Crafting –Ready, Steady, Go.

Crafts make good gifts. Crafts items can be made from materials around the home, office, or perhaps a purchase of a few inexpensive materials will morph into a few quality gifts. Crafts made from the effort that comes from your own hand rather than store brought sends a deep message of love from the heart. 

You maybe surprised of how much craft material you have already at home. 

Perhaps the last week or so has seen you turn the wardrobes upside down saving unused clothing to use for your craft projects.  Well done!  Cleaning out wardrobes is always one of the often-delayed chores.  Instead of giving them to goodwill (although that’s also a nice thing to do) I cut off the useful bits and recycle into a gift.

Those jumpers no longer worn can be felted to make a coffee cozy and also to decorate hats, bags, tea cozies.  Nothing will go wasted with some instructions and a few projects in mind. 

Now that you have bits and bobs to use for your craft projects the question becomes how best and where to store them so they don’t just become another source of mess.

I made a craft equipment bag made from an old jumper that I no longer wore.  After felting the jumper made from mostly wool, I hand stitched pockets to store my craft tools around the outside then added a long handle so I could hang it on the doorknob in my study. 

You wouldn’t believe how easy it was to create.

One of the best craft gadgets ever invented is the row counter.  A row counter sits on the end of a knitting or crochet needle and helps keep track of where you are in the pattern.  So when you get distracted it’s easy to pick up where you left off when you come back to your project.   Row counters are an invaluable friend and can be purchased from any craft or department store. 

Winter is a time when clothing is packed away and summer clothes brought out from storage to take their place in the closet.  I always find myself sneezing for a couple of hours after slipping into a jumper that hasn’t been worn for a good few months.  I could take the time to air the garments but an even better idea is to store a lavender scented sachet in the space bag along with the jumpers.  That way when I pull them out they have that beautiful scent I adore. 

Scrapbooking has become a craze and for a very good reason.  Scrapbooks are a collection of clippings, photos, and mementos of people we love and experiences we have enjoyed. Putting together old memories preserves the history of a family and scrapbooking helps us to store up history for the family members we don’t have yet.  By collating the photo’s we love we can show new coming relatives what type of person we are and some of our favourite memories are captured an immortalized.