Category: fiber craft not otherwise mentioned

Instantaneous plant hanger

quick and simple knotted plant hangerLast year I had a pot of snapdragons that bloomed off and on all summer, despite the fact that I really didn’t take any care of them. Last week I bought myself a little sixpack of snapdragons, and potted them up together. We’ve been using the deck a lot more so far this year than we had been before, so I didn’t want them sitting on the table where they would make a mess that would have to be cleaned up all the time to use the table.

The deck came with a plant hanging hook that was perfect for the little pot of flowers. We straightened and sorted almost all day this past Sunday and early on I unearthed some cotton yarn, suitable for the purpose and in desirable colors (unlike the red/cream/ecru stuff which was all I’d found before). I made this up as I went along and it would be perhaps overly gracing it to call it “macrame,” but it is a plant hanger made by knotting yarn.

Instructions behind the cut (if you’re on a blog archive page). Continue reading Instantaneous plant hanger

Green-eyed macrame owl

In honor of I Love Yarn Day I decided to try a yarn craft I’d never done before. So I chose macrame, which is not actually a yarn craft; it is more commonly done with cord or something else that doesn’t stretch. After looking around I found a pattern for a macrame owl by a crafter named Alice.

macrame owl finished

The pattern was wonderful and I highly recommend it. It uses only lark’s head knots, half hitches, and square knots, and the diagrams are clear enough I didn’t need any supplemental material, even though this was my first macrame project (odd, since my mother did a fair bit of macrame when I was young). I did use a different macrame resource to confirm I was interpreting the diagrams correctly, but I was.

The pattern calls for crochet thread, and I used sport weight yarn. I wasn’t sure what the length conversion would be, so I cut pieces at least two yards long. I didn’t need to; I had well over half the original length left over. However, it was convenient to have the extra weight – with the end of the yarn wound on bobbins to keep the strands from tangling together.

yarn bobbins for macrame

I used bamboo skewers for the top and bottom rods, and beads from my stash for the eyes. Instead of putting glue on the ends of the yarn to turn them into needles, I folded a length of thin wire in half to use as a threader. I stuck it through the bead, put the yarn through the folded end of the wire, and pulled it through.

Here’s a picture of when it first started looking like something. I added pins to keep the fold in step 6 in place until it was knotted up.

macrame owl partway done

I found the pattern via the Macrame Lovers blog. It updates sporadically (and hasn’t for over a year) but has a decent number of patterns both locally and linked around the web.

[I accidentally categorized this as crochet and then linked to it from elsewhere, so it will stay in crochet to keep those links valid.]