Craft Gossip

Independent craft blog since 2007

Baby Food Jar Camping Candle Lantern

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Jeff from Gear Report made this quick yet functional camping candle lantern out of a baby food jar and guitar string.

He suggests you use them for gift giving because “nothing says you care like a used baby food jar and some old guitar string”. Ha.

You could always jazz it up with paint. A few bright ladybugs might be cute or fish for an angler. That would actually make a good Father’s Day present that children could create. Supply a few back up tea lights and he’s good to go fishing  in the evening.

Weaving the wire around the jar and creating the handle makes it a handy little lantern to have on hand. I haven’t had babies around in awhile and for that reason I might stick with tin cans and canning jars.

See Jeff’s article called Camping homemade DIY candle lantern for the full tutorial.

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Cross Stitch Cards for All Occasions

I have never stitched a greeting card, but I kind of like the idea of it. It’s a card and a gift all in one, and hopefully one the recipient will hang onto for years to come. 

This collection of easy and colorful greeting card cross stitch patterns from Susan Bates (via Gathered) are a great place to start if you want to stitch your own greeting cards. 

These text-based designs cover a lot of card-sending events, such as:

  • get well soon
  • happy birthday
  • thank you
  • thinking of you
  • congratulations
  • anniversary
  • new home
  • good luck

The lettering is done in gradients and there are other details like hearts and stars, a house key and a gift, depending on the text. There are full cross stitches and back stitch on all of the cards, and they use 15 colors for the cross stitching and six for the back stitching (and just two colors are used for both, so it’s 19 colors total). 

The designs vary a bit in size but the biggest one is 52 by 67 stitches, which comes out to 3.75 by 4.75 inches or 9.5 by 12 cm when worked on 14 count fabric or 28 count evenweave. The text suggests beads are also used in the patterns but there’s no note of them in the key, so go wild and add some beads if you like. 

Designs are worked on a price of 6 by 8 inch/15 by 20 cm fabric and then mounted to a card with a colorful baking piece of card stock behind it. This is easy to assemble with whatever cardstock greeting cards you have on hand.

You can get the free charts as a PDF from Gathered. 

Have you ever stitched your own greeting cards? I’d love to hear about it, or let me know if these inspire you to try. 

[Photo: Susan Bates via Gathered]