Vintage-look e-reader cover

Having served faithfully for almost four years, this summer my Kindle has given up. I very quickly received a replacement as an early birthday present :) The new e-reader was smaller and so the cover that I had made for my old Kindle was far too big - a new cover definitely had to be made!
I had two types of ..hmm.. supplies that I wanted to use up. The first was a ball of mercerized cotton yarn in a vintage cream colour, bought in a charity shop ages ago; what I had in mind when buying it is a mystery to me. I tried to crochet several things with it, but they all came out too thick and stiff - I've undone them all, except for this square motif, made using a diagram here:

 I also had scraps of grey linen-look fabric - remains of the cushion cover from IKEA. I used this fabric as a background for the Phoenix picture and for another felt applique (which I will post soon), and also for the feathery doll "Growing wings". The scraps were too small for a book-cover style holder - so it had to be a pouch. I also used heather-coloured lining fabric from my stash and cotton wadding. The crochet motif was hand-sewn onto the grey fabric, and after that I had to invent as I went along.

The cotton wadding was cut

and hand-sewn using a hemming stitch, rather than machine-sewn, to avoid the seam bulk. This layer was then inserted into the grey fabric pouch, and from that moment the two layers were treated as one.
I tried it with a zip first:

After shortening the zip, stitching it in and making all the edges and corners neat and tidy, it turned out that the opening was too small for the e-reader to go through without being scratched by the zip.
I've taken out the zip and made a loop instead - that worked much better:

I had a covered button in my stash, cut off from an old skirt; I unpicked it with a small screwdriver, took off the old fabric it was covered with, replaced it with my grey fabric the way covered button are usually made and pressed the parts of the button together again:

Crochet cowl scarf

During summer, one of the children's projects involved yarn, so I allowed them to look in my stash. Then one thing led to another: the girls left the yarn where the puppy could get it, the puppy got it, and as a result, next day I had this beautiful dark-red acryl yarn spread all over the lawn.  Luckily, it was dry, but the yarn became a large tangle, which existence annoyed me for weeks. So I decided to use it up by crocheting a scarf. I found the scheme here. The yarn was double-knitting, as far as I remember, and I used hook size 5, as I tend to crochet very tightly. A few rows in I realized that I made a mistake: the loops of 3 chain stitches (row number 4 in the diagram) became loops of 4 stitches in my hands... But it didn't look bad, so I continued with 4 for the rest of the scarf.
And, of course, by the time I got to the end of the tangle, it became evident that what came out is too short to be just a long lacy scarf. So I joined the last row (which in my case was the row of loops, number 4 in the diagram) to the first row, and turned it into a cowl. Here is what it looks like: