My friend Holly and I had craft night the other night, and this time the assignment was puppets! I brought a stash of sweaters and other goodies I had over, and we set to creating. No pattern, no plans, these are a great way to have fun and get creative. And when we were done, the boys had some fun monster puppets to play with.

This would be a great project to do with friends for your own craft night, or to make with kids.

This tutorial is less ’step by step’ than…

Gorgeous weather this weekend means I spent the time away from the computer and mostly attending parties for kids and kids-to-be.

I love to make homemade gifts, and I had some fabulous die-cut felted sweaters that the lovely Colleen had graciously allowed me to cut up on her die cut machine a few weeks ago. So I did a cute appliqued elephant onesie for the baby-to-be’s shower, and for the 2 little girl birthday parties I made pins.

I’ll have a tutorial on making the pins up later this week!!

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Wanna play? If so, send me links to any good crafts or art you made, or stuff you’ve found you think is cool, related to all things cephalopod-ish (squid, octopus, cuttlefish, nautilus…), I’ll be linking to some of the cool stuff around the web this week.

Related: Free Download- Squid Valentine Cards.

So, in honor of Cephalopod week, here is another order of calamari in watercolor form.

And–since I think it’s the only cephalopod I’ve made craft-wise, I should re-introduce Henri the Hexapus… He’s a pupput and/or a stuffed toy made from recycled sweaters and lots of annoying to sew on buttons…. Go make…

My friend Holly and I had a little crafting party the other night while our husbands were out getting into trouble. We decided to make some cute little picture frame ornaments, using felted sweater scraps, scrap plastic, and pictures (small school pics work well for these)! These would make great little gifts for teachers, grandparents, aunts, or whoever loves your little one. Older kids can make these themselves too!

We documented the process, so here it is. You’ll see both of the prototype ornaments we made in the steps. Tutorial below pictures.

(PS: We have some great guest blogger how-to’s coming over…

While Dot is off remembering why she thinks ‘roughing it’ is a hotel without room service, you get a repeat of a project you might have missed!

Henri is a fun little puppet made out of recycled sweater sleeves – more on Henri here.. If you liked the hand drawn tutorial for the Monster Wreath, you might like this too!

Click through to see/download the full size instructions.

Materials needed:
Two coordinating sweaters, felted. 1 sleeve from each.
Felt for eyes
Buttons (if you’re up for the fun of sewing on all those suckers!)
Embroidery thread
I sewed everything but the embellishments on the machine.

Prototype Henri:

This can be…

You remember the Ele-purses, right?

Well, this is a Baby Ele-purse, and her name is Ginny. Please welcome her into the world.
I envisioned the pattern for this one the other day, and couldn’t stop myself from attempting immediately. Except for the strap, she’s made entirely from one felted sweater sleeve. If you guys are interested, I’ll do a tutorial..

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OK, I’ve been promising to post the kick-ass cool sweater snake I made the Boy for Christmas, and I’ve also been wanting to enter the Instructables Homemade Holidays challenge… so to kill two birds with one stone (metaphorically, of course, I wouldnt hurt the little birdies!) I’ve created the tutorial to make the snake as an Instructable. Here’s the LINKY!

This was a fun project, and The Boy loves it.

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This was a ultra quick project that I did because I wanted to bring a bottle of wine to a party, and wanted to include a cute wine bag. I’m sure someone has thought of this before, but I noticed my pile of sweaters sitting around from my sweater recycling projects (the elepurse, the snake, the future stuffed robot) and figured a sweater sleeve would make an ideal Wine Cozy!

The Process:
(You can see the original sweater used, in this previous post)
I held up a wine bottle to the sleeve to get an idea of the length, and cut it off…

I made another Elepurse, this time for Erin for Christmas. This one is made from thicker wool, which felted much heavier, so it’s smaller and sturdier. Also the original sweater was multicolored, and I like how that gave it a totally different look.

If you remember from before, here’s my original sweater haul:

Here is the sweater I chose for this purse, after felting*, and the process is below:

The process was pretty much the same as for the original Ele-purse. Click here for details. The only differences were that I wanted to just use the yellow for the trunk (there was an…

edit: Welcome to those who came over from Craftzine.. and Ciao to those from ri-creazione! 7/15: Welcome stumblers! We’ve done alot since December, check out some more recent stuff while you’re here!

So, I bought a whole bunch of sweaters from the thrift store the other day (half of me actually doing a project is forcing myself to buy supplies–cuz then the Guy bugs me to do the project so he doesn’t have to keep seeing the bag of supplies). But i digress… So I bought these sweaters because I want to do a sweater snake for the Boy, and i…