Once upon a time, waaaay back in January 2023, Past Julie thought, "Ooh, I have the perfect idea for a cute Christmas gift for my niece! I'll hand-sew her a moveable alphabet out of the rest of my stash of wool felt. I'll just sew, like, one letter a week and she'll have SO many letters by Christmas!"
June 2023 rolled around, and Past Julie thought, "Hmm, no big deal. I'll just start stitching a couple of letters a week."
During the October meeting of my mending group, I happily cut out letters and burbled to my fellow menders that "I just need to sew one a day and they'll be done in plenty of time before Christmas!"
During the November meeting, I said, a little more grimly, "Just two a day and I can squeak them into the mail just in time for Christmas."
Those last couple of days in December, it was more like six a day while binge-watching Chicago Med DVDs, but look at the glorious result!
I am SO pleased with them!
Here's a rooster for size comparison, because the entire flock could not get it out of their heads that these colorful nuggets were perhaps made of delicious chicken food:
My favorite part of this project is that even though yes, it took a lot of me-hours to accomplish, the materials are ENTIRELY stash!
The felt is a really nice merino wool felt that I bought long ago for projects with my own kids (it's this exact set, but I bought 8"x10" cuts instead of the 4"x6" cuts shown here). I blanket stitched the letters with basic-grade Amazon embroidery floss and I stuffed each letter with snips of that same felt, and won my own personal game of wool felt chicken because after the very last letter was stuffed, I had less than a handful of little wool felt snippies left.
I even had all the colors left! I managed a complete rainbow to start the set--
--and also had enough grey, brown, black, and white to make a nice variety and multiples of every letter (except for X and Q, ahem):
My partner handled creating all the Dolch sight words in the same font and size, and I backed each one in pretty paper and laminated it so my niece can use them as templates to make words with the wool felt letters:
Wool felt has such a lovely feel, though, and the colors are so pretty, that I'm hoping that the letters alone are a fun sensory experience. Sensory experiences build intrinsic knowledge and increase one's love for a topic.
It's clear that the chickens, at least, appreciate the sensory appeal!
Even though this project took a loooong time, it was not hard at all, and I actually would recommend it as a beginner-level hand-sewing project for absolutely anyone. Over Thanksgiving break my college kid sewed a perfectly acceptable "I" after about five seconds of instruction, and it's now mixed in there somewhere with the rest of the letters, completely indistinguishable from the lot (well, *I* can distinguish it, but definitely nobody else could)...
Best. Christmas. Yet. Now, to figure out something even more unwieldy to make for next year!
P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
Nutcracker is finished, and Christmas is on the horizon!
Here's what I'm currently working on, trying to finish, or at least determinedly not abandoning:
SUCCESSES
Look at that Mouse King army, all sewn and stuffed, labeled with ribbons that read "Team Mouse 2023," and ready to be wrapped and handed off to a corps of little mouselings!
I sewed these mini Mouse King stuffies from the Nutcracker stuffies fabric that my teenager designed a couple of years ago. I also sewed a complete set of the mini stuffies for the teenager so she could hang them on our Christmas tree... but it turns out that the performance casting document that the ballet department sent out to the parents omitted one kid's name from the Mouse corps, and therefore I was short exactly one Mouse King!
Obviously, the solution was to give that kid my own kid's ornament, lol.
So technically this remains a WIP, as my own teenager's set is short a Mouse King until I upload a fabric panel to Spoonflower that's all Mouse Kings, have it printed and sent to me, and then re-sew that stuffie for her. That's an AFTER Christmas project for Future Julie to enjoy...
Also in the realm of Still-But-Not-Really-A-WIP is the stocking that I sewed for my Girl Scout troop's Elf Project kid. I managed to sew it start to finish during my mending group's monthly Mending Day at our local public library--
--then the next day the troop met to wrap all the presents they'd bought for our sponsored kid and stuff this stocking. I just have to run out today and buy a couple last things, have my teenager wrap them, and then I can pack up everything and drop it off for the kid's caregiver to pick up before Christmas.
Also at that meeting, we made a pretty epic version of these gnomes, which required me to score some faux fur remnants from Joann's, dig through my fabric stash for the body and hats and noses, buy five pounds of rice, make a sample project, then walk five Girl Scouts through their own versions. We had to do some on-the-spot trouble-shooting when their bodies came out weird and none of us could figure out why, but eventually five ADORABLE gnomes are now all sitting fat and happy in five Girl Scout homes.
FAILURES
Unsurprisingly, I suppose, after all the extra holiday projects I put on my own plate, most of my November WIPs remain WIPs. I haven't even touched the skull quilt block or the weaving loom or the England travel journal since then.
That kind of project is what the cozy, relaxed week between Christmas and New Year's Eve is for!
CURRENT WIPS
I called my teenager in to take a process photo of my hands kneading this cinnamon dough for an upcoming tutorial, and while she was at it she also took a photo of me fighting for my life to keep my fuzzy monster foot slippers (I bought these in 2019 and still wear them allll winter every winter!) out of the frame.
These grapefruit slices took a LOT longer to dehydrate than I thought they would. I think I cut them too thick?
My goal is to write tutorials for both of these projects for my next couple of freelance writing pieces, in the process making a nice winter dried grapefruit slice and cinnamon cut-out garland for my kitchen.
Y'all, I only have SIX MORE LETTERS to sew to complete my niece's hand-sewn wool felt moveable alphabet! They are turning out as cute as they can possibly be! I still need to sew a carrying bag, print and laminate some sight word cards to go with the set, write my niece a holiday letter, and then pack and mail it all off to her. Do you think a Saturday mailing is too late to get it to California by Christmas?
Other remaining tasks: finishing up one last handmade-ish Christmas present, keeping an eye out for the last of the family presents to trickle in and then wrapping them, helping/prodding the teenager to finish up college applications and her Gold Award proposal, and picking my college student up from Ohio after she finishes acing all of her final exams.
After that, it's nothing but cookie baking, movie watching, gingerbread house decorating, and board game playing for the rest of the year. I can't wait!
P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
This easy macrame plant hanger makes a comfy home for all your favorite plants!
Like every city planner faced with overcrowding, I am dodging population control measures with my houseplants by instead going vertical. Every window is fair game, as is every corner with ambient light. Even the central room with no exterior windows now has a couple of ferns hanging under the skylight.
Plant hangers are great for getting your houseplants off your crowded shelves and into those sunny windows. They also put all of those tempting spider plants and inch plants and other delightfully dangly leaves out of the reach of cats, dogs, and toddlers.
Especially if you’ve got an older house, though, or any place with unconventional windows or other spaces, you’ve probably found that store-bought plant hangers just don’t fit your space exactly the way you’d like. Or maybe they’re just not the right color. Or maybe, like me, you simply don’t want to have to buy something when you’ve already got everything that you need to make it.
That’s why I found myself making my latest stash of plant hangers: the houseplants had a bumper year, and after dividing them and giving tons away I still had more than I have room for on my shelves. But my weird old house with its half-vaulted ceilings and oddly-sized windows doesn’t lend itself to the comfortable placement of most lengths of plant hangers. AND about five years ago both of my kids went through an epic paracord crafting phase, one that left me with a large stash of unused paracord after they both eventually moved on to using up all of my embroidery floss on super elaborate friendship bracelets.
I have made SO many macrame plant hangers this summer, using my easy technique that lets me make them exactly the length that I want. Here’s how you can make yourself an easy macrame plant hanger, too!
Supplies
To make this easy macrame plant hanger, you will need:
split o ring. This is the ring that holds your cute keychain. You want it to be VERY sturdy, but most keychain rings are.
macrame cording. Cotton cording is availability in multiple widths and colors, and is natural, eco-friendly, and quite sturdy and long-lived when used indoors. Any cording that doesn’t stretch will work well for this project, however. This paracord that I’m using, although it’s all polyester and therefore an ecological nightmare, actually makes amazing plant hangers! Whatever you choose, you’ll need 80 feet, or eight 10-foot lengths, for the hanger, and 2 feet, or two 1-foot lengths, for the gathering knots.
tape. A lightly sticky tape, like masking tape or washi tape, will help you keep cords together as you knot them.
Step 1: Use a gathering knot to tie the cording to the split ring.
Cut eight pieces of cording, each approximately 10 feet long, and one piece of cording approximately one foot long.
Thread the eight pieces of cording through the split o-ring and center them.
Now, it’s gathering knot time!
With one end of the cord, make a long “u” over the spot where you’d like the gathering knot to be. I like mine just below the o ring.
Keep that “u” in place as you take the other end of the cord in hand and begin to tightly wrap the bundle with it. Each wrap should be just below the one above.
When you near the end of your cord, leave a long tail and tuck the end through the bottom of the “u.”
Put your hand back on the top tail above the gathering knot, and pull on it to tug the “u” bend, and the end of the cord that’s tucked into it, up inside the gathering knot. It’s a bit of a fiddly process to figure out exactly the right amount of strength to use, so don’t feel sad if you have to start this knot over a couple of times.
The finished gathering knot will look like the one above, with the “u” bend pulled inside to the middle. Notice that I left such a long bottom tail that you can still see it, but the knot itself is well-secured.
Trim both tails for a cleaner look.
Step 2: Tie four groups of five square knots below the gathering knot.
Separate out four adjacent cords. The cord on the right will be what the vertical sides of the knots will look like, and the cord on the left will be the center color.
Ignore the fact that I’m not working up by the gathering knot here. It was too hard to photograph single-handed!
Pass the cord on the left OVER the two center cords and UNDER the right cord.
Pass the cord on the right UNDER the center two cords and OVER the left cord. You can also think of this as putting it through that left loop made by the left cord as it prepared to pass over the center cords.
Pull the knot tight.
You can see that the vertical piece is created on the opposite side from where you started–if you lose count, you can use that to tell you what side you’re on. You can also see that the left and right cords switched places.
To finish the square knot, continue from the right. Pass the right cord OVER the two center cords and UNDER the cord on the left.
Pass the left cord UNDER the two center cords and OVER the right cord, or through the loop that the right cord made when preparing to pass under the center cords.
Pull the knot tight. It should tuck up right under the knot above it.
Repeat four more times to make a total of five square knots with that group of cords. Hint: you’ll have five vertical pieces on each side.
Repeat three more times to make a total of four sets of knots around the gathering knot. This will use up all your dangling cording.
Step 3: Make a second set of square knots six inches below the first set.
Measure down approximately six inches from the bottom of the first set of square knots.
From two adjacent sets of square knots, take the two right cords from the left set and the two left cords from the right set. These are the cords you’ll use for your next set of square knots. I like to tape them flat and in the correct order, because at this point it’s very easy to start getting mixed up.
Tie another set of five square knots (one knot starting from the left, then another knot starting from the right equals one set) with these cords.
Repeat with the remaining three sets of cording, until you have four new sets of square knots, each six inches below the first set and made up of cords from two adjacent sets above.
Step 4: Repeat the process 1-2 more times.
You have enough cording to tie four total sets of square knots, each set approximately six inches below the set above. That being said, four sets results in a plant hanger that is quite long, and I prefer to stop at three sets for most of my plant hangers.
Step 5: Tie a gathering knot at the bottom of the plant hanger.
Measure six inches from the bottom of your final set of gathering knots, and tape the cords together at that spot.
Using the second piece of foot-long cording, tie a gathering knot at this tape mark.
Trim the rest of the cords below the gathering knot.
On the left is a shorter plant hanger (three sets of five square knots long) mounted just above the window. On the right is a longer plant hanger (four sets of five square knots long) mounted to the ceiling.
These plant hangers are super versatile, and since you only have to learn two knots, they’re super beginner-friendly, too! Once you’ve mastered this simple version, feel free to fancy it up with more complicated knots.
P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
All this year I've been trying to be more organized with my various craft projects--including, you know, *actually* completing the projects that I start.
I've been doing a fairly good job with it, too... until November. Things seem to have run off the rails a bit this month.
Here's what I'm currently working on, trying to finish, or at least determinedly not abandoning:
Skull Quilt Block
I actually sewed this skull quilt block back in October, a couple of weeks before Halloween. I was wanting a quick little homemade holiday thing to give to my teenager and put in my college student's care package, and I thought that this skull quilt block would be lovely as the front panel of a zippered pouch big enough to hold their ipads. And while I was at it, I could make one for my nook, as well!
Well, this little sucker was a LOT more challenging and fiddly to sew than I'd anticipated, and it took me two days of seam ripping and swearing to get this one wonky, crooked block.
I DO know what I did wrong, though--when a pattern tells you that the seam allowance is 1/4", they mean it!
Even though it's well past Halloween now, I'm determined not to abandon my project. After all, I have the kind of kids who'd welcome a patchwork skull ipad cozy in their Christmas stockings just as much as they would in their Halloween candy buckets!
Weaving Loom
This was also technically meant to be an October project. In early October, I taught a workshop to Girl Scout leaders on the topic of upcycled cardboard crafts. I'd wanted to include this simple corrugated cardboard weaving loom, but ran out of time to demo it and write/photograph a tutorial.
I DO actually have plenty of process photos now, so at this point I could write the tutorial up, but now I've gotten wrapped up (ahem) in various weaving patterns, and I checked out a ton of pattern books from the library, and I want to make a few more long braids to use as hangers for all the Christmas ornaments I hope to make.
England Travel Journal
For Mother's Day, Matt and the kids gave me a beautiful blank book and some themed stickers and accessories so that I could keep a travel journal during our upcoming trip to England... which I did!
After I got home, though, I realized that I had plenty of room to intersperse many of my trip photos, as well as other embellishments I'm cutting out from old travel guides and National Geographics. It's... gotten a little out of hand, to be honest. I'm only about halfway done with it, and it's already so fat that Matt's talking about finding a larger set of book rings and rebinding it for me.
Hand-Sewn Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet
This might be my most unwieldy project to date. I've had a partial package of very nice wool felt (I got it from this shop 11 years ago, and the shop is still in business!) kicking around my stash ever since I got on that Waldorf materials kick back when the kids were small, and I settled on the plan of using it to make a hand-stitched moveable alphabet for my three-year-old niece's Christmas present.
While fabricating this plan, I conveniently forgot about my extreme myopia and my newly-middle-aged eyesight that means that there are a few specific distances at which I literally cannot focus my eyes... one of them being the distance to a piece of embroidery held in my hands.
Nevertheless, I am nearsightedly soldiering on! I finished cutting out all the felt letters just a few nights ago, while Matt plied us with cocktails and read me crossword puzzle clues, and my benchmark goal is completing two letters per day--a couple of days ago, I completed three! Alas that currently, most of these letters are being sewn while the teenager and I listen to 12 Years a Slave, which is the most harrowing, saddest, emotional book I've read in I don't know how long. I can't think of a better book for making the human cost of slavery tangible, and it's the best possible book to read with a teenager, but I do feel a little weird sewing away on a three-year-old's toy while listening to Eliza's screams as she's torn away from her small daughter in the New Orleans slave market.
Hopefully, all these WIPs will be finished by mid-December, and I will try very hard to discipline myself not to start anything new until they are!
I mean, though, I DO need to make some Team Mouse gifts for my own mouseling's fellow Nutcracker warriors, and I've got a couple more handmade Christmas gifts in mind, and we were thinking of really leaning into the Christmas cookie game this year, and I have some England photos that I want to print but first I need to thrift and makeover some frames for them...
Maybe I'll just start the Team Mouse gifts and the Christmas cookies...
P.S. Want to follow along with my unfinished craft projects, books I'm reading, cute photos of the cats, high school chemistry labs, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
It's the middle of the week, and here are the projects that I'm in the middle of!
Felt Moveable Alphabet
I saw this TikTok the other day--
--and immediately decided that a felt moveable alphabet would be the perfect next big gift for my toddler niece, AND it would also work to accomplish one of my favorite long-term goals, which is to use up my ridiculously large felt stash!
Here's where I am on that project today:
Cutting and sewing by hand is VERY slow going for me, so it's good that I'm not in a hurry to finish this project. The letters are looking super cute, though, exactly the way I'd hoped, and I love how tactile and sensorial they're going to be with the color and the heft and the stitching and the texture. I'm also considering making some command cards with short words on them in the same font, sized so that my niece can set these felt letters directly on them to spell the words.
Front Yard Fence
I've been able to read the writing on the wall for years now, with my college-bound kid and the dog she takes on two walks a day.
Gee, I wonder who's going to pick up that slack when she goes off to college?
I've been bitching my head off for years about our need for a fenced-in yard, and I'm not even going to go into how I would have freaking LOVED to have had it when the kids were young enough that I didn't like them playing out there, just one roll down the hill from a road with a high speed limit.
But oh, well. I will also love it when I can substitute one walk a day for letting Luna out to frolic in what will soon be our fenced front yard!
And crap. Here's me just now noticing, after the fence guys have been out there all morning so I know that part of the fence is mostly done by now, that the gate isn't lined up with the sidewalk?!?
Whatever. I'll just sit planters on that sidewalk, I guess.
Eco-Friendly Kid Craft Book Reviews
I wrote 50% of this article last week, and another 40% of it on Monday, and now I'm just waiting for the public library to give me the last book I need. Hopefully I'm able to pick it up in the next couple of days, or I'll have to come up with a completely different topic and write an entirely new article for Crafting a Green World this week!
Novel and Non-Fiction
Here are the books that I'm currently in the middle of:
Please note that neither of these are the many books in my house that are overdue--those I'm probably going to have to just return and check out again, ahem.
Deliberately Divided is a study of what little can be known so far about the unethical human experimentation done in New York City by deliberating separating twins and triplets surrendered for adoption, never telling them or their families what had been done, and regularly testing and observing the children for several years afterwards, to what purpose we don't know, because the experimenters never published their results and instead insisted that all records of their actions be sealed until 2065. To me, the idea of separating newborn siblings for no other reason than to study them feels like an unconscionable human rights violation, and I think I'm progressing so slowly through this book partly because it makes me feel so sad.
The Book of Accidents seems, so far, to be a horror novel about a haunted house and maybe a ghostly serial killer? I'm not sold on it yet, but I do usually love horror, so I'll give it a few more chapters before I decide to DNR it.
Teenager's Bedroom
The house I grew up in had paneling on all the walls, and I still really don't know a ton about painting rooms. But I DO know that I hate priming these bookshelves the most!
I'm pretending like someone is going to help me prime the whole top half of the shelves that are too tall for me, and the top half of the walls, too, but in reality I'm going to have to go get the ladder from the garage, unfortunately.
But check out how much whiter the primer is than those nasty walls that I did kind of already know were nasty, but did think were white?!?
And nope, I don't have drop cloths down, because we've booked a company to come and tear up that nasty carpet, fix the floors so that they're actually level, and then install wood flooring. I'm trying to figure out if I should definitely paint the baseboards and door frames now, or see if I can paint them when the workers take them off to do the floors, or do it after they've finished and just hope I'm more careful in here than I was when I painted the walls in the family room, ahem.
Here's to my fond hope that by this time next week, all of these WIPs will be finished and I'll be in the middle of all-new WIPs!
Other than that alphabet, of course. That alphabet is going to take me months to finish...
Twice in the past few months, I've wanted to make some kind of custom fan apparel, but I didn't want to devote a ton of time, energy, or money to it. The first was for a Mother Mother concert, and the second was a present for all of the children dancing the (kind of shitty, because you have to wear a fat suit and giant mascot head that's apparently hot, smelly, and hard to see out of) role of Mouse in our local university's production of The Nutcracker.
You can do this project a lot more nicely than I did it, with super clean lines and really even tones, but here's how you can ALSO do it quick and dirty-like, whether it's for a concert tomorrow or you've got to make six in a row and you're already bored.
To bleach paint T-shirts, you will need:
black 100% cotton T-shirt. The best shirt is obviously a thrifted shirt, and for my Mother Mother shirt I did find the perfect black T-shirt at Goodwill. Speaking of... y'all have the Goodwill prices gotten absolutely RIDICULOUS in your area, or is my town the only one in which the local Goodwills have decided that not only do they no longer need to offer any sales or discounts on the crap they're literally given for free, but they've also just absolutely jacked up their prices to Jesus? I'd long more-or-less abandoned the little indie thrift shops around me for more than just the occasional browse-through, because their selection is the pits compared to Goodwill, but 2023 is the year that I rededicate myself to their cause. Anyway, I picked up the six Medium Team Mouse shirts that I needed via a Black Friday Doorbuster from one of the big-box craft stores. I feel like those shirts have a reputation for being cheap in quality as well as price, but 100% cotton shirts are nothing to sneeze about these days, when pretty much every shirt and its dog is infused with polyester!
backing material. This will need to be thick enough to keep the bleach from bleeding through to the back of the T-shirt. I used a brown paper grocery bag.
bleach. Get the cheapest, and don't get it on you.
cotton swabs.
glass dish.
paper stencil.
glue stick (optional).
Step 1: Prepare the stencil.
Both of the stencils I wanted to make were word art, so I just did them in Google Docs. Because I am basic.
But at least I printed them as outlines to save ink!
Cut out the stencils and save the widows, since you'll need to place them back on the shirt before you paint.
My Team Mouse stencil took up two pages, so I taped them together with the spacing that I wanted.
Step 2: Paint!
Place your backing material inside the shirt, making absolutely sure it will cover where you'll be bleach painting.
You can either just set your stencil on the shirt, if it's fairly short and simple--
--or you can tape it down with more masking tape.
I even took the glue stick to the back of those fiddly M and U sticky-outy bits to make sure they stayed put, and I also glued down the widows. I was able to reuse this same stencil for all six Team Mouse shirts, gluing the bits and the widows each time and pulling them up afterwards.
Then, put on a podcast and start painting within the lines!
I found it easiest to first draw the outline of each letter, then color in the center. It made them look wonky as I went, since the bleach activates right away--
--but I think it evens out pretty well by the end:
I'm disappointed in how much the edges bled, but none of the recipients of these shirts seemed to notice, and you also can't really tell when you're standing a normal distance from the human wearing it.
Below is the first shirt I did, though, and for that one I just painted away and it also looks fine:
Step 3: Rinse and Wash.
After I finished painting, I gave the bleach a few more minutes to even out the last couple of letters, then I rinsed each shirt very, very well under cool water and then tossed it into the wash. I washed each individually so nothing else would accidentally get bleach stained, but fortunately my washing machine has an eco-friendly quick wash, so I'm not the cause of the nation's water shortage.
I haven't tried it, but this TikTok recommends a hydrogen peroxide rinse to deactivate the bleach:
Might be worth a try!
Step 4: Show off your beautiful work.
Here's what happens when you ask your husband to photograph you in your beautiful shirt in front of the theater where Mother Mother is about to play:
Seriously, it's a cell phone camera. You have to really try if you want to get your thumb in the way of a cell phone camera.
And here's one particular member of Team Mouse, coincidentally the one who walked by as I was finishing up and asked if she could use the rest of the dish of bleach to customize her own shirt. Since "her own" shirt is inevitably the shirt that I messed up on (can't give a flawed shirt to someone else's child, gasp!), I happily let her also make her shirt the most elaborately cutest:
It's very likely that I'll do this project a few more times this year, because it's SUCH a quick, easy, and cheap way to customize a T-shirt. I would like to get smoother edges, though, so next time I'm going to play around with thickening the bleach first so it can't run away from me.
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