Cosy Sisters

I knitted scarves for my sisters this Christmas... 

They got a long loop scarf each, knitted from fluffy faux-mohair yarn. One in black, and one in cloudy-blue...

... (the blue scarf can be seen in-progress here). I also knitted a third one for myself in a bright peacock-ish green. It is very very cosy but a ridiculously difficult colour to photograph! 

Then the moss green cowl I was knitting for myself turned out to have too high a wool content for me to wear it happily (when will I learn?) so instead it ended up being two cowls, one for each sister :)

Works in Progress

I've started my sky blanket! So much fun. 

The weather is so changeable at the moment that the sky can look totally different within five minutes, so I'm looking out of the window / up at the sky at midday each day and using the weather at that moment as my guide for the day's colours. It's fascinating how many creative choices are involved in translating the English weather into a mere two colours.

I've been noting down my colour choices on my calendar (a pretty one I got free with the craft magazine Mollie Makes at the end of last year) so I can knit the squares in the evening, and (most importantly) keep track of what square matches what day so I'll sew them together in the right order!

I'm definitely in the mood for knitting at the moment. I'm still quite tired after the busy Christmas season, and am spending my evenings curled up on the sofa watching lots of TV and doing some simple knitting. 

My current project is a black scarf - basic garter stitch on big chunky needles, using one strand of soft faux-mohair yarn. Black is always a pain to work with in bad light, but this is so easy to knit that I barely need to look at it (bonus: I can read the subtitles while watching Borgen and still keep knitting, hurrah!) It's very light and fluffy, and quite wide but I'm not sure how long it will end up being yet.

Work-wise I'm mostly doing admin at the moment (yawn), but I have made a start on the slow process of getting restocked after Christmas - beginning with a pile of poppy brooches.

I've also been making some progress on those knitted cushion covers.

The new one is almost finished (all the squares sewn together, all the ends woven in). The two older ones (the pink and the blue) also needed a bit of work as when I first made them I rather short-sightedly stitched the cushion inserts inside them without any way of removing the covers for washing... They've now been unpicked & washed, and all three covers are getting a row of little snap fasteners along one edge so they can easily be removed in the future.

As if I hadn't already sewn in enough yarn ends this week (oh my gosh, so many bits of yarn), I've started sewing in the ends of this stripe-y something that was lurking in my WIP box...

 ... and I've come up with a project for using six of the remaining eight blanket squares leftover from making the knitted cushions. I'm sewing them together in matching pairs...

... then lining them in matching acrylic felt and adding a mini zip...

... to make little coin purses. I've just finished one so far, it was a bit of a "don't measure or plan, just sort of wing it" job, but it turned out quite nicely and the end result is pretty darn cute if I do say so myself. I popped a few of my business cards in this one to add a sense of scale for the photo, but when they're finished the three purses are destined to be gifts for my two sisters and for my mum (who, of course, will get first dibs). 

Now I just need to come up with a plan for the final two non-matching squares. Hmm...

Knitted Cushion Covers

I watched lots of movies over Christmas and New Year, while working on some crafty projects... including one that's been a "work in progress" for over 25 years!

When I was a baby, my mum knitted me a blanket made from lots of little squares. She then started knitting squares for a second blanket but never finished it, and the bag of squares sat in the back of a cupboard for years.

Then when I started knitting as a hobby when I was at University, my mum gave me the squares and I picked out all the pink ones and the blue ones and stitched them together to make two cushion covers:

The rest of the squares had been sitting in a suitcase under my spare bed for several years after University. Then I found them while moving this autumn, and decided to sew a third cushion cover so I could have three lovely colourful cushions to put on the day bed in my studio.

Here's the front and back panels of the new cushion, almost ready to sew together:

I thought those colour combinations looked a bit crazy when I made the blue & pink cushions years ago, but now I think they're rather awesome and I love the idea of having a mis-matched front and back. It's funny how your tastes change over time, isn't it?

There are just a few squares leftover which will go back in the bag and in my "works in progress" box until I work out what to do with them...

... I don't know how long it's been since there was a wool section in WHSmith's but I imagine it's been quite a while!

Less 365

Last Christmas I set myself a challenge to give away 100 things in the run up to Christmas, to counterbalance all the consumption and excess of the season.

I had to find one thing in my house each day which I no longer used / liked / needed and then give it away (to local charity shops or to friends and neighbours). The giving felt great, but the decluttering felt even better! I was totally amazed by how many random things I'd been keeping that I no longer had any use for or real interest in (including the cookie cutters pictured above, which I'd bought many years before and never used).

As I wrote last year, "I will never ever ever be a minimalist. I like having a house full of colour and pattern and vintage treasures and sentimental trinkets and family heirlooms and things which just make me happy because they're beautiful. But I do want my posessions to earn their place in my home, and to have a house filled with wonderful things rather than clutter."

So, without blogging about it (because, honestly, I didn't know if I'd be able to manage it, especially after having just cleared out 100 things) I set myself the challenge in 2011 to do a "Less 365" project, getting rid of one thing a day for a whole year... and I just completed it yesterday afternoon!

I put a box in the spare room and started adding things to it one by one. I didn't completely stick to the "one thing a day" rule, but I kept a list of everything as I went along so I could keep track of my progress and so it wouldn't matter so much if I missed a few days here and there, I just made them up later. Sometimes my "one thing" for the day included lots of individual things (like a big pile of old magazines, or a china coffee set), sometimes they were big things, sometimes small, but the list just kept on getting longer...

Some things went to the charity shop, some things to friends and neighbours, others got recycled or just thrown away if they were really old or damaged. I could probably have sold lots of stuff on Ebay but to be honest selling on Ebay makes me really stressed, and I wanted that warm fuzzy feeling you get from taking bags of nice things to the local charity shop more than I wanted a bit of extra cash.

It's remarkably easy to pick out just one book you're not going to read again, one CD you never listen to, one sweater you never wear, your least favourite bit of crockery, and so on... and I've found that by sticking everything in a box out of sight for a few weeks, decision-making is a lot less stressful. Putting stuff in the box doesn't feel scary and final, when you empty the box when it gets full you'll probably have emotionally let go of most of the contents... and if you haven't you get a second chance to rescue something at the last minute if you've changed your mind, or you can just leave things in the box for a few months while you make a final decision.

I'm not going to lie to you, it does get trickier to choose things as the year goes on, but it makes you really look hard at all your "stuff" and be really honest with yourself about what you want to keep and use/display in your home, and why... and, of course, your space will be much less cluttered. I hugely recommend it! And even if you don't fancy the full "Less 365", you could just try it for January and see how you get on :)