Mandalas for yarn bombing – free hoops!

I never really know how best to title a post.  Hopefully this one got your attention.

One thing I am easily able to do is sit and knit or crochet.  I can do it in the car on the way to appointments and while sitting in waiting rooms.  A couple of knitting groups locally do yarn bombing – google it, it is colourful and cool.  I’ve not made anything for past efforts but I thought I would have a go for the upcoming ones.  I liked the idea of a mandala but also liked the idea of recycling stuff and not buying anything new for the project.

I am not totally sure how the idea came to me, but in thinking of what might be used as the ring to attach and stretch the mandala I had an AHA! moment.

Aren’t these fun!?

Believe it or not, the rings are the rim cut from one of our endless supply of huge coffee cans from Costco.

And while the edge of the rim is the choice piece. you can get other rings from the lid too.

The inner rings are quite flat and less rigid, but they do more or less work.

I have also experimented with other plastic lids, like these from Pringles:

Quite small, those.  I have a tub of Fage 0% Yogurt in the fridge and that lid is just about CD size so looking forward to seeing how that works out.  I did crochet and add some mandalas to the shiny side of a CD, and covered the back with a plain white label, so I didn’t have to use two CDs back to back and crochet two mandalas and they turned out quite nice as well.

My sort of idea is to use a picture that I saw as inspiration – one that I struggle to find again.  So often the links on Pinterest that show this image don’t go anywhere or seem to go to some totally unrelated thing.  I just tried to search for the “beaded curtain” words that led me to it originally and it does not come up!  I did find a link in my search history and hopefully it will show up here:

If I wanted to make this to go over a shop door, for example, it’d be pretty expensive to buy the rings. But a lot of those rings could work as the lid-rims.  and what’s more, I might have a line on some big rims for massive pots.  Not only cheap but using recycled things too!  Win-Win.

Bearing in mind this is all for outside yarn-bomb installations and not meant to be work for sale, I am pretty happy with where I am heading!

Been a while… Tear off calendars for 2019

I have been busy and also had a little relapse of my NAM so blogging has not been my top priority.  But I did manage to make a couple of sheets of tear-off blocks for 2019.  Those of you who like to make calendar related gifts might find them useful.  There are older posts, like this one,  that show how to make a tear-off calendar from cut month blocks.

I’ve tried to make these simple to cut this time, just cut along the lines.

Here is the flat-topped circle one:

And here is a version with a bit more space around it, in case you want to make your tear-offs a bit special, like these:

You can see how I do that here. There is also a cute, simple foldable calendar card project in that post, so worth having a look anyway.

And here are the plain block ones:

No idea why the line looks darker here.  I doesn’t look like that in the PDF preview!

I hesitate to say the dreaded C-word (not THAT one, the DECEMBER one!) but if you make gifts, that Calendar card project is one you can easily whip up and have a stash on hand in case you need an emergency gift!

Also bear in mind that many of the Project Life sized cards also make nice tear-off blocks:

and you can see other 2019 calendars here.

Have fun!

PS I am still more or less keeping up with the book folding templates, getting a few requests every day, just in case people think I am not doing them because I am not posting about them.  I am.