1. To make a meal using only ingredients I’ve grown, raised, caught or killed myself.
2. To travel to a place on my “top ten places to go before I die” list.
3. Finish writing my second novel.
4. Learn how to make sausages – wet English style ones and cured ones too.
5. Spend at least a day fishing out on the North Sea.
6. Finally finish learning how to drive.
7. Make a full outfit’s worth of clothing for myself – including spinning any wool used.
8. Learn how to program and make a mini-game/application using Ruby.
9. Climb a mountain or at least a jolly big hill.
10. Participate more in the real world – plan/run a real life green event or scheme.

We needed some hankies and I remembered I had an old pink gingham school shirt in my scrap bag.

I’d got the shirt secondhand from a charity shop in Liverpool in about 1999 but I’ve put a littleweight on since then so it didn’t fit any more, and it had little sweat stains under the arms and it had a run-in with something dyed at some point so wasn’t good enough for a charity shop. For something to wipe our noses on though? Perfect.

I got six hankies out of the sleeves and front panels – I’ll save the back for something else.

Just playing with some wire this afternoon. Fingers hurt now.

(Second button related post in a row, heh.)

I bought a new-to-me cord jacket at a charity shop in Portobello while visiting Edinburgh recently* and it had big feature buttons on it.

I very much liked the idea of feature buttons but unfortunately I didn’t like the actual buttons used. A trip to my usual haberdashery in Leeds revealed it would cost about £18 to replace them with my favourite big buttons from there – because it’s double breasted and so needs a billion of the buggers – so I thought I’d try making some myself.

A Fimo purchase off eBay later, I made myself some gloriously green buttons last night.

I played with a few different shapes/styles but I went with big, flat and simple in the end. I got seven big buttons (the six I need plus a spare) and two little ones out of a 56g block of Fimo. I divided the clay up and rolled it into a ball in my hands to loosen it up then squished it using a coffee can lid, with a layer of cling film inbetween so the clay wouldn’t stick. Then when it was the desired diameter and thickness, I placed a brass curtain ring on the clay, squished with the can lid again, then poked the holes with a cocktail stick. Twenty minutes in the oven later, my buttons were ready to rock and roll.

They’re not perfect but they’ll neither am I, so they’ll do :)

(Click for bigger pictures.)

* as I raved about on Things To Do Today, the Beach House Cafe there is AWESOME. Go! Go! Go!

Following a query from a reader yesterday, I’m doing a post on buttons on Recycle This next week and wanted to post a(n admittedly not great) picture of my most favourite earrings in the whole wide world ;)

I wear the dangly ones all the freakin’ time and they constantly get caught in my scarves but I love them. I should probably remake them so they’re a little less snaggy…

Before I trained my ears to accept dangly earrings though, I loved the studs – the buttons just glued onto stud findings. I like that the black ones were subtly buttony. ;)

I’ve made a few of these crocheted shopping bags now and am refining them further and further every time. They’re roughly based on Melinama’s pattern though (a note – she uses US stitches so SC = our DC; and her DC = our TC).

My favourite thing is they’re super quick and easy to make – I’m not particularly fast at crochet but I can make them in a few hours. They’re a great project for beginners too because you only need to know chain, double crochet and treble crochet (US = chain, SC and DC). They cemented my love of crochet because they were the first thing I made that produced something really different to knitting.

Most of my bags so far have been made out of some super cheap dishcloth-style cotton so the stretch comes from the stitches not the yarn. The beige for this one was heavier than normal so in comparison, I had to double up the purple so it didn’t look weird. A single thread of the purple would have been strong enough though. (I’ve also tried making a bag out of old carrier bags cut into strips and crocheted using a chunky hook. It was fun as a Recycle This-style project but something about it seems a little too stretchy for regular use.)

I like making the handles considerably wider than in Melinama’s pattern – TCs in each stitch up each side – and joined to the body in more than places than just the first chain/last slip stitch. If I had more patience, I’d probably do two rows of TCs up each side but by that point, I get over excited about the finishing line being so close. I do love how neat the top of the bag is though.

The bags crunch down pretty small when not in use but then stretch up quite a lot as soon as you put something heavy in them. Really pretty smashing.