Duct Tape Purse

This past week was the spring school holiday for our kids and I like to come up with different “theme” days for them.  Thursday was craft day and I was looking for inspiration for crafts and I found a few blogs talking about duct tape purses.  I have to admit I did not realise how popular this had become and the wide variety of duct tape that was on offer.  It’s a bit mind boggling!

I took my inspiration for my daughter’s purse from All Things Thrifty.  So off we went to the store to pick out what duct tape the kids wanted to use.

My daughter had an old shirt that didn’t fit anymore so it was perfect for this project.  I recommend using a tray as well for this.  And a good pair of scissors.  Sounds like a no-brainer but I grabbed our worst scissors and as we were doing this at a park with a picnic we ended up struggling a bit.  We’ll know better next time!

Cut out a piece of fabric that is the size you would like for the purse.  This will be folded in half to cover both sides of the purse.  Tape it down on the backside of the tray.

Take the chosen duct tape and cut to length you need and tape it down in the pattern you want on the fabric.  My daughter wanted horizontal stripes for her purse.

Trim the tape it is all even on the edges.  Remove from the tray and fold in half.  If you used good scissors the fabric would have been cut smoothly and you won’t have to worry about the tape sticking together.  I didn’t do that so there were some tricky moments!

Tape up the sides.  Here is the trickiest part of the whole thing.  The bottom corners need to be tucked in to square off the bottom and sides.  The outside and inside need to look like this:

Next tape up the bottom and inside seams to strengthen and finish off the edges.  Also, tape along the top to finish that edge.

My daughter chose to have fabric handles so we took the sleeves of the old shirt and cut them into strips.  Then we braided them and attached them with tape to the inside of the bag.

And before you know it you have a really cute bag!

For my son we did a little satchel that followed this from Craft-Create-Connect.  We used a sandwich ziploc bag for him as he just needed a small bag for Lego.  He was so excited they had Angry Birds! 

Despicable Me Minion Hat

As I found I didn’t have time to knit 3 dolls like Young Elsie I wanted to find something creative for my kids.  I decided to try my hand at hats.  My son loves the movie Despicable Me so I went onto Ravelry.com and found a pattern for the minions.  It looked relatively easy which was good as I’d never knitted a hat before.  As I’ve forgotten how to crochet and have never done it in the round before here is how I got round that bit.

After I knit the hat I had to come up with a cunning plan.  (Yes, I watched Blackadder last night but my plan actually worked)  I bought bits of felt for the goggle eyes.  I didn’t have any patterns to cut out so I used household items to get the size right and cut it out of paper.

So once the felt is cut out you should have pieces to do this:

Using matching thread you want to sew the black to the white, white to the grey.

For the band, I tried crocheting and I am just so out of practice I decided to garter stitch until I got the length right.  I used 5mm needles and cast on 5 stitches.

I did however manage to single crochet the mouth!  Small victories.    Sew it all onto the hat to complete.

My son got a kick out of this Christmas morning. 

 

Young Elsie – the finished product

Happy New Years everyone!  I hope that 2013 is a great year.

I posted about knitting Young Elsie at the end of August.  My plan was to make 3 dolls for Christmas.  It was down to the wire on one doll!  I finished a couple of days before Christmas.  Not that it was difficult but it was time consuming given all the details.

I loved all the components that went into this doll and I got to try out a lot of techniques to make the various toys and accessories.  I needed a bit of stuffing, paper, straws, and cardboard to bring it all together.

This was for my niece and the poor thing was wary of it as she was very tired and the doll is 16″!  In time I hope she warms up to it though my sister was thrilled.  My kids are each picking a doll out for themselves so I’ll be working on that this year. 

Jean Greenhowe’s Young Elsie

When Rich and I were in England earlier this year I was introduced to Jean Greenhowe’s patterns for knitted doll figures.  They are really adorable so when I got back I looked for them here.  I was able to order a few books online and they came this week.

I am making this one for my 3 year old niece:

Turns out this is a lot easier to knit than Aran jumpers!  Given that it’s mostly st-st go figure.    My kids love them too so hopefully I can get this one done quickly then make one each for my kids.  There is a pirate I can do for my son and a cooking one I can do for my daughter.

I’ll post a picture of the finished project when completed.

Aran knits

Full disclosure, I may be one of the slowest knitters out there.  Which would have caused my Grandma to shake her head in wonder as her fingers could fly.  My dad has a long torso and he would come home and ask for a cricket jumper to be knitted.  It would invariably be needed within the week and she would get it done.  The first jumper I knitted was for my dad, it took me a few months and I would spend a few hours most days getting it done.  Needless to say I’m in awe of what she could accomplish.

Soon after finishing that mum mentioned she would love a cardigan.  So I went out and picked out a lovely purple yarn and found the pattern I thought she would like.  After much effort I had about 6 inches done and we were traveling together. She pulled out her knitting and I noticed she was knitting with purple yarn as well, and wouldn’t you know it?  She was knitting herself a cardigan in purple!  Just as well as she got to wear hers for a few years before I completed this:

And I’m working on a new jumper for my husband in the same pattern as he really liked it:

It’s taking awhile.  Good thing he isn’t growing! 

 

Fun Garden Markers

Anyone living in New England knows that one of the most successful harvests are rocks.  So what to do with them all?  Well, I found an idea on Pinterest that would be fun to do with the kids.  So I sent them out to the garden to harvest some good rocks for this little project:

We spent an hour or so painting our markers for our veg garden.  After they dried I sprayed a clear coat of acrylic paint onto the rocks.

Now for the fun part….

We then painted designs with glow in the dark paint!  The kids got such a kick out of this.  It is very easy to do so we’ll definitely do more of this as we have time since we plant so many different kinds of veg.