Activities

Recently we've tried out a few different activities. In my corner I have a multitude of repair work, and other things to do. Willow and Gabriel have some pants needing to be fixed, as do I, and there are a few other bits there too. For my brother, Justin, I am crocheting a hat as a very early Christmas present, before he heads off to Germany later in the year. I'm also still in the middle of doing Damien a jumper- I'm now onto the front, but unfortunately with all this other work I'm not quite getting through it quickly enough for him. On the plus side I have finished the corduroy pants of mine that I was redecorating into 3/4 pants, so that's one thing off the list.

Homeschool wise we've been trying out a few things. Last week we made pompoms, with varying success depending on the thickness of the wool. I read it works better to have a very fine ply, but we wanted to try a few colours, and some of the thicker ones really didn't work all that well. Still it was a fun exercise, and they look quite nice hanging in our carport.

Today we tried out making our own felted sheets. We're not sure yet if it was a success- they're still drying, so time will tell. I found a method using sushi mats, so since we have an abundance of them that seemed perfect. It was a bit tricky with Arden, he was very enthused to join in, and help with laying the wool. If it comes out nicely I plan to use some on the slippers I'm making for Gabriel.

Gabriel has just felted his first bit of knitting and sewn it into a beautiful pillow for his doll.

And Willow is still working on knitting her baby booties, they're coming on a little slowly, but very nicely.

Birthday Crafts

Recently our neice and cousin, Elly, celebrated her fourth birthday. Since they were staying in Adelaide it was the first time we've been able to attend her birthday party- they reside in Mt Gambier. So since we usually have a rule where we don't give presents for cousins at birthday time- there are too many of us- Willow, Gabriel and I had a crafting session to make a present for her.

We recently bought a knitting book called 'Usborne's How to Knit' which has some nice simple patterns for children learning to knit, with simple instructions to help them learn to follow a pattern. So I decided to give a try felting some wool, that was in my basket, from when we lived in Scotland. Unfortunately I had no idea as to what type of wool it was- ie if it would felt, so I knitted a few pieces to see what would happen. The result was one unfelted yellow piece, one felted magenta piece, and one stretched and much more fluffy purple piece. Gabriel and I used the magenta to make some shapes- his were placed in the gift box, whilst I sewed mine onto the purple which had made a very nice small scarfe shape through all the washing.

Meanwhile Willow had been hard at work knitting a party bag from the same knitting book, and after some dedicated knitting finished it in time for the party. We thread some ribbon through just before it was time to go, and everything looked lovely!