Bags for Everything

I like bags, purses and boxes and anything at all that can hold something. This is what I made for my husband for Christmas. They are for his laptop and graphic pad. I used African cotton and padded them with fleece and lined with unbleached cotton and used velcro for fastening the flap. I must admit that I almost did not give them to him, because I was so in love with them myself. Coveting the gift I had made for him! In the end I actually decided that I could easily produce similar ones for myself, if I really needed them. I haven't as it is, but I made this for my new mobile:

Looking at the material makes me smile, but next time I will plan my velcro sewing so that it won't show on the outside. The lining is made of hand dyed African cotton.
Something much less arty are these bags I made for my son, the same African cotton and old white sheet used for the project.:

They contain his lego, all sorted according the type (length, width and thickness) and labelled. Yes, we are nerdy in that way in our house, but when you own lego in the amounts that Elf Son does, this is the only way forward, if you don't want to lose your mind while searching for a certain bit.

February is so weird. It is such a long short month. Sometimes it just drags on and on, but this year it seems to dissappear before it started. I might not be around for a while, as it is school holidays and the Son and I are heading towards Scandinavia. We are back on the last day of this month. I will blog a little from our travels if I get access to a computer and time to use it. Hope your winter holidays are good!

Bob the Bunny

Meet Bob the Bunny. He looks far hairier than he is in person, I notice.

He is my first ever felt project, entirely made by needling. He is made of  British Blue Face sheep wool, nothing else. People are always really surprised when I tell them this.  Bob is rather firm to touch, so many people assume that he has been filled with something else. Wool is like that. You can choose to work it so it is loose and soft or very tight and hard.

I made Bob about a year ago, I think. I haven't ever taken a course in felting techniques, just studied it from books, so I was rather pleased that I could get the wool to felt at all. I found the needling rather an easy process albeit couple of fingers were punctured! I was working from raw wool, so the process took its time. If you have not tried felting at all, this means that I bought a sheep fleece, washed it, dried it, hand carder the fibres to soft fluff and then attacked it with a hand held needle to make it to felt. Since my first attempt I have done couple of cushion covers and a handbag which sadlly still is WIP (work in process).

I love wool and have a bunch of ideas to realise, but have not got around to clean and carder enough wool for this. Sometimes I think that I should buy some merino wool or at least carded wool, so the process speeds up a bit. Just the thought of having to clean the room after a session of carding can put me off. The solution to my dilemma must be that in the coming spring I need to give up a few sunny days of gardening for washing, drying and carding of wool outside. We will see...

Yarn Temptations

Oooh, aah. I have been to a BIG CITY over the weekend and got to caress yarns and haberdashery in John Lewis. I meant to be very diciplined and only buy some wool to begin a blanket, but then I eyed cotton yarn on sale and decided to have some colours for little projects like birdies and purses.
I could almost eat these...

I did restrict myself to the yarn and did not succumb to the temptation of East of India ribbons as lovely as they were. By the way, I was by no means the only one trying not to leave a wet patch of drool on Jonh Lewis' carpet. There were several ladies having the unmistakable lovelorn look in their eyes on Saturday morning.