Little boxes, little boxes

... made of felt and fabric.
I have been making felt bags for a long time now, but I also wanted to make felt boxes. Pickle-Lily is the hand bag queen, but she also has lots of boxes. Her schema is definitely putting things in bags and boxes! So I set to work!

Already full!

My first one, was quite big, based on a 30cm square. I used iron on interfacing to stiffen the fabric, which made turning it out tricky, as it was so stiff. So I downsized my starting squares and am now very, very happy with the finished product.

pencil tub

In fact I got rather carried away with making them. as you can see! P has now asked me to make four with the letters l, o ,v and e on, and she has got a birthday coming up!

reversible felt and fabric boxes

There are lots of tutorials for these out in blogland, but if you would like it, I can do one on here. I'm joining in Handmade Monday this week, and hopefully there'll be no IT issues!!!!

I T was bad!

Little birdies

At the end of January I filled in my tax return on-line, and a few days later I received an email telling me there was a problem detailed in the attached file. And yes, dear reader I opened it :(
I immediately did the thing Mr P-L told me not to do when I spoke to him on the phone later. I shut the computer down - apparently it embeds the nasty bit in the boot system and makes it much more difficult to get rid off.
Luckily, Mr P-L is a computer whizz-kid and could get rid of the nasty bug, rebuild nearly everything and make the computer even better, stronger, faster and it didn't even cost six million dollars!!! I know, the last reference really dates me, for my younger reader, it is similar to a 'vintage' tv programme's opening credits 'The Six Million Dollar Man'.
But, it all took time. So, for several very long weeks, where the younger members of this household berated me and complained about having to change all their passwords, we were without a computer.
The point to my long tale is - if you get such an email - don't open it no matter how real it looks and don't turn the computer off.

blue tit

In the meanwhile, I have been up to all sorts of things, including feeding the birds in my garden. I have a bird feeding station outside my kitchen window and I love watching the birds. Last week, there was an enormous kerfuffle in the garden and son went to investigate. He told me a large pigeon had pinned down a small brown bird and the little bird was squealing. When he opened the back door, the little bird managed to fly away and the 'pigeon' gave him a glare before it too flew off. I asked him if the pigeon was brown with speckles and had orange eyes, which it had, and we then decided a sparrowhawk was more likely!!!

blackbird

All the visitors inspired me to make some little felt birds to remind me of my garden - so I have made a robin, a blackbird, a chaffinch and a blue tit. They will be in my Folksy shop when I have finished writing this blog post!

chaffinch

robin