Felt buttons (crafty)!

Or beads for stringing, or items for applique/decoration...take some felted wool from an old sweater (or you could try it with unfelted). Cut sets of three circles (or you could cut flower shapes). Draw yarn with a knot on one end through a stack of two only (important!), then put the third one on top, hiding the knot. draw the yarn through the center, back up, and bisect the stack, divide that in half again, and then in half again to make this eight-segmented vaguely Buddhist sort of button. be sure to keep the yarn tight to bunch it all together. I used felted sweater wool, but I think I will put these through the wash to mash the materials together further. This is a fun little craft  project which takes little room and time. The wool came from the bottom of a long sweater which had developed holes in it- I may replace the original buttons with these, or I may make a necklace.

Victorian Lady's Knuckledusters

Here's a very quick craft project, arm warmers made from sleeves cut off an old sweater felted in the washing machine - I just sewed thin black yarn (could be thread) across the area between the thumb and the fingers - took twenty minutes or less. Buttons (from original sweater) added afterwards in case of trouble.

This one, though - two sweaters- both felted unintentionally - sewed together by whip-stitching the raw edges- took in excess of twenty hours (enjoyably spent streaming stuff like The Storyteller on my computer - is John Hurt's coat to die for or what?) The collar, where I inset the gold-colored wool where there was no space for it (I didn't remove fabric from the red, it's just a straight cut) has interesting sculptural qualities, I think. It takes a lot less time if you have a magic machine like Urbandon