a lot of suggestions on the table at present. But Little Miss has decided For Definite that she is going to be "Draculaura" - a cartoon character who is basically a pink-clothed girl vampire. To go with her costume I made her some long fingerless bright pink gloves.

I worked out my own pattern - which I'll share when I've written it up properly - and embroidered the spider-webs on once the gloves were complete. The diagonal ridge you can see on the left hand one is because I crochet in the round with an invisible seam - ok so it's not invisible but it isnt't loose and hole-y which is what I find happens if I don't do it this way. It's a technique I learned for making hats, but I'm not sure it translates as well to gloves. But hey-ho, I still love how they turned out:)

Little Tomboy got in on the act and asked for orange ones with spiders .... I was happy to oblige ....

They were really quick and easy to do, and a real crowd-pleaser. Also a great way to use up some rather gaudy yarn that a friend had donated to my stash a while ago. I'm definitely going to make some for myself as well, to coordinate with my many scarves :)

There has also been a request for a green pair with creeper faces on (you mine-crafter-peeps-or-parents will know what that is!), so guess what I'm doing in front of the telly tonight :)