Jewelery Kit

  Making things very often means creating waste too, and my work is no exception.  I have a fair amount of yarn and felt scraps from making my wands and crowns.  I came up with this solution for the really small scraps which I discribe in this post, but what to do with the pieces that were too small for my wands, but still usable?  Having time to bring new ideas to fruition does not come my way too often, but I did get a moment this week to finally finish a project that uses those still usable scraps.  What I came up with is a jewelery making kit containing lots of wooden beads and a rainbow of small square felt pieces to be threaded onto hemp string for necklaces and bracelets.

It comes in a natural cotton bag containing 117 unfinished wooden beads of various sizes and styles, 180 pieces of plant dyed felt (20 pieces of each color) and 4 yards of hemp string.  I mention in my shop's listing for this kit that the beads could be colored with markers, painted with watercolor paints or dyed with Easter egg dyes or simply left plain.  My original intention was to plant dye the wooden beads, but I became a little overwhelmed with the process.  I'm still hoping to try plant dying before the summer is over and just focus on 1-3 colors.  Maybe the kits could contain half colored and half plain beads.  What do you think - would this kit be better with colored beads, plain beads or both?  I wanted to keep this item simple as everything else I make is so time consuming and detail oriented, but then maybe that's just my style.  What do you do with your project scraps?

Swimming

We just got back from a short camping trip to Baker Park.  It's not far from our home, a mere half hour drive, but it feels like getting away none the less.  We camped for just one night packing in a lot of outdoor play time taking walks, running around at the playground and of course going to the beach (a prerequisite in the summer living in the land of 10,000 lakes.)

Sam has surprised me on how comfortable he is in the water as of late.  Dunking his head all the way underwater (on purpose no less), flying in the air after being tossed by Dad and finally floating on his back resting his head in the water.  He hasn't had a formal swim class yet, but I think it's time as he's almost teaching himself!  We've heard good things about Foss Swim Schools so I think we might try there.  It will be good for him to swim confidently before we take our trip to the Phillipines this winter. 

Here's a few snaps of my boy in action!

Looks like fun - yes?  What are you doing to enjoy your summer?

What To Do With Felt Scraps?

Hello! It's been a while since I'd posted so I just thought some sort of greeting was in order. Now that that's done on to my new post.

I hate to throw away anything in our garbage unless I absolutely have to, so we compost, donate and recycle as much as we can. But, as you can imagine there are many things that do not fit into one of these categories. And, being a person who sews, knits, stitches, scrapbooks etc. I seem to accumulate large quantities of material waste. With larger amounts of yarn I came up with the following use you can read about in this post (it's gotten much longer since I posted) but the tiny felt and yarn bits have up until now been sitting around in ziploc bags hoping a future use would arise.


That use came to me when I was making the bed the other day. Our pillows have flattened to the thickness of pancakes. I want to replace them with wool pillows (we have one which I adore), but don't have the money. So, we have just been living with them as is bunching them up as best we can. Then I thought I'd make a wool pillow instead! Yes, I took out the pancake pillow from it's protective cover and filled it with years of amassed tiny, tiny felt and yarn scraps. Figuring they were all wool and naturally antibacterial so why not just try it and see.


Well the results have been good and we are now fighting over who gets the scrap pillow. I filled it about 3/4 full (loosely not packed) and it has the consistency of a down pillow but more firm. I highly recommend it to any of you out there with the same issue.


Now, all I need is a use for all my small fabric pieces and scrap booking waste. Any ideas?