Recent projects #2

I've been a bit quiet of late. Not because I haven't had anything to post about, but more through shame. I'm reluctant to post about projects I've finished when I still feel guilty about not finishing the present I was making for the lovely Lisa's 30th birthday months ago. Lisa - I'm really sorry! I promise you'll get it before Christmas...

I've been being fairly experimental, trying to learn new techniques:

This, believe it or not, is supposed to be a sand dollar...


I've also been mucking about with recycled yarn and made a few crochet scrubbies:


I also messed about with colour work (don't look too closely - it's fairly rubbish) with this Charles Rennie Mackintosh sample:


In terms of garments I was pleased with these:

This 'Mudstone' shawl used the Old Shale* stitch and some lovely soft merino tweed wool that my marvellous brother bought me for my birthday this year. It now resides in my office where it routinely keeps me warm when the university fails to put the heating on.

(* According to one of the Earth Science profs here, there is no such rock as shale - they are all mudstones...)


This Urchin beret used to be a cardigan. (Note also my new favourite t-shirt.)


These Maggie arm/hand warmers are also made from the other tweed bought by Stef for my birthday. My very first invisible joins. I feel quite proud.


And finally, the Wispa cardigan. It cost me about 50 cents to buy the crappy acrylic fibre at a sale in the Anna Templeton Centre. It's not perfect, and if I do it again I'd make several changes, but overall not bad...


I have a few other things on the go (not least the mystery late birthday present), including my first pair of socks and my first lace. However, I appear to have destroyed my hands in making my Halloween costume for next Friday, and I'm only about a quarter of the way through. Doh!

Recycling office paper

I use an extraordinary amount of paper on a daily basis. In clearing out my office (see earlier post) I am currently on sack number 4 of office recycling. I've always tried to be economical with paper but I think an office job accumulates more than one person can deal with.

My first trick with old printouts is to simply gather them altogether, turn them over and stick a bulldog clip on them as a handy desk pad.

However, when the time came to leave this job I realised I was never going to use all of this up and so my mind turned to giving them away. I couldn't give them as gifts in the bulldog clip format so I started investigating making notebooks. There are tonnes of tutorials on bookbinding on the web, but I needed something where I didn't require specialist equipment of any sort.

I patched lots of different ideas together from various sources so I'll outline the rough process here. However, take a look at the great blog on Design*Sponge (always a great source of inspiration!).

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What you will need:

Office paper printed on one side
Card
Bulldog clips
Guillotine / scissors
Heavy-duty stapler
Double-sided stickytape or wheat paste
Cover materials (fabric, paper, wallpaper, old maps, etc)

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1. Fold your office paper so that the print is on the inside
2. Stack them all into a pile with the folds all on the same side
   
3. Cut two pieces of card the same size and put them at the top and bottom of the pile
   
4. Ensure the pile is neat and then fasten the paper with bulldog clips
5. Draw a vertical line down the non-folded edge of the top piece of card
6. Use this as a guide to staple along the edge
7. Stick double-sided tape around the four edges of the front piece of card (or brush on wheatpaste) and lay the notebook onto your covering material
8. Turn over the book and apply adhesive to the back cover
9. Gently turn the book and stick down the covering material to the back side
   
10. Cut away any excess materials to give a clean edge to the notebook
11. Fold the front page just in front of the stapled edge to allow the notebook to open cleanly
    

...and that's it! It's really easy. I used a load of wallpaper samples I had left over from when I was decorating the flat, but my favourite was one I covered with an old geology map of Lichfield I found during my clearout (it was actually a colour photocopy I think, but sadly I don't have a photo of it).

I also did different sizes. I found that using a guillotine to cut the A4 paper in half first, and then folding it to A6 size made for a great-sized pocket notebook.