A foray into crochet

I quite like crochet, but I like it on my terms, when I feel like doing it. I didn't particularly feel like crocheting this week, but I had to take four flights (I was away at a business conference) and of course, knitting needles are strictly forbidden. So what to do? I really didn't fancy a craft fasting exercise - it calms me down and allows me to relax and mull over the events of the day. So I had to chose a crochet project that was small enough to take on the plane and stimulating enough to keep my attention.

Quite by chance, the week before I went away, I came across this pattern from the fabulous cherry heart blog and fell in love. I answered all my needs - small amounts of yarn, quirky finished result and loads of colour - hooray! I broke out my sock leftover stash and got to work.

Once I got home from the conference, I went through my button stash and found the perfect finishing touches. The weather has turned this weekend and we are experiencing our first autumn storm, so I think they might get a fair bit of use over the next few weeks!

I'm a winner!

I'm not a big competition enterer (is there such a word? Probably not!) - but when I saw one on Planet Penny's wonderful blog to win a Daylight Lamp  I couldn't resist entering. Penny asked how a Daylight Lamp would make life easier for me - now that wasn't a hard one to answer! Up here, in the northernmost town in mainland UK , the winter nights are long and the days are short. Here's a pic from my kitchen window last winter:

You can see my lovely little studio on the left there. However it does get a tad dark and gloomy during the long winter months, so I really coveted the lamp.

So I entered the competition, then off I went on holiday for two weeks and thought no more about it, because I never win anything. (that could be because I rarely enter anything, but let's not split hairs now...)

So imagine my amazement when I got home to find that I had WON!!! I had a lovely email from Penny and my Swan table lamp was very speedily dispatched and arrived all the way up in the far north in very quick time. I finally got it set up and working and took some pictures this afternoon, I am so thrilled with it!

Here is the lamp in all its glory - not the best pic but I haven't found a home for it yet, so it is just lurking on top of my 1942 Singer sewing machine at present:

It has a fabulous acrylic magnifier which pops on and off the base really easily, and can be positioned wherever you want it. The light is neat and also will move wherever you need it.

And look at the difference in the photos! Without the lamp ...

And with the lamp ...

Whoo hoo!!

(The picture, by the way, is of my binsenkorbchen socks that I am knitting up ... wonderful pattern creating by slipping stitches rather than stranding - really pleased with them so far!)

So a huge thank you to Planet Penny for running the competition, and to the random number generator for picking me as the winner, and to  Daylight Company for their brilliant lamp!

Look, I knitted the world!

I found this lovely pattern via Ravelry and, though I can crochet perfectly well, I much prefer to knit. So I wondered if the pattern would translate to knitting ... and bravely decided to give it a go. As knit stitches do not form a perfect "square", I was a little concerned that it might come out slightly elongated. If you've ever looked at knitting graph paper you will notice that the squares are slightly wider than they are tall, so that when you create your design it comes out "square". I wasn't sure if the same thing applied to crochet ... anyway enough waffling - here's the end result:

As you can see, it worked perfectly! I was quite delighted. Here's Europe and Africa:

And look! The chart even has Antarctica on it:

If you would like to have a go at making the globe and you are not on Ravelry, visit Crochet Parfait for full and comprehensive instructions on how to crochet it.

I gave the globe to my two little boys to play with, they were delighted!

Handmade slippers

 Despite the lack of activity on the blog, I have still been busy making. I always wear slippers in the house, but my old slippers were in a right state, just about ready to drop apart. Rather than part with at least £20 for a new pair, my other half suggested I should make some instead. So I did! I bought felting yarn (Filzit yarn, four balls), followed the wonderful pattern by Pilgrim Purse , and knitted my slippers. I felted and shaped them, stuffing them with plastic bags to keep their shape until they dried. Although you can felt in a machine, I did mine by hand so that I could ensure I got them just the right size for my feet.

Once I was happy with the shape and look of my slippers, I set about decorating them! I used my needle felting skills to add a simple colourful design.

 Needle felting is quite easy to do and not too expensive to start up - have a look at Gillian Gladrag's delightful site for some great tips and starter kits.

Once I had finished my needle felting I added leather soles to the bottom of my slippers. Because however much I tell myself that I won't go outside in them, I know I'll forget ...

I used a bradawl to poke holes through the leather at even intervals, which I had marked previously with a pounce wheel. That made it much easier to attach the leather to the soles. You can see the pounce wheel in the top left of this picture.

And here are my finished slippers! They are a little bit wider than I would have liked, but it means they are nice and airy for the summer. I think I may knit woollen liners for the winter!

More Adventures - this time in yarn dyeing

Wow, what a long time since I last posted! Apologies, life has been a little hectic around here. Crafting still going on (at a slightly reduced rate!) but back to normal after next week.

In the meantime, I finally got round to dyeing my lovely hanks of yarn I got from World of Wool . I got a gift voucher from there for my fortieth birthday last year, and promptly invested in  two hanks of yarn and six wee pots of dye. However I was then too scared to use them! So this week I got together with a friend and she showed me what to do.

Firstly, we dunked the yarn (and some carded fibre to experiment with first) into a bucket filled with malt vinegar. I didn't realise you could use normal brown vinegar, I thought it had to be distilled! So that was my first surprise.

This is Bettine giving my wool and her fibre a good pummelling in the bucket. You can imagine the smell for yourself! It's not really a very social activity!

She showed me some of the yarn she had dyed herself the previous week - aren't the colours wonderful?

Unfortunately I forgot to turn the flash off so some of the colours are reflected in the lustre of the yarn but you can see what wonderful vibrant colours she got! There's a mix of painted and pan-dyed yarns there.

OK - on to our experiments. This one didn't go as expected (actually to be fair, none of them did! But that's half the fun of it!). I used cherry red, crimson and orange, but it all ended up fairly much one colour.

You can see some undyed fleece in the background there. This is the fleece all dyed and ready to go into the microwave (I put it inside a microwaveable bag first to make sure we didn't coat the inside with dye!).

The next thing we did was take the first skein of yarn and pot-dye it in two colours, fuschia and periwinkle. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the dyeing process because my hands were covered at that point! But here is the end result, with the red fleece and another piece of fleece dyed in fuschia and periwinkle, all drying on my washing line (scuse the poor photo, the light was just beginning to fade at this point)

And here's the skein all dried and ready to wind!

A lot more pink than I intended, but I was really pleased with the variation in the colour in the blue.

Naturally I wound it up and started knitting a pair of socks straightaway!

That was yesterday. Today, embolded by my success, I decided to paint my other skein (I had kept it in a bag so it was still damp with vinegar). So I laid out my yarn on bin bags and clingfilm, and started with some turquoise just dripped onto two points of the yarn:

I then took some bright yellow and dribbled that over the yarn. Then I added a wee bit of turquoise to make a lovely green, and splatted that in the spaces. I'm about half way through doing that here.

Now what I didn't anticipate was how much the colours would mix together during the setting process! Here's the yarn just after it came out of the microwave (I did it for three minutes in a 700w microwave, then did it for another minute just to make sure).

I think maybe I hadn't done it for long enough, but I was scared of burning the yarn. I took it out and rinsed it ... and all the colours began to blend! Never mind, I'm very happy with the finished result.

The turquoise is now more of an emerald green - I was aiming to have "dots" of colour when it is knitted up but I think they will in fact be wee lines of bright green - we shall see!

One thing I will say though ... I am hooked!! I can't wait to try this again!!

An alternative use for leftover sock yarn

I love knitting socks. Once you have made your first pair I swear you become hooked. They are a lot simpler to make than it appears at first, you can have so much fun with pattern and colour, and they are so nice to wear.

However, I find I always have lots of sock yarn left over - not enough to knit into another pair of socks, but enough to make me want to do something with it. Lots of sock knitters make sock yarn blankets with their leftovers, but whilst I find them lovely to look at, I like my blankets to be big and heavy, so a blanket didn't really appeal to me.

So, I decided to make a pair of leggings with my leftovers, and I am really pleased with the final results. I like to wear them under a long sweater, or with a skirt over the top, and they are great in our cold Scottish winter weather.

I loosely followed a pattern which I found on Ravelry, called Super Easy Leggings by Phoenix Bess. And she was right, they really were super easy!  They didn't even take as long as I expected to make, about two months in all. I sewed the ends in as I went along to make it a less daunting prospect!

Thank you to my very kind friend Helen who bought me the pattern!

Tea, anyone?

I do love a nice cuppa. And of course a drink is too wet without a biscuit. However I don't think anyone will be dunking these ones in their tea!

I made each of these from fleece fabric, using wadding and backing fabric and my lovely vintage singer sewing machine to create the lettering and decorations. I love my singer - it sews through anything!

Delicious looking custard cream

Yummy jammy dodger

Chocolate digestive - the front ...

... and the back!

A squidgy bourbon

And a cuddly pink wafer!

These were such fun to make! They are now winging their way to the recipient in a Very Large Box.

Of course, if you are going to have biscuits, as I said earlier, you need to have tea. In a tea pot. So as a bit of relaxation last week I made this tea cosy, from a lovely pattern in a book called Tea Cozies 2 (it's American, hence the "z"). I think I might have to make more cosies, they knit up satisfyingly quickly!

The front, with tea towel, tshirt and knickers!

The back, with skirt, jumper and camisole

Hope you all had a lovely Easter. Enjoy the spring weather!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaargh

That was me last week. No internet! For almost a fortnight! Not quite sure how I survived. We are back up and running now (with a different provider, natch).

However I did survive, and now I will bring you up to date with the last couple of weeks' happenings. First, lots more owls and chicks have been made for the upcoming Easter rush. Here are the chicks nestling in their new home:

Don't think they will be there for long though! For sale at Eye Candy in Thurso. Also at Eye Candy are some more owls and some knitted eggs - they'll last a bit longer than the chocolate ones!

I have been very busy making bunting for the Puffin Croft Farm Shop too: Firstly a lovely set to hang up in their shop space (scuse the wonky spacing on my wall, it'll look much better in situ I'm sure!)

Here's a close-up of the puffins (they match the bags I made for them earlier):

And I also made some bunting to sell in her shop - here (am rather pleased with the packaging!):

All the items shown here are available to order - just email me on jill@miaoucrafts.com or message me on here!
More new items in the offing, will share soon!

Lots of news and deliciousness!

So much has happened over the past week!

Firstly, I have started working with a lovely local gift shop called Eye Candy who sell some fabulous gifts. She has some cupcakes and owls that I have created, look!

They look like they are jostling each other for the front spot, don't they?!

 I also made her some little Easter chicks - aww cute!

Soon to go into Eye Candy - exclusive bags and birthday bunting. Watch this space! It's lovely to work with a local business who "gets" handmade craft :o)

Another local business who I mentioned recently has just taken delivery of some more gorgeousness for their shop. Puffin Croft Farm Shop in John O'Groats now stocks these yummy lavender hearts:

And the commissions continue - here's a cupcake phone cover I made last week:

It even has cupcake lining fabric and a cupcake button - more cute!

As you can see, I have been busy, with lots of things in progress behind the scenes too!

I am very busy at the moment trying to improve my workspace. Currently I have all my things squished into a couple of cupboard shelves, with the overspill behind the sofa. However the overspill is threatening to take over and so Nick has cleared all his things out of the cupboard this afternoon so I can organise my own things in there a little more efficiently. I reckon that once I have sorted everything out I will save at least a couple of hours a week that I currently waste looking for things! Well, that's the theory anyway. If I am brave I might post some before and after pictures. Hmm.

New product!

And I'm a little better too :)

Here's a project I have been working on for a wee while - bags for a wonderful place in John O'Groats called Puffin Croft Farm Shop . They do fantastic veg boxes which they deliver weekly, and they sell their own home-grown vegetables plus eggs and deli items. If you are in the area they are well worth a visit - the owners are really friendly and they have some lovely animals there too! The bags are for sale at the farm shop.

I started feeling a wee bit better yesterday afternoon, but am still not feeling great! You can tell by the amount of squares I have knitted.

Hopefully I will be back to full health soon!

Slow Progress

Urgh - I have the lurgy. A nasty virus has been working its way round the family and settled on me last Wednesday. I am now on day 5 of being poorly and still getting worse, which is very unusual for me!

The thing I hate the most about being ill is that I can't work (either at my salaried job, or at my lovely craft work). I have neither the concentration skills to work on the challenging Harry Potter socks, nor the ability to sit at the sewing machine to make any of the mounting orders of phone cases, bags and toys without descending into a coughing fit. Fortunately everyone is very kind and patient, but I still wish I could just get on!

However as any crafty person will agree, it's impossible to sit around and do nothing. At first I pulled out my scraps blanket and added a few rows to that, then when it was long enough (it's been needing an extra few inches for a while now!), I swapped my crochet hook for knitting needles and started making mini squares. At first I had no particular design in mind for them, I was just pulling scraps of yarn out of a huge bag and knitting mindlessly, but Calum has requested that I use them for making a blanket for him. Hooray - another project! Like I need another project on the go, hahaha. Here's my first few squares:

In the background you can see Calum's newly revamped chair - up until a couple of months ago it was still painted pink and white from when his big sister (now aged 13) owned it!

Hopefully, normal service will be resumed shortly.