Still more craftiness

I haven’t accomplished a wealth of crafty things this week, but have a couple of items to share. First, dishcloths!

I found a wonderful pattern at a crafty blog, Princess Nimble-Thimble. If you are interested in checking this pattern out for yourself, look here:

Crocheted Dishcloth

When I found this pattern, I just couldn’t wait to get started. I only had white cotton yarn on hand, but that didn’t stop me. I dug out my H hook and started right in. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of that one. Almost as soon as it was finished, I wrapped it up as the first installment of a friend’s birthday gift. She loved it!

The next chance I got, I went shopping for colored cotton yarn. Here’s the dishcloth I made with the color called “Gumdrops”. (The pattern says each dishcloth will take 1 small ball of the yarn. I must crochet a lot larger than the pattern’s originator, because I ran out of yarn before the edging was finished. A friend suggested using white, which was a super idea.)


I switched to a G hook for the next one, in the color called “Sea Mist”. Isn’t it gorgeous? But I still ran out of yarn before the edging was finished. Fortunately, this one also looks nice with a white edging.

Also in this picture you see a partially crocheted dishcloth in the “Orange Sherbet” color. I’m using an F hook for this one, and am hoping I can do this one all in one color. I’ve bought about 6 more balls of yarn, all in different colors, and will have lots of fun making these for gifts! I’ve found them to be an ideal project for working on at the beach.

Also this week I managed to finish the clothespin bag I was planning to make. I’m not totally thrilled with the way it turned out, but it’s a vintage style pattern and it holds my clothespins just fine. It sure is a big improvement over my [purchased] ripped, held-together-with-safety-pins clothespin bag which I’ve been using. I have made other clothespin bags (out of dishtowels) for gifts and I like the look of them much better than this one, but it will do for now. The fabric came from my grandmother... isn’t it nifty? I imagine she planned on sewing aprons from it. I have used it to make a chair cover and now this clothespin bag. (I wasn’t able to use the bias tape of hers for this project, because it was all narrow, single-fold tape and this pattern called for extra wide double-fold tape.) The bag looks lumpy in the photo because it is already filled with clothespins!



Lastly, I wanted to mention this simple daily journaling idea. I read about it on Susan’s blog (By Grace) -- it’s an idea from Jewels at Eyes of Wonder.
Basically it involves using things like cutouts from magazines and catalogs, along with stickers and other goodies, to decorate pages of a loose-leaf sketchbook, leaving some room for journaling on the pages. Jewels’ post about this -- you can find it here -- Simple daily journaling
-- will give you all the details as to how she does this. I’ve started my own journal and have been really enjoying both decorating the pages and having a space to jot down some of the thoughts and happenings from each day. Here are a couple of my pages.


This is a very fun and relaxing activity. One of my ongoing prayer requests for myself is to nurture my creativity. I seem to really need to do something creative each day, and I feel the Lord would have me take time to nurture my creativity. This simple daily journaling has been really helping with that. (As a plus, I am getting rid of lots of my magazines I've been hoarding forever! I take what I want from them, then they're off to be recycled!)

I want to thank Shereen, at Waiting for Him for hosting Sew Crafty Fridays. My crafts, no matter how small and simple, are just the sort of thing I enjoy sharing with friends at my real kitchen table. Just this morning I was showing my dishcloths to my sister-in-law, who fell in love with the “Gumdrops” one and wants to learn to crochet just so she can make her own! She came up with a really neat idea to make these squares with the white border but without the picot edging and then sew them together to make an afghan. She says they are just too pretty to wash dishes with. These are just the sort of ideas friends share at a kitchen table. So thank you, Shereen, for making this possible. And I want to encourage others who are reading this to join in on Sew Crafty Fridays... the accountability has been a huge help to me!

Edited to add: Just wanted to say that if anyone tried the links in this post, the first 2 did not work. For some reason some extra stuff got put in with them (not by me). I just tried fixing them and they do work, as of right now, anyway!

Hope this didn't inconvenience anyone too badly.