Just finished this pillow. It's been staring me in the face every day. All that was left to do was to stitch down the yellow flower and two leaves. That's it! Today was the day! It's a simple single crochet stitch, round and round, done in spiral fashion. A back, front and crocheted together with a shell border. I didn't even have a round pillow form, but I did have a square one. So I tucked in the corners and stitched them down. It worked perfectly. The pillow is crocheted from Lily's Sugar 'n Cream, variegated, Aloe Vera. It is one of those cotton yarns that has an odor, smell, scent - I don't like that. I don't go into a store and say, "let me smell your yarn". Do people do that? So why the need for scent? But I liked the color, and that was that. It reminds me of summer, cottage living.
As for the dumpster diving, it wasn't actually a dive, more of a reach my arm in and pull out that sweet, vintage, pale pink chenille full-sized bedspread. I don't know how old it is, but probably a good 50-60 years. When Aunt Grace's house was being emptied last summer, her two sons thought it was garbage and threw it in the dumpster. I saw it peeking out later that evening and went over to give it a good look. Well, there were only a couple of small stains on it. I snatched that thing lickety split and made a b-line up my sidewalk. It was going home for a nice, warm bubble bath. After coming out of the dryer, all soft and snuggly, the stains had magically disappeared! I felt a little guilty about swiping it and made a confession. They told me that if I found anything else I wanted to help myself. I might have found a few more things.
S.W.A.K.
Don't forget to visit Frannie at CuteKatyDolls on YouTube!
A while back I found a cast-off, lunch-sized picnic basket at Goodwill (thrift store). I don't know how old the basket is, but it appears to have been around the block a few times. I paid $2.50. Of course, I didn't take any before photos because I was too excited with my new found treasure and wanted to get started with the revamp right away. You can take my word for it that it was in desperate need of some TLC.
Job number one was to gut the basket, thoroughly clean it, sand down the lid and paint it my favorite color.
Then I went to work crocheting numerous roses. There are more flowers on the basket than you can actually see because I doubled some of them up to make them appear fuller and give it some various heights.
The flowers would need a platform to be attached to, so I made one using recycled cardboard and a layer of thin foam rubber which I covered with a scrap of natural colored cotton batting. I used hot glue to adhere.
Next, I added a trim of cotton lace around the edge to hide any batting that might be visible.
After finding the center of the purse, I hot glued the platform to the top.
Around the edge I put some very sweet, pale pink velvet ribbon, just to finish it off. The ribbon went on very neatly and I tacked it on with two sequin pins at the very back - no glue clumps here!
Then came the fun part of flower arranging.
Each flower is attached with a pearl head pin, some pink some white. The leaves are also attached with pins, this way if anything should get dirty I can easily remove the flower for hand washing or simply make a new one, repin and send it on its merry way.
All the flowers are crocheted from various cottons such as my very favorite Tahki Cotton Classic, Paton's Grace, and maybe some crochet cottons as well as some embroidery floss.
On the front I added a pink umbrella dangle charm (which I found at Michaels) as well as some pink cherries to give the purse a front and back.
I have been stopped by more people than you can imagine (both men and women) who compliment my purse and want to know where I got it. I proudly tell them.
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