Floral arrangement for Rose's birthday

My grown-up bonus daughter Rose loves the colors orange and black. This year for her birthday, I decided to make her a pretty silk floral arrangement. Roses for Rose!! 🌹

The florals all came from my local Michaels store. I started with this 18-inch Orange Ranunculus Deluxe Bush by Ashland. Flower arranging is easy when you start with something like this that provides a lovely base for the bouquet, and I loved that it had lots of orange roses and greenery. Then I added five of these Black Open Rose Stem by Ashland. The stems on the black roses were longer than the stems on the orange ranunculus bush, so I used my wire-cutters to trim about 4 to 5 inches off the end of each black rose stem so the flowers had a balanced appearance.

The vase is the Beautiful Amber Glass Flower Vase for Fresh or Artificial Flowers by Drew Barrymore, which I found online at Walmart. To hide the bottoms of the stems, I filled the vase with one box of these 6mm acrylic beads from Amazon, but by themselves, they didn't fill the vase quite enough, so I mixed them with most of one tube of Clear Colorfill Diamonds by Ashland from Michaels.

The finishing touch is the adorably goth 9" Black & White Cat Skeleton Pick by Ashland from Michaels. Isn't she just the cuuuuutest?!?!? 😍

 

 

 

 

Moon dreams

 

Kinderspiel or Seamless Kitty Cat Hat free pattern

Here's a pattern that will add a bit of fun to your day.

I'm calling it Kinderspiel because that means "child's game," but the real name given to the pattern by its designer, Valerie Johnson, is Seamless Kitty Cat Hat.

Not only could this be a wonderfully warm hat/hood to keep you or your little one's head and ears warm on a blustery winter day, but the built-in ears would make this a great addition to a homemade cat costume. 😻

I wanted to make this large enough to fit a bigger child or adult so I deviated from the pattern by starting with a cast-on of 96 stitches.

The Kittehz Commission

Sabrina saw some of my projects I had posted on Facebook and messaged me to ask if I could make six cat scarves in some soft yarn for her to give to her daughters and friends at Christmas, sending me this photo as an example of what she was looking for:

I said absolutely and got to work on a prototype using Red Heart With Love. I asked Sabrina which colors she would like the scarves to be, but she said any colors would be fine. So I made the first one in the Holly Berry red colorway.

Sabrina liked the way the red scarf turned out. The only detail she wanted to change was the black outline around the eyes, which was no problem for me to fix.

I neglected to get a photo of all six finished scarves before delivering them to Sabrina (and after fixing the red cat's eyes), but here's a photo of four of them:

The other two scarves were a black one and a brown one. Sabrina was thrilled with how they turned out and said it meant a lot to her to have these gifts be made by someone who would enjoy doing them, so that they were made with love.

I also made a tiger scarf in the school colors of Sabrina's grandson Kaden, so he wouldn't feel left out of the fun. I think this one turned out looking kind of like a yellow-and-blue Hobbes. 😊

Kittehz commission prototype

Finished my prototype scarf (red one) based on the photo of the gray one on the right. Turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself. 🙂