The joys of decorating

Sorry for the lack of posts, but we have been decorating our living room. Any sort of work in this room causes upheaval because we have hundreds, if not thousands, of books and they all need moving out of the way. Ripping out the awful nylon carpet we inherited when we bought the house and laying a solid wood floor has added to the chaos, though has been enormously satisfying. I have decided to take a break from painting today and concentrate on choosing fabric for the curtains and blinds. I always sew my own, which I enjoy doing, but oh dear, I do procrastinate over the choice of fabric. A very pleasant problem to have though. Do you cogitate for days over these sort of decisions or do you know instantly what you want?

Mothering Sunday is coming up in March, here in the UK, and I have started making a gift for my lovely mum, a crocheted granny square cushion cover. I will post a photo when I have finished making it.

I have popped this photo in to cheer up those of you who are affected by grey, miserable weather at the moment. I took this picture on a warm, sunny day last summer, on a walk along the north Cornish coast. Don't you just want to go swimming in that gorgeous blue sea? Oh well, dream on for a few months longer. I love the architectural shape of this umbellifer plant and plan to use this as inspiration for my living room blinds. I am thinking of adding some simple white embroidery to a lovely grey linen, though isn't that creamy white against the deep blue absolutely wonderful!

I have been thinking about another venture that I would value your opinion on. There is an excellent blog by the very talented Clara Parkes that provides comprehensive reviews of yarns aimed at knitters, knittersreview. Being based in the USA the yarns reviewed are predominantly those that can be bought there, though she does review some British yarns such as Rowan. I was wondering whether knitters and crocheters would appreciate a review blog concentrating on British and European yarns. It is something that I would enjoy doing, in fact, it would be a labour of love for me. An excuse to buy tons of different yarn and knit samples, my idea of bliss. So, what do you think? Would I be stepping on toes if I did this?

Thanks for dropping by.
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Crochet baskets

I am a little obsessed with crochet at the moment. The internet is to blame.....all those lovely blogs and Pinterest boards just make me want to sit down, get my hook and yarn out and fill my home with colourful throws and cushions. I made some baskets as a start; actually the first basket I made, in white, blue and grey, I gave to my sister for her newly decorated bedroom. I filled it with cotton wool balls and she was thrilled to bits with it. Of course, I omitted to take any photos of it.

However, I had caught the basket bug and it wasn't long before I had three more, one for bits and bobs (the white one), one to throw our cars keys into in the hall (the blue one) and one to store some yarn in (the BIG one).

My fabric stash has always been the sadly neglected sibling of my yarn stash, a sorry situation that I am now correcting with some gusto. Here is a selection of my most recent purchases.

Endless possibilities for these.

I'm thinking of embroidering around some of those wonderful butterflies.

I fell in love with these gorgeous pansies, what fantastic colours.

 I thought that the pansy fabric would make great cushion covers, perhaps as patchwork? I searched through my yarn stash and found these balls of 4 ply wool. The blue is alpaca, cashmere and silk so you can imagine how soft that yarn is. A nice crochet throw to complement the fabric would work a treat. I plan to outline all the crochet squares with a soft pale grey.

Thanks for dropping by.

Until next time, take care and happy crafting!

A new blog

Welcome, again!

If you have followed the link from my old blog to this new one, thank-you.

The infrequency of my blog posts was something that both bothered and intrigued me and so I asked myself some questions. Why did I not post more frequently and why did I not really enjoy composing posts?

I came to the following conclusions:

• I didn't really like the look of my blog
• I felt that my blog was too dull and lacking in humour
• I wasn't inspired by it at all

There must have been some deep wish to continue with blogging otherwise I'd have scrapped the idea there and then, so I decided that I needed to address the above points. I tried, and failed, to get the look I wanted at WordPress. This may have been due to lack of competence on my part and an unwillingness, at this time, to pay for a different theme. Someone advised me to have a look at Blogger and I must admit I found that customizing a basic blog theme was relatively easy. I redesigned my banner to include one of my knitted scarves, the most colourful I could find. I realised that I needed to be more confident with the use of colour.


I set myself the challenge of writing a blog post at least once per week and to relax a little with my style, finding my own voice instead of worrying so much about how the blog is perceived. If after 3 months I have not lived up to the challenge I will accept that blogging is perhaps not for me after all and I will bow out gracefully! 

So, enough with the procrastination, here is what I have been up to.

I have been knitting hats.

 I knit this tam for my neighbour from a pattern by the lovely lady at Color Shift Yarns. My neighbour loved the colours used so I tried to reproduce them as much as possible. I purchased the yarns from the same site and was very impressed with the high level of service and quality of the merino yarn. It was a delight to knit. I love the gradations of colour and plan to incorporate these into my own designs. 

My daughter is modelling this hat I made for my mum. Her request was for a thick, warm hat that would go with a red jacket. I combined a strand of pale grey wool/alpaca and a strand of a gorgeous yarn from Perran Yarns. I wrote about this lovely yarn in my previous blog (juicy yarn) and the colour combinations seemed ideal for the project. My mum was thrilled and told me that it goes perfectly with her jacket.

 I apologise for the poor photo, it really doesn't show the colours at their best. I have since invested in a couple of good daylight lamps to photograph my handcrafted items so hopefully future images will be much better. I decided that this was a better option than waiting for it to stop raining!

It has not been particularly cold here in Devon so far this winter but like everywhere else in the UK we have had seemingly endless rain. We ventured down to the river Tamar with our dog on his morning walk a couple of weeks ago and discovered just how much!

This is a field normally, not a lake.

It was safe to walk on the road again, though our terrier wasn't too sure.

     The actual river is the bit in front of the tree bank.

 

 

 

   

  My next post will be about crocheted bowls.

Thanks for dropping by.