...upcycled T-shirt

Todays Waste Less Live More week challenge is Value It. This was an easy one for me. T-shirts.

We have a couple of T-shirt issues in our house. A good example of two problems making a solution (for one of us at least).  I realised recently that I had no T-shirts without holes in them. Quite serious holes. Now in one respect this is fine, the chickens don't mind my holey T-shirts and gardening chic kind of demands a few holes, right? But I do occasionally leave the house and it is occasionally nice to have clothes without holes. I went out and bought a new T-shirt and promptly ripped a hole in it on the chicken run. Current budgeting dictates this cannot continue so, new approach needed...

At the same time piling up in my sewing corner are a stack of Dans not very old T-shirts. He is quite tall and broad shouldered hence after about 20 washes a fair number of T-shirts are already too short and look like he has grown out of them.  The upside to this T-shirt tragedy is that there is enough fabric In Dan's tshirts to make new clothes for me and he has worn the fabric in so it is nice and soft. Super!

So this is todays wardrobe rework. Dans top to my top.

1) Cut off the neck to make a new neck line. I used one of my fave tops as a pattern.

2) Cut the cuffs off & take a slice out of the arm to make them the right length. Sew the cuffs back on.

3) Cut the bottom hem off, below the seam stitching to make a lengthy piece of binding for the neck. 

4) Cut the stitching off left after cutting the bottom hem off and rehem the bottom edge. I used a blind hem foot on my serger so it has some stretch. Use a zig zag or stretch stitch on a regular machine.

Use the binding made from the bottom edge to bind the neck edge. 

Tips for sewing with stretch fabric-

-Sergers really help, theres no getting round it and they are so fast. I bought a really cheap one and its the best bit of sewing kit I ever bought. So fast and versitile.

-When using a regular sewing machine treat yourself to a walking foot. It stops the fabric puckering up which is a real problem when sewing knits

-Use ball point needles rather than regular sharps. They work much better and make it easier for your machine

-Cutting stretch fabric can be tricky, a cutting wheel is easier than scissors if you have lots to do. Use sharp scissors!

... a sort of forest garden

Waste Less Live More week, day 2 - Borrow It

I love the library. I adore books and am able to devour them at a rapid rate of knots. When I was recovering from surgery reading was one of my favourite things to do, the slight problem being that I could not hold a book or indeed get to the library. So at the time it was audio and digital books only for me. 

And then I discovered that the public library has a digital library - a whole new feast of accessible booky wonder. Check it out. Ours in Gloucestershire is fantastic. I have borrowed countless books, fiction, non fiction, audio book, ebook. Brilliant! Try it. Free books you can have whenever you like. Whats not to love?

All you need is a library account and you can register, visit you local library or see your local council's library webpage to find out more.

I tend to read a lot about gardening. One of my main responsibilities in our money saving exercise is to provide most of our vegetable crop and eggs from our garden. We have 66m2 of available back garden to grow veg and keep chickens in, not a huge space, but this year the only veg we bought were potatoes and mushrooms and I have no idea when we last bought eggs!  With such a small area there is obvious competition for space and I am always keen to keep as much of my veg beds as possible for annual and more choosy veg.  Problem is herbs, comfrey, rhubarb etc all have different ideas and need somewhere to go.  Then my partner said "Why not use the front garden?" (a 16m2 hedge surrounded weedy, dead, unused space). 

Coincidentally at the same time I borrowed a great book by chance from the download library called Forest Gardening by Robert Hart. All of a sudden my front garden, the plants needing a home and the forest garden idea all converged. Front garden makeover! 

Forest gardening is a low-maintenance, sustainable plant-based food production system based on woodland ecosystems, using fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields that are useful to us.  Key things that stuck out when I looked into it - low maintenance, sustainable, useful to humans and as an added bonus they are beautiful. I love the idea of a more natural, interdependent garden. As someone who loves to garden but is not always well enough it is great sometimes to feel less needed!

One slight issue to start with, there are no trees in the front garden, I don't have any trees to put out there and if I did put one there there would be no room for anything else. But we do have a hedge and a shrub that came with the house. No idea what it is, red berried and the army of sparrows & bluetits love it so thats good enough for me and will have to suffice as our upper layer. In an ideal world I would probably start my forest garden with a plum tree (dreams of future garden...). So this is going to be a sort of forest garden.

The garden before the makeover ...

So today has seen phase 1 of the project, planting up a section of the sort of forest front garden. I have cleared away all the mouldy nasty bits, put a log border in (from our old tree that came out) and planted various plants from the list below.  As the perennial plants will get bigger next year but either will be dormant or small over winter I have added some short term veg to add colour and get the garden producing immediately. Swiss Chard is adding spectacular colour and green food for the chickens and I have put some Mustard, Red Frills in there as an experiment, they have been uniquely slug and snail resistant in the back garden and I want to see if the hold up in the wilder front garden.  Phase 2 includes a bit of bush moving that is a two person job so that will have to wait a few days.  Plus I created so many bags of weeds I might have to spend the rest of the week composting!

Plants going in the sort of forest garden and what they will be used for :-

Rhubarb (food)

Gooseberry (for cuttings & food for sparrows!)

Fennel (food, herb mix)

Mint - peppermint & apple mint (food, herb mix, insect repellent)

Oregano (food for us & chickens, herb mix)

Lemon Balm (food for us & chickens)

Tansy (insect repellent)

Thyme - grey, broad leaved & lemon (food for us & chickens, herb mix)

Wild Garlic (food for us & chickens) (not from wild, from my back garden!)

Wild Rocket - perennial rocket (food for us & chickens)

Chinese Celery (food for us)

1000 Headed Kale (food for chickens)

Sorrel - red veined & buckler leaved (food for us)

Perpetual Spinach (food for us & chickens)

Red Frilled Mustard (food for us)

Flowers will be added in the spring - calendula & nasturtium

(Herb mix is a dried mix of various herbs I use in my chickens bedding to keep the bugs at bay and their health tip top)

Plan of my sort of forest garden...

... Lavender Bags

It is Waste Less Live More week this week - http://www.wastelesslivemore.com - a great idea and something which caught my attention as, by necessity, we are being mindful of what we use and how we use it at the moment. 

We need to move house. Houses are expensive. We need to save astronomical amounts of money to move house. This means our resources are more valuable and stretched than ever. This week I am taking up the Waste Less Live More challenge because it's a good idea, it's good to not waste stuff and to spice things up I am trying to focus on those pesky tasks that we all have, things you know you probably should do but haven't quite got round to.  So this week the planet wins as I will be tying to impact on it as little as possible with my makes, I win because I get stuff and hopefully other people win as I will be sharing something every day to help you waste a bit less too.

Day 1's theme is Make It. So I am making lavender bags. Two reasons:-

1) We have needed moth repellers for our wardrobe for ages and much to my shame despite having the fabric & the lavender our clothes were left to protect themselves. It's a good idea when trying to save money to not need new jumpers because your old ones were moth food.

2) I saw a tutorial for making lavender bags the other day and it made me angry (I realise this seems a bit far fetched and you may think I need help). They had crafted beautiful hand stitched lavender bags from new fabric and said at the bottom that you couldn't refill them so when they didn't smell anymore to throw them away and make new ones. I mean really? Throwing stuff away wilfully is bad enough but something handmade that it is super easy to refresh is just plain wrong I tell you. WRONG!

So these lavender* bags are cute, easy to make and best of all can be refilled!!!

*Actually you can put all sorts of dried herbs in your bags if you have other herbs or don't like lavender. Bay leaves, dried basil leaves, mint, thyme, tansy, rosemary and wormwood will all help repel unwanted buggy guests.

Tutorial and the pattern for regular, butterfly and ukulele versions are below as pictures you can save and print out if needed. Sorry they are a bit dark, they will be updated in the week - IT issues :( To be honest they are not complicated patterns so have a go at designing your own!

A few notes on the waste less theme...

I used offcuts of fabric from other projects for these bags. Use something stiffish (my partner is a painter so I have a responsibility to find 101 uses for 10cm strips of painting linen). I save all fabric over a cm square -seriously I do! 

I dry my own lavender and other herbs - it's easy. Hang some lavender clipped from your plant up somewhere dry for a few weeks until it is crispyish. Leaves can be used too they are just not quite as strong.

I used a machine to sew mine as I had 2 lots of hand surgery recently and that rules out hand sewing but if you can hand sew them it would both look lovely and save a bit of electricity.

I hand drew the pattern and instructions as it saved tons of digital device time and was good hand therapy to boot ( only just been able to start writing again recently). Don't print out the instructions unsless you absolutley have to!

Replace the herbs in the bags about every 6 months

 

...Storage Pots

I love terracotta pots - they are beautiful things. They have a gorgeous colour, texture and look. 

They are also fragile. Unfortunately for all around me I am somewhat prone to dropping things and have made a fine art out of knocking into stuff and consequently I break a bit more than my fair share of the world's goods. This is bad news for my terracotta pots. They end up being fairly frequent victims of my inability to walk in a straight line or see things where they actually are.

As you may by now be aware I am pathologically incapable of throwing anything away. And when it is something I broke I feel a desire to give it a second chance in life as a kind of thankyou/ sorry for its previous service in making my garden beautiful and my unacceptable behaviour towards it.

Hence broken things in our house often get stored for repurposing. I had built up quite a collection of small but broken terracotta pots and as they were on the easy craft list I decided their time had come. For such a simple process it is a great result that really brightens up the greenhouse and makes things easier to store than the mishmash of greehousey stuff i had crammed into various tubs before.

These were super easy to do for my hands and I am really pleased with the results. A real bolt of colour for the greenhouse which I think will be especially cheery when I am out there over the winter!

... a clever garden thing

Ok, so I have not blogged for over a year. Bad bad bad. Problem is I've hardly been able to make anything for the last year due to all the hand surgery fun I have been going through and seeings as how my blog is about things I have made and not where I moan about chronic pain, surgery & the general joy of hypermobility I was left a bit short of material.  

My left hand is now recovering slowly and my right hand is very pleased it is starting to feel better after last years surgery. What I have been doing is gardening. A lot. "What?" I hear you cry, chronic pain, surgery, gardening??? Surely that's not a good idea. Having finally mastered (most days) the fine art of pacing gardening is more than possible, in fact I truly believe almost anyone can garden on some level and the benefits are truly immense.

Some things are a bit beyond me though - like writing by hand which makes labelling your plants a challenge. So I made my label coding system. Very easy, write on the board what colour represents what variety and use that colour when sowing seeds. Easy, colourful, cheery, saves work and cheap, oh my it's a win win win win win.

Possibly my easiest make ever (bit of sanding on the edge of the wood offcut, sticking on the labels & talking nicely to someone to drill the holes) but one of my favourites and I am sure the lettuces have grown better this year!

... Cyclists

As mentioned last year (blog post on 27th August) I have fallen for cycling. It turned out to be no summer romance and is turning into a long term relationship. I have just started watching the Giro d'Italia, the last major tour I have not seen yet and I am settled in for three weeks of spectacular sporting wonder.

Three weeks I hear you cry in concern for my possible sanity.  Well maybe I have a few other plans, alongside keeping my rapidly growing veg garden in check, I am mainly hoping to expand my collection of cycling embroideries.

So to start off the fun we have two new cyclists who can join Bradley (sorry, Sir Bradley) to make up the start of the cycling wall of wonder in our front room. They will be joined by others soon, probably something to celebrate Mark Cavendish's spectacular first stage sprint to take the maglia rosa (it means he's winning), (designed by Paul Smith this year) and then some to celebrate the range of colour wonder that are cycling jerseys and the crazy feats of human endurance they give them out for.

...crocheted cushion covers.

Sometimes (most times indeed) I like to make things out of stuff I have found, scavenged, been given etc (more on that soon). However, sometimes you want to treat yourself to something new and exceptionally lovely to work with. This was one of those times. I had a hankering for some cotton to crochet some cushion covers with and after much searching, visiting many wool shops and nearly everywhere online I settled upon Debbie Bliss Cotton in a beautiful turquoise . I know - good name coincidence eh?

As you can see from the picture it is a beautiful colour and you will have to take it from me it feels just as lovely. It was a real treat, a little bit more than I would usually spend but worth every penny. I was in making raptures for the whole project.

(Just to stick to my repurposing roots the black cover the crochet is stitched to is made from an old sofa cover and the buttons came from an old coat)

Maybe my reverence for the materials or maybe something else explains why they have taken me so damned long to get finished! Seriously I have had these on the go for an age and they were a long standing member of the job pile.

That is all behind me now. They are done and I love them.

Off to gracefully lie around on my gorgeous cushions....

...a hot water bottle cover

Designed to be extra snugly in response to all the snow we have been having.

If you have been following my makes for a while you might think I make a slightly above average number of hot water bottle covers. You'd be right, I have a thing about them. Most people's hot water bottle covers last for ages but I have 10+ hot water bottles a day to ease the daily pain and stiffness I enjoy due to hypermobility. As I also often have more an one at a time I need quite a lot of them and due to their hard lives they tend to give up the ghost quicker than the average!

In my aforementioned drive to get on top of my making pile hot water bottle covers were near the top of the list as my hot water bottles have been going round in the nuddy for a while now. This is all my own design and I enjoyed crocheting it so much I have already started another one prior to writing up the pattern.

This is the third completed job in my drive to get on top of my making pile hot water bottle covers were near the top of the list as my hot water bottles have been going round in the nuddy for a while now in my pile reduction drive (job number two was repairing Dan's long johns but I decided you didn't want or need to see them, however good the sewing was). Job number three is likely to involve cushion covers or pyjamas, we'll see where my mood takes me when I face up the pile next.

... more Croc liners

So it came to pass that I really really needed to sort out my craft area. My normal method of sorting my space out usually ends up with everything in neat piles but sadly the same amount of stuff is still there (too much stuff bay far). But not this time. This time I have decided to tidy my space up by actually doing the jobs in the various piles not just rearranging them so they look better. Revolutionary I know!

Brace yourself for a raft of upcoming posts that are finishing off projects. I am going to feel GOOD after this little episode is over.

Completed project number 1 is a reworking of the Croc socks that I made a couple of years ago which were a great success. This time I changed the pattern somewhat to meet with feedback received on the first pair which meant there was some fun freeform crochet moments (I.e. I made it up as I went along). But despite the need to bodge them a little they have turned out a treat and just in time for the upcoming snowy conditions.

Right onto the next thing in the pile...

... a monster

I was bought a zombie making kit by some friends for Christmas which was a brilliant present and having had a making break over the festive period this seemed like a good place to start warming up my crafting muscles ready for my new year plans.

So I hunkered down, put on appropriately unchallenging tv (Star Trek) and created a monster zombie. Not quite like the one the pack was designed to make as I employed a large dose of creative licence!

He needs to be handled carefully as his jaw, like my own, can stretch quite a lot. Unlike mine however, his is, at a stretch, capable of eating a small human or dwarf (of which I am one, though which one no one knows).