book treasure box

i always liked the idea of a book box to keep treasures in (or a book clutch, although i can't imagine they'd be big enough to fit all the standard handbag stuff in...), but i never seemed to get around to making one. then my mother asked me for one for her birthday, here's how that went:

they're not difficult to make so much as time consuming - you want a fairly thick book so that you can actually put stuff in the box, but that means that you have more paper to cut through. and no matter how sharp your craft knife is, you will most likely get half way through and get annoyed and start just hacking at the pages you have left to cut through. DO TRY AND AVOID DOING THIS as you really want the inside walls of your box to be neat. i cheated, i mean, i hacked away at it and then concealed the mess by lining it with card covered with an old map. you can do this too as it totally worked out fine.

this is one of my 'here's one i made earlier' things so there's no step-by-step photos i'm afraid. it's pretty much how you might picture it though - be smiley and polite to the ladies in the secondhand bookshop as they scowl at you and tell you cutting up books is sacrilegious, get book, cut a hole in the pages of said book, hold book shut while applying glue to the edges of the pages, panic when you realise that you didn't put a sheet of greaseproof paper between the top cover and the pages so that it wouldn't all stick together, carefully pry the top cover away from the rest of it - damaging it in such a way that you now have to paint everything to conceal the gluey mess, line book box with a snug, much thinner and prettier card box, glue that in place, then pretend it was all intentional as it turned out rather well in the end.

good luck.

pompom garland

i have, yet again, moved into something of a blank-canvas flat and am now  in the process of prettifying my new room. this process obviously involves pompoms. obviously:

 

ok, so i got swept up in the pompom craze that's been on pinterest and then i got my free pompom maker courtesy hobbycraft and mollie makes and things got a little cute. I did not in fact use my new high-tech pompom maker, but a fork, so...

you will need;

- wool in various colours (i got a pack of eight 10g balls for £2.50 in hobbycraft)

-a fork

-scissors

-some ribbon or something, to hang them off of

to make;

wrap you wool around your fork until it looks a little something like this:

 

then tie it up so that it looks like this:

then slide the whole lot off of the end of your fork and trim until it's a pompom. make a fair few of these (they only take like 5 minutes each) and tie them at intervals onto ribbon. 

pretty easy really : )

i'm back!

yes i know it's been a while and there's really nothing i can say to make up for it. sorry anyway.

here's a little montage of some of my crafty goings-on since i last posted:

i got into amigurumi ... and made a tiny cactus for my sister.

i started, but never finished a 'settlers of catan' set of hexagons, where each is made out of the resource it represents.

i designed my first crochet pattern from scratch - a buttercup, which i promptly lost the pattern for.

i went through a phase of making horribly difficult puzzles...

and things made out of puzzle pieces.

christmas came and i got my craft on - i made box nets for most of the blocks in minecraft for my siblings to put together.

and i got a little bit better at amigurumi - here's a pikachu.

there was a lot of other stuff as well, but as i had no internet most of it didn't get photographed at the time. there may be some 'stuff i made earlier' type posts in the not-too-distant future. enjoy.