Friday, March 27, 2009

I've been tagged..


...by Roz. I'm to show the fourth photo in the fourth folder of My Pictures. I think it is one that has appeared here before, of the almond tree below the snug window. Just in case you are wondering how we afford the water to keep the lawn looking so lush, it isn't a lawn, it's a putting green made from a piece of the old bowling green carpet that was destined for landfill before we rescued it. One of our friends claimed another chunk and used it to carpet all his balconies!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

New layout ...


and a friendly glass of lemonade along with a cyber hug, both from my friend Marion, who makes meticulously crafted cards.

I've changed the layout because those bits of foliage that overlapped the text were becoming an annoyance, and it was more fun to make a new header than to fiddle about with HTML...

Sunday, March 22, 2009

Family Ties

When 0j0 was last here, she found an old Paton's book of bazaar knits (that's bazaar, not bizarre) and was laughing at the knitted ties, tea and egg cosies. She then asked if I could knit a really garish tie as a Christmas present for a friend of hers, and hinted that she really needed that knitted dachshund draught excluder...

Not having anything on the pins at the moment, I was happy to tackle the tie commission, and chose a ball of turquoise, orange and yellow acrylic as I was passing through the Chinese Bazaar yesterday. The tie in the book was a silky slip of a thing; With DK I was obviously producing something much more substantial. Something that could be used to replace a fan belt in an emergency.

I cast on 6 stitches with 5.5mm pins and knitted garter stitch. The yarn was quite pleasant in texture for acrylic; quite silky and without any of the usual horrible squeak. After a foot, I increased to 8 stitches and knitted to the end of yarn, an event that coincided with the end of the programme I was watching on Beeb 2 about Communism in Czechoslovakia. I looked down at the finished article, and realised that the space dye had coincided nicely with the row length, and produced a neat yellow zigzag up the tie. I'm not sure what 0j0's reaction will be as it turned out quite attractive in its own way, and I think her intention was something a trifle more gross...

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Not the Wild Things...


As those of you who read my other blog will know, I'm cataloguing the weeds and wild flowers that are growing in The Bottom as it recovers from the deprivations of Ivan the Bulgarian. Because there are only so many hours in a day, there might not be any craft related posts here for a while, but you might get the odd flower photo that doesn't fit into the wildflower category...

Thursday, March 19, 2009

A Scissor Keeper...


...from a pattern I found on The Drawn Thread. I had some oddments of home dyed thread I wanted to test, and this seemed an easy pattern. The pink to red thread is Coats crochet cotton left over from a batch dyed years ago with Dylon Cold, the green shaded thread and the pink/yellow is a Spanish crochet cotton dyed with Chromotex T shirt pens.

I've cheated on the photos because I haven't shown just how un-square this is! I used cloth that wasn't quite evenweave, and so when I stitched the side seams following the instructions, I ended up with a rather interesting twisted shape. I don't seem to have photo of the hanging loop, either. I made it with the remainder of the red/pink crochet cotton.

I've spent a few hours cross stitching this week, embroidering a band on a guest towel for a friend's birthday; wrapped up and dispatched before I remembered to photograph it...

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

More holiday stitches


This looks wonky because it is wonky: despite being stitched on a frame, the minute it was released from its bondage it took on a list, as needlepoint is wont to do before it is blocked. I am not sure yet what I shall do with it when it is blocked. I bought a bag of thread oddments from the charity shop, and a little kit was amongst the bits. The kit consisted of canvas and crewel wool to make a pincushion and needlebook. The needlebook was partly finished, but the crewel wool did not cover the canvas and it looked very threadbare. I found Anchor Tapestry wool in my stash that more or less matched the colours and took the pincushion canvas and pattern on holiday with me. I ran out of the red wool, and have only just got round to finishing it off. I looked for wool in Tenerife, but three different shops that stocked Anchor, Coats or DMC all said that no-one in Spain used Tapestry wool, they all used Tapestry Cotton. A rather strange statement, as I have bought it locally here in Alicante Province. Maybe that is because there are so many residents from more Northern climes. I shall unpick the crewel stitching on the other bit of canvas and restitch it in wool. It has two different birds, one on the front and one on the back, and I think is copied from a Medieval Tapestry.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Postage ATCs

I had a little 1-to-1 swap with my friend KR, with a dual theme of Green and Postage Stamps. KR makes fantastic fabric PCs and QTCs, but hadn't ventured into paper based ATCs before. The first is titled Woman in Motion. How clever was she to find a rubber stamp that echoed so well the girl dancing? The second is titled Dragon from Tyvekistan...the green leaflike thing that forms the dragon's body in the second card is actually a piece of melted Tyveck, and the stamp is to celebrate the Lunar New Year...a lovely play on words. In exchange, I sent Starting Point and By the Pond.

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Holiday knits


The cardigan is for a friend who's daughter is expecting, and was a little experiment in knitting in the round. I enjoy a little light knitting, but always procrastinate when it comes to sewing all the parts together. I used a commercial Patons pattern for the stitch count, and started by casting on the the sleeves together on one loop needle using opposite ends of the ball of yarn. I knitted up to just before the armhole cast off as if knitting a pair of socks, making the increases at the beginning and end of the appropriate rounds. I then left these on a couple of holders while I cast on sides and back in one piece, and knitted up to the armhole shaping again. I had to do a little working out for the buttonholes, as the pattern said to knit one front, space out the buttons, then knit buttonholes to match, but that was easy enough. When it came to attaching sleeves to body, I was on a wrong side row because then I wouldn't need to worry about the pattern. I worked across one front, then positioned the sleeve so that the stitches that would normally be cast off lined up with the stitches that would normally be cast of on the body, and purled the two sets together, thus formimg the underarm seam without any need to sew. I continued across the back, attached the second sleeve and purled across the other front. The next few rows were the most difficult. Keeping the pattern correct, I knitted across the first front, then across the sleeve stitches, back stitches and front stitches, placing markers for the raglan seams as I went. I found it easiest to pull the needle loop through in the middle of the sleeves as I had when knitting them. It was a little tight for the first few rows, but as soon as I started the raglan decreases it got easier by the row. I wasn't sure what would happen with the garter stitch button band as I got up towards the neck, but I just knitted the last garter stitch with a shoulder stitch until I reached the top of the shoulders, then knitted it seperately for the last inch and a half. Apart from sewing in the ends and sewing on the buttons, this little bit was the only sewing I had to do.

The little jumper was even easier. I knitted the body in the round up to the armholes, then completed front and back and cast off. I picked up the sleeve stitches from front and back, taking them through the two layers where front overlaps back then knitted down towards the cuff. There is no shaping in this sleeve, just a decrease row before the ribbing. Again, the only sewing was weaving in ends and sewing on buttons. You will note how uninspiring the buttons are; these were the only ones in the shop that were anything close to being the right colour and the right size. I have knitted both of these in the 6 month size. The little sweater is for the boychild expected in April by our lovely clinic nurse, and he won't have much use for a pully in a Spanish summer. The little cardie however is going to Wet Wales and will come in very handy for their summer...

Friday, March 06, 2009

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