The thing with knitting is that it doesn't always turn out as planned. I made great progress with my tea cosy yesterday afternoon. Got to the difficult part of having to purl two together into the back of the stitch and decided to leave it until today when there wouldn't be quite so much read wine in my system to confuse my brain.Sunday started early so that we could watch Lewis Hamilton's efforts to get the championship from Massa. A bit of help from the internet meant that I felt positive about the next stage so I continued. I managed the difficult ... read more
Evening entertainment
Saturday night at home. Mr C and I used to play a lot of Scrabble against each other. Recently we've been busy with other things, but tonight the board was dusted down and the book that's necessary to prevent arguments found on the bookshelf. We still play with the set that originally belonged to my parents and we take the scores very seriously with an excel spreadsheet that plots our scores and personal averages.Annoyingly Mr C won. Again. ... read more
Battenberg Tea Cosy
My sister asked me a while ago to knit a tea cosy for her, after seeing one that she liked in Jane Brocket's fantastic The Gentle Art of Domesticity. A quick flick through my various knitting books found a perfect pattern for a 1940s style cosy in I Love Knitting and the search began to find the perfect yarn colours online. The Rowan website provided colour charts and a decision was made. Shopping list in hand I went off to my local John Lewis. I managed to find the Calmer in one of the shades I needed, but struggled a bit with the Carnation shade. Luckily their clearance sale was on at ... read more
Salem Falls – Jodi Picoult
I'm not quite sure why, but Salem Falls initially didn't draw me in as other Jodi Picoult books have done. It may have been the talk of paganism and witchcraft that I'm not too fond of, but luckily as I carried on the strength of the characters came through and it ended as a reasonably good read.Jack St. Bride arrives in Salem Falls having been released from prison where he was serving a term after being accused of raping a pupil. He is determined to pick up the pieces of his life and takes a job washing dishes at the local diner that is run by Addie Peabody. ... read more
NZ Stitches
I had a bit of a sort of all my sewing and knitting things over the weekend and realised just how bad I am at actually finishing things. I have a whole pile of half finished projects and a single box full of not finished (or in some cases not even started) cross stitch projects.We're swiftly running out of space in our little flat so I've vowed to finish a few projects before allowing myself to buy anything else, no matter how cheap it is. (Mr C's probably reading this and hoping that I'll do the same with books!) The first projects to get finished were probably my most recent ... read more
Woolly Embroidery
I certainly wasn't planning to buy any more craft books when I went to the Knitting and Stitching show, but this one on the Embroiderers' Guild book stand caught my attention and I just couldn't put it down.Woolly Embroidery is an American English language version of a book that was originally published in Japan in 2006. Split into two halves, the first part of the book provides beautiful photographs of various embroidered items, whilst the second half contains instructions and patterns for the reader to be able to reproduce them, along with a detailed reference ... read more
More purples
As I said in my last post, quite a few purple items ended up in my shopping bag last week. Another example was this 'experimental pack' from Stef Francis. An exciting little bundle containing dyed silk noil, Indian organza, Indian fabric, two skeins of dyed yarn, coloured copper wire and some sequins. I'm not sure how it's going to be used yet, but just looking at it and feeling the contents is keeping me satisfied for the time being until my creative juices take over. ... read more
Purples
As a child, if asked what my favourite colour was I was never too sure how to answer. I just seemed to go for what everyone else liked. After all, no child liked to stand out from the rest for the fear of being picked on as a result. One colour that I would never have dared respond with would have been purple - my school uniform at the time was grey and purple.Nowadays I'm still not sure how to answer the question as it very much depends on my mood. Last Thursday though, looking at the contents of my shopping bag from the Knitting and Stitching show, I must have been in a purple mood. This ... read more
Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef
The first thing that greeted us at the Knitting and Stitching show was the UK reef part of the Institute for Figuring's Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project. I'd missed this when the original reef was at London's Hayward Gallery earlier in the year so was thrilled to be able to see it up close. This version was co-ordinated by the Craft Council and was inspired by the original reef's London exhibition. I won't even try to start trying to explain the mathematics behind hyperbolic crochet as it just started to make my head hurt to be ... read more
Stuck socks
I've written before about the first sock that I was trying to knit, but unfortunately, since then, I've become a bit stuck and have not been able to go much further.Basically, the instructions that came with the sock knitting kit that I bought were making no sense at all. I thought something was a bit suspicious when I got to the end of the tube that makes up the top part of the sock (i.e. stopped between needles 4 and 1) for the instructions to say that I needed to create the heel by knitting along needle number 1, back again, and then along 4 and back again. I thought ... read more