Sixth and Final Handmade Winner: Yarn Box

 

Here is my final giveaway project! I made this yarn box for a friend I met at North Bennet Street. We were there for the same two years, she was down the hall from me studying Piano Technology while I was in the Bookbinding department.

  

From time to time I noticed Emily working on lovely knitting projects and discovered that she is an avid knitter. I found a little bit of inspiration while browsing Etsy one day and immediately thought of making something for my knitting piano tech friend! I found a shop called Darrielles Clay Art filled with beautiful stoneware pottery. Something that caught my eye was this yarn holder. It intrigued me and I ended up searching the web and finding other yarn holders here and there.

  

I thought it would be fun to transform this idea into my own craft. So I wrote to Emily to find out about what size a yarn ball would be at it's largest and got to work.

  

The ball of yarn fits into the box with the end of the yarn threaded through the opening slot. The lid fits snugly into the top of the box if you want the yarn to stay put, or it can pop off if you'd like to take the yarn out!

By the way, if you live in Texas and are looking for an excellent piano technician, Townsend Piano Service is the place to go!

Reusing Household Containers

Last week it was time to make new batches of paste and methyl cellulose and I was pleased to discover a couple of containers from my stash that were the perfect sizes and match beautifully! Aside from patiently waiting for their new use, they have something in common -- olive oil! The paste container was a Fleishmann's olive oil spread container, and the quart jar was for Kraft Mayo with olive oil.

After my olive green excitement, I took inventory of how my container saving habits have come in handy. This is our cinnamon sugar shaker, formerly of Parmesan cheese fame.

I'm pretty sure this was originally a tomato can. I hang my pva brushes, bristle down, from the edge of my bench, but this tin snugly holds the rest of my brushes. I like how the ridges on the tin are similar to the crimped ferrules of the paint brushes. I didn't quite know how to describe the silver part on the brushes, so "crimped ferrules" is the result of googling "paint brush anatomy".

The crimped ferrule look alike is all covered up on this old soup can.

An empty Puffs box was turned into tape central.

Some paste paper covers my jar'o'pens.

We live in a place that doesn't offer recycling services, so until we find a plant, a stack of jars and cans is growing under our sink! We are focusing on the second part of the recycling mantra -- Reuse! I also have a healthy pile of flattened household cardboard boxes that I use for packaging all of my sold items from Etsy and Ebay. Rhonda Miller's Earth Day post provided a link for the Trans-Canada Etsy team's blog on which Laura Bucci shares a post about making mailers from cereal boxes. I usually make mine a little differently, using the box continuously and hiding the tabs on the inside of the package. Next time you need to send something, I highly reccommend this, it's very satisfying!