Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Challenge: beat our gods eye snowflakes!

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While admiring something done by Red Ted Art the other week, I had the idea for some yarned snowflakes. So I took the kids out on a walk, collected sticks and when they got back they had a go.

To be honest, I think really we made spiderwebs, though if we spray them with glue and glitter, they'll make nice frosted ones 😉 I've been trying to come up with a way of improving them since and making them a little more crystal like, but I've not come up with anything pleasing yet. So I'm throwing it out there as a challenge; can you take the gods eye idea and improve it? I'd love to see your blog post or photo if you do!

 

 

Pumpkin Glow Pot

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Here is a quick and fun way to use up the strips of crochet you accumulate when a child is learning that craft.My 10 year old actually taught me to crochet, but is still happiest turning out long chains. I got her to do a long piece in bright orange acrylic wool for me, so we could make a pumpkin pot using some glass baby food jars we have stashed.

As you can see, he turned out really well. It’s so simple; one long chain of yarn, crocheted in orange. Then paint a jar in tacky glue and wind the crochet around the jar. We did felt shapes for eyes and nose and mouth in yellow, but I think for a quirky effect, we might replace them with black tomorrow. The felt got glued on too.

For a bit of fun, Amelie covered the lid of the jar in green fimo to give him a top. She decided it turns him into a French pumpkin! If you use an electric tea light for the glow effect, you’ll be able to leave this lid on while he’s ‘alight’ – obviously with a flame tea light, the lid will make him go out though!

For the record, we put a flame tea light in. The yarn is synthetic and can’t burn easily. I lit it once the candle was inside (grown up job!) but you could flame proof the yarn if you wished. Be careful – and don’t do anything silly with it. We aren’t responsible for anything daft you do while making or lighting this craft!

Easy Crochet Butterflies

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The internet is full of ideas for crocheting and knitting insects and goodness knows they are all better at it than me but one of the great things about crochet is that once you have hold of a basic stitch (a double crochet in the UK, a single crochet if you are in the US) you can have a good stab at creating something even with very little expertise. So, with summer fading fast, we bring you a ‘Maddy Makes’!

The beauty of letting someone just ‘go’ with something like crochet is seeing what they make of it. Maddy is 12 and has only just learned to crochet and she approached this from a very different angle to I would have. She crocheted a doubled length to be the body, then attached the green and crocheted a circle inwards to make the wings. I think I might have done the circles and finished off by stitching them to a tube of crochet but I quite like what she ended up with. She had a lot of fun inventing her butterfly and photographing it in the garden anyway, so who cares!

Here are some other patterns to try:-

Little Birdie Secrets

The obligatory Pinterest selection

King Soleil

Craft Passion

And a book I like too is 75 Birds and Butterflies to Knit & Crochet

Maddy used Rowan Hand Knit Cotton (nice and easy to hold and crochet) and a 4mm hook.

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Rainbow Baby Blanket

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This one is not really a craft I would normally put on this website but it deserves more attention than it gets on my ordinary blog. I’m not going to attempt to describe how I knitted my more complicated rainbow blanket, as I wasn’t that pleased with it anyway but the simple stripey one was a pleasure to do and definitely counts as a simple craft 😉 You can read more about it here, if you would like to where it was first posted.

It’s double seed stitch and in various shades of Lang Superwash Merino 120 (which is nearly impossible to find online). The rows are 120 stitches long and the white stripes are 6 rows and the coloured stripes are 8 rows, except for the two end reds which are 6 rows (knew I would run out of wool!) The edges are finished in double crochet. As knitting a blanket goes, it’s a lovely frothy light stitch which has proved to be really warm and snuggly and soft enough to bend and snuggle comfortably round a baby, but light enough in the summer too. Perfect really. It was easy to knit it while pregnant, which was good as I was short on brain power and the ends wove into it fairly easily too afterwards. It’s stood up to washing well, thankfully. I highly recommend Lang yarn but if you know of another bright and soft wool, use that as Lang is tricky to find.

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Crochet Tree Picture.

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Learning to knit and crochet has been one of my main achievements over the last couple of years. I’m not especially proficient but I do really enjoy making things with yarn and I’m gradually getting more able. I’m also slowly bringing my daughters over to the yarn side 😉 Last week, having taken delivery of some felting supplies and a drop spindle, we had a go at spinning out own yarn. The initial efforts were quite lumpy and bumpy, but they did lend themselves to a bit of sculpture. I remembered that a friend taught my daughter to crochet using this coral reef as inspiration and encouraged her not to worry about any errors. Amelie had a go at spinning some appropriate colours and then used a fat hook to crochet it up into a rough, wiggly chain. Once she had done that, it was easy to arrange it into a tree shape.

One thing we sometimes do with crafts is take a photo of them on a nice paper pattern background and edit it using a photo app on my phone. Then we print it out and save them to decorate home made cards at another time. It’s a great way to make something personal, but easy to post (and easy to store)!

Required: wool, crochet hook, patterned paper.

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