Use It or Lose It: Unravelling

This week's crafting has been all about simple, relaxing projects - bits of restful craftiness squeezed into the start and end (and sometimes even the middle) of my working days.

Mostly I've been working on my patchwork blanket: using bits of yarn left over from other projects to make mini moss stitch squares to (very slowly) make a colourful, slightly chaotic blanket.

I've been knitting squares with bright yarn left over from my (still in progress) happy rainbow blanket, and with blue, white and grey yarn left over from my (now abandoned) attempt to record a year's weather in the medium of fluffy pompoms. In between knitting sessions, I've been sewing together the finished squares (and some I made earlier) and adding them to the blanket.

Inspired by my Use It or Lose It challenge, I've also admitted to myself that there are a couple of knitting projects on my "in progress" list that I'm never actually going to finish. So, I've unravelled them to put the yarn to good use as mini blanket squares.

This heap of yarn was originally going to be a stripey coffee cosy. I knitted it into stripes several years ago but never got round to turning it into a cosy like I'd planned... and now so many years have passed that I'm actually no longer friends with the person for whom it was going to be a gift! So, it's definitely time to abandon that particular project.

And this yarn? This used to be some patchwork squares, knitted by my mum 30+ years ago. She'd planned to make a blanket like this one but she never finished it. A couple of decades later I turned most of the squares into a trio of cushions that now have pride of place on the daybed in my studio.

There were a few extra squares left over that I never really knew what to do with. I made a half-hearted attempt to turn them into purses but never finished them - mainly, I think, because I was making "something" with them for the sake of it, rather than actually making something I wanted/needed.

It's great to be re-using the yarn my mum knitted with all those years ago, and especially to be knitting moss stitch squares just like hers!

Bags and Bags of Lavender

I finished my first Use It or Lose It project!

Lots and lots and lots of lavender bags:

 

That's not even all of them - I had so much dried lavender to use up I made a massive 29 sachets!

Lots of happy hours of hand stitching later I've got lots of scented goodness to add to our wardrobes and chests of drawers to keep them smelling fresh and help deter those pesky clothes-nibbling moths.

In a bit of magical de-stashing coincidence, I had exactly the right amount of that moth and butterfly print fabric to use up all the lavender. Hurrah!

 

I've just got a few small scraps of the fabric left now, plus a pile of these thin strips...

... which I am totally planning to use in another de-stash-y project soon.

Patchwork Progress

After a super busy few months jam-packed with deadlines, I had a deliciously lazy Christmas and New Year. It was lovely!

I purposefully didn't get much done, but I did knit a lot of blanket squares (my go-to crafty project when I want to relax). I knitted some large squares for my happy rainbow blanket, and some small squares for my patchwork picnic blanket... and spent lots of happy hours sewing some squares I'd knitted earlier onto the patchwork.

 

I'm making my patchwork blanket with leftover yarn from other projects. I knit as many small moss stitch squares (10 stitches wide) with the yarn, then sew the squares together to make some simple shapes. Then I add the shapes to the blanket sections (I'm making it in several sections so I can spread the colours across the finished blanket) and trim any yarn ends that are no longer needed.

I last blogged about the blanket back in the summer... here's how the sections are looking now, with a total of 270 mini squares stitched together:

 

 

Making this blanket is a sloooooow, labour-intensive process! Here are the yarn ends left over from my stitching over Christmas:

As part of my Use It or Lose It challenge I also decided to make use of the half dozen dark squares I had that aren't gonna fit in my bright, happy blanket, unravelling them...

... and re-knitting the yarn into small squares to add to my patchwork project: 

I wonder how much my patchwork project will grow this coming year?

Use It or Lose It: A Crafty Challenge for 2015

I've been doing lots of decluttering this year and I've found that one of the hardest things for me to clear out is the stash of random crafty stuff I've kept because "I might be able to make something with that sometime!"

So I've decided that in 2015 I need to either get on and actually make stuff with the supplies in my stash, or admit to myself that I'm never going to use them for anything and just get rid of them.

This will be a slow, ongoing process but I'm hoping to have lots of crafty fun along the way and (fingers crossed) a lot more space in my studio at the end of the year. I'm rather looking forward to the creative challenge of coming up with projects to make with my long-hoarded supplies and I will, of course, be blogging about my progress!

Thanks to taking some time off over Christmas, I've already made a start on my first de-stashing project: making lots of lavender bags.

I'd been keeping two huge bags of dried lavender (harvested from my mother's garden) which was waaaay more lavender than I thought I'd ever need but so lovely and scented and potentially useful that I'd not been able to bring myself to just (gasp!) throw it away.

So when my sister mentioned this Christmas that something she owned had been nibbled by moths, I offered to make her a big batch of lavender sachets to help keep the pesky creatures at bay. It's been a while since I made some lavender sachets to proect my own wardrobe so I'll also be making some for myself.

I'd planned on using some scrappy fabric like an old pillowcase to make the sachets. However, looking through my fabric stash I found an old dress my sister had made many many years ago and then given to me in case I wanted to use the fabric for something...

... it's been sitting untouched for about ten years, it belonged to the sister for whom I'm sewing the lavender sachets, and the print is a pattern of butterflies and moths. Perfect!

As well as using up some long-forgotten-about fabric and a big stash of dried lavender, I'm also using some odds and ends of ribbons (mostly the sort of loops I'd cut out of new dresses and kept because "they might be useful for making something!") to add to the smaller sachets so they can be hung on coathangers.

Three de-stashed birds with one crafty stone = an excellent start to the challenge!