Makes: Easter Teacup Bunny, Egg Nest....and Messes

I've been starting to assemble some Easter decor in our house that I can pull out year after year.  I don't want to get to the point where there's an Easter bunny perched on every empty surface and a decorated egg balanced on top of that, but I do like the idea of having a few hints of the holiday hanging around.

Last Wednesday while browsing the shelves at The Salvation Army, I found a polka-dotted teacup in all shades of Easter.  (The stamp on the bottom says it's a Starbucks 2006 special edition; is it too soon to call it vintage? ;)

I crocheted a small stuffed bunny using some scraps from my stash.  The pattern is from Lion Brand's site. I opted out of putting a face on the bunny.  For some reason, I think it's cuter without a defined expression.  With a bunny for my cup, it's looking Easter-y indeed.

Cost of this project:

$1.99 for the teacup and saucer
$0.00 for the yarn and polyfil scraps from my (ever-shrinking, but still enormous!) stash
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$1.99

The last Easter feature for this year doesn't look as cute as it did when it was full of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs, but it's still pretty sweet.  I found the "bowl" at the MCC Thrift & Gift in Elmira a few months back.  I think it's the kind of thing that you can buy at a craft store and paint, but I like it all in ivory.

Cost of this project:


$2.00 for the bowl
$0.99 for the Easter basket grass
$1.29 for the Easter eggs that just....disappeared...
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$4.28

...and now for the mess.  When we moved into our house about a year and a half ago, one of the things we wanted to change quickly was the wallpaper upstairs.  Not only was it pink flowers and blue ribbons, but it was nicotine-stained.  I'd been putting it off and putting it off because...well...everyone always groans about stripping wallpaper and how much work goes into it.


Today we (and when I say we, I mostly mean Dan...but I've been working, too!  In the ongoing battle of clean laundry vs. dirty laundry, clean is once again winning) stripped the wallpaper in the master bedroom in less than two hours.  It was a bit messy, but the project went quickly, using just fabric softener and hot water in a spray bottle.

Turns out our wallpaper was "strippable," which made the job easy.  This is yet another lovely thing about living in an older house!  The top layer with the design on it came off easily by hand.  Then we sprayed on the fabric softener and water, lifted the edge with a scraper, and the glue layer peeled away, slowly and satisfyingly, in nice, long sheets.  We purchased a few different "scrapers" to lift the wallpaper, but it turns out that the 3 for $1.29 plastic putty knives from Wal-mart worked best.  Go figure.  I peeled off an entire piece of wallpaper, floor-to-ceiling in one go.  I feel like a champion.

Blue walls, post-peel.

Right now the walls are a grubby robin's egg blue and the whole upstairs smells like Fleecy.  But all the glue is gone from the walls and the torn off paper is packed into a garbage bag and ready for curbside pickup!  Perhaps I'll even head to the hardware store tomorrow and get the paint we need to finish up the job. Grubby walls aside, it already feels much more up-to-date up there.

Shared on Visions of Sugar Plums, Craft Envy and The Crochet Way.

Pinned It, Made It: Ruffly Flower

Since I'm home with time to blog every day this week, I was looking for a quick and easy project to finish in a day.  Inspired by my recent jewelry acquisitions, I decided to try this flower from sew ritzy-titzy.  (Follow that link for a great tutorial with photos at every step.)

Red, ruffly and waiting to be pinned on. :)

I made this flower using just shy of one 50g ball of crochet cotton and an H hook from my collection that's a little on the small side.  (I started to fret as I neared the end of the ball of yarn, but there was just enough to make this a one-skein project!)  This made a flower that's about 15-20 cm in diameter (BIG and floufy).

There was enough scrap left over to make four of these teeny tiny flowers using my favourite pattern from Lucy @ Attic 24.  I keep making these little flowers from scraps and then leaving them...well, I'm not sure where I'm leaving them.  In the bottoms of project bags, perhaps?  Yesterday I got smart and started collecting them in this vintage canning jar.  Hopefully I'll find the others before I forget about the jar!  The ultimate goal is to string them together as a garland.

Contained beauty.

Valentine's Hat

Last Thursday, after an energy-sucking day, I was able to mellow out on the couch with a bit of creativity and my big tote of worsted weight yarn.  By the end of the night, I had this sweet little hat for my sweet little niece!

That's Maddy on the left, rockin' the Zoolander look.  The lucky girl is also sporting a homemade Valentine's shirt.  You can read all about how to make that on her mommy's blog.

A Solution For Every Problem

Crochet isn't just about finding calm in row upon row of neat stitches or finding joy in the giving of homemade gifts, it's also about finding satisfaction in problem solving.  If I could solve all of life's problems this simply, I'd be a super hero.

Problem:  After deciding upon a repeating pattern for my chicken foot blanket, I realized I was running short on certain colours of yarn.

Solution:  Add in a row of circle-in-a-square squares.  (Thanks to Manner's Crochet and Craft for the basics of the pattern.  You'll probably find a better tutorial there, so I'd encourage you to follow the link.  I added an extra round of white sc and a round of black sc  Make sure you do 3scs in each corner stitch.)

Here's a circle-in-a-square patch.  It's a bit bumpy and lumpy because I just pulled it out of my bag.

So far, I've added 5 of them along the edge of the blanket.  Looks like 6  will do the trick!

Also, I officially ran out of just the right weight of bulky black yarn that I'll need to finish this project.  This blanket was a stashbusting project, but I decided it was okay to bend the rules a bit and buy a big ball to help finish this off.  (I did use a 50% off coupon, so even if it's cheating, it's only 50% cheating.)

WIP (Work In Progress) Wednesday

I'm continuing to work through my stash of leftover worsted weight yarn.  I've still got most of a big Rubbermaid tote full, but I'm having fun playing with colours and learning a few new stitches.

This week, it's the Chicken Foot stitch, from Robyn Chachula's Crochet Stitches Visual Encyclopedia, mentioned two posts back.  I'm crocheting it in horizontal rows (of course)...

...but ultimately I think I'll end up creating a blanket with vertical stripes.  I know it's all simply a matter of perspective, but I think it looks cuter this way.  Originally, I was working it up in random stripes, but I decided that there were just too many colours for the randomness to work.  Regularly repeating rows add a little balance to the chorus of colours.  (...or at least I think they do.  What do you think?)

This blanket is a great project to work on while watching TV.  I think Monday night is going to end up being my couch&crochet night, because the TV lineup on the one channel we get is actually really good: "The Voice" and "SMASH" are both light and lovely shows to watch while winding down.

Ooh, yes!  Yesterday I made and tackled a huge to-do list, so I finally mailed off my monogrammed creation for the Initial Heart Swap.  Fingers crossed that the package makes it to its destination by Valentine's Day!  I'm looking forward to sharing that yarn-free craft with blogland once it gets to its recipient.

I'm sharing this post at tamisamis' WIP Wednesdays and Musings From The Fishbowl.

Crafting On The Bright Side

My Crochet Stitches Visual Encyclopedia arrived earlier this week.  Designer Robyn Chachula has an engineering background, so there are many helpful comments relating to structure and texture, and it's become my new bedside reading.  I found a simple tweed stitch in the book and used it to start this project:

 I'm calling it "Technicolour Dream-Tweed."

Working with lotsa colours means lotsa ends to work in.

Here's a view of the stitch up close.  It's simply staggered single crochets and chains (chain one over a single crochet in the row below, single crochet in the chain one space from the row below).  This is a great stitch for beginners.  It also works up fast and is helping me use some yarn from my stash!

I'm sharing this post on Visions of Sugarplum's Fibers on Friday and Wisdom Begins in Wonder's Fiber Arts Friday.

January's 'Monthly Make' ....A little late!

I've been itching to blog this week.  My sister-in-law recently joined the blogging world and definitely upped the ante for post content.  This post won't be as eloquent as hers, but at least I'm writing something. ;)

My cats did most of the making in January.  This past week in particular, they discovered a glass vase I had filled with balls of yarn and set out as a decoration.  Apparently, they had their own creative vision for this particular stash.  Here's a quick glimpse into their crafting talents:

Now, picture that yarn strung all around the guest bedroom, upstairs landing, down the stairs, through the office, around the chair and couch in the living room and around the table in the kitchen.  I actually had to take scissors to the spiderweb they created when I came downstairs in the night for a glass of water.  My cats are likely not trying to kill me, but they might be trying to break my legs.

Now that report cards are done, I've had some time on the couch.  I am a Crochet Today! subscriber, but I think I've only ever made one project out of the magazine--and a frogged project at that.  (Don't know about frogging?  Think "rip it, rip it"....or read more about it here.)  I like to look at crafting magazines and daydream, but in an attempt to stashbust and get a monthly make in for January, I opened up an issue from last Spring.  Here's what I made today:

It's a little girl's hat, sized 12-24 months.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it actually fits on someone, since it was pretty easy to whip up and it looks super cute just sitting there.  I want to try a few different colours, but I'm thinking brown and pink would be cute for Valentines Day.

Today, I'm sharing my work at: someday crafts (There's over 600 crafts linked up there!  Check it out!) and tami's amis.