Paper houses

When I saw these houses/tea light holders a couple of weeks ago, I was instantly inspired to make my own, despite the fire danger. =) (Although they are not as flammable as these, as they do not have actual roofs)
Here's how my houses turned out. Imperfect, but lovely.

I enjoyed this photoshoot so much, it brought me a lot of positive emotions and set the right Christmas mood. =))
Hope you liked it too.

Before/After

Just a couple of my handmade efforts from last months :)

T-shirt yarn

I made T-shirt yarn in November, and couldn't imagine the long and painful fate that awaited it :)

At first I was planning a bathroom rug. I made 2 attempts in that direction:

As you can see, both were a disaster. Anyway, I didn't have enough of old T-shirts for a rug of satisfying size. So I had to give up that plan.

Next, I thought of a T-shirt scarf - they were overfilling Pinterest boards at the time.

Scarf looked OK - about 12 meters of  braid, by the way. It was almost finished (a few months in that state, to tell you the truth) when I said to myself: hey, actually this yarn was made for CROCHET!

So, after tedious couple of hours of unravelling braids I again had this:

Also I had an idea in my head, inspired by these pictures from nice blog Sort of pink:

I liked the triangles on the rug and the idea of basket, so I mixed them together. Here's what I've made:

 Now I'm working on a pattern for this basket. I'll post it as soon as I can :)

Leather bracelet

 I made this bracelet a couple of months ago, while practicing with 5-stranded braids. But only yesterday, with a little help from my dear husband and his pliers, it was finally finished.

Art & Craft shopping

There are not so many things that I love about living in megapolis, but shopping, and particularly big self-service stores, is definitely one of them. Yesterday I visited Hobby supermarket. Here are the results!
Paper:

- smooth for graphic pencil
- textured and very dense for watercolors
- less dense for watercolors (cheaper)
- in various neutral colors for pastels.

Guess it's enough for the rest of my life. :)

Drawing and painting accessories:

Yarn and thread (unfortunately, I haven't found very thick yarn that I wanted - probably, need to look  in specialty store)...

...and crochet hooks for (almost) every occasion:

Gifts:

By the way, while shopping I learnt about kinds of hobbies that I didn't even know existed - for example, soap carving. Sometimes a store is more interesting than a museum :)