Thank goodness I had to send off gifts to NY state by December 15th, otherwise, I would have never finished this gift!

The rug is the “Labyrinth Rug” from Leigh Radford’s _Knitted_Gifts_. I let my friend Sarah borrow the book while she was in the hospital, so I purchased the internal cotton cording without the pattern. The cording I got was much smaller than what the pattern called for, and this meant more knitting and more stitching the cord together as a rug.

The finished size is just over 26 inches. It is small for a rug, but as the circle winds around, it just takes longer to get another inch. Those last two inches almost did not get done.

Gave the rug to my mother for Christmas, and she said she was going to hang it on the wall. Now she says she just keeps it on a table. I think this would be a really cool way to upholster a piece of furniture.

I want to make one for myself someday. I still have 20 ft of cord left. Maybe I should double it up.

I’ve got several bigger projects on the horizion, and I finished the Aran Skirt last night. Pictures to follow tomorrow!

Up next is the Green Gable Hoodie. Thank goodness Redlipstick.net posted a link to the pattern before Vogue Knitting snapped it up! I bought the yarn for it 2 months ago with a gift certificate Tyrone got me for my birthday.

Back to the CRAFTSMAS pictures! I think I may try to sell this pattern? Of course, the yarn is free, so that makes it pretty much unsellable. I have the pattern written somewhere, so maybe I’ll post it to the site. I made Ruth and Sara yoga mat bags!

I really have a soft spot in my heart for that recycled-bag plastic “yarn”. The more colors, the better. Ruth got an orange stripe in hers since it was her wedding color.

This year, after many years of saying, “we should make our own bath bombs,” I finally purchased the items needed. The friend who always said we should make them propmptly went to the hospital for a month, so I went on alone.

I tried using notmartha.org’s instructions. They were helpful to a point, and made more sense after I tried to make them once. The site references another recipe, Brenda Sharpe’s, which helped even more the second time.

Pictures! Prep:

You have to wear a mask, because the citric acid flies everywhere and burns your nose! 




Here are my hints. Make smaller bath bombs. Hobby Lobby had many sizes of clear round ornament “molds”. The smaller the bomb, the less likely it was to melt under chemical reaction, or just instability.  (I tried the 100mm, 80mm and 60mm sizes.) Three or four of the above perfect-looking bombs in the above picture “melted”. ASIDE: save the melted hard remains, and use it for yourself. The baths are perfectly satisfying, just not fizzy.




 If the bombs don’t “stick” together, DO NOT keep adding drops/sprays of glycerin or water until they do. The reaction means that the proportion of ingredients is constantly changing, leaving a hard crust at the bottom of your mix.

At the end I just had a sort of oozing mess, which I figured would crust, so I put them into little truffle holders:

The tiny bombs continued to fizz through the night, grew together, and were useless as gifts.  This is what being crafty is all about: EXPERIMENTATION!

Final pieces of advice: Give up on the perfectly round bombs. Use the correct proportion from the recipe, and then just mold the mix into half-bombs, cup cake pan indentations, or measuring cups. Give each bomb a few minutes to settle and react to form an outer “crust” and then lightly pop them out onto a pan with a towel above and below the bomb to dry.  Keep these puppies covered for a day before packaging them.

Stefanie Japel from glampyre.com also made cocoa ones. She put them in star-shaped cupcake bins. I want to try that next.

Merry Craftsmas to you all! It was fun, but I am glad it is over now!

Ended up crafting almost all of the gifts. If the gifts were not crafted, most had some sort of made-in-the USA craft influence. For instance, we got Ty’s father a Sailor Jerry Tattoo art book, and we had a picture blown up and framed for my father and brother.

My sister even topped-off “Craftsmas” by bringing blank shirts, acrylic paint, and freezer paper to do freezer paper screen-printing. The pictures of those shirts are to follow.

Here’s one of the finished gifts…A sun hat for my mother who really likes floppy sunhats. This one isn’t very floppy. It was my first experience with fusible interfacing, and a valuable technique for when I decide to make my derby hat.

She didn’t realize I made the hat until I pointed it out. As a former Home Econ teacher, she gave it an A+!