Scent To You

The picture behind is 'Battersea Power Station By Night'

Reed diffusers are all the rage at the moment, with people trying to eliminate artificial air fresheners from their homes.  However, the ones on the lower end of the market can often contain alcohol (if the oil is stated to be ‘highly flammable’ it most likely contains alcohol.)

The flip side of that is the purer oils can cost upwards of £20, so why not save some money in the long run and make your own?

All you need is:

Bamboo skewers

A small clean glass bottle

Aromatherapy base oil

A selection of essential oils

Start by giving the bottle a thorough clean, particularly if it’s a wine bottle as you don’t want the former contents messing with your final scent. 

Now it’s time to mix the scents.

If you have a few essential oils and are unsure if the scents will mix well, remove the caps, hold the bottles tightly together and waft under your nose.  This should give you an indication of how well the oils will blend. I personally used a mixture of vanilla and sweet apple, which created something close to the aroma of apple crumble.

Place half a cup of aromatherapy base oil, such as sweet almond, into a mixing jug and, slowly, start adding essential oils: 20 drops is a good starting point. Stir and inhale the scent.  Is it where you want it to be, or does it need a little more?  Keep repeating this adding and stirring process until you have your desired scent.

You can use ordinary barbecue bamboo skewers for this project, but be sure to snip off the sharp end - partly because pointy things are dangerous and, more importantly, to open up the end of the skewer, allowing the oil to flow more freely.

I used about 10 skewers, which was around the right number to ensure each reed got some space in the bottom of the bottle.

Pour your scented oil into the bottle, add your reeds and you are pretty much done!

For the first couple of days, be sure to rotate the reeds top to tail, and back again, to guarantee that they are entirely covered with the oil.  This ensures that the oil has a channel to travel up through.

Enjoy the aroma!

Shake your pom poms!

This is an easy (if somewhat time consuming!) crochet project that won me a second prize in the Instructables Fibre Arts Contest. (Yay!)

It all starts with one giant ball of wool...

This is the full list of what you'll need:

A fair amount of wool (I used a giant ball 400g. 840 metres/920 yards) 

A size 5 (H8) crochet hook

A sewing needle

Matching thread and...

Monumental patience

 I call this an ‘easy challenge’ because it only takes a few minutes to learn the skills to make the snood, but the project can (and will) be time consuming. 

We start by creating a long chain of stitches.  If you have never crocheted before, here’s a basic instruction on how to do so.  I wanted my snood to be long enough to be looped twice and still retain a certain amount of ‘drape’, so, I made a chain three times the width of my shoulders.  (You really should aim for an odd number of stitches, but I always get distracted and lose count!)

Once you have your chain you are going to wrap the yarn around the hook once and insert the hook into the eighth stitch from the hook.  You are now going to wrap the yarn around the hook once, again, and then pull the hook out of the stitch.  You should now have two loops on your needle.  Wrap the yarn around the hook and pull it through two of the loops. You should (again) have two loops on your hook.  Wrap the yarn one more time and pull it through the remaining two loops.  Congratulations, you just did a double crochet!  Now do two chain stitches and your ready to work along the row.

With your two chain stitches completed, start the double crochet process again in the third stitch away from the completed double crochet.  This row is the one that takes the longest as it’s the one that requires the most amount of concentration - it gets easier as time goes on!  

When you get to the end of the row, you may find that you have more or fewer chain stitches to work with (if you weren’t counting them), just try to keep the stitch as even as possible in relation to the other stitches. 

When starting a new row, chain five and double crochet into the top of the first double crochet.  Then continue as before - chain two; double crochet into the top on the the stitch below.  When you reach the end of the subsequent rows, give the corner a little tug to ensure that you’re aiming your hook in the right place - it’s really easy to accidentally change the shape while turning.

Let’s have a quick recap of the double crochet. Wrap. Poke. Wrap. Pull. Wrap. Through two. Wrap. Through two. Chain. Chain.

Now, all you have to do is KEEP GOING for about twenty rows.  You will probably feel as though you’re not making any progress from about row ten, but it’s purely psychological ;-)

 Once you’ve done the long haul, tie off the piece by extending the loop, cutting the work away from the ball of yarn and pulling the loose end through the loop.  Then intertwine the tail of the yarn along one edge of your work.  The easiest way to do this is with a tapestry needle, but, if you don’t have access to one, you can use your crochet hook to do the same (I did have a tapestry needle, once, but sometimes tools get restless and feel a need to ‘move on’, and they leave without saying goodbye…)

Now that the crocheting is done, it’s time to start on the pompoms.

For the size of pompom I have on my snood I used a regular sized tin can as a template.  Draw around this, twice, onto thick cardboard.  I used a seam gauge to ensure that I kept the inner circle even.  Cut these out and your template is ready.

Place the two circles together, cut a length of yarn and start wrapping it around the edge of the circles.  Keep adding yarn until you can no longer see the cardboard.  Carefully snip along the outer edge and cut another, shorter piece of yarn from the ball.  Slide this shorter piece in between the two pieces of cardboard and fasten with a knot.  Then pull each piece of cardboard away, and you should be left with a fluffy ball!  Trim off any really scraggly untidy bits and repeat… And repeat…And repeat… 

Whee!

I ended up using about twenty pompoms, but I made them in batches so that I could start sewing them on when the constant doughnut wrapping was starting to grate on my nerves.  Which ever way you chose, you will eventually need to sew them on to one of the long edge - for this you will just need a regular needle and thread.  Be sure that you are catching enough of the pompom when attaching them to the snood.

Did I not mention that you’d need patience?

Once all the balls are on we can close the loop.  I waited to do this bit because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to add a twist before closing, or to keep it flat.  I chose flat, but you can place a twist in easily if you prefer.

We close the loop, essentially, the same way that we intertwined the tail into one of the edges.

And we are done!

East, West, Homemade Is Best!

Like most crafters I always feel the urge to get creative over the festive season: but this year I knew I would be working on one large sewing project, which meant that I would have to keep all of the other crafts relatively simple. 

So, what does one do when one needs to create something that's both fabulous and flippin' easy??? Why, one turns to Martha Stewart, of course!

I decided to put together a 'pamper hamper' for my sister-in-law and her two adolescent daughters using some of the bath treat ideas from Martha Stewart Living. I live close to a herbal apothecary so I decided to make some of the 'tub teas', and bath salts, using lavender, lemon verbena and chamomile (and, for the salts, some essential oils that I already had to hand). I purchased two packets of empty teabags online via Amazon, and some jars of various sizes, from IKEA. I used the smaller jars for the bath teas, fitting three into each jar, and used the larger jars for the salts. I tried my hand at the 'bath bomb' recipe as well, but couldn't quite get the colour to set as I wanted (they're yellow 'cakes' in the jar, but I was trying to make them blue...) - I packaged them up anyway ;-) 

Bath fizzes, bath salts, hand soaps and tub teas...

I also decided to add some simple 'melt and pour' soaps to the hamper, using a pure vegetable soap base from Mystic Moments and adding a few drops of essential oils and a swirl of food colouring. Needless to say, the gift basket went down a treat!

However, my main creative concern this Christmas was assembling Vogue 8940 for my husband...

I had, quite literally, lost track of time as the December days skipped along the calendar, and so found myself with less than two weeks to get this surprise completed. Luckily, my local sewing emporium had the pattern in stock, but, as I am used to drafting patterns rather than using commercial ones, it seemed to take forever to lay the pattern out and cut the fabric, which stunted my progress a little: I had to resort to banishing him from our home on Christmas Eve in order to do the lining and buttons!

Thankfully, though, he loved the outcome :-)

Trust me, that is him looking pleased....

Not sure how I'm going to top this next year....

Project Skate - part 1

One of the problems with being a DIYer (and I’m sure many of you will relate to this) is that you get to a point where you feel as though you may as well hand-make everything.  You start to mentally reverse engineer almost everything you see, and a never ending list of future projects sits permanently in your mind.

That is why I decided that I was going to acquire a new pair of roller skates the hard way… I’d obviously watched a few too many roller skate building tutorials online - but once the idea was in my head I, simply, could not get it out of my head.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the skates, especially the fact that they’re ‘tailored’ to me, but as this was my first skate project, I tripped over a few unexpected hurdles, no pun intended, (one of which was, admittedly, a dead power drill) - which led to a bit of frustration - which then led to a bit of ‘mood shopping’…

Anyway, this ‘tutorial’ should ensure that whoever decides to do the same shouldn’t have to do it ‘the hard way’ ;-)

These were my tools and supplies:

One old pair of roller-skates 

One pair of skate shoes/trainers

One skate tool or ratchet

One pair of Sure-Grip insoles

One 15mm spanner/wrench

One 10mm spanner/wrench

Electric drill

Marker pens/pencils

4mm bolts and washers, and nuts (if needed)

Hack saw (if needed)

Locktite Threadlocker 

I started by removing the wheels.  I had to hold one of the nuts with the 15mm spanner while using the skate tool to loosen the other.

I then proceeded to remove the skate plate from the boot, and set the boot to one side.

I took the skate shoe and removed the insole.  I then placed the skate plate (from the old roller skates) on the sole of one of the skate shoes, and, when I was sure that I had it in the right place, marked the sole through the screw holes.  

I repeated this action with the second shoe; luckily for me, the sole had a very distinct pattern, so it was fairly easy for me to tell if I was getting a good match on both shoes.

Then, with the help of my Hubby, I drilled the holes in the shoes.  We stuffed the shoe with scrap fabric to ensure that we didn’t drill into the upper.

The next step was placing the Sure Grip insole into the shoe and marking through the holes I had just made, so that the drilling process could be repeated.

This is one of the hurdles…  I removed the screws from the old skates, and the next item on the agenda was to, simply, transfer those screws into the new shoes.  However, as you can see from the first picture, the original skates were more street hockey than roller disco.  They had quite a prominent heel, and a very thin sole at the front.  This meant that the screw plate for the heel was too long and the one for the front was so short it didn’t even penetrate the shoe let alone reaching the skate plate.  I discovered this at around 10pm - that’ll teach me for not planning ahead….

The following day I made a trip to our local ironmongers and bought a handful of bolts, nuts and washers.  I wasn’t entirely sure of the length, so I decided that too long is easier to deal with than too short. You can always cut down. but you can't cut up...

A little bit of elbow grease and they all fitted in nicely :-)  The original insoles then went back in as the bolts I had to use for the front were not flat headed.  I also decided to lace the shoes back up while they were still static.

On goes the plate and out comes the hacksaw… 

This is also the time to add some kind of adhesive to the bolts as the vibration you’ll create whilst using the skate will cause the nuts to unwind.

Almost there - just gotta get the wheels back on… 

WAIT!!! 

On the ‘night of the ill fitting screws’ and after what seemed like a lot of effort, I decided that I couldn’t put those cheapo, crunchy wheels onto my new skates (they were the sort of wheels that have the bearings sealed so that there’s no real way to clean or oil them properly, making them both difficult and slightly dangerous) which is where the ‘mood shopping’ comes in…

I headed off to kateskates.co.uk and treated myself to a full set of new Ventronic 'Ventro Pro' wheels and Kate’s Skates ABEC 7 bearings and….

BOOM!

I am LOVING these!!!  

Now, what can I make with those old wheels? ;-)

POST SCRIPT!

If you’re eager to do something similar, but don’t have an old pair of skates to hand (and you’re not keen on trawling through Ebay) then you can build a set of skates from the ground up with the separate components.  Almost all of these can be found at Kate’s Skates, the insoles can be found at Skate Attack:

A skate plate kit (including all the fixings)

Wheels

Bearings (they usually come in packs of eight and you’ll need sixteen for a full set of wheels)

A pair of skate shoes or trainers

Suregrip insoles (or a piece of wood or metal cut to the same shape and size as the shoe’s original insole)

Happy Rolling!