Mass Production

I like to think of craft as a peaceful relaxing activity, preferably accompanied by a pot of tea. In reality though, it often degenerates into something like mass production with me determinedly making lots and lots of the same things and regretting my initial enthusiasm. Luckily, I'm normally re-enthused once I see the finished project but in the meantime it can be a bit of a chore.

Would you like to see some of the projects that are currently filling up my days? This year I'm on a mission to actually make all the cards I send, rather than just think I'll do it right up until about mid December when the penny drops.

In the first three months of 2025 I made all the birthday cards I needed for this year. I can only show you the ones that have been sent so far. These are all cross stitch, a mixture of kits and patterns from magazines.

There are a couple of canvaswork designs in this next batch and the red one is Lagartera embroidery.

Having made the birthday cards I moved on to Christmas preparations last month (Don't laugh, I'll be the smug one later in the year). I started by making lots of Christmas gift tags, some in cross stitch and some blackwork. They're now packed away in a pretty tin with this year's mini stockings that I always design and knit in January. I tie these to the outside of the presents and fill them with little chocolates.

Next I stitched the cards I make for the four people in my immediate family. Which left what we call my mass produced Christmas cards. Every year I work out a design for a handmade Christmas card and then make an awful lot of them.

Last year I sewed together strips of scrap fabrics and then cut them into tree shapes and added a felt pot and a sequin star.

This year I decided on papercraft cards and found some nice cutting dies in the shape of baubles. This is what 50 Christmas cards in kit form looks like.

This was after I'd cut out all the various pieces. Now I'm on to the gluing stage which is fiddly but, by doing one small stage at a time, I'm getting there. 

These are the essentials for this year's cards. Well not Tolly obviously but he does like to join in. First, my Sizzix Big Shot machine. This is so good. As well as making cards I also use it to keep my daughter and I supplied with thread bobbins and to cut aperture cards for our cross stitch. The little bronze shapes are two of the dies I used for my bauble cards. You can cut out the basic bauble shape and then re-cut it with the detailed cutter. I'm using shiny card but I also tried it with felt, thinking it would probably be too thick but it worked perfectly. Think of the possibilities ...

The plastic thing with a snowflake pattern on is an embossing folder. You put a piece of card inside it, run it through the machine and end up with a pattern of snowflakes embossed into the card. You might just be able to see some of the card at the top of the picture with all the pieces in. When it comes to gluing small pieces of card together I find my fine tip glue bottle from Petite Properties is a must. I fill it with ordinary PVA glue. The tweezers were a present from my son; they're reverse action tweezers which means that, once you've got them holding whatever little thing you want, you can relax your hand, only pressing when you want to open them again. As well as holding tiny pieces of card to be glued, I've also used them when painting miniatures.

So, that's one lot of mass production but, obviously, there's always a production line of knitting and crochet going on here too. Out of my many unfinished projects that need working on, I'm currently trying to concentrate on three different lots of crochet. 

This is my box of corner to corner blocks; I need to make 64 of these all together. They'll go together something like this ...

Then there's my box of African Violet hexagons too.

These are fun to make, mostly because of that pretty yarn. I don't know how many of these I'm going to need but I know I've still got lots to make.

Then I had the bright idea of making some crochet flowers on sticks (as you do) and I seem to have got a bit carried away.

I'm producing these at a rate of six a day, mainly in an attempt to get them finished before I go off the idea. I think I might need to give them some leaves too.

The only bit of mass produced knitting I'm working on at the moment is these little pouches.

Last year I decided to work out how to make my own crackers using thin card, wrapping paper and ribbon. I made a dozen, six for here and six for my daughter's house.

The inner tubes and the ribbon can be used again and I made notes on how I made them so this year's set should be a lot easier to make. I wanted to put something nice in the crackers and, after much searching online, came up with the idea of little jigsaw puzzles. The most economical way to get them was to buy one of these.

This is the Christmas Village Advent Calendar, 24 little 50 piece puzzles. It cost about £30 and gave me enough puzzles for two year's worth of crackers which I thought was pretty good.  Also, isn't the box pretty? I'm going to keep it to turn into a special advent calendar one day; there are little pictures in the back of each drawer too. 

The puzzles come in plastic bags but I decided to knit little pouches for them too, just in case those plastic bags split. I used my old Gift Wrap pattern and oddments of plain and variegated yarn left over from knitting socks.

This year I'm knitting plain pouches but, every time the yarn changes colour, I knit a round or so in K1, P1 - stops me getting bored.

Although it's very satisfying to be getting ahead like this, it will be nice to get back to making just one of something. 

Meanwhile, the decorating goes on. Over the past month or more, I've been working on the bedroom on the middle floor. 

Looking good you might think but, if you look at the other half of the room ...

... you can see that it's not finished yet. Once we've moved this lot, I've got to do it all again. Mind you, I'm not varnishing the floor under the bed. I might give it a clean but that's it. The second lot of painting and varnishing might be a bit quicker as there's less wall to paint. The built in cupboard, fireplace and window take up quite a lot of it. Of course, that does mean I've got to paint the window frame. Maybe by the end of the summer I shall be able to show you another finished room. See the bags on the bed? They're my Mum's quilts, waiting for new storage in this room once it's finished. I'm really looking forward to showing them to you once I can get at them properly. There are masses of them and they're all beautiful.