Give it some welly!

About two months ago I bought a cute pair of nice, warm, fluffy fleece welly socks to keep my tootsies warm when I walk the dog. I spotted them while doing my weekly food shop in Aldi and immediately my brain shouted 'PURPLE!'. They were all packaged up so it wasn't until I got home and put them on that I realised that, despite being advertised as size 5-6, they were more like a 7-8, and they were also far too long. I mean, who has knee-high wellington boots?

My poor flowery wellies were feeling a bit inferior at this point. 

The socks languished in my wardrobe for a couple of months, gathering dust and generally making a nuisance of themselves, until I had a light bulb moment. It's Christmas coming up, I could refashion them into better welly socks! Not the most imaginative light bulb moment I've ever had I'll grant you, but I wasn't sure I could make anything but more socks out of these babies. To start with I had to unpick the fold-over boot top from the leg of the sock, and remove the horrible black 'Avenue' labels.

Then I chopped about four inches (four inches!) off the top of the legs. I'm not sure what I'll do with these scraps yet but I'm sure they'll come in useful eventually.

Finally, to jazz them up a bit before stitching them back together, I raided my button stash and stitched a scatter of mismatched buttons onto the outside of each boot top bit thingy. I've never used the button function on my sewing machine before, so this was a bit tense! It worked fine after a couple of thread-tangling hiccups luckily. Stitching all those buttons on by hand would have taken far more patience than I've got.

I then got so excited about the result that I immediately wrapped then up in pretty Christmas paper before I remembered to take a picture of them in my wellies. HOWEVER! Once they get gifted and unwrapped on Boxing Day (and hopefully loved more than any pair of welly socks has ever been loved in the history of the world), I promise to take a picture and update this post. I'm sure it won't be the last time that this happens, so at least I'm starting as I mean to go on. 

UPDATE!

Luckily, the mother-in-law loved the socks! Hurrah!

The day it all began...

So. Here we are. I've decided to write a blog.

I'll be honest with you, this goes against my nature. I'm a complete introvert most of the time. Putting myself 'out there' is really difficult for me: I have this horrible crippling terror of being made fun of, which makes being a creative person a bit tricky. I used to love to write stories, but it's been a really long time since I've done any creative writing. That's why I've decided to put down my thoughts here in a way that people can see and comment on. I'm hoping it will help to snap me out of my inferiority complex rather than turn me into a trembling mess, but we'll see. Even if no-one reads it, at least I'm getting in some practice!

So without further ado (drum roll please), I present... The Whimsical World of Miss Betty Smart!