This is really barely a craft. But after I saw this beautiful doily table runner, it reminded me of two linen tea towels I had sitting in our linen closet. First of all, who uses a white linen tea towel with a pretty and simple embroidered bouquet of flowers on it? No one in our house, that’s for sure. And that’s why they were sitting all folded up in box in the linen closet. But, that is really not good feng shui, as it’s better to use things you love rather than keep them for special occasions, or indefinitely in a box in the closet, where you forgot about them for oh, 4 years or so.

I sewed the matching tea towels together and made this:

You can’t see it in this photo, but on the other end of the runner is the same embroidered pattern.

I put the blue pistachio pot on top. Easy, simple and quick. And it brightens up the table.

Next up, I want to make a great big pillow for the living room. I was thinking about turning our old futon mattress into some kind of beanbag pillow just like this t-shirt pillow.

and all I got was this mediocre table runner.

Clearly, I am not a quilting designer. I found a very simple cat face pattern on the internets – which turned out to be too simple, I think. The pattern is half of a traditional quilting star pattern. I pieced that together so I could make myself a terrific quilt sandwich. I just love doing the free-style stitching of the quilt sandwiches. What I wanted to do was stitch the faces of the kitties in the fabric. Here’s how that turned out close up:

Meh. The proportions are out of whack – the ears are gigantic and don’t look like kitty ears at all. They look more like fox ears.

So that part’s a bummer, but what I do like is the stitching amongst the apples on the contrast fabric.

And I also like the light stitching on the border:

I think it’s clear – I should just skip the cutting and sewing and just make quilt sandwiches from now on. I’ll cover the house in quilt sandwiches – everything will have a quilted cover. I’ll start with the dining room chairs.

Due to the world’s slowest cold, I stayed home today and punched butterflies out of some flyers that came in the Burnaby Now – one of those newspapers that arrive on the doorstep every few days. Mike loves to read the flyers for some reason. I’m not sure what I’ll do with all those butterflies. I’ll figure that out later.

The tea party was a big success. It’s not often you get good company, great treats and a fun project all at once. Our project today? Fancy photo frames. We painted, modge podged, glittered and adhered decorative pieces on those plain old boring wooden picture frames you get from Ikea. There were babies and pets and toddlers, too. All and all, a good time. While I was there, I got some sewing advice for those little birds I was trying to make last week. Cynthia and Bea (the sewing geniuses) showed me how to do it. They also showed me how to read a pattern – as in, fabric 2 means, the second piece of fabric, not cut two pieces of this fabric. The reason why I couldn’t figure out the pattern was because I had cut out 3 pieces instead of 2 pieces. Yes. I was stymied on a pattern with 2 pieces. Good one.

A big thank you to Cynthia for the party and to Cynthia and Bea (from Texas) for the sewing hints. Here’s one – when you sew in a curve, it’s best to clip the fabric on the seam allowance side so it gives when you sew it.

But, as you can see, I followed their directions and got the bird together. It’s not quite perfect (there’s kind of a lump on the top of the head I don’t like) but other than that, I think I can whip together a bunch of them. Oscar and/or Donner seemed to have enjoyed the bird, too. Mysteriously, I found the bird on the opposite side of the room a couple of hours after I finished making him.

PSST…I think it was Donner.

After my crafty, busy day, we settled down to watch the Canucks (thankfully) beat the Kings, which means they will move on to round two of the Stanley Cup. Hallelujah. The third period was terrific and then Luongo‘s interview immediately after the game was pretty sweet – especially this quote:

“That’s how I play. I only play when it matters.”

Oh Luongo. I really like you when you win. I really do.

After seeing this funky, free-form quilt, I thought I’d try to make some squares myself. I just made one tonight -

I think it’s just enough free-form…I’ll make a few more and see how they look together. Rather than having the pressure of making an entire quilt, I think I’ll stick to more and more pillows. I really don’t like all that measuring – one wrong measurement, and the whole quilt could be wonky…and the next thing you know, you’re adding extra pieces and cutting things here and there and then it just looks, well, crazy.

I’ll keep working on the smaller projects and work my way up to bigger and bigger projects.

I decided to make this bird mobile. It’s supposed to be for a kid’s room, but, I like it. I’m not sure exactly how to get the balance right for this little project, but I’m getting way ahead of myself because I didn’t even get one bird completed. Not when the first game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs was on.

It looks like my productivity over the next few weeks could be, well, down.

Here’s what we watched in lieu of crafting…

Yup. That was a great save.

Back to crafting on Saturday before the Canucks game at 7:00.

Not these colours, but soon, there will be beautiful springtime colours. I love this Squiggly Squiggles pattern by Sarah London. I found her website a little while ago and I like all the happy, cheerful colours she uses. Her entire site is just filled jolly colours.

Right now my version of the Squiggly Squiggles looks like a fishing net…the squiggly parts with the coloured yarn gets work in after you build the grid part. I’ll keep you posted.

Tomorrow Donner needs to go to the vet. He’s got some kind of sniffling thing going on. They said all the cats at the shelter had “a cold” but his hasn’t cleared up yet and he’s been here for a month already. Luckily Oscar hasn’t caught it. However, getting Donner into the carrier is going to be a whole other story. He hasn’t been cooperative and gets really frightened. But we shall preserve tomorrow morning. We have it so easy with Oscar. He’s way more easy going about this stuff.

This is probably the easiest “craft” you could possibly make. It’s barely even a craft because it took only a few steps, including the cleaning.

After the house next door was demolished, there was some fall-out here and there on our side of the property. Besides a bunch of wood (which they’ve moved) I found this VW hubcap by the side of the house. I was going to take it to the recycling station (they take metals) but then realized that I could use that plus an old black, wrought-iron, Gothic candlestick holder to make a birdbath for the front yard.

I’m kind of out of my Gothic stage now. I save all my Goth up for Halloween these days. The month of Halloween, if I’m honest.

Meanwhile, in the front yard…

I hung up this big birdfeeder:

I’m not too sure it will see too much action while the house next door is being built. I’m pretty sure the birds that come to visit will be of the early morning variety. I don’t believe they’ll appreciate the hammering and construction noise during the day. However, the construction workers don’t exactly keep nine to five work hours, so maybe it will become the place for songbirds to visit on a regular basis. We shall see.

I’m planning another pumpkin patch for the front yard again. Only this year it will include gourds. And 3 giant pumpkins.

It was Mike’s suggestion to move the birdfeeder out front so the kitties have something to watch out the windows. The back is a gong show until the house is finished being built. I’m glad about that – no more falling down fence.

I thought a birdbath would be a nice edition to the Kitty Entertainment Centre, and didn’t think that paying $124 for a standard cement birdbath was really a good plan. Ever since I watched the video about the Pop Man in Los Angeles, I can’t get his comment out of my head, “Reusing is better than recycling. You don’t use as much energy reusing something as you do recycling it.” (or something like that).

Here’s how I did it:

1) I scrubbed the found hubcap clean with steel wool in the bathtub.

2) I clipped off the spike in the centre of the candle holder with some wire cutters.

3) I wiped off the top of the candlestick holder.

4) I sanded the edges of the candlestick holder and the most convex part of the hubcap in preparation of the epoxy. I decided to use epoxy because I couldn’t really drill any holes in the hubcap to connect the pieces together.

5) Followed the directions of the metal to metal epoxy. I used clear epoxy.

6) I spread epoxy on the candlestick holder and some on the hubcap for good measure.

7) Placed the hubcap on the candlestick holder and left it alone overnight in the garage.

That’s all it took. I decided to bury the stand in the dirt so it doesn’t tip over. I’ll add some rocks in the hubcap because little birds don’t like their water too deep. Fingers crossed I’ll get some chickadees-bathing-in-the-hubcap photos.

I had a day of sewing that started off with a little beanbag for Mike’s spacephone. We’ve been listening to his iphone as we drift off to sleep at night and thought it would be nice to have a little dock for it. Mike also uses it for his alarm clock. All I did was cut two six-inch squares, sew around 3 1/2 edges, filled it about 2/3 full with dried lentils and sewed it shut. Instead of laying it flat, I made a fold in the bottom so it kind of sits like a triangle.

Since I had the sewing machine out and after seeing Cynthia’s and the Ookie’s quilts, I thought I’d try a mini-quilt. But opted, instead, to make a quilted table runner. And instead of making a bunch of fancy blocks, I make 1 log cabin blog and two additional “blocks” that consisted of 3 strips sewn together. I didn’t think I was ready for lots of math and all that measuring. So I sewed my three blocks together, made a quilt sandwich and did a big whack of freestyle stitching. Turned out that’s my favourite part. I just doodled on the quilt with the sewing machine and I really like how it turned out. I think I should do more of that. Here’s the photo:

Tada! You may have noticed that I sewed the binding on backwards. I sewed the binding on by hand on the front…carefully. I learned from that one. And something else I learned? My favourite part of quilting? Stitching random designs on the fabric with the sewing machine. Maybe I should just skip the rest and just make quilt sandwiches to stitch my doodles on.

I was as surprised as Dion Phaneuf* this morning to find that I had actually nearly finished my rug. Finally! The Year of the Ox wasn’t kidding. Just one long year of putting one foot in front of the other and feeling like the field would never be tilled. I didn’t think I’d ever get anything completed. But today, I finished the rug! I spent just about the whole day yesterday ripping and rolling fabric – the most time consuming part of the project. Crocheting it was easy.

I thought I would have to block the whole heavy carpet by soaking it in the tub and then drying it off in between towels and putting something heavy on it so it would flatten out. But instead, I just ironed it. I turned the iron on to the highest setting, hit the steam button a lot and it flattened out into a perfectly flat circle. Yay! You can’t do that for every crochet project, unfortunately. I only ironed this instead of blocking it because the fabric was made of cotton (I’m sure there was some polyester in there, too) and is safe to iron out. I would not do that with wool (NO!) or mohair (NO!), but piles of torn fabric you’ve had in your closet for at least 4 years? It’s totally cool.

Would you like to see it in our front entrance? You can see it below…

*Hockey Talk – Dion Phaneuf was traded this morning to the Toronto Maple Leafs from Calgary. I didn’t see that coming.

I love our blue front door. It’s very cheery. I went for a navy trim instead of black. I had more navy fabric than black and the black fabric I had? It was kind of shiny and slippery. I think I’ll save the shiny black stuff for Halloween.

And here’s Oscar doing his exercises on the rug before I put it downstairs. It looks like he’s doing the bicycle.

I knew he’d like the rug. He started laying on it as I was crocheting it in my lap.