Instructions on how to make your own recycled sweater wine cosy:

First, a couple of points to note…

• Make sure your chosen sweater (or jumper for us Brits) is 100% wool, and that the label says handwash only. Machine-washable wool will not felt. The size of the sweater is not that important, but I reckon an XL would be too large and an XS might be too small to fit onto a wine bottle. The one shown was a ladies Medium sweater. Ideally the sweater won’t have raglan or massively bulky tapered sleeves. The straighter the sleeves, the better.
• The whole process is a bit experimental: you can’t guarantee exactly what size your item will come out. Even if you can’t make the wine cooler, you could make other items from the felted sweater, such as hotpads / oven mitts, placemats, coasters, or tote bags. Another idea would be to cut both sleeves off, sew them into a long tube and fill them with old socks, underwear or t-shirts to make a draft excluder.

You will need:

• 100% wool sweater
• Old pillowcase
• Safety pins or old shoelace
• Washing machine & detergent
• Scissors
• Bottle of wine or other delicious beverage
• Optional: embroidery floss or yarn and a large needle, needle and thread, felt pieces, fabric glue or heat-n-bond adhesive, sequins, beads or buttons
• Possibly needed: masking tape or lint brush/roller

Steps:

1. Stuff your sweater into an old pillowcase and tie, roughly stitch or safety-pin the pillowcase shut. This will help keep your washing machine from clogging up with little tufts of wool.
2. Chuck it into the machine, and put in a normal amount of laundry detergent, but NO FABRIC SOFTENER. Now put the machine onto the hottest wash cycle and start.
3. Once the cycle has finished, open the case and check your sweater. Try sliding a bottle of wine into the sleeve. If the sweater has not shrunk enough, you may find that it shrinks a bit more if you run it through another wash cycle. If you are scared of it shrinking too much, you can use a Quick Wash or short cycle. Sometimes it won’t shrink any more, though – it really depends on the sweater.
4. When your sweater is finished with the washing part, take it out of the pillowcase and put it somewhere to dry. A radiator is fine.
5. Some sweaters really shed a lot of fluff, so you may need to remove the excess fluff with masking tape or a lint brush when it’s dry.
6. Once dry and fluff-free, you can cut the sleeve off the sweater. Properly felted wool will not fray, so there’s no need to worry about the edges. You can cut the sleeve to whatever size you desire: you may want a short sleeve that just covers the thick part of the bottle, or if you want one like mine, cut it about where the metallic wrapper on the neck starts.
7. Now you can get as creative as you want. You can choose to stop here and leave it as-is, or you can embellish it however you want. For my version, here’s what I did next:

• Sew 4 darts around the top of the sleeve, so the cooler looks more like the shape of the actual bottle.
• Use a blanket stitch to sew around the top edge of the sleeve for a decorative effect.
• Cut out shapes from felt and adhere them to the sleeve with hot-melt iron-on bondable adhesive (or fabric glue).

The original pattern in the book just calls for the front and back of the head to be sewn together, but other books from the Magic Scrubber series have a sponge inside, so I decided to add a sponge to this one, too. It certainly makes it a bit more robust and I reckon a bit more useful as well. As the yarn is pure acrylic, it should be pretty hardwearing, faster to dry than natural fibres, and it should last a good long while.

I decided to give this as a gift to my friend Nettie, who has a pronounced love of all things slightly bizarre – especially plastic dinosaurs. I reckon there’s no one better to appreciate something like this!

So I decided to knit an outer shell to cover the tub. I made it with acrylic yarn so it could be removed and washed, and would withstand being left on the patio. But it looked a little plain, as you can see.

I then decided to embroider some cherry blossoms on the outside, to jazz it up and make it look special. I added some matt glass seed beads in a vibrant red to bring the whole project to life. I think it looks really sophisticated with a red pelargonium inside.

This is one of my favourite projects, because I think the results show that recycled stuff doesn’t have to look cheap or all earth-mother-hippy-ish. I can’t imagine how many of these tubs get thrown away every day, when they could be used to make something really pretty. I reckon there’s loads of ways they could be customised, so I will have a think about how I can decorate the next one. And of course it’s another excuse to eat loads of flapjacks and mini swiss rolls. “But I NEED to eat them because I need to use the tub. Honest!”

I made this one from crochet, which is not really how you are supposed to make felted things, but there you go. I think knitting rather than crochet probably makes a smoother felt, but as crochet is thicker and sturdier, I figured why not give it a go? I pretty much followed the same pattern as I did when I made the recycled jeans bowl – which is really easy: just crochet in the round and increase when you want to make the bowl sides go up & out, decrease when you want to make the opening narrower. Anyone could do it.

I picked nice manly colours and used Rowan Super Chunky wool. He loved it and it goes well with his decor. Yay – now what will I make him next year ?!?

It so happened that it was Ken’s birthday when I went to see him, so I just had to crochet him something… and quick. So I got out the ‘Happy Small Goods of Crochet’ book and whipped up a small cotton bowl in no time:

As luck would have it, the inside of the bowl is exactly the same circumference as a Mason jar, which Ken uses to store his sticks of incense. So I didn’t realise it at the time, but I made an incense cozy. I am pretty sure that’s a first . In any case, it looks rather sweet in that shade of duck-egg blue. It sure has smartened up the Mason jar.

Ken is such a wonderful caring friend – he kept a string bowl I crocheted for him a couple of Christmases ago. In fact, he even kept the little tag I put on it. It now sits at his bedside holding handy things like lip balm, so a little part of me is there with him every night, even though we now live more than 3000 miles apart.

I made it from cotton postal string – the kind you tie around parcels – so I reckon it will last for a while as that stuff is pretty durable. I love the slight texture you get with that string: little flecks of brown & black from the cotton seeds. I think it really gives the bowl a rustic charm. The pattern for this bowl is adapted from one in Erika Knight’s book Simple Crochet.

So when it was my friend Jane’s birthday, I whipped out a mega huge crochet hook, some scissors, and made this groovy denim bowl out of the legs of those jeans. I just cut lengthways back & forth almost to the edge, resulting in a long strip that I crocheted in the round to make the bowl. I increased/decreased on each row to shape the bowl.

I think it looks pretty cool. When I gave it to Jane I filled it with some sachets of homemade bath salts, and I reckon it was a pretty darn good gift.

I chose a dark chocolate brown superchunky cotton yarn that has strands of white and grey satiny ribbon running through it, and here’s the result. I didn’t follow a pattern, I just made it up as I went along, and I am pleased with the results. I have a whole ball of the yarn left, so I’d like to make a matching tray liner (dare I say modern ‘doily’?) or some coasters for the teacups.

We worked really hard on the garden, which was an overgrown wasteland when we moved into the flat. It was a rental flat, and it looked like it hadn’t been used in years. There were thistles that had grown to 7feet high, discarded toys & furniture, and weeds everywhere. It took us AGES to clear it all out, prepare the soil, and plant it up. But what took the longest was the mosaic.

We were new to London and neither of us was working in a well-paying job, so we had to do the whole thing on the cheap. So I decided that we would build our own ‘mosaic deck’ out of marine plywood and paint. So we cut 2 hemispheres out of marine ply, laid footings to support it, and then got to work on the paint. Little did I know how long it would take to sponge-paint 1inch x 1inch squares onto a circle of around 8 feet in diameter. Well, you can do the math and guess. It was the longest most tedious project I think I have ever done – with Mark’s help, of course. The pair of us must have spent about a week off & on out there in the garden, with our little plates of paint and tiny sponges, dabbing away at this massive white circle. Because the circle was huge & white, it reflected the sun so we both suffered from sunburn. But I think it turned out really well in the end, and we got lots of pleasure sitting out there on our own masterpiece.

During the course of digging and mixing compost in with the topsoil, we ended up with a big pile of builder’s rubble and stony soil that we didn’t know what to do with. We couldn’t really afford a skip, so I had a MacGyver inspiration and decided to make use of our mound, by turning it into a raised bed. Instead of doing something more conventional, I had the crazy idea of using cheap plastic plumbing pipes as the barrier to hold all the soil back, and wanted to make a curved bed that would flow around the mosaic. I cut the pipe into pieces, spray painted it with car paint so it wouldn’t chip, and then set about planting the bed and inside the pipes with rockery plants. The end result looked pretty cool, kind of like a big pipe organ buried in our garden (see picture left). And the ‘mind your own business’ plants absolutely loved the pipes, and were spilling over the edge in no time.

One of the things I remember best was that when we were digging we found a set of false teeth! I wonder how they got into the ground, or what their owner must have thought when they went missing. We also found a tricycle, some wicker shelving, loads of broken pots, as well as several tables and chairs, which I reupholstered and painted. In fact we still have 2 of the chairs and one coffee table to this day.

I often wonder what happened to the garden after we moved out, just a year after the makeover. I remember the estate agents were over the moon when they came round to view the place as we were leaving, because they hadn’t seen it since it was a big wasteland (when we moved in). Of course I had asked them if we could tidy up the garden and make use of it, but they hadn’t yet seen the change until we were moving out. We took a few of the plants, but left most of them in situ, so I wonder how they have grown. I also wonder how well our mosaic and pipe-organ stood up to the weather over the years. Who knows; it may now look just as much a mess as when we first moved in, but I like to think it stayed beautiful.