Cute things

Needles to say, I've given up on the whole jumper thing. However, I have some other, nicer jumpers which I have exciting plans for....

This week, in between the irritating time consuming thing called going to work, I've been doing a nice little bit of creating and some experimenting.
I really need more things to put in my online shop: www.thegiftlab.misi.co.uk and I decided to start a line in keyrings.

First I made this one using a pattern from the amazing book Lisa gave me:

Then I decided to experiment with making something original, cute and a little bit geeky. Here's what I came up with:

It's supposed to be an alpha particle by the way! I reckon it still needs a little tweaking before I put it up for sale, but hey that's why I call this the gift lab. I reckon I'm going to attempt some more: I have visions of bacteria, red blood cells, test tubes... so many ideas, so little time!


This week I have also been working on a cute little knitted bunny rabbit. It has brought me a lot of joy! (except when I couldn't get the head pieces to fit together, and ended up with what looked like an abscess which I had to operate on!)

I found the pattern here: http://bysmallmeans.wordpress.com/free-patterns-and-tutorials/
It's not bad for a free pattern, and fairly quick to make as it's small.

Here is my finished product:

Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!

Jumping for Joy... or possibly not

Question: What do you do with a bag of old jumpers

Answer: After hours of joyful experimentation, I'm still not really sure...


It all started with a bag of old clothes from my (sadly missed) Uncle John. This bag contained several fantastic hand knitted creations (more on those to come soon), and some wonderful pure wool (yay!) Grandad-style jumpers! Surely this was a bag of creative treasure??
So, I went searching for inspiration and typed in 'upcycle jumper' into pinterest. This revealed three main possibilities:
1. Cushion covers
2. Mittens
3. Slightly weird cuddly toys

Anyway, despite this I was still excited by the prospect of turning something old and slightly ugly into something new and wonderful. So I took the plunge and lobbed a jumper into the washing machine on hot, with a big rug and lots of soap. Some time later emerged a smaller, softer and thicker felted jumper.

  I removed the collar and attempted to make a mug cosy, but that was too bad to even photograph and to add insult to injury it moulted all over me. GRRRRR!

Anyway, this still left me with a large amount of felted wool in what I thought was a quite funky pattern (going off it now mind...) so I decided to try something new. My idea? A bag!
First I started off making a little purse which I sewed a zip into:

Then I set about designing a larger bag: ideally a sort of backpack, with a drawstring to close the top. I got as far as cutting out the pieces and turning on the sewing machine before realising that the silly thing was too thick to get under the sewing machine's foot. End of project.

Oh dear I feel like a bit of a quitter now!