Pets, Lavender and Repurposing Jeans

Our mail lady at work recently lost her cat and of course she was very upset about it.  This is the card that I put together for her.  The cat is stamped in VersaMark and clear embossed.  Both the cat and the sentiment come from C is for Cat.  The scrap paper banners were die cut and I added some ribbon and three little flowers with pearl centers.  It's never easy losing a beloved pet.  This I know.  They depend on us, but we depend on them too because the giving of love and the need to feel loved goes both ways.

This has nothing to do with pets, but the other day I got one of those Etsy notifications on my Facebook page.  There is a woman in Oregon, I think, who is selling lavender wands for $20 a piece.  She recommends using them as wedding/shower favors.  I had recently pulled out these lavender wands that I made from some plants we had several (or more) years ago.  They are easy to make if you have enough lavender and they last for years.   If you google lavender wands you're sure to find explicit directions.  I had pulled these out because I was investigating how to get rid of silver fish recently.  We seem to have stirred up a nest or something like that with all the closet cleaning and flooring that we've done recently.  It is said that silver fish do not like the fragrance of lavender.  I've stuck them in the linen closets and also purchased some loose dried lavender and made sachets for the bedrooms and closets.  Hopefully this will help turn those silver fish away.  

And another project - I have saved all the old jeans that the kids outgrew/no longer wanted.  We have them in all shades of blue and a few shades of black also.  I decided that I wanted to use them for a window treatment at the condo since our furniture there is denim covered.  I took apart several pairs of the jeans at the seams to get the most useable portion of the fabric and then made a pennant pattern out of newspaper.  I calculated how many pennants I would need to span the front window and used several different shades of denim.  I strung them on some nylon rope and used white nails in the trim to rest the rope on to keep it straight.  

I was aiming for a nautical look.  

I've got lot's more jeans to work with.  I always meant to make a quilt that I saw in a magazine a long time ago that alternated squares of denim and flannel.  What I liked about it was the seams were on the outside and frayed.  I believe I have a bag of flannel shirts somewhere.  Now that I have a working sewing machine again I should probably look for that bag and get that started.  Hopefully, it's not full of silver fish!