Party preparations - party bags

After all the manic crafting to fill party bags with mostly homemade goodies I wanted to try and make my own bags to hold all of the stash. After a quick search on google I came across this tutorial for making newspaper gift bags and after tweaking it a little ended up with a stack of these brown kraft paper bags.

Now I stuck deciding whether to decorate these or not... any suggestions?

Party preparations - paper books

For my next party bag filler I decided to make up some very simple blank books which I thought would be popular for doodling on the go.

The instructions I used were from glittergoods blog (mini book tutorial) and with the aid of a guillotine to chop up a stack of A4 sugar paper this was a very quick make. The trickiest part was making the holes in the spine before sewing the pages together.

These little books are pretty cute and would look even cuter with some sort of cover... however I'm now running short on time so I just kept them simple.

Back in the crochet mood

Thankfully my craft block seems to be clearing and to help get back into the swing gently I decided that crochet was what my hands were wanting to do.

I really love making baby bits, they are so quick and satisfying, just a couple of hours of work and you end up with a gift ready to send to a mum who usually is just as excited about it as you are. The hat shown here is from another "Happy Hooker" pattern, this time part of the Sejia set by Bev Ireland. I had to add an extra increase row in this hat though as my hook size was too small (I really must get round to buying a size 4mm hook one day...) and thus the hat would have turned out tiny. I also just worked the hat in two shades of purple as that's what I had to hand, and I'm glad I did too as it matches the little two tone booties that I also made.

The booties are from "Crochet gifts in a weekend" by Nola Thesis and though I've made up the basic bootie a number of times this is the first time that I've had a go at making the ballet style version. Orinoco the octopus also loves the hat and booties and wanted me to show here how good he looks in them. Sadly I haven't got the energy to make another 6 booties for Orinoco so his other feet have had to go cold.

As well as doing crochet I've also been folding these pretty little stars from some cheap Ikea gift ribbon that I picked up last week. They are fiddly and time consuming but strangely addictive.

These stars are called Frobel stars and I first came across them years ago in an old girls activity book that my mum owns. You are supposed to make them from strips of paper and depending on what thickness you make the strips you end up with a large star or a tiny one. These are smaller than a British 10p piece and now I've made them all I'm not too sure what to do with them... too small really to use on the top of presents. Any suggestions?