for household Archives - Page 13 of 16

Spray of flowers

We have come to Craft Countdown #7, the only one for which I bought new materials. My half bath has an absurd amount of shelf space that I really do not have any need for. It is also painted a shade of periwinkle that I believe was engineered in the laboratory to coordinate with as few other colors as possible. I decided to go with green and yellow as accent colors, which work okay, and a mild frog theme. There are four cubbies on each side of the mirror, and one was empty; it had held a large bar of soap that is now in use. I wanted something a little livelier than the other cubbies’ contents.

I dropped by the dollar store while running errands in the afternoon, and found some nice looking yellow roses that I picked up. When I got home and cut them apart, I discovered I could move the leaves, so I pushed them all up right below the blossoms. I bent the stems around so the flowers would stand at varying heights, and wired them together.

Then I found some (accidentally perfectly) coordinating ribbon from my stash and wound a length around the bottom to hide the tangle of stems. Initially I had it pinned together, but the ribbon was actually iron-on, so later I went back and pressed it so it would stick to itself and stay wound.

It serves its intended purpose!

Stately soap and a countdown

On New Year’s Eve, I was going to go to a First Night event, but the friend I would have been staying over with was kind of lukewarm on the idea (she was not completely healthy), and I had just gotten back the day before from my long holiday trip, so I wasn’t so up for going out anyway. I decided to stay home and craft in the New Year. At some point in the afternoon I had the idea to complete ten projects by midnight, like the last ten seconds’ countdown. I didn’t expect to do everything from scratch, though as it turned out I did all but #1 from scratch. Also, except for the flowers used in #7, I didn’t buy anything new for the projects. Here’s the Craft Countdown list:

1. Ulu knife sheath
2. Vermont soap
3. Business card holder
4. Trio of “paint card notepads”
5. Trio of bookmarks
6. Lowly Worm
7. Flower decoration
8. Memo pad case
9. Robot iron-ons
10. Denim coaster

Since work will be busy through March and I’d like to avoid a replay of the baby sloth episode (though baby sloths are well worth the bandwidth), I’ll post individual entries for each of these, spread out with other entries. Today, item #2!

I stopped in a La Quinta on my drive back from the Midwest to New England, and they had lovely orange-scented soap. The only problems with it were that it was small, as one would expect, and also kind of hard. No problem; I’ve solved that before. This time, in addition to water, I drizzled in some orange-scented bath gel (I like citrus scented bath products). And then I decided to get fancy with the shaping, and dug out a cookie cutter. I am ridiculously tickled by the result:

As before, I diced up the soap fairly fine but not perfectly (it was two La Quinta bars), threw it in a bowl with water and bath gel, and microwaved it to melt/dissolve it. I was a little subtler with the heating this time, doing shorter stints, and I think that helped. Then I put the cookie cutter on waxed paper and used a rubber spatula to scoop and press the soap into it. I left it for several hours to cool and solidify, and then was able to press it out by hand.

Bottle cozy

My grandmother has been instructed to drink a lot of water, so she asked for a water bottle for Christmas. Specifically a metal water bottle. She likes her water very cold, so I thought I could take yarn with me and make her a sleeve for the bottle, which turned out to be an Arizona Tea bottle after all. She’d suggested black; I also bought white and had some sparkly burnt orange on hand. I made the bottom from cotton yarn so it could act like a coaster, and the sides were Vanna’s Glamour. She looks like a real Hawkeyes fan.

I just freehanded it; there are some shell stitches, some alternating dc inc and dc dec, some straight dcs and some multi-row scs. It was all with an E hook.

On my first attempt, I decided for some reason that smaller yarn meant I should use a larger hook for the sides so it would fit. That was erroneous. I decreased by lots of stitches as I went but it was still way too big. However, it made a great hat for my niece’s new stuffed cat!