Homemade

Last night I went to the first ever craft event at Mostly Books, the bookshop just round the corner from the new Mooncalf Towers.

I wasn't sure what to expect but I turned up clutching my ticket, my little jar of buttons and my camera.

The guest speaker was Ros Badger, one of the co-authors of Homemade. I was a little unsure what to expect. I hadn't seen reviews of the book on any of the blogs I read and I'm a bit sceptical of knitwear designers I've never heard of. She turned out to be absolutely delightful.

She gave us a description of her career so far; although it is hard to pinpoint many specifics as she was obviously trying to walk a fine line between telling us her background and not name-dropping and boasting. Hard to do given how many designers she's worked with. And, best of all (and MrMooncalf was totally impressed to bits by this) she designed The Edge's hats for the Zooropa tour. How cool is that??!!


Next she took us through loads of the projects from her book. All really simple little projects but really effective. They're the kind of almost foolproof crafts that you could do as a total beginner and end up with something pretty cute at the end. This isn't advanced crafting but if you want to try out a little sewing, plant a few seeds, make some cupcakes for the first time, knit some fingerless mitts this is the book for you. Many of the project recycle or reuse things you might already have around the house so they don't involve a huge investment in materials. I've only had chance to quickly flick through the first half but there are several things I'm going to be trying out.

We even tried out a couple of little projects at the bookshop so we had little treasures to take home with us. We'd all been told to take our button boxes and we spent some time threading our buttons onto wire to make cute little hearts. For those that finished their hearts there were felt cut-outs and little hair clips to sew a really simple but adorable little flower clip.

Here are mine:


I have no idea what I'm going to do with them but they're adorable! I'm really looking forward to properly sitting down with this book - I think it is going to be very inspiring.