June in Pictures: Blanket Squares, Summer Sunshine, Packing Parcels, and Playing with Paint

How is it halfway through July already?? Eek!

I'd better blog about my June Instagram pics before we blink and it's August :)

At the start of June (when it was really rather chilly) I was spending lots of my evenings working on my mini patchwork squares blanket. Whenever I have any double-knit acrylic yarn left over from other projects, I use it to knit mini moss stitch squares (just 10 stitches across) to add to the blanket.

Once I've knitted the leftover yarn into squares, I sew them into blocks (one colour per block). I've been sticking to the same few shapes so the blanket is random but cohesive. This is a slow, labour-intensive process but a really relaxing one!

Once I've sewn the squares into the various shapes, it's time to find a space for them on the blanket. (Sometimes I lay the blanket out before sewing the shapes together so I can sew the squares into the perfect shape to fit a gap but not this time). I'm trying to get a nice mix of colours and shapes across the blanket - so, again, this is a controlled randomness.

As I add the squares, I mark them on the matching chart so I can track my progress. I'm up to 514 squares so far... 386 still to go! 

The finished blanket will have a sweep of colour down the middle and the rest will be white, so I've also been knitting lots of little white squares behind the scenes. Sadly, white squares do not make for very exciting photographs.

All those little squares take a long time to stitch together, and there are a lot of yarn ends to weave in. Every time I share pics of this project there's always someone who recoils in horror at the thought of all that boring stitching but honestly I find it very relaxing and almost meditative. This is definitely not a project I'd recommend embarking on if you can't bear weaving in ends!

It was my birthday at the beginning of the month (yay!), and I was gifted some excellent things including Step Aside, Pops by Kate Beaton and a book & comic by the always awesome John Allison.

Summer finally decided to show up, so I spent my lunch-breaks reading in the garden - enjoying the sunshine, the flowers and the chirping of birds and buzzing of bees.

What a contrast to later in the month when we had days of sudden thunder and rainstorms! Ah, England I love you but your weather is not reliable.

Back on the crafty front, I made a DIY envelope from an old map. It's so easy to make your own envelopes (you can cheat and use an existing envelope as a template!) and they add some extra specialness to a bit of snail mail.

 

I de-stressed by spending a few hours playing with paint (I am terrible at painting but this was so much fun!).

I continued to work on my felt flowers - these are old designs I used to sell in my shop that I'm giving a new life as sewing patterns (coming to my shop later this summer!). I've been getting the designs absolutely perfect and taking lots of notes so I can write detailed step-by-step instructions.

I also had a tidy up in my studio, adding last year's magazine features to my "archive" (a fancy word for a few folders on my bookshelf). I worked on lots of fun projects in 2015 but the partridge and pear wreath I designed for Mollie Makes was probably my favourite - not least because it ended up on the cover (very exciting).

During my studio tidy I got as far as writing a list of "things to photograph!" - including these colourful finished projects - but not as far as actually taking the photos. Hopefully I will have actually ticked these things off the list by the end of July! I do so adore these bright colours.

I cleared out lots of crafty supplies and other bits and pieces and held a destash and declutter sale. It takes a long time to sort and weigh and measure and photograph everything for a sale, but it's so good to have made some more space in my studio and to have found new homes for so many things that were sitting around in my home unused and unloved.

After my sale, I had lots of parcels to post! That fab parcel tape is by Hazel Nicholls - I love using decorative tape, it's such a simple way to cheer up the packages I send.

After my destash/declutter sale, I had another sale: this time of lots of samples I'd stitched for craft books.

(The projects pictured are from: Banners, Buntings, Garlands & Pennants; Super-Cute Felt Animals; Mollie Makes Woodland Friends; Mollie Makes Weddings; Tis the Season to be Felt-y; and Craft Camp)

Again, there was lots of weighing and measuring and photographing and parcel packing... but all the work was well worth it as lots of pieces found new homes and I have lots of space for new things in my studio (hurrah!).

I also love this photo I took of samples stitched when working on my second book, Super-Cute Felt Animals. You'll find some of these projects available as free tutorials here and (almost all of) the rest in the book itself.

 

Finally, no Instagram round-up is complete without our sleepy cat sneaking in somewhere. How he manages to sleep upside down with one leg in the air is a mystery!

You can follow along with all my creative adventures (with the occasional cat photo!) over on Instagram. 

#Crafting365 Days 16-23: Yarn Experiments, Festive Embroidery & Making Envelopes

Time for another #Crafting365 round-up!

It's slightly scary how quickly these photos are mounting up - but, of course, that's the whole point of this challenge, isn't it? The days zip by so fast and it's all too easy to let days and weeks go by without making space for creativity. But if you do make a bit of time each day to get your craft on it's amazing how much you can get done as the weeks roll by.

Day 16 was all about yarn. I did some more blanket square knitting (my current go-to project at the end of a long day) and had fun experimenting with leftover yarn scraps from previous projects. I love these colourful stripes!

On day 17, I looked in my box of "in progress" projects (a.k.a. a big box of half-finished stuff that has lain undisturbed for weeks, months and in a few cases years) to choose some projects to re-start. It was great to get this embroidered snowman finally finished about a year after starting it! If you want to stitch your own snowman, you'll find the pattern here.

On days 18 and 19, I worked on my floral cushion. The pale green thread in this photo is the thread I'm using to tack the felt flowers in place. They get pinned, then tacked with a few large stitches, then I remove the tacking threads once I've whip stitched the shape in position.

Here's how the cushion looked by the end of day 19:

I've now stitched flowers in each colour, and used up all the shapes I cut out at the start of my 365 challenge... but, as you can see, there's lots of space still to fill! So, I'll be cutting out a whole bunch more flowers soon.

Day 20 involved more simple knitting. I'm continuing to re-knit the wrong-sized squares for my happy rainbow blanket. The squares I made from this pink yarn were so big that I've got enough yarn left over from each re-knitted square to make a mini moss stitch square to add to my patchwork blanket. Knitting the moss stitch squares made a nice change from the endless knit knit knit of garter stitch!

On day 21, I stitched some more of the festive embroidery patterns I drew last year: a penguin and a Christmas pudding. These stitched motifs are going to become Christmas ornaments - fingers crossed they won't take me another year to complete.

I finished a letter to a friend on day 22 but realised I didn't have any envelopes, so I got out my scissors and made one:

I love making envelopes from magazine pages, it's an easy way to jazz up your letters and a great way to get another use for a magazine once you've read it. Plus it would be sad to just recycle these beautiful pages! Glossy magazine pages make excellent envelopes, especially now the Royal Mail have those postage stamps that are like stickers - they're much easier to stick to glossy paper than the kind you have to lick! (Those gorgeous autumnal photos = from the October issue of Harper's Bazaar)

Then yesterday (day 23) I did yet more simple-blanket-square-knitting, and got my paints out to test out some ideas for a new project. So much yummy colour...

365 / 222 - Hundreds of Circles

I was a bit sleepy yesterday and spent the whole evening curled up on the sofa watching videos, and cutting out teeny felt circles from my stash of felt scraps...
... colour therapy at its finest! In other colour-related news, I bought some delicious plants yesterday to add a bit more colour to our balcony and am most annoyed at the rain we're having today cos I can't get outside and plant them... plus: we're busy picking paint colours, starting with a blue for the bathroom. The bathroom has a blue carpet, so it's going to be blue walls to match. Test patches are drying as I type, and so far we're leaning towards this one, the imaginatively titled "blue sky":
Not too dark, not too pale, looks half-decent with the carpet, etc etc. I rather liked the look of this one... .... but it ends up darker than that and we definitely want the whole room painted one colour, it could be quite oppressive (though it would make a lovely and chic accent colour). Named "stormy sky" it may have similar effects on the emotions as real life stormy weather, and paint colours that seem likely to cause Seasonal Affective Disorder are probably a bad idea, haha. Also the boyfriend thinks it rather revolting and has vetoed it completely! Hopefully we'll have some sunny painting-friendly weather sometime soon - the bathroom does look rather funny at the moment covered in blue patches.