Reuseable & Recycleable shopping bag

I made this reusable shopping bag  patterned after the brown paper bag and added handles. (next time I'm adding some padding to the handles)  It can even have a brown paper bag for a liner.  Using a paper liner means you don't have to launder the cloth bag as often.  A recent segment on a morning news program discussed the cleanliness issues of using reusable shopping bags, laundering and lining them are a couple of solutions.  We usually have some of these brown paper bags because when we forget our reusable bags we always ask for paper (where available) because I recycle them in the garden (more on that in a minute).  Now they can be reused as liners first and then off to the garden .

Paper bags in the garden:  I put them down as a weed barrier and scatter some mulch on top to hide them.  They decompose nicely after they do their job and we use less mulch this way.  

Felted Rocks Tutorial

Felted Rocks Tutorial  Here is a tutorial for felting rocks.  This is not the one I used, but I can't find the one I first saw.  I think it has been deleted.  This one is very similar.

This is the third kind of felting that I have done.  In my first knitting class we knitted and felted a bag.  In the second class, a hat.  Since then I have felted some old wool sweaters and blazers to use for other projects.  The baby shoes, HERE were made from wool from one of the blazers.  If you have accidentally shrunk/felted a wool/cashmere item, I have another project in mind.  Don't throw them away, I need them. 

Felted Rocks

I saw this post about felted rocks for checkers and decided to try it myself
Homespun Checkers

I did not want to hand sew and these squares turned out kinda wonky, not sure I like that.  I had a couple of issues with the assembly and think I might try it again sometime.  Making the felted rocks was a ton of fun.  I thought this might be fun for the grandchildren to try, but it was a bit more challenging than I anticipated. 

Monogramed Coasters

Here is a pile of monogramed coaster sets I made on commission this year.  Fun project.  When I can't come up with anything new to add to my blog, I'm going to go through my photos and add something from there.  Now if I could just find a way to organize my photos (and the time, because I think it just might take years to do that) and remember to take photos of the things I've made.  All too often they leave here before I remember to document them, sigh.