Pinch, punch, first of the month

Ok so it is now the 3rd but that's not such bad going, only a couple of days late. It's been a busy week this week with both work and college in the evenings.

This is a little post about a year long project that I started in January but have not yet told you about.

Over the winter we have started (& almost finished!) having our kitchen decorated. I will show you how it looks when it is fully finished but the basic idea is that the walls have been re-plastered and painted white, we're having new wood cladding around the bottom of the walls in the dining room half of the room (not done yet) and we've had new tiles around the kitchen above the worktop a. The tiles are mostly white but we have had a few random coloured tiles placed around in between to brighten things up a little and to match the colours of our plates etc.

With this in mind, knowing that this was going to be the year that the kitchen was decorated and finished, I decided that something I would like to make is a table runner for our dining table in there - something that we hope to be able to use a lot more than we currently do, once the rest of the kitchen is finished.

I saw last year as I was making the crochet "mood" blanket, someone had had the idea to make a blanket based on the temperature where they lived. This was in an area with a much more varied climate than ours here in England but I hoped that somehow I would be able to make this work.

I decided to use Patons 100% cotton 4ply yarn (the same as I used to make the Christmas table runner with that I made a couple of years ago) as I liked how this felt for this runner before. It is not too soft to become a table runner, it holds its shape well enough to run down the centre of a table and comes in enough colours to create the effect that I am after.

The table runner would require me to crochet one row per day with the colour chosen dependant on the temperature that day. I felt that this would be much more manageable than the crochet squares that I tried to do last year (I got up to about April/May with the blanket last year and then fell so far behind that it just became completely unreasonable to even try to catch up). With the blanket being based on what happened each day and to some extent, mood, there was also a fair few bad days towards the end of last year, this did not provide me with any incentive to try to complete this either.

So temperatures should be more reliable. There would be no doubt of the colour to be used and just 1 row per day would be manageable to maintain even if I were to get a few days behind for any reason (hence this post coming on the 3rd April instead of the 1st.

I have chosen the following colours for this blanket (again to match the colours of the mugs/plates that we have): red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue and purple. I will also use white as a separating colour.

These colours correspond to the following temperatures:

Dark blue - less than or equal to 0*C

Light blue - 1-5

Purple - 6-10 (this didn't end up in the traditional rainbow sequence as I was only able to get 1 ball of the dark blue yarn as opposed to 2 of each of the others and I assumed that the coldest temperatures would be too rare for my liking in England)

Green - 11-15

Yellow 16-20

Orange 21-15

Red 25+ (possibly wishful thinking but we will have to wait for tht summer months in order to find out!)

In order to try to utilise the full range of colours throughout the years, I will choose each day's lowest temperature for the winter months (January. February & December), each day's highest temperature for the summer months (June, July & August) and for all of the months in between I will take an ever age of the 2.

Here is the first 3 months of my runner.

I started with 2 rows of white, just to form an edging and then continued with 1 row per day in the relevant colour, depending on that day's temperature. I have also added 1 row of white in between each month just to show the separation in the colours. I thought that when I switched between my methods of deciding the colour (low, mid or high) this might look a bit strange without the distinction between the months to show where this change had occurred.

From this we can see that the start of the year was not too cold, however the temperature really dropped towards the end of January, beginning of February. March is when I changed from using the low temperature to the middle temperature and hence I had my first rows of green starting to crop up. Green is definitely the warmest that I have got to so far. This could be v different if I were now using the high temperature for each day but is keeping the colours fairly evenly spread so far.

I am hoping that the runner will start with the blue and purple colours get up to reds and oranges in the middle and then fall back to blues and purples at the other end. I think that this should go really well in our newly decorated kitchen and really look forward to having this on display from the beginning of next year. The only downside on using the temperature method for choosing the colours is that you can never really get ahead at all as I need to check the confirmed temperatures online before completing the day before's row.

Also today was the first day that I found one flower in the display I made last week that had started to wilt ever so slightly. Luckily I was given a few spare flowers to bring home at the end of the course last week so this pink rose was easily replaced by a purple coloured one to maintain the balance of the display. The lilies have started to open now as well so this is really starting to fill out and show itself to its full potential.

I hope that you are all having a lovely start to your bank holiday weekend and I will check in again in the next couple of days with how the final Easter decorations and celebrations turn out.

Christmas in March

Another lovely Saturday. I could really get used to this not working on a weekend thing!

Today I have spent the afternoon with my mother-in-law doing her Christmas present. A little late I know but December is just such a busy time so this seemed like a much better time to do it. In fact the last couple of days have really felt like Christmas all over again.

Last night we went over to see some really good friends that we haven't seen for far too long. They are those sort of friends that you can go for months without seeing and then just instantly pick up from where you left off like there has been no time apart. Their dog had definitely not forgotten us after a few months apart!

Yes, those are my legs! Anyone who knows how terrified I am of dogs will never really believe this photo! He stayed there for most of the evening as he has always done whenever we have been to stay. It always feels so much like going to our second home going to visit - so comfy and with the best cheese sandwiches and cups of tea in the world!

As we were leaving they did produce a bag of Christmas presents for us as well - yes it's been that long since we saw them! Again a sign of some really really good friends as well, such thoughtful presents. I got a box to keep all of my sewing stuff in as they know that I have recently started to give sewing a go as well as a sewing magazine which included my very first ever proper sewing pattern.

Today's prezzy was for me and my mother-in-law to go on a flower arranging course with Totally Flowers (http://www.totally-flowers.co.uk/contact.php). The one that we did was the supermarket flowers course - learning how to arrange flowers that could be bought in a supermarket & let's face it, the only kind of flowers we are ever going to buy/be bought!

We started off by choosing the container that we would like to make our arrangement in - either a small glass cube of this tin. We lined it with sellophane in case it would leak when in contact with water and then added some flower foam (also known as oasis). The oasis was soaked in water prior to adding to the container and adding any flowers. This would just be rested on top of a bucket of water (with flower food in) until the foam was completely submerged. We were told not to force the foam into the water as this could create air bubbles inside the foam.

Then to start arranging the flowers - the scary bit. We were left to our own devices a little so that our creations would come from within and not be a replica of anything that she had made. These were the flowers that we were all given.

I personally thought that they looked nicer already arranged in this bucket than my supermarket flowers normally look after I have tried to arrange them in a vase.

I decided to arrange mine tall on the right and then low on the left. The intention was for this to go in the corner of our living room, next to the fireplace, in the alcove but the colours don't quite work now I have got it home.

I started off with a very tall flower on the right (no idea of all of the names though I was told on numerous occasions) foliage sticking out on the left to start the formation of the shape that I was trying to create and some ivy around the front to hide the front of the foam over the top of the container.

And gradually to form the rest of the shape in between with the other flowers - lilies next.

And then the remaining flowers that I liked the look of for the rest of the arrangement.

I am really pleased with the way it turned out. My mother-in-law did really well with hers too. It's amasing how different the two arrangements turned out even though we were given the same selection of flowers to start with.

And both of them survived the journey home too!

It has definitely been a really really lovely day. These chilled out and relaxing Saturday's are very much needed at the minute and I am looking forward to an enjoyable evening too - I'm sure my hubby won't mind having a nice girly evening and will love it that the pair of us will most likely spend our time knitting/crocheting. Maybe we can gang up on him and get him to join in as well! Not holding my breath on that one though.

Engine System Service Due

Well yesterday was slightly eventful but turned out to be s really nIce day in the end. It all started with an engine warning light coming on in the car on the way to work. It had only been into the garage earlier in the week so we decided to turn around and take the car back to our local garage to see if they could correct the issue without us having to call out a recovery truck. They did manage to fix it without too much trouble - they had put in too much much oil during the service.

In the meantime though I had had to call into work to say that I wouldn't be able to make it. I may as well enjoy my day off if I'm getting one even it is completely unexpectedly. I booked to have my hair done which I was really pleased about as otherwise I was going to go next Saturday morning at 8am (I have another day off next weekend which I will tell you all about next week) and so I spent a lovely day being pampered and doing some sewing too.

I went home to have a lovely long shower and sew whilst watching a really old TV series (Cold Feet) that I have on DVD but never normally get the chance to watch as it is pretty girly, before going out to have my hair done and to collect the car after it was fixed. I started off with seeing some more of my rows together of the patchwork seat cover that I am making. This is as far as I got with the second set of rows for the patchwork befor my machine stopped working:

Once I got to this point my machine started not releasing the bobbin thread properly and started to eat the fabric into the underneath of the machine. It has done this a few times before and I have sorted it (with the hep of my hubby) by taking off the base plate of the machine, removing the bobbin and cleaning out the bobbin holder to get rid of any lint that had got stored in there. This time I had tried this and still couldn't get the machine to work. It was still doing the same thing of eating my fabric into the underneath of the machine.

I wasn't sure what else I could do the fix this so I decided to start cutting the pieces for my chicken instead of sewing and see if my husband could see something that I was doing wrong when he got home. I have cut out the larger pieces now - the only bits that I have not yet worked out how to do is the comb, wattle and beak as I am still not 100% sure of how to do these.

Once I had been to collect my hubby from work in our (now fixed) car I asked him to take a look at this. He found what we thought was a really large amount of lint underneath where the bobbin sits in my sewing machine. We removed this with tweezers - it did look a lot like a big tube of lint stuck well down into the bottom of the machine and then re-attached everything as it should be. I tested my machine and his now seems to be working fine. By this point it was fairly late so I have not done any more sewing with it since its test.

After more searching online last night it would seemed that we have removed the oil wick from my machine. I do think that this must have been damaged anyway as there was a small piece of plastic that also are out with it and the wick itself seemed to be really discintigrated. The machine should still work ok without this I believe but might need servicing regularly in order to keep the machine oiled. Hopefully if I can get it serviced soon this might be able to be replaced as well.

In the evening last night I did manage to make one more egg for the easter basket meaning that I have have 4 (almost) complete eggs. I just need to sew in the ends on this final one.

I think I will try to increase the pattern slightly to make some larger eggs. Doubling up the yarn on one of them worked ok but I think it would be good if I could also increase the pattern a little and make some slightly bigger eggs as well.

Finally this morning I have been getting ready to go to Wembley to watch Bristol City play Walsall. I don'T really support either team but I did live in Bristol for a while and my hubby's Dad also supports Bristol City so it seemed like it would be a good day out.

Luckily Bristol City and Nottingham Forest both play in red and white so this morning I found some scarves that I had knitted a long time ago but had never quite got around to sewing the ends in. A couple of minutes sewing this morning ensured that the ends were finally finished and these are now ready to go and be used at the match today.

Come on you reds! I know that chant as it can also be used by both clubs! Let's hope it's a good game.

Yesterday was definitely an eventful day but turned out to be very nice really - the after effects of one service fixed and now another one required for my sewing machine. All in all not too bad though - I definitely feel like I made the most of my unexpected day off, even without my sewing machine for a portion of the afternoon.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Today I have had an absolutely lovely day yet again. This wasn't quite such a crafty Sunday as the  but there is still a little progress to report today.

Whenever I have had a spare few minutes this week I have been working on my patchwork for the seat cover in my little crafty den. I have really enjoyed finding the time to sew and I really feel like I am now making progress. I have managed to get some more little rows of squares made up ready just to sew together and then attach to the first block that I made. I chose this time to make rows of 5 blocks this time instead of 4 - this just makes the rest of the numbers work out better - just another block of 5 to go until the seat cover is its full size.

I hope that these will join as successfully as the last ones did.

Today I also had a lovely day celebrating Mother's Day as well as my Nan's birthday by going out for a lovely meal with the family.

When I got home I decided that the next celebration to really start to think about is Easter which is coming up in only a few weeks now. We are having a couple of friends round this year. We're not planning a huge celebration but we thought it might be nice to have a few little special touches compared to a normal Sunday.

I was looking around this afternoon for inspiration and spotted this basket. It was one that we have had for a while now. It originally came with a selection of sweets from the era of my childhood inside and has pretty much ever since been used as a storage basket for the wool that I used for the rainbow ripple blanket.

I had seen a few days ago a pattern online to make some small crocheted eggs. I think that if I make a few of these in different colours and sizes this could be really fun for Easter Sunday. To answer the title of this blog post the egg definitely came first. I started to make a few this evening.

The tiny golden egg is made from some leftover 4-ply yarn that I had from the Christmas table runner that I made in red and white but have decided that it is best not to decorate with anything else as I had planned. The blue and green speckly egg is made from some yarn that I had a tiny amount left of from making some of the baby blankets that I donated to the local hospital for premature babies. I have now also started to make a slightly larger egg by using 2 strands of double knit weight yarn and mixing both  pink and yellow together.

What does a basket of eggs need? A chicken of course.

I have found a pattern online to sew a chicken. I hope that once it is done this will be able to sit on top of my little eggs and will make a good Easter decoration.

I have found and printed the pattern off of the Internet and started by cutting out the pattern pieces so far. There was much deliberation about what the perfect chicken colours were and what this should be made out of. Again being the slightly nervous (and possibly slightly cheapskate!) sewer I decided that this could definitely be made from something already in my stash.

I have gone for a brown tweed body. This material came from one of the Crafty Creatives boxes that I got. I have always thought that it was lovely but being only the amount of roughly a fat quarter I wasn't too sure what I was going to make from it or how this would combine with any other materials. It seems it has finally found its destiny as a chicken body.

I will use some of the green checks for the wings. I still have a lot of this left from making my skirt from the double duvet cover that I bought.

And finally I think I will try to change the pattern slightly from what it says to do and make the comb and wattle from the pink checked fabric - previously used to make my sewing bag. I am hoping that I can amend these pattern pieces to include seam allowances and slightly stuff each of the pieces before attaching them to the rest of the chicken.

I am not really a huge fan of using felt for these kind of finishing touches so I hope that this will work on my chicken. The beak (if that's what you call it on a hen) I am not totally sure about yet. This is also a felt piece in the pattern and the way that this is attached I am not sure how I will be able to make this from anything else but I think that this might have to be something that I experiment with towards the end of my make and see if there are any other options that might look a little better.

This week is set to be a pretty busy one so I am not sure how much time there will be for any crafting but I will let you know of any progress that is have made as soon as I can. I still have a couple of longer term projects to share with you so I will see you soon with the progress that I have made on these even if I don't get too much further with these that I have already shared.

Quilting

It really was not intentional at all to leave my blog for a while 6 months before writing again. I know I say every time that it has been far too long but this really is quite ridiculous!

There are a few things for me to catch up with on here but we'll go for 1 at a time for now. Today's challenge for me was quilting (or at least making some progress on what I have started as my first quilted piece).

I thought I had at least let you know about when I met the lovely Hannah from her blog but maybe I didn't. We had a lovely weekend together last year during which we started to make a dress together as a bit of a sew-along. We both got as far as cutting all of our pieces out but as far as I'm aware neither of us has since got any further. We did also manage to get to a local fabric shop (the fabric guild in Leicester). As the only things that I had made previously were clothes (my apron and skirt) but Hannah's specialities lye in quilting she really inspired me to give this a go.

From the fabric guild I bought a load of packets of fat quarters that I thought would go together nicely and would work in my crafty room/study.

I decided that I would make a cover for the "seat" in the corner. this would involve quilting 2 pieces of fabric, joining these together and filling them with a foam square the correct size to fill the corner bench in he room.

I cut all of the various fabrics I into 3.5" squares so that this will make 3" squares when joined together (1/4" seam allowance for each side).

I then laid these out on our spare bed in order to establish the best possible arrangement of the colours/fabrics.

This is how it turned out. I am very happy with the arrangement and fairly sure that this is just about as random and as spread out as each of the colours can be.

Once I had done all of the arranging then comes the time to start the sewing! The exciting bit.

I started from one end of the picture above and started by sewing 2 squares together at a time.

Then cakes squares 3 and 4 from each row. I was advised that by making rows first this should then be fairly easy to join these rows and make this feel like a decent size piece (and a decent size accomplishment) later on.

I had got this far a fair while ago - all of the rows of 4 squares completed but the joining of these row felt really rather daunting. When I tried to line up the squares, as a first look there seemed to be a lot of pieces where I had been no-where near accurate enough. I was very worried that none of the squares would line up and I would end up with a very wonky looking patchwork.

Today I finally braved it. I started to join the rows after my wonderful helper (my husband) had ironed all of the seams for me. Each piece had one seam to the left and the next to the right, alternating on alternate rows so that I could make something called a "nested seam".

The first two rows went together something like this:

I was really quite shocked and very pleasantly surprised as to how well the seams seemed to be matched up. They are by no means perfect I know but for the first time that I have tried any kind of patchwork I was really quite pleased with how this had gone. I had started at the end that I thought seemed to be the most accurate in the initial stitching so was still nervous as to how the rest were going to go but pleased with the start anyway. It made stitching the rest of the rows together feel suddenly a lot less daunting anyway.

The rest also went as well/better than I had expected so I am really happy with the way that this is going. All of my rows of 4 are now together so this should now be the full left-hand side of the planning photo complete. Just a few more to go but I think that this will look fantastic once it is finished.

As much as I'm sure that sewing should be really relaxing and as much as I enjoy it while I'm doing it I also find it really rather stressful and involves an awful lot of concentrating for me at the minute given how new I am to it so I am tired out now and feeling the need to just sit down on the sofa and chill out. There might have to be a bit of crochet happening this evening as I have a couple of projects on the go that I will tell you about next time and a Sunday night film with some lovely dinner. I have to say that this has been the best and most chilled out Sunday that I have had for a long time (even if I did have to do some of my college course this morning - even that wasn't awful as I was preparing my own revision to get ahead of the game before I get too close to my exam.

Adam's Input to my crafty room

We have had this mini set of drawers for a while - they were bought with a purpose to start with but have since become redundant. They look like they should be really handy though so as with most things, we didn't want to get rid of them "just in case" they might be useful in the future.

They were pretty boring and plain to start with  - just plain wood - but Adam recently had the idea that if he were to paint them up for me then they could be really jazzy and would look really good in my study/crafty room.

If he had the idea then I thought I would leave him to execute it. I would help with the fun bit of course! So we went out to choose some paints.

A nice variety of really bright colours should do the job nicely and really cheer the drawers up.

Adam started off by spray-painting the outsides of the drawers in a plain white and then set to work painting the drawers with these little tester pots of colour

They go well with our crockery really as well! You can just see one of the pots hiding away in the back of this picture.

I am really really pleased with them and they are filling up very nicely. They are incredibly useful for keeping all sorts of my new fabrics and soft crafty things.

There will definitely be more blogs coming up soon so that you can see what I have been doing with all of the things that are currently filling the drawers.

My Sneaky Crochet Project - Discovered!

For a little while now I have been working on a little sneaky crochet project for myself.

I don't know if I ever mentioned it but almost exactly a year ago now I went on a trip with my local yarn shop (Knit Nottingham) to a new craft fair that had been arranged in Skipton. Last year was it's first show and it was so successful that it is running again this year. Unfortunately I can't make it this time around due to work commitments but it was a fantastic event.

Anyway, I got a little side-tracked there...a year ago when I went to Yarndale I bought this lovely 4-ply yarn. I found the picture!

It is hand died and was quite expensive so I know I certainly didn't want to knit socks with it (4-ply is what is used for sock knitting) but I had no ideas what to make. I have asked around a fair bit, spoken to my friends and looked on the internet for ideas but nothing really grabbed me. I even bought some dark blue 4-ply that would go with it nicely incase I found something to make with it that required a little extra than the one ball of this fancy stuff that I have.

I kept looking and looking and the only thing that anyone could really suggest was a scarf/shall type thing. I am not normally one to wear one of these triangular scarfs so I had been trying to avoid it. As most of you I'm sure have figured out by now, I really don't like all of these fancy stitches or decorative things so even if I were to give in then I certainly hadn't found a plain enough version for me to wear.
Until I found this.

I have seen pictures of these all over Facebook and other crafty sites - they seem to be all the rage at the minute. I think just about everyone who crochets must have made at least one with the amount that I have seen around and about.

Again I don't really like to go along with crowds or follow examples set by others but this did seem like the best option I had for what to do with my beautiful yarn.

I know I have a lot of projects on the go at the minute so I was slightly worried about starting another when I already have so much else on - I thought my hubby might have a little moan about me having so much stuff everywhere and that nothing was getting finished. So it has really been a secret project. I have made a conscious effort to try to only work on this at times when I am hanging around - so sat in the car waiting for him to finish work (or for me to start) - it is called a road trip scarf after all - or waiting for college to start when I am hidden away in the study at home waiting for my lectures etc. Any time really when I have a few minutes peace and quiet.

It is called the road trip scarf as it is designed to be done whilst sat in a car - I love the story behind it. Well it is slightly gruesome/sad to start with but the idea behind it is great from there. A lady was crocheting as a passenger in her car and the project she was working on required her to change yarns. As she was using her craft scissors and cutting the ball of yarn from her work there was a sudden movement with the car and she ended up cutting herself with the scissors. She therefore decided that this was far too dangerous a pass-time in the car but really didn't want to give up on this perfect crafty time. This is where the road trip scarf pattern came from. It can be made using one yarn (variegated is usually used to give a colour change without the need to cut the yarn) and is a really simple pattern so can be done relative easily once you get going, without a pattern.

I started this with my pretty yarn in the car one morning whilst waiting to start work. The first few rows are the tricky part as they are slightly fiddly with the size of the piece as it begins but after the 4th or 5th row the continuing pattern starts and all becomes clear. From here on it is plain sailing all the way and so obvious what is to be done that there is no need for a pattern. 

I do have to admit, I have been pretty good at keeping this as my little secret - it has been hidden in my handbag since I started it - but last night I left this out after I had been working on it before college and it has now been spotted by Adam. The good news is that he really likes it and wasn't at all upset that I had been working on this while I have other projects on the go.

I think I will enjoy the making of this almost more than the wearing of it once it is done but I do love the way that it is turning out and you never know, I might turn into a shawl-y sort of a person.

I have chosen to start my scarf in the pretty yarn from Yarndale but I will be including a little of the blue that I bought to go with it just to break up the colour a little bit.

It is growing fairly slowly as I have really only been working on it in these little snippets of time between other things but I love the way that it is starting to look.

I like the fact that it grows from the middle and as there is no real pattern to it, you can just keep going until you get fed up or run out of yarn. I am sure that there should be an edging on it once you have made it to the right size, but I'm sure that even this wouldn't be 100% essential. We will see how it looks when I get that far.