Weekend crafting

We have had quite a few rain days here lately, which is great for the garden, and gave me some time to get back to crafting since the garden was way too wet to work in.

I have dyed this batch of white cotton yarn to make a secret self-striping project.  One of the few things I have left in my yarn stash is piles and piles of white cotton, so I have been experimenting with Rit dye as it is one of the few things I have heard of that dyes cotton.  I will share as this project progresses.

Maya, from maya made, has recently released a book:

(The sew and tell isn't really on the book cover, it is from one of her links)

 
On her recent blog tour for the book release, someone (I do apologize but I have searched and cannot find it again) made a floor pouf inspired by this book.  She mentioned that in the book, it was stuffed with all of those odds and ends from sewing that are too small or of a quality that couldn't really be used in another project.  I thought it was brilliant.  And, I realized it would basically be a giant version of my "scrappy" pin cushion...

And I happened to have in my stash a large piece of very sturdy fabric I was saving to make an overnight bag...and a matching zipper to boot, so I chopped it up and got to work.

 

This is what it looks like unstuffed.

This is what it will look like when I stuff it....it may take me a while to accumulate enough scraps for the stuffing, but that is what the zipper is for.  It is tall and skinny so that it will be at just the right height to work at that box you see in the background.  Usually, when I work there, I am on my knees, and quite frankly, I am getting too old for that.

Also on the weekend, we went to "artwalk" in town and the library happened to be having a sale of books they were taking off the shelves.  You could buy "mystery bags" of books for ages 6-8 or 9-12.  Score...(N is 9 and S is 12).  You could kind of see the titles through the bags they were wrapped in, but at $1.00 a bag, we were willing to take some chances.  We came home with 5 bags for $5.00 because S was so super excited about it.  The boys quickly determined their piles of what they are starting with.  I also have a pile.  In total, we ended up with just under 50 books.  One we already owned, 5 were for girls and the rest are all divvied up waiting to be read.  How lucky are we???  I will update which ones they enjoyed as they go through them.  I will be starting off with a book something new to me...a kind of "Little House on the ..." book, but it is written by Wilkes and it is actually Caroline Ingalls as a child.  Have you seen these?  This will be my first one, but it looked like there were a handful of them.

And, to prove that I am in fact eating from my garden according to my challenge...

 Look at all that kale...too bad it cooks down to a little handful :)

...I actually remembered to take these two pictures last week.  I will say that if I didn't have an herb garden, I would be having a terrible time meeting the challenge.  I am relying quite heavily on the herbs.

Now, the link ups...I will be linking to Frontier Dreams on Tuesday for Keep calm Craft on, Stash Bash at Crunchy Catholic Momma on Wednesday, and I will be joining Needle and ThREAD on Thursday over at In the Heart of my Home.