726 - Rainbow Road Hot Mug Cozy

As is the tale with a lot of things I make, I have had this pinned for ages. Since March in fact. Phew! But in the spirit of making myself things that were useful for starting a new job, I decided to make this lovely Rainbow Road coffee mug cozy from Wild Olive. This was part of Wild Olive's Mario Week series, and is based on a level from Mario Kart.

I decided to change to colours up a bit and just use colours I liked the look of, so the main colour isn't a road colour, it's a lovely green.

I also had to change the shape of template as for some reason the curved version from the template just wasn't working. I think this meant that my road shapes are maybe a little more spaced out than they should be, but I still think it looks very pretty. 









I love the colours combos, and the wee star on the front is so cute. So hopefully when I'm drinking tea on a cold morning, this will stop my hands getting too toastie. It's a little bit more squint than Mollie's, but I definitely don't have her tidy skills.

725 - Everything's Coming Up Milhouse!

Guess what guys?! I got a job! I am so happy! It's a three month contract just now but I'm crossing my fingers that it could lead to something more permanent. If not, at least it's more experience for the CV.

To celebrate this fact I decided to embroider a blank tote bag I've had for a while to be my new work bag. I usually have to take another bag to work to carry my lunch box and book in. I had been planning to embroider an Aimee Ray pattern on my bag, as I bought it probably over a year ago, but decided to change it up a bit.

I went for the quote from The Simpsons, "Everything's coming up Milhouse". If you don't know the quote, you can see it below.


It's one of my favourite quotes and I thought it summed up my mood of things are looking up!





I'm very happy with how it turned out, and the photos I was popping up on Instagram as I was making it were getting bucket loads of likes, so I guess other people are Milhouse fans too!

I also really liked this tote bag, which I got from Hobbycraft the same as all my other ones, but this one was nice and thick, as opposed to the quite thin ones I'm used to. So I'm hoping this can handle all the crap I lug around with me. 

724 - Mick Foley Beanbag

So as you may know, me and Donald watch a lot of wresting. A few weeks ago when we were watching WWE, one of the announcers said this.

Image via

We laughed a lot, and I said "how cool would it be to make a little Mick Foley beanbag". I had the idea on my craft ideas list for a while and decided to make it for Donald for our anniversary. Our anniversary isn't actually until Saturday, but as we'll be roller derbying all day, we decided to swap pressies/have dinner last night.









I filled his bum up with rice to give him a bean-baggy feel. I love his little cutie face and how cute his little smiley face t-shirt is too, so I'm very happy with the way he turned out. Donald also loved him too, which is the main thing.

723 - Polar Bear

So for the past couple of years I've been making Christmas ornaments for my Mum to hang on her Christmas tree. This year I asked her what she would like and she finally settled on a polar bear.

I looked around for a good pattern, but sadly there was quite a lack of good free ones. I settled on tracing an outline of a china polar bear figure and changing the face (as the one in the ornament was looking up at the sky). I also added a little fish parcel for the cute polar bear as his Christmas present.

So here he is.



And I embroidered the date on the back of him as I always do, so we know which ornament is from which year.



I still have a couple of Christmas ornament craft kits left to make but I think my Christmas crafting is over for this year. Alongside the tag and card kits I have to do (which I already said I was probably going to leave and just focus on ornaments) I still have a peg doll, a garland kit and a little knitted polar bear kit to do. I bought the needles to do the polar bear kit before realising it was actually double pointed needles I needed. And as I haven't got the hang of knitting on them yet, he definitely won't be getting done this year.

I'm hoping to avoid having such a backlog of free kits next year as I'm stopping my subscription to Cross Stitcher this year. I just feel a lot of the free kits are very similar, and as cross stitch is such a time consuming craft, I feel I already have such a huge library of patterns, I really don't need to add more to the pile.

I'm still considering my Mollie Makes subscription, but as they focus on loads of different crafts, and the kits are more varied, it will probably survive. I don't think I can go cold turkey on crafty magazines!

722 - Robbie Robin

A great thing about crafting is you can make ugly little Franken-creatures that no-one else will love, but you do because you made them. I think this is true of little Robbie Robin that I made this week.

He came as a free kit with Let's Knit magazine, and I made him in about two evening sittings. I'm not sure if it's just when I sew my knitting together it seems to go downhill, or if the knitting is a bit mental to begin with, but Robbie maybe looks a little more squint than he's meant too.







But, he does look like a Robin. And his mental looking legs (I'm sure I knitted one longer than the other) look fine when he's sitting, which is what he will be doing this Christmas period.

I do love all my little created children. And hey, at least I had my first double pointed needles experience when I was knitting Robbie's legs. Hoping to progress to socks or something soon. That would be awesome.

721 - Roller Derby Award

So usually at a roller derby bout they give out awards for the best jammer, best blocker and MVP. Refs don't get awards, but a couple of weeks ago at scrims, I started making stupid little awards for a fellow ref V for Vienetta.

However, last week I forgot my handbag notepad, and promised him I would make him a proper award, with colouring pencils and everything. And because I drew it properly, I thought I would pop it up on the blog.



He won grizzliet ref award because that particular night he had grown quite the beard. Past award categories include swishist fall and sexiest belt. Clearly much better than the usual awards ha ha!

720 - Nativity Dolls

One thing I feel I've been missing from my Christmas decorations for some time is a nativity scene. I keep seeing lovely handmade ones, but a lot of them are knitted, which was more time and skill than I felt I had.

A while ago I came across this amazing pattern from What Madeleine Loves. It's felty, quite simple to make, free and is only three little dolls, even though it represents all the main nativity people.

You can check out Madeleine's post about her dolls, and another post which has the pattern in it. They are so cute. So here are my little versions, done in plenty of time for this Christmas.










How cute are they? And they aren't going to take up too much space in my already cramped Christmas display so they're perfect.