Brightly coloured wrapped headphones

Ages ago now, I got some new headphones because mine broke, as they do now and again. My old ones were pretty pastel colours, and the cables were light blue with little hearts on them, and they were generally delightful. My new ones are black. This was a big disappointment to me, even though the quality of the headphones is good. But! I was looking at things on the internet the other day, and I saw someone had wrapped theirs, and I did the same.

It's a basic macrame/friendship bracelet knot, with the cord as the 'lazy' thread and embroidery thread or similar as the working thread. My stripy one was done with a colour-changing thread, though you could just as well do stripes the old-fashioned way. This was me doing it on the train (which intrigued my fellow passengers):

And here's the finished headphones:

Supposedly it also stops them from tangling, though I'm not sure that's actually true.

Father's day mathematical card

Today is father's day, and Mr T had an idea for a card. He wanted to use that technique where you use straight lines to get a curved shape, and I like using eyelets and making a lot of noise, so we pooled the two and got the hammer out. It's not a real card unless you need a hammer to make it, right?

First step: glue a bit of Indian newspaper (with writing in Hindi (I think)) to a card, and punch a grid of holes around the edge. That pen-like tool is the hole punch, which punches holes just the right size for the eyelets to go in:

Next, I added the eyelets. They're just little metal things, and you put the face of it on the front of the card and the back goes through the hole. Then you use the other tool and hit it hard with the hammer till it splays the back open and fixes it in place. I used multi-coloured ones:

This is the back of the eyelets - they look like little flowers:

Then I used embroidery thread to make the lines. I used two colours here, and did two curves. You could easily add in the opposite corners and do four:

The back of your work should always be as neat as the front:

Happy father's day!

Mother's day rolled paper bracelet

I carried on with my rolled paper beads theme to make this bracelet for a mother's day present: 

I made straight beads rather than the usual sort of tapered oval/bicone ones, by rolling rectangles of paper instead of triangles. It's slightly fiddlier in that you have to get the paper exactly straight to start with, with no room for error, and also the pattern will show on the outside of the roll much more obviously so you have to bear that in mind when choosing paper. I used an advert for a Honda car, which has lots of shades of purple in it. I alternated which end of the paper came out on top for a variety of bead colours.

Then I decided to do something a little bit different from just stringing them together, and did this sort of ladder design. The beads are side-by-side, rather than end-to-end. It's quite simple to do, but mine was massively complicated by the fact that I didn't have any proper bead-stringing thread and had to use embroidery thread. I wanted to use a cotton cord, but all the ones I've got were too thick to go through the beads twice (as it has to for this design) and far too thick to go through the fastener, and we don't have any bead shops to get more from in Newcastle. None at all. Not one. So, embroidery thread it was, the benefit of which is that it comes in every shade in the world so you can pick the right one. Combined with some nice purple beads for the ends, I was happy with the colours.

To make the bracelet, you have to start from the middle of the thread so that you have two ends (on needles is easiest, though dangerous). Each time you add a paper bead, you need to thread each end first through a seed bead, then each end goes through the paper bead, from opposite ends of the bead so that the threads cross over inside the bead. Once you get into it it's quite a quick process (though using embroidery thread means it keeps on getting knotted and splitting - don't use this).