Quick Crafts

At the beginning of the week I had a declutter/spring clean of the sitting room, and once it was all lovely and clean and fresh I finished off by adding some fresh spring flowers. Flowers always make a room come to life don't you think? I had a Little bunch of dafs left over, not really enough for a big vase, but too many for a little one. So I used a glass jar, which in another life held the contents of some spaghetti sauce. Having just been given some material off cuts at the time, I improvised and wrapped a bit of the material around the jar, and tied it with some garden string, and hey presto enter one pretty little flower display.


On seeing how well this worked I decided to have a bit of a rummage around on the sewing basket to see if I could make in any better, and with another piece of fabric popped on these lovely little mother of pearl buttons, added some stitching around the edge and a bit more garden string and there you have it, how pretty is that!

Close up

Back view.

Rooting out the problem.

Mass of roots

I have to confess that gardening and growing things are not one of my stronger points, so any house plants we have need to be pretty indestructible. I have been known to kill off spider plants! But when I noticed one of my plants looking a bit sorry for its self I thought I better do something about it. This one has been with us for a few years now, but seems to have stooped growing and on further investigation I noticed that the roots have out grown the pot and have been busy growing around in circles at the bottom. May be that's the problem, its getting dizzy!

So it called for a trip to B&Q to pick up some houseplant compost and a bigger pot. (A tip for you here, measure the old pot size the your plant has grown out of before you go, because when you get to DIY store you will be standing in front of the pots wondering which size to buy) I bought a set of 3 16 inch pots for £2.12, and a 12 litre bag of B&Q houseplant compost at £2.76. For all you Eco lover out there, B&Q compost is a mixture of peat and alternative sustainable ingredients, and the peat does not come from areas of designated SSSi sites (sites of special scientific interest, though what makes them interesting I don't know)

After teasing out the roots a little, I put some compost in the bottom of the pot, then place the plant onto the pot and filled the sides in, filled the pot to the top and watered. And as you can see from the photo, the plant is looking much better.

Oh and another thing, you will need to place the plant and pot in a bigger container, as the one before will probably be to small, told you I'm not good at this stuff, lets hope my plant doesn't die off after the trauma of being moved!

Get arty with lamp shades

How about this simple little weekend project, use old maps to create a lamp shade using a lamp shade kit, available at craft stores or check on line.  

Getting Crafty

If there is one thing that is catching on fast this year, it is crafts. Our local paper reported that the interest in craft courses at our local highland college is on the up, with most of them being full up. So that begs the question, what new craft are you learning? Click in the comments at the bottom of this post to let us know. My efforts are more along the line of re-using things around the house, so what was once milk powder containers become storage for my bits and bobs. And a diary gets a make over with similar fabric. A little Blue Peter-ish I know! Hey I'm new at this.