kattitudes

Listen up, all you granny afghan making people out there.

So you have one hundred and seventy three bazillion afghan squares all made up and ready to connect into one of those merciless afghans that always pollute the back of the furniture?

Stop!

Back away from the sofa.

Great. Do you have your attention?

Excellent. Then could one of you use some of those squares or whatever they are called and make me one of these please?

Yes yes, I know. Shameful to trick you like that, but I like this! OK, so I’m not thrilled with the five foot like tentacle like frills attached to either end, but other than that, this has a real bohemian charm for which I have really fallen.

And it is getting chilly which means that it is well past time to be making these, particularly if you are making them for gifts. And if you already make afghans, you probably have a wee little stash of afghan squares and the like all made up, just waiting for the right project, am I right?

Two squares wide and your imagination is the length (personally, I always go for the Dr Who length. I’m not happy until I’m tripping people behind me with my scarf). This is really a very beautiful item and one that would make a very bright, very colorful and very hip gift. If you have anyone that fits that description, it might be time to get out your crochet hook and get down to business.

A single potpourri classically consists of several layers of fragrance. There is the main scent which is what makes a potpourri smell primarily spicy, fresh, floral or more specifically like roses or oranges, for example.

The next scents are the blenders which “ground” the potpourri. These back up the main scent and can consist of things such as wood shavings, dried berries, spices, fruit peel or a few drops of an essential oil that will compliment the main scent. Some oils that make good blenders are frankincense, myrrh, light musk, synthetic ambergris or lemon oils.

Finally, there are the fixatives which preserve the scent of the potpourri. While they do not lend their own scent to the mix, they keep the potpourri smelling fresh and new. The most commonly used fixative is orris root, which is the powdered root of a particular Iris variety. Powdered orris root is widely available.

Using a mixture of herbs, flowers, woods, oils and spices from the same family of scent is a good place to start. You can bulk up your potpourri with pretty unscented objects like pine cones, dried flowers and even sea shells. If your potpourri gets dusty from sitting around, place the potpourri in a muslin sack and shake it for a bit, Add a couple of drops of essential oil, give it a few more shakes and it is as good as new.

One enjoyable potpourri recipe is as follows:

Ingredients:

* 4 ounces coriander
* 4 ounces orris root
* 4 ounces rose petals
* 2 ounces mace
* 1/4 ounce cloves
* 1/4 ounce table salt
* 1/4 ounce oil of lavender
* 1/4 ounce oil of cinnamon
* 1/4 ounce oil of clove
* 1/4 ounce oil of rose
* 1/2 ounce tincture of musk

Mr. Massey’s Favorite Potpourri

The following recipe is Mr. Massey’s favorite potpourri. Mr. Massey is half founder of Caswell-Massey, well-known supplier of scented bath supplies and scents. Caswell-Massey also has mail order where potpourri supplies and oils can be ordered.

To 4 ounces each of coriander, orris root, and rose petals, add 2 ounces of mace, 1/4 ounce each of cloves, table salt, oils or lavender, cinnamon, clove and rose. Include 1/2 ounce tincture of musk.

Another entry into the super simple to put together; just takes a little concentration and review of your bead storage to make sure that you have all the pieces you will need. If you are not familiar with the style, the detailed silver bead in this particular necklace is called a bali style silver bead. Run a quick search on eBay for bali style beads if you are short any and if you like this particular look and we guarantee you will fill your quota, and then some.

Again with the wire wrapping. As you can see, if you are going to make jewelry, you are going to be twisting metal. Make sure you have some good pliers. And based on experience, good tools are really tools that feel comfortable in your hands and with which you feel familiar working. That is what makes a good tool.

One of the hardest parts (please note the tongue inserted firmly in cheek right now) of being a bench jeweler is that we have to build a stock of jewelry pieces and jewelry components to play with. If you want to make jewelry pieces as gifts, you need to be doing the same thing. Keep a small stock of chains available. Make sure that you have some nice classic pearls around all the time. In other words, basic jewelry pieces that you know you are going to be able to use in pretty much any circumstance.

Other pieces that you might wish to consider keeping an eye out for include the semi precious stones like the blue topaz here. We have found that if we keep an eye on eBay, there are times that we can find strands of briolette stones (which still seems to be going strong in popularity) for a song when sellers get tired and throw caution to the wind. However, it is a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Keep your eyes open and comparison shop all the time.

We will say that it is not worth overstocking on your jewelry supplies if you are not going to be making a significant number of pieces. In other words, do not use up your hard earned paycheck on lots and lots of high priced stones or tools if you only ends up making one or two pieces. Not a great return on investment that we are looking for here. But we are looking for a great balance - if you happen to see some good jewelry items, inexpensively priced and they fall inside your budget that week, do not be afraid to snap them up and plan ahead for some utterly fantastic pieces for the holiday season. Jewelry is such a personal gift that your recipient is sure to thank you!

If you are already making jewelry, you know what pliers you are using to wire wrap. When we saw this particular earring, we recognized the basic heart design we had been taught previously and loved how the beads were incorporated into the heart.

Once you get the heart down, you can reproduce the heart over and over into chains. And once you create chains, you have necklaces, belts, bracelets, straps for purses, adornments for shoes, decorations for books, highlights for scrapbooks, ways to attach tags to wine bottles, hair decorations, electronic charms, Christmas tree ornaments, interior decoration highlights and the list goes on.

Imagination. Limited only by your imagination.

We are so making these this year for our annual Halloween Crazy Dinner! We have to tell you about our Crazy Dinner, but we will do that in another post, as it is just too fun.

Anyway, we just love these. And oh my gosh, how incredibly simple. Come on, it is just a bunch of crepe paper and construction paper! And dig out all those stickers that you have left over from past projects from your crafts closet or your crafts armoire and you are in business.

We always try to make sure that all the Halloween candy is out of the house asap if you know what we mean (and come on, you do). For us, it is a joke at this point because (yes, yes, it is a sad story, but a true one.) We are part of the unlucky people that have migraine attacks, and we know that chocolate is a migraine trigger. So we literally cannot eat chocolate without suffering from a massive brain pain. So out of the house it goes asap. We just hate to have it around.

So, come this Halloween, back to early childhood we go, and we are going to pull out our construction paper, our crepe paper, our blunt scissors and all the silly Halloween stickers we will have in our stock and we are going to make these wonderful Halloween hats and fill them with Halloween treats and use them as placeholders at our annual Halloween dinner. We cannot wait!

The beauty of this design is that it lends itself to absolutely everything. You have a birthday coming up? Fill it with treats and change the colors to match the birthday cake. It would make a great little craft for the kids in the house to keep busy doing while you are trying to get the house ready. Easter, it would be a wonderful basket replacement if you don’t want to fill an entire basket. Christmas - fill with a silly paper hat, a joke and a small gift to make your own Americanized Christmas pseudo cracker and put around the Christmas dinner table. Fourth of July - fill with water balloons and take everyone out to the pool later. You name it - this is a great little project and something that you don’t have to worry if it gets absolutely destroyed, because you can make about a kazillion more and they will all still look great!

When we saw this bracelet, oh we wanted to purchase it so much, but the price tag of forty odd dollars made us literally laugh out loud. Literally. Forty odd dollars for a few pearls, less than a yard of pink ribbon and a set of bracelet findings? Nope. No. No way. We have those supplies in our craft armoire and can make one of these bracelets without much effort. And certainly without forty dollars worth of effort.

Again as with so many of the jewelry items on Kattitudes, the trick is finding the right finding (oh we love the word play this week). As a reminder, the findings are just the official jewelry terms for the metal pieces that are used to put jewelry together. In this particular case, the findings are the metal pieces that are used at the ends to grab the ribbons and crimp them together. You are looking for crimp end findings. Fortunately, as more and more people get into making their own jewelry, these findings are getting easier to locate, but they used to be quite the challenge. As always, even with our super secret jewelry source houses (because we are in training to be a bench jeweler outside the computer) we still get our best deals and usually our wildest pieces off eBay. Ooh, we hate to admit that, but it is true.

OK, so on this piece, the pearls have been strung onto the ribbon (and that is going to be a bit tricky if your pearls have not been drilled with a larger hole than normal jewelry pearls. You will need to check to see if the diameter of your hole is large enough to fit a ribbon and you might need to use a bead reamer to give yourself a little space in there). Once the pearls are where you like them, the ribbon has simply been braided, then the crimp ends have been mushed into place and voila. You have yourself a forty dollar bracelet for about twenty minutes worth of work. We would say that is a pretty decent pay off, wouldn’t you?

Love love this necklace and we have made literally multiple variations on this theme. Various stones and with all types of metals including different karats of gold. This is such a simple necklace and it looks good on everyone. Our only design tip that we give with this necklace: do not make the chain too long, as the stone needs to sit as the base of the neck. On the other hand, do not make the chain too short because when your necklace looks like it is choking you to death…well, that is not a good look on anyone. You want the stone pretty much at the base of your neck, not getting lost around your belly button.

There is one word of warning that we will give you based on our experience. If you will notice on this necklace, we have placed a red circle over the light colored stone. That circle is where the briolette stone is drilled and the sterling silver wire is threaded through. With most the lighter stones that we have used (amethyst, topaz and citrine to name a few) we find that as the stone moves naturally on the necklace, the silver naturally tarnishes right at that pivot point and you end up with two very dark points in the stone. Nothing a little quick cleaning will not get rid of, but it is something to be aware of if you make this necklace from sterling silver (which many people will end up using).

You can see how easy the twist of the metal wire is to attach to the chain and how the briolette stone has been threaded onto that wire. With practice, you can get the hang of making those twists and you can whip out necklaces like this in literally about five minutes. Talk about assembly line gifts! You could make an entire set for all your bridesmaids. Or pick up different stones and make a rainbow of necklaces for a very special friend (or keep them for yourself. We would never tell.)

We made ornaments like this using labels decoupaged on blank porcelain gift tags found at the local fabric/craft store. Then I put the name of the recipient directly on the with a metallic Sharpie marker.

There is a lot of focus on “going green” and understandably so, considering how much waste is generated each year by the phenomenal amount of paper that is used when we wrap all those Christmas presents and put a tag on each one. Hey, look right here for the first in line to say how much we love wrapping up and making all the presents look so wonderful. We adore that part of Christmas - love it so much! But what an incredible waste. We actually have a running joke around our house … at the end of the present opening frenzy, we call what is left over the Mountain of Greed. The wrappings, the boxes and bags and ribbons and whatnot that is piled up waiting for the garbage bag…that is the Mountain of Greed.

These permanent gift tags are one way that we are trying to reduce the amount of waste that we generate each year. One idea we used for tags was taking the baby pictures of the recipient in place of the name. One side of the porcelain gift tag was decoupaged with their baby picture, the other side was my baby picture. It made it a LOT of fun to figure out who got what present and who it was really from. And because the gift tags are porcelain, we can use the tags through the year for a number of other purposes also.

Consider doing something like this in place of all the wasteful paper wrap and tags we throw away throughout the course of the year.

Materials Needed:

* 1-1/2 yards red gimpe braid
* 1-1/2 yards of red satin ribbon for bow (if you do not tie bows well, purchase a pre-tied bow)
* 10 packages of red ribbon roses
* Heart frame (this project uses a 7 x 7 inch frame)
* 1/4 yard of red satin fabric
* 1/2 yard of batting
* Glue gun with plenty of glue sticks
* 1 inch cabone ring

Cut batting to same shape as frame and glue to frame. Cut satin fabric 2 inches larger than frame, but do not cut the center from the fabric. Lay fabric on work surface, right side down.

Lay frame over fabric, batting side down. Begin gluing fabric to outer edge of frame. Glue small sections at the top, bottom and sides of heart first, then go back and continue to glue rest of fabric. (Fabric will gather and wrinkle, but will be covered later with backing.)

Cut center out of heart fabric, leaving one inch extra around entire opening. Clip fabric every 1/2 inch around opening, staying 1/8 inch from the frame (these cuts will be your gluing tabs). Glue each tab to back of frame. Repeat directions to cover back board of heart, omitting steps for center opening.

Glue red gimpe braid to edge of each heart starting at top of heart and continuing around entire edge (tape the ends of braid to prevent raveling). Glue front and back sections of frame. Remember to leave the top edge of the heart open to allow for picture insertion.

Glue roses to entire front of frame starting with the outside edge to the inside edge and then fill in the middle. Start and end gluing at the point where you will eventually glue your bow. The bow will hide the area that is not covered by roses (see the photo). Tie a bow with satin ribbon and glue to frame. Glue tassels to bow and glue cabone ring to back for hanger.

It is the end of summer and fall is finally on the way. The heat of summer finally broke here in the southern United States and we are actually almost thirty degrees cooler today than we have been for the last week. Unbelievable, but wonderful for those of us that prefer it cooler. However, we still have a need and a desire to see the beauty of the summer season and all the hard work of our garden season. If you have any wonderful rose blooms still available, or if you have dried blooms available, this might make a wonderful gift from your garden.

Materials Needed:

* 1 shadow box (purchased)
* Dried rose buds or dried rose blossoms (amount depending on size of purchased shadow box)
* Glue gun and sticks

To make assembly easier, keep the shadowbox flat on your workspace until ready to hang.

Prepare roses by cutting off entire stem. Starting on one side of the shadowbox, glue roses to backing. Working in rows, slowly fill shadowbox, taking care to fill as tightly together as possible.

If desired, alternate rows with alternative color roses or even alternative dried flowers.