One man's trash...

...Is this woman's treasure! today while I was taking the boy to nursery I passed a bag placed on a low wall outside a house in a way that stood out. Next to it was a glass 'Bonne Maman' jam jar, I've always thought those jars were cute, but I can't afford that jam, so I rarely get a jar to save(I have a total of one at home!) Anyway...I peeked into the bag, and got really excited because it was full of the Bonne Maman jars, I picked them all up and carried them with me to nursery to drop off the son then all the way back up the hill past where I got them from (too excited to be sensible clearly!) I couldn't have found these at a better time as I've just started planning Christmas presents, and there are so many gift ideas that revolve around jam jars that don't include any kind of condiment! When I got home i counted them....22!
I'll let you know what I get up to with these!

The cost of Christmas

Last year I spent £400 at christmas. That may not sound like a lot to some of you, but for me it was big overdraft, still paying it off in July kind of debt. So....this year I'm making gifts!

I've had to buy some craft materials to make my giftsm soi here is the cost so far:

Knitted Rabbits (I'm making these for children of my friends, about two or three per child)-

• I have way too much yarn anyway, and I have needles and stuffing and embroidery thread, so no cost
• I'm thinking of giving them in painted egg boxes with toy carrots...maybe that's too 'easter' though

 Bottle Cap Magnets (My favourite gift idea so far, involves going to the local pub and asking for bottle caps and getting them for free!) I have bought craft material to make these;

• A slight luxury maybe but I bought a 1 inch hole punch to cut out photos with - £11.94 off ebay inc. postage
• Contact Cement for sticking magnet on the back of bottle caps - £4.62 off ebay inc. postage
• 100 magnets for sticking on the back of bottle caps - £3.00 off ebay inc. postage
• 100 mixed alphabet beads and 40g mixed seed beads - £2.88 off ebay inc. postage

So to make 100 bottle cap gifts (say I give each person 5) They work out at 22p each and £1.12 for a set of five! That does only make 20 gifts though....but if I wanted to make twice as many it would be even cheaper.

Bottle Cap Jewellery (I saw some very inspirational stuff online and have tried to make my own versions)

• I have a hammer (no cost) and pliers already (no cost) and a £20 voucher for the local DIY shop should I need any new tools!
• Stretchy elastic (I already had some from a previous project) no cost
• Beads to go alongside the bottlecaps 

Peckham Pot-Pourri - I thought this would be a funny gift to the posh relatives who live in far nicer places, also it's very light so cheap to post

• The pot-pourri is made from drying roses and lavender I've collected from the streets of Peckham, so...no cost!
• I found some awesome jam jars perfect for the job of storing/presenting it, so no cost there either!
• I wonder if I could find any kind of silly ribbon alternative?

a project of note

just saw a really cool project posted on the internet and thought i'd mention it.


http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/05/designing-a-19th-century-kindle-an-e-reader-for-dickens/238884/


Basically a woman has made books within a book in an attempt to explain a Kindle to a 19th century person, such as Charles Dickens.



Very cool idea. It reminded me of an essay I wrote to go with an art piece I made. I made a doll's house then wrote the essay looking at different dollshouses through history and then ending with The Sims - the modern day dolls house. Was a fun time.

false impressions....

I've realised i've given a rather false impression of myself so far knitting-wise. I have had two posts in a row, both of the same project, both showing a fair amount of progress and within a very small space of time.

My knitting reality is somewhat different... if you are, like me, a member on Ravelry, you can find my project page here. for the rest of you, let me break it down for you what terrible consistency i have when it come to my favourite hobby. 

Quite a few of my abandoned projects were started just before my son started to walk, before then it was easy to knit for hours at a time while he sat and played and crawled, but once he got moving my amazing skills for churning out new projects weekly disappeared!

I planned to make a pair of christmas stockings for my cousin and his wife as their wedding present, they are soon to celebrate their 2nd wedding anniversary! I have not done anymore to them since I missed the original date, i'm hoping to get it together so they can have them this christmas! before they give up on me and go buy some! It's so stupid that I haven't finished them yet, I spent a fair bit of money on them too, I normally just knit in cheap acrylic but these are pure wool. This picture shows the first half-knitted stocking ---> as you can see, i've done all the tricky fairisle, intarsia bits and cables, turned the heel and stopped. Easily distracted or what?

This is an unfinished teddy bear.It should look like this, but there was an error in the short rows on the head, and me being the anal person that I am, i re-knitted the head about four times all with the same mistake but refused to think outside of the box enough to correct it myslelf, and then gave up. I have been tempted to sew a pair of eyes on the stomach and be done with it, but it has hung around the house looking like this for two years now. Have you noticed sometimes that when something remains unfinished for a really long time you simply stop noticing it? The weird blob on the top of the body is actually a really cool feature, the main reason i chose the pattern to knit, the head is able to turn around, which makes the bear far more posable and therfore fun to play with! lots of knitted bears look very flat, i can't stand that!

Another major cause of my huge pile of unfinished projects is due to my being easily distracted! All it takes is a quick pattern search on ravelry, or looking at someone else's profile and their collection of knitted items and off I go on a knitting tangent, pulling needles out of old projects, foraging for yarn, breaking yarn balls off other projects....tut tut!


I'll share more forgotten projects later...

wash the dishes, 30xp!

every now and again I find the 'perfect tool of escapism' and for a while all the chores get neglected and I get to the point of having to bribe myself to do housework. At the current present moment this 'perfect tool of escapism' takes the form of The Sims Medieval! 

It is a PC game that is so good it feels like my two favourite games had a baby game! I've been playing Runescape for years. It's a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) it's a game when you make a little person run around and fight loads of monsters, do loads of different quests, meet loads of characters, get gold, buy cool stuff...etc, it goes on forever, they are constantly adding new stuff, so you never get bored and you can't complete it. I've also been a fan and avid player of Sims for as long as it's been around (2000) where you play as a god and create and boss around these little people in a world you can customise in a million ways. 

This game, Sims Medieval, got a really bad response. I think a lot of people had the same hopes as me of it being a beautiful hybrid of my two favourites, but a lot of people did get disappointed. The best part of this was that I was saving up for it, the original price being a ridiculously high £39.99, but within a month (which means it's really bad for the company) it had gone down to £19.99 so I got to buy it much sooner than I thought! But yeah, it has less combat than Runescape, which I don't mind at all because I'm more of a collector and quester than fighter. It's on a smaller map too, which I'm actually preferring, it makes the quests achievable much faster (less frustration) and you can really get to know the map like the back of your hand! It has less choice of items and clothing and character personalising than Sims3, but actually, do you really need all that anyway? The clothes are all super cool medieval gear and they get two traits as well as a fatal flaw, which is loads more realistic really, don't people get sick of making nice sims all the time~?! The biggest difference at the moment that pissed people off the most (people who get excited by the hype of a new game then don't like it are hard to win back!) was the way you couldn't move around 360'' in the world or in the buildings, you can't build the buildings yourself, you can only furnish them and change the wallpaper and carpeting. I really don't mind in the slightest! The thing you have to realise about the Sims Medieval is that it's a completely new game unrelated almost to The Sims as we know it. And I reckon it stands in it's own right. I can't wait for the new patch today! They've basically fixed so many things that players moaned about! And to think my mum always says don't give in to peer pressure?!

p.s. just reaslised they've now put it up to £29.99! :( still good, still good!

as for avoiding the chores it goes like this; do a quest, wash up, do a quest, hang out the laundry, do a quest, tidy up the toys and sweep the floor, do a quest, go to bed! haha!
I'm 'making up to my house' this morning by making stock - a chore that doing it makes me feel like the perfect housewife! Go on the link to see how I got on....!


p.p.s bloody hell from £19.99 to £39.99 in a week! I sure got it at the perfect time! also the first release of Sims Medieval was so faulty and bugged they've given everyone who bought that a free copy of the limited edition game, as in the game that works!

dusting out the cobwebs

I've just got back from a weekend break, I went away from Friday to Sunday with a group from my church and we just chilled the whole weekend, it was fabulous, I didn't have to cook, clean, get up early, deal with tantrums, be selfless, it was fab and I came back refreshed then looked at my house and got a bit grossed out! But it's okay because I had such a nice break that I have that extra bit of energy to tackle those chores that build up quietly in corners, or ceilings...

I had to use flash for this cobweb to show up at all, seeing as it's not a very dusty one, but there was many very dusty cobwebs around my flat this morning. gross. they're fine and un-noticable high up in the ceilings until you do notice them, you notice a big one, you walk around and notice that there are nasty big cobwebs in every corner of every room. oh.

I shockingly enough don't own a feather duster (shocking because of my infatuation with feathers) so I grabbed the broken blind twisty sticks and waved them around in the corners till they looked like this and the cobwebs were gone! gross, huh?

it's dragin on...

ahh nearly there! i decided to change the design from a scarf into a puppet seeing as it was knit into two pieces anyway, it just seemed the logical thing to do...! so here's the photos so far

it still needs a face and ears (made out of 12 separate pieces!) and a tail. im also thinking of maybe continuing the belly stitch after the arm entry hole to even it up, and maybe to make some arms and legs to attach to the sides and maybe a spiky back spine running down the length. also maybe some stuffing in the cheeks to pad them out and a bit of face shaping.