Birds Birds Birds

Also on this weekend's to do list: sewing lots of felt birds for my shop! 

It's a lovely relaxing project, but there's still a lot of stitching still to do in order to get all these birdies finished. 

 

The crochet blanket in the pics is a cheerful new addition to the sofa / day bed in my studio. I bought this blanket a few years ago but it's been in storage since I moved out of my old flat and I was rather missing it. So I unpacked it this week and I'm very glad I did, it cheers me up every time I look at it - so much yummy colour. It's hard to tell from the photos, but there's even some neon orange and pink in the mix! Yum. 

UPDATE: I'm gradually turning my bird designs into sewing patterns! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns:

Giant Granny Square Blanket: Finished!

With my mother & sister helping me take a photo of my sky-blanket-in-progress at the weekend, I thought it was a good opportunity to finally get a couple of snaps of the giant granny square blanket I made last year.

Look how big it is!

This blanket is the first thing I've ever crocheted (if you don't include the small practice square I made when learning the technique), and the largest thing I've ever made (I've knitted a couple of blankets before but they were much smaller than this).

One of the lovely ladies at my old knitting club taught me how to make a simple granny square and I just kept crocheting until the blanket was big enough for a double bed. It's a slightly distorted square but it looks "just square enough" not to look strange when it's lying on a bed.

The sunshine makes the colours seem a bit brighter than they are to the naked eye - this photo is a bit more
accurate:

Lots and lots of happy hours went into the blanket - towards the end, it took over an hour to crochet a single round (I really don't want to do the maths and work out how long it must have taken in total).

It was a very relaxing project, not least because crocheting it all in one piece meant I only had a few ends to sew in when it was finished (just the strands which were left each time I switched colours). Its size did mean that it wasn't the world's most easily portable craft project though, and I had to take a break from it during the warmer weeks of summer as it was just too hot to sit with a great big blanket on my lap! (I started it in May and finally finished sewing in the ends in September).

I'm very pleased with how it turned out, and I'm still a big fan of the colours I chose - the umming and aahhing in the shop while I was trying to find a selection of colours that worked well together (and the eye-rolls and slightly impolite comments I received from the shop staff, especially when I realised I needed to pop to a cash machine before paying as the yarn ended up costing a bit more than I'd expected as I'd chosen so many colours) was totally worth it.

I didn't plan the colour arrangement totally in advance, but I did plan each repeat of the seven colours. I stitched one row / two rows / one row / three rows, and made sure to arrange the colours so I ended up with a balance of the different shades throughout the blanket and so I avoided creating the same colour combinations over and over. I had planned on finishing with a double row of the navy blue, but alas I ran out of that shade / batch number of yarn & couldn't get hold of any more! (If my memory serves me well, I think I bought two balls of each shade?) Ah well. 

I definitely want to try making another crochet blanket sometime, and I'd very much recommend it if you're thinking of trying to make one yourself. If a crochet novice like me can manage it, so can you :)

July Bits & Bobs

Hello there! Things continue to be a bit quiet around here as I'm still suffering from creative block (ugh), but I've got a few snaps to share of things I've been up to lately...

My shops are all still open, so I've been keeping up my usual routine of parcel-packing and posting a few times a week. I like listening to Agatha Christie audiobooks while I'm packing up my orders and I'm currently 3/4s of the way through Dumb Witness. I'm so familiar with the plots of these books, and they're so light and gentle-paced that I can half-listen to them easily while I'm focused on writing customer addresess, etc. 

I have been doing a little bit of sewing here and there despite my creative block - I finished a batch of small poppy brooches earlier this week. The poppies have always been one of my favourite designs to sew.

Unfortunately I hurt my hand a couple of weeks ago and had to stop knitting for a bit, so I've fallen a bit behind with my sky blanket. I'm still taking careful note of the sky colours each day though... there continues to be an awful lot of grey!

I've been trying to switch off the laptop as much as possible when I'm not working, as part of a wider effort to develop more regular & less workaholic-y working habits. Being self-employed it is all too easy to get into the habit of just working all the time and not properly "switching off" from work, but I'm trying to make a determined effort to stop work at a set time in the evening & take proper days off (just a small bit of emailing in the morning and evening on my days off, which honestly can't really be helped when you're running an online business which is "open" 24/7).

So instead of reading blogs I've been reading stacks of library books, and instead of writing emails to friends I'm doing my best to send them cards & write them proper letters. I'm currently reading Philip Pullman's Northern Lights (a.k.a. The Golden Compass) which is just ace. I am a huge fan of novels like this and read soooo many of them as a teenager, that I am completely amazed / slightly baffled that it's taken me so long to get around to reading the His Dark Materials trilogy! Mmm... lovely books...

On my days off I've been enjoying the slightly unseasonal pleasure of curling up with lots of blankets, reading books or watching DVDs. The "day bed" in my studio is covered in comfy cushions and cosy blankets, including the giant granny square blanket which I crocheted last year. The double-bed sized blanket was my very first crochet project, and a huge amount of fun to make. I finished sewing in the ends just before I suddenly moved house last autumn & it's been packed up in a box ever since... it's very nice to finally be using it, and I think it looks rather snazzy with those vintage florals! I must remember to try to get a photo of the full finished blanket in all its stripey glory sometime :)

I've also been going on some day trips - yay! I'm currently living a mere hour and a half from central London so I'm trying to get up to town as often as possible for trips to galleries and museums and to meet up with friends and some of the lovely folks I've got to know through Etsy over the years. I've been buying a postcard or two from each place I've been to, as a little memento of my travels...

... with so many great galleries & museums (almost) on my doorstep I'm determined to visit as many of them as I can while I'm living here! The Natural History Museum is next on my list, and then after that I'll be giving London a miss for a few weeks while the Olympics are on and going to places like Oxford & Windsor instead. You can see Windsor Castle from my parents house on a clear day, and as local residents we get free entry (yay!) but I haven't been for at least 15 years. I am quite looking forward to it.

UPDATE: My poppy design is now available as a sewing pattern! Visit my shop to see all my printable PDF patterns

Giant Granny Square Blanket: update

My crochet blanket is getting larger:


The colours are a bit bright in that photo - they look more like this in real life:


It'll still be a while before it's finished... I want it to be quite a bit bigger, so we can use it on the double bed in the spare room, and it's currently taking over an hour to crochet a single round!

It's proving to be a great "end of the evening" project: simple and super-relaxing.

WIP: Giant Granny Square Blanket

My first crochet blanket is growing steadily...


I'm not following a fixed pattern, just stitching a repeating pattern of one row / two rows / one row / three rows, and mixing up the seven colours as I go along to get a nice selection.


I've not decided how large I want it to be yet... or how I'm going to finish the edge. I've got a while to go yet before I have to decide!