Christmas 2017 – Crafty Haul!

     Hey everyone, how’s it going? Hope you’re all doing well.

      I don’t do hauls too often these days unless it was an occasion (like going to a craft fair) but I think Christmas counts as an occasion. I know Christmas seems long over now, it’s taken me a few weeks to get around to writing this, but I got an awful lot of crafty things that I’m excited to share and in some cases get some ideas of what to do with them. Really, all of my family and friends know I’m a crafter so I think everyone got me at least one crafty item…more actually! It is great because it means I don’t have to buy much for a while…well, expect those pesky essentials like tape but I always need more tape for my craft room.

     But tape is boring, let’s get onto the fun stuff. I’ll try go through everything in the order that I opened things. First up, my present from my friend Laura:

     She got me a huge selection of stickers and paper. She also got me tea but that’s not photographed here. Do you spot the Totoro stickers? Expect to see those sealing my envelopes for the rest of the year!

     From my sister and her partner (but really just my sister, I know she picked these out!), I got some yarn:

     I may have mentioned to her that I saw some really nice purple and grey yarn! Let me know if you have any ideas of what I could make with this yarn. I have three 100g balls of the Stylecraft Cabaret and one 200g cake of the Stylecraft Batik Swirl. I really do love the Swirl yarn but 200g is all I have of it (haven’t been able to find any more of it at all!) so give me ideas of what I can do with one yarn cake! Oh, my sister also got me a jumper with a Totoro image on it, I’ve pretty much been living in it since I got it.

     Now, onto the mannequin in the room…it was wrapped but walking into my sitting room on Christmas morning, it was hard to ignore the wrapped human size object in the middle of the room that was from my parents! I did suspect what it was immediately (what else could it have been!) but it wasn’t something I’d actually been expecting to get. I hadn’t asked for it or anything so it was a surprise in that respect. Now that I have a dress mannequin, I have no excuses for putting off learning how to sew clothes…or at least now I’ll have somewhere nice to photograph things!

     Onto what my twin got me now. There’s only some stuff here because she actually filled a box for me with a lot of small, random craft supplies – it was like opening a lucky bag on Christmas day – but here’s one of the bigger items:

     I’ve had a flip through of this book and it’s really good. It’s got 52 different crafts and it arranges them by season but it’s just fun looking for inspiration and ideas in it. The range of difficulty varies and none of them involve really crazy supplies so I definitely recommend this book if you want to try out a range of crafts.

     Aimee also got me some more journals. The hot air balloon one is a really cute little notebook that comes in a box (with a lock on it!) and the sketch a day one…well, it’s pretty self-explanatory, it gives you a small space each day to sketch something. I started it January 1st and happy to say that I’ve kept with it so far!

     I did have a few books on my Christmas list this year (yes, I’m a 25-year old who writes a Christmas list to give to my parents), and I got a few of them. One of my crochet goals for 2018 is to learn the corner-to-corner technique and hopefully this little book will help me do that (how cute is the blanket on the cover!). I also got a botanical line drawing book to inspire my doodles for my planner and snail mail, and I guess make sure I don’t run out of things to sketch in my new journal!

     And, for the third year in a row, I got the Flow Book for Paper Lovers because it is one of the best things for a paper addict!

     There’s a lot of pretty in this new volume and I’m looking forward to using the goodies in my snail mail for 2018. Would you like to see me do a flipthrough of the book by the way? I can if anyone’s interested.

     And onto the main part of my Christmas present from my parents, I got a HP Sprocket!

     Isn’t the rose gold so pretty? I won’t go into too much detail on it now because I do think I’ll do a review post on it next month so look forward to that.

     And that was Christmas Day for me but as it turned out, not the end of my Christmas haul but it turned out that my friend Laura had forgotten to give me a part of my present so I got this book:

     Amigurumi is my other crochet goal for 2018 so I definitely have enough to keep me going, there’s a lot of really cute things in it!

     And that was my Christmas 2017 crafty haul! It was a very good haul and is keeping me very busy indeed!