The Usual Suspects

Another gift, this time for me, from a friend at work. Cross stitch and computer games together, it's a combination of two of my pastimes.

Bookends

Arjan's sister has asked for some bookends. Given that she and I share a love of all things Tigger, we've chosen a free colouring image featuring Tigger and Pooh as a basis for the design.

The outlines of the design has been traced onto two bits of MDF, one for each character.

And Pooh has been cut out, and partially filed.

More updates on this one can be expected soon, as we'll probably be working on this one tomorrow.

Birthday Board

Such a dangerous site, Pinterest. It got me again, when I fell in love with the idea of having one of these in the house. Why have to transfer birthdays into each year's new calendar, when instead you can make something decorative for the house that does the same job?

First job for me was to paint up some wooden disks which we bought from Hobbycraft, with names and birthdays of friends and family.

Next, I worked out the font style and size for the "Birthdays" to go on the board itself, printed it out and used tracing paper to transfer it across to a piece of MDF Arjan had cut out.

And then he went to work on it, as we'd decided we wanted the top of the word to be cut out as well as painted. Lots of jigsawing, filing and sanding later, and the letters have begun to take shape.

Next steps are to prime, decide what colour to paint it, paint it, varnish the whole lot, and put it together with some jewellery fittings that we've also bought from Hobbycraft.

Catch up: Woodwork desk

The new house has (much) more space than in the one bedroom flat we were living in this time last year, including a garage which Arjan has claimed as somewhere to do woodwork.

To make it really useful though, required a place for him to work and store his tools. So he's built his dream desk.

Catch up: Bedside drawers

This was just a quick one, last weekend, to make an old set of bedside drawers fit in better with our office - which is decorated in light blue and white.

We started with drawers which had previously been stained dark to match a bed frame. The bed now has new and shiny bedside tables, so this small set of drawers were going spare. Storage always being useful in an office, they're being used there now.

First job was Arjan's - surface preparation by sanding all over.

After that I painted on a base coat, and then finished off with white gloss spray paint. Finally, Arjan trimmed some knobs we'd bought earlier in the weekend and screwed them into place.

Catch up: Presents for a pregnant friend

A couple of weekend's ago I was invited to a friend's birthday shower. In preparation I had decided to make some booties I had seen on Pinterest here. Of course, the only knitting I'd done was decades ago with my Gran and back then I was incapable of casting on so she did it for me. A knitting beginners book, and a little youtube browsing, and I began my quest to make the cutest little shoes ever.

My first few attempts were pretty dire, but my fourth and fifth goes worked out pretty well.

But by then I might have been gripped a little by the knitting cute things bug, and again Pinterest came to the rescue. The next knitting project was a bunny from a square.

Catch up: Bed Runner

My main solo project for the last three months has been a patchwork runner to go across the end of our bed.

It's partly to add some decoration to our new bedroom, but the main aim is to try and protect my bright white duvet covers from the incessant moulting of our two black cats. Since they seem to think that anything left on the bed is intended for them to sleep on, my hope is that they will prefer to sleep on the darker runner, rather than the lighter duvet cover.

I started by sourcing green fabric (to go with the pale green walls in our bedroom), from a local craft shop and a jelly roll from Ebay. Next I cut the fabric into thin strips, 1.25" by 10".

The next job was to decide on the layout; the design is a random placement of a variety of patterned fabrics, but with an overall fade from lighter fabrics at the sides, with darker ones at the centre.

Once the placement was decided, the sewing began. Whilst adding each strip, I cut varying amounts off each strip, to add a little more randomness into the design.

Gradually the patchwork top of the runner became wider and wider, and slightly more unwieldy to work with, until finally, all 23 rows were sewn together.

After hours and hours of iron seams open, the patchwork top, batting and backing fabric were basted together using safety pins. And then the quilting began, breaking almost every rule I know: because of the pattern I've started at the edge rather than the middle, and because I'm: a) not very good at it, and b) I'm sewing curves, I'm quilting a stitch at a time instead of loading many stitches onto the needle.

I'm also doing it entirely as I go, without drawing out the pattern at all. It'll either be utterly awesome, or a complete mess which has to be completely unpicked. Only time (probably a lot, because when the quilting starts I slow down massively), and future updates will tell.