You might recall that a while ago I tried mak­ing a dinosaur planter. I plant­ed in it the small­est suc­cu­lent I could find, in hopes that it won’t out grow the planter, but it turned out that the dinosaur real­ly isn’t enough space for the suc­cu­lent to grow, and the suc­cu­lent died :(

Oth­ers sug­gest­ed air plants. Well, I killed an air plant too! I real­ly don’t know how, but the one I had did­n’t live very long :’(

Not want­i­ng to give up on the dino planter, but also not want­i­ng to kill anoth­er plant, I thought I’d cro­chet some suc­cu­lents. Found this beau­ti­ful series of pat­terns by Com­mon Thread and fol­lowed them loosely.

Dino’s got its plants again :D

In the pat­tern the Bur­ro’s tail suc­cu­lent is made of I‑cords, but I found the result to be too thick, so I just made chains and slip stitch into the chains.

Faux dino + faux sea glass + faux succulent

Quick week­end projects make me hap­py. Hope every­one is hav­ing a good week­end :D

Cro­chet­ing these san­dals made me want to fur­ther inves­ti­gate whether home­made shoes are a viable solu­tion for my odd­ly shaped, high arch, achy feet. So I thought I’d make anoth­er pair in a dif­fer­ent style :D pos­si­bly some­thing for dai­ly casu­al wear.

I came across this pat­tern from Hook Can­dy on Rav­el­ry and real­ly liked how shoe-like they are. I did­n’t want some­thing that would make it look like I’m wear­ing slip­pers out on the street.

I just used the same yarn as the san­dals because I had a lot of the yarn left over. Used the left over jute as well for the soles and treat­ed it as per the instruc­tions from Wild­flow­ers and Sage’s pat­tern to make them out­doors ready. And the insoles were made with some left­over Bernat cot­ton from anoth­er project.

I’m quite hap­py with them! :D I did­n’t have to mod­i­fy the pat­tern at all to make them accom­mo­date the width of my feet. I did have to add an extra round of sin­gle cro­chet stitch­es to increase the height of the sides and heels so they don’t feel like they’re falling off my feet, and used dou­ble strand of yarn for the entire shoe to make it feel a bit stur­dier. They were very com­fort­able when I walked around with them at home.

The oth­er day I took them out for a test run and wore them to work.

After walk­ing on them for a while the tex­ture of the cot­ton insoles start­ed to both­er my feet. It was quite lumpy, and there was a knot in the jute sole that I did­n’t hide and flat­ten very well, and at the end of the day it was dig­ging into my foot and became a bit painful… (man I sound like the princess in princess and the pea…) and the lack of arch sup­port was a prob­lem as well. So when I got home I put in a pair of foam insoles and tried them on again, they felt much bet­ter. I’ll take them out again anoth­er day. It would be so nice if I could just make my own shoes from now on and do away shoe shop­ping forever!

Hap­py Wednes­day, everybody!