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Marianne's remarkable bread bag hat

Marianne’s remarkable bread bag hat

Clothing & Crafts / By

Marianne's remarkable bread bag hat

Meet Marianne, a talented and resourceful country woman who makes the most of whatever she finds and creatively uses it. Her recent creation is a floppy hat made from recycled plastic bread bags. “I didn’t have any wool so I used an empty bread bag and when another bread bag became empty, I added more to it,” she said. The result is an attractive and unusual hat that has been crocheted in one piece.

TO MAKE THE HAT:

Firstly trim the top of a plastic bread bag. Then cut around the bag in a continuous spiral creating a long strip of plastic about 2.5 centimetres wide and roll it up into a ball. Crochet the plastic strip into a flat circle to create the top of the hat’s crown using two in one stitch. Then crochet one in one stitch to create the side of the crown. When the crown is the length you want, start adding on extra stitches and keep adding on until the brim of the hat is the width you want. When the plastic strip runs out, tie it to another strip from another bread bag and crochet over the knot so it’s hidden inside the stitch.

Marianne's remarkable bread bag hat

Marianne's remarkable bread bag hat

 

 

 

Kathy's tree decorations

Kathy’s tiny stocking decorations are an ideal gift to make for Christmas

Clothing & Crafts / By

Kathy lives and works in a small country town in Victoria. She is creative, interesting and an absolute whiz on a sewing machine, a skill she learnt from her mother and dressmaking classes at school.

Her beautiful tiny stocking Christmas tree decorations are made from scraps of fabric, tape, lace and bias binding. They are an ideal gift to make for Christmas and can be filled with treats to make them even more appealing. Chocolates, $1 or $2 gold coins, written notes, poems or jokes, small toys and novelty items are just a few of the things that can be placed inside them.

To Make:

The pattern is drawn over a group of 2cm squares and includes a seam allowance of around 12mm. The same fabric used for the front of the stockings can be used for the back or you can use a completely different fabric. The length of the ties to hang them with is about 10cms long then folded and tape or bias binding is used. Lace or fabric trimming around the top can be open over the back side seam. Use your own creativity to decorate the stockings before sewing them together. It could include embroidering someone’s name to make it more personal.

A child's journal

A child’s journal can be the gift of a lifetime

Health & Family / By

A nice thing to do for a child is to give them a special journal to write in at the beginning of each year and then keep each one. It’s a lovely way to help them learn valuable skills and the entire collection can be handed to them as a special gift when they reach 18 or 21 years old.

Provide them with a nicely bound book that has blank pages with faint lines. You can rule off larger lines for them while they are very young. Encourage them to write something inside each day or at least each week. They could start with writing the day, date and time at the top of the page and then anything that comes into their mind underneath. It might be something they have done or seen or the way they feel. It doesn’t matter if they fill the page or only write a few lines. They could then illustrate it with a drawing underneath or on the opposite page. It can be colour or black and white. If they misspell anything, avoid correcting it. Allow them to correct it themselves but only if it’s something they want to do. You don’t need to wait until they are school age to start; their first one may only have two or three words and a picture on each page. It will still be a valuable learning experience for them and a beautiful item to keep.

Your child’s journal is an educational exercise that will teach them naturally about the days of the week, months of the year and time. It will help develop their reading and writing skills, their observation and drawing skills and later it will become part of a beautiful collection you can hand to them as a gift when they are adults. It’s lovely then for them to be able to look back through their journals and read their childhood thoughts, to remember the things they experienced and to see how their skills developed throughout their growing years.

Wendy Morriss