Weekend Making

This weekend I've been continuing to make & finish little hats for The Big Knit...

...lots of yarn ends have been woven in & trimmed!

I've also been working on some tutorials (and editing lots of tutorial photos, yawn)...

... and sewing cherry blossoms, forget-me-nots and owls.

Remember, all this week I'm having special FLASH sales each day. Today's offers are Sunflower Headbands for £1.50, White Cherry Blossom Brooches for £5 (half price!) and Tea Rosette Brooches for £2.50 each or £9 for a set of 4.

You can check out the offers each day HERE (Etsy) or HERE (Big Cartel).

Knitting in Public

Today is World Wide Knit in Public Day! Hurrah!


WWKiP Day is actually being celebrated from 11th-19th June this year (bit odd, but the more knitting the merrier, I guess!), so even if you miss the chance to knit in public today you've still got lots of time to get outside and get knitting! Click here to search for events in your area.


Innocent are also launching their Big Knit 2011 campaign this weekend. They "want to raise £160k this year for Age UK by knitting 650,000 little hats which will go on our smoothie bottles and be sold in stores in November. For every little hat knitted, we'll give 25p to Age UK to help them make winter a little warmer for older people across the UK." The knitting patterns will go up on their site next week, but you can also find them on Ravelry by searching for the Big Knit.


I always have fun knitting a few hats for this campaign (I knitted those hats a couple of years ago, and the ladies at my knitting club managed many many more last year!), it's a useful way to use up all those teeny odds and ends of leftover yarn from other projects and it's delightful seeing hat-wearing-smoothies appear in stores in the autumn. The deadline for this year's hats is 14th October, so you've got plenty of time to get knitting.

Comfort Crafting

I was a bit ill yesterday and have spent most of today recovering on the sofa in my pajamas watching Poirot DVDs and doing some knitting.

As you've probably noticed I spend most of my crafty time sewing but I love a nice simple knitting project to keep my fingers busy when I'm feeling under the weather and stuck watching TV all day. (I've got to be really ill to abandon crafting altogether!).

One year when I had the flu I knitted all these little hats for the Big Knit (my mum made all the matching pompoms)...


... and all the blankets I've knitted over the years have started out as projects to keep me from getting bored during one illness or another.


Do you have a comfort craft you turn to when you're poorly?

Little Hats for the Big Knit

The Big Knit is back! I've made a start on this year's collection of little hats...


I've been knitting these for so many years now it's starting to feel like a crafty tradition. I've only knitted two little hats so far, but have plans for many more... and lots of the ladies at my knitting group are knitting them too, and they're all much speedier knitters than me! Hopefully we'll end up with a veritable mountain of little hats to donate to the campaign.

A Big Parcel of Little Hats

Along with the usual bundle of orders to post, I had another package to take to the Post Office yesterday - 42 little hats for Innocent's Big Knit project:I have to admit to finding some half-finished ones leftover from last year (oops) and I didn't get half as many quiet evenings of knitting in as I'd have liked but they still make quite a nice pile.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing all the little hats appearing on smoothie bottles in our local branch of Sainsbury's next month!

Knitting Season

It's starting to get pretty darn chilly round here lately, and a drop in temperature always makes me dig out some knitting!
I've blogged before about what a sporadic and lazy knitter I am, but it's always a pleasure to do a bit of easy knitting in the colder months especially when it's for a very good cause.

Crafting 365 / 47 & 48 - an assortment of simple crafty tasks

I am still ill, and it is still rubbish. I'm at the "pottering about the house in pajamas and an old sweater not really doing very much and watching lots of rubbish on dvd" phase (very technical medical term, that!). So I'm still ill but at least able to communicate with the human world instead of being stuck in bed the whole time dreaming weird dreams about theme parks, tomatoes and adding a nice ribbon trim to a bolero jacket from Topshop (analyse that as you will!!).

The day before yesterday I was really not up to very much and sat listening to the radio, watching dvds and generally staring into space a little whilst knitting some little hats. Then yesterday the old noggin was working slightly better & I managed to get a little bit of my work-in-progress sewing pile attended to.... here are the products of both days:
As you can see, I sewed a few more eyes onto a few more birds (though only the whites of some, making them look slightly spooky), made a few moustaches and started a few more, and I stitched together a couple of pink & purple ornaments which have been waiting for their ribbons for just ages (they look rather wonky in this picture but I assure you that they are perfectly fine!). Of course now today it is raining like crazy and there is no light to speak of so actually listing the little blighters will probably have to wait another age... ah well. Taking photographs would involve standing up for rather more time than I can manage at the moment anyway, haha.

Right, I am off to drink tea and to do a bit more knitting. This would almost be my ideal way of spending my time except for that whole feeling ill thing (that and the knowledge of all the money I'm not earning by being unable to attend my legitimate paid employment. Bah).

Crafting 365 / 44 - some knitting and some more moustache-related fun

It is starting to get very dark here in the evenings so sewing anything dark is right out. I managed to get two brown moustaches finished & labelled before the light went but the rest of the moustaches had to wait...

Instead I turned my attention to my bag of knitting and made a few more little hats. I'm rather slow at knitting them so I only managed three last night, but as I've been knitting one or two at the end of each evening the pile is gradually growing. Here are the 20 I've knitted so far, along with those 2 moustaches:
So far there have been no knitting disasters, though a few of the hats are a little irregular and one time I forgot to change the colour over so the stripes are Not Quite Right. I'm tucking them all away in a brown paper bag once I've knitted them, ready and waiting to get stitched together & pompommed at a later date. It is very satisfying making a new mark on the tally (I can never remember how many I've done otherwise) and I do love to make stripey things.

In other news, my cloud-themed treasury was on the Etsy front page last night, hurrah! I missed it as I was tucked up in bed but you can take a peek at it here - I'm really pleased that several of the people I featured sold stuff, excellent items one and all.

Also, the lovely Brooke has been taking some more self-portraits with her moustache... the second one is particularly excellent, I think (a moustache eye-patch! genius). She also has a teeny thumbnail of herself modelling the moustache included in her new banner over in her Etsy shop which made me smile rather a lot! Hurrah for moustaches! :)