Keri Smith’s Wish Jar Journal has a link to Cynthia Malaran’s webpage today. My favorite part of it is the Furry Laptop howto. I feel compelled to try it on my faithful powerbook.

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I know it looks like I got this idea from Craftster, but it’s a coincidence. I had this nice wool jacket my mom got me, but my dear husband put it in the wash and it felted. The felt turned out to be pretty nice, though, so I cut it up and made a scarf and mittens. I made the scarf out of the two arms (you can see how the cuffs make a nice edging at the ends) and a few shorter pieces from the body that I sewed together. It was a little uneven along the edges where I sewed the pieces together, so I trimmed it up. For the mittens, I traced around my hand on a piece of tracing paper, giving it about an extra inch all around, and cut it out as a pattern. Then I pinned it to the felt and cut out 4 pieces. Then I sewed each pair together on my machine. They turned out a little snug, but my hands do fit, and after a few wearings, they’ve stretched to fit even better.

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I got the kit to make these on sale from Martha by Mail. (I think they’re sold out now.) They’re pretty easy to make, except you have to have the velvet presses. All you do is iron some interfacing onto the wrong side of two squares of velvet, put the interfaced velvet on the press, and let the iron sit on it (I used a dishtowel as a pressing cloth) for about 30 seconds. Then you glue one embossed piece to one unembossed piece, cut out the shape, and stick the ends of the ribbon between the two pieces.

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I don’t know what it is about these little bags from Cut + Paste. I like the furry one the best. I should get some fake fur to play around with.

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Oh, the Sunny and Windy books by Robin Mitchell and Judith Steedman are so cute. After longing after them for a few weeks (see earlier post), I got them from Buy Olympia when I noticed that Sunny was listed as out of print on Amazon. Buy Olympia included a cool bookmark with the order! Now I want to make my own little doll dioramas and take pictures of them. Sunny came with a CD, but I haven’t listened to it yet. The leaf says there will eventually be 5 books total; the other three will be Chinook (Amazon says it’ll be out this month), Gail, and Snowy.

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You get a free bookmark if you fill out a survey at If’n Books + Marks. They’re a cool shop so you should go visit them even if you aren’t motivated by free loot. I particularly like their bookplates.

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I got some craft instructions from Dub & Sam for a bunch of tiny books. I also got a pack of elastics with metal tips that you can use to adapt notebooks. The templates for the little books are not really anything you couldn’t figure out yourself, but there are a lot of good ideas included, and they were pretty cheap.

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I’ve been coveting the Winter Village Kit from Martha by Mail for years now. I made a few buildings using the patterns in the December 2000 issue, but the kit always seemed more glamorous, if expensive at $49. Finally, though, the Haunted Village Kit went on sale ($24, plus a 10% off coupon.), and I couldn’t resist. It is the exact same little houses and trees but with different colors of paint, and tombstones instead of snowmen.

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