Crochet Bandana And A Wood Shim Wreath

     I fell into a rabbit hole of looking at patterns for crochet bandanas.  I remember them from the 70's and I thought it would be fun to make a few.  I found a couple with some bobble textures in the patterns and I settled on a pattern with small bobbles made with picot stitches.  Here is the youtube video with the full pattern including a beautiful border which I modified.  

    

   I finished my wood shim wreath with stain.  I used Rustoleum dark walnut stain with polyurethane included.  It took a couple of days to finish the staining of 30 shims, but I love the look.

  Next projects are the fall and Halloween pinwheels and I have to finish making the embroidered Halloween pillows.  Those will be the only fall projects I'm making this year.

Wood Shim Wreath Project Done

     I have been wanting to make a wood shim wreath for almost three years.  I bought the wreath forms back in 2020.  I wanted this to be a joint project doing it with my daughter but that never happened so I made one by myself.  I found the instructions on pinterest.  Here is a link to the website that pops up for me that was the most helpful with list of materials and step by step instructions.  

     The pictures of pinterest show the wood shims stained a dark color and that's how I wanted to make both of my wreaths, but when I asked dear daughter if she wanted her shims stained she said no.  She wanted a white wash on the shims.  The shims are a very yellow wood and I told her that a white wash might not look that great on the yellow wood so we decided to paint them completely white.  I painted the back, front and sides of each of the 27 shims I used and the wreath form with white acrylic paint.  You can  use any acrylic paint.  

   Then I glued the shims to the wreath form with E6000.  It took me several days to finish this because I had to wait for the paint to dry and on the last day when I was gluing the shims to the wreath form I had to wait for the glue to dry on the first set of shims before I could add more.  It was a process.  I can't remember how much I paid for my wreath forms in 2020 but I bought 6 packs of shims for the two wreaths at $1.58 a pack at home depot.  I bought extra shims and I'm glad I did because some had knot holes in them and some were very rough and I didn't want to use them so I weeded them out of the project shims.  The acrylic paint cost me $2.00 at walmart.   I'm glad this wreath is done.  I'm making one more for me with stained shims.  I will start that project next week.

   I finished knitting my gray earwarmer and I'm working on a dark blue one now.  

   One other thing that I have been wanting to make is a trivet using half wooden beads and felt.  I saw this on a youtube video.  Here is a link to the entire video:  Liz Fenwick DIY  The instructions for this trivet start at minute 35:10 of the video.  The trivet I made used 66 half wood beads and I glued them with E6000.  I made three of these for dear daughter.  A pack of 300 half wooden beads cost me $12.99 on Amazon and I bought a yard of thick dark gray felt at Hobby Lobby for $6.99.  The felt I bought was very wide.  It's a lot of felt.  This is a very easy project and you can glue 3 of these in about an hour.  Wait for them to dry and trim the felt.  

    Here is a picture of one I glued before I trimed the felt.

More Crochet. Lavender Flowers.

    There are loads of tutorials for the lavender flowers.  You won't go wrong with any of them.  I did use one tutorial for the flowers and one tutorial for the leaves because I thought the small leaves worked better with the flower.  These were fun to make.  It takes about 45 minutes to make the flowers and another 20 minutes to make one leaf.  I painted each skewer/dowel stick green that I glued the flowers to.  That was the easiest way for me to get color on it.  I didn't want to wrap it with yarn like one tutorial did.  I thought that was a waste of yarn.  Here is a picture of the small (using a 6 inch skewer) and large (using a 12 inch - quarter inch dowel stick) lavender flowers I made.  These are going to dear daughter.  I'm going to make some for me in the next few days.  

Crocheted Snowflakes

     It's never too early to crochet Christmas ornaments.  I found a lovely snowflake pattern on youtube by Jonna Martinez, the link to her youtube video is here.  

     I made the snowflakes with a size 3 white crochet thread and a size D crochet hook.  Each snowflake took about 40 minutes to make.  The video is very well done and easy to follow.  

    I made a total of 13 snowflakes.  Ten for dear daughter and three for me.  Here is a picture of them blocking them with glue to make them stiff.  

    I mixed 2 parts Mod Podge with 1 part water, stirred it up and I dipped each snowflake in the glue mixture until is was soaked, squeezed all the excess glue/water out then I pinned each snowflake out on an old pillow I bought at Goodwill just for this project.  They took about 8 hours to dry.

   I've been wanting to make some snowflakes for a while now.  I never made any before.  I enjoyed making these and I would have made more but my daughter has enough handmade decorations for her tree now.