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Oh...I forgot to say. I also followed the pattern on MochiMochi to make a little pigeon from leftover sock wool. He's very twee (and only a few cm high):
Chris is very pleased with him. I'll have to make some more to decorate our classroom! They're adorable!
I'm so sad that I haven't been able to update all week, because I've been so enjoying my rippling! I can't wait to show you! I'll start from the beginning though! Here is the lovely wool I got at the Stitch and Craft fair, all lined up and ready to go, with the first couple of rows.
I have used Lucy's pattern, which she's published on her gorgeous blog here. She explains it beautifully clearly and although the first row is an absolute nightmare because you have to squeeze into tiny spaces it was simple pimple to follow.
I've been working on it at every free moment all week, including on the bus journey to and from Duxford Museum when we took the children for a WW2 themed visit this week, and so it is already THIS big!
I love love LOVE the colours:
Since the Stitch and Craft fair I have also had a go at zentangling, which is quite addictive:
I'm most pleased with my last one, partly for the letters, partly for the patterns.
I have also done some multi-coloured ones as part of my EastFeast homework, but they are upstairs, so I'll have to photograph them later.
I'm going to carry on enjoying my rippling while I watch Upstairs Downstairs.
Ciao!
I have had a LOVELY day!
Having spent the night at Mum's we all went headed out bright and early to...
I have to point out though, that the venue's name has changed completely since the tickets and catalogues were printed, making it all too easy to drive right past!
The first thing we did was have a go at silk painting. I LOVED it at last year's Stitch and Craft Festival, so I was excited to give it another go. Rachel and I are quite pleased with our efforts:
My multi-coloured lilies:
Rachel's birthday card (for her Dad):
We found the stand of "Yarn Therapy", which is apparently a wool shop in Great Baddow. I'm feeling very sad that I'd never visited it before. I had a marvellous time stroking the many types of wool. Mum bought some gorgeous skeins of various types of wool which she is going to use to make a chevron blanket. Here they are:
We discovered a totally new artform which I can't wait to try - it's called Zentangle:
It's really cool! You just do doodles - repeated doodles over and over and build up these incredible patterns. I can't wait to teach my class to do it - they're going to love it!
I also added to my button collection with some more miniature buttons - they're great for double-buttoning when you are embellishing.
I had also added to my collection when we went to "The Cheap Shop" in Tiptree during the week. I got some colourful wooden beads of various sizes. Wonderful.
Oh, and I've got a new decopatch project to get on with later:
Oh, oh, and we saw Rachel John's extreme knitting stall. I love extreme knitting. I've got some giant needles and a giant crotchet hook. In the past I've made a scarf (in about an hour - very quick!) and a hat and some bags out of plastic bags cut into strips. However, today they were selling something called Hooplayarn, which is like t-shirt fabric:
She's going to use it to make a colourful rug. We want it to be really thick, so she'll hav to use a strand of the hooplayarn with some aran wool and some other wool strands. It'll be awesome.
Most excitingly, I finally bought plenty of beautiful wools to make the ripple crotchet blanket I've been dreaming of making for some time. Check them out:
On the way back we had to face a road over a reservoir blocked by very beligerant geese. They really did NOT want to move.
Anyways, now we're back at home and I'm wondering what project to commence first. I love having lots of projects calling to me. So exciting.
Technically, very first of all I should knit a mini-pigeon for my pal Chris, who requested one.
Happy days!
Wow, did we have a nice Valentine's? We did indeed. I spent the morning planning at home and updated displays at school. Then I spent the afternoon baking, icing and scrubbing the house so it was spick and span for our evening.
Lookit what I made!!
I made the most gorgeous icing - white and dark chocolate buttercream icing. Boy oh boy it is gooooooooood!! Hmmm... I'm struggling to know how to punctuation "Boy oh boy". Would you say "Boy, oh boy!" or " Boy! Oh boy!" Tricky...
Anyhoo - they are DELICIOUS and I'm quite proud of how attractively they came out. After my epic baking session, I made the table look lovely:
It looked even lovelier with the lights out:
We had a delicious meal from the Red Lion. We didn't go there - oh no. We went for a meal on Friday (which was amazing, by the way). And while we were there, we bought a Reddimeal which you can take home and bung in the microwave later! We got a sicilian stew, so we cooked it up with some roast potatoes. Perfect. We were even brave and ate green olives.
For Valentine's, I crotched Rachel a little heart. I used Lucy from Attic24's pattern for "Teeny Tiny Hearts", made two of them, stuffed them (with the ends of the wool!) and sewed them up. Then I embellished (loving that word) with some beads that I bought on Saturday at The Cheap Shop (literally one of the most exciting shops in Britain - I have to go to pay homage and buy some treats at least once a term!) in Tiptree and a button which I already had in my button box.
The beadwork was seriously fiddly, especially since I selected (from my Mum's sewing box - that's why I was near Tiptree - day at Mum's) the most inappropriate thread which just kept fraying and refusing to get in the needle. It was something of a palava, to be honest. But then, the simple act of walking across a room or putting a box on a table can be a palava for me and end in serious injury or liberal decoration of the carpet with icing sugar.
Rachel bought me a pair of glass beaded earrings from one of the little shops we found in Lavenham:
We polished off our day with some bags of chocolates and the DVD "Mr & Mrs Smith", which we hadn't watched for YEARS. Love it.
Today I've been doing lots of work - planned literacy, French, PSHE, planted our apple tree into it's pot and mulched it with some not-so-leaf-mouldy-leafmould. It's just leaves, basically. Not sure what's gone wrong there. I'm slightly concerned they're going to blow right out of the pot and land all over the lawn. Where I carefully raked them from in the autumn. Hmmmm...
I've also been busy in the last couple of days crafting tiny flowers (Little Picot Flowers, to be exact) from old bits of wool, for the school's sensory garden. I'm doing quite well, in that I'm managing to use the tiniest, teeniest little bits of old wool. I think these ones are so little that I'll string them up and dangle them from the willow fence and the trees.
Now I'm having a go at an Auricula flower, from my "100 flowers to knit & crotchet" book. Bit fiddly, so I'd better concentrate.
Quite enjoying these holidays!
When we woke up on Saturday morning, I went to fetch my milk. That was when I realised it had been cold overnight. Really cold. Apparently around -15 !! The milk was frozen and had popped off the foil tops. The pressure was so immense that the milk bottles had shattered. Luckily, the whole frozen mess held together long enough for me to drop it in the sink.
After a lazy get up, we headed over to Lavenham, via all the snowy backroads. It was BEAUTIFUL outside. These photos are actually from the journey back, after we'd enjoyed looking through various lovely home and craft shops, bought a leather tortoise doorstop (Horace) and a leather bunny doorstop (Biff), eaten toasties and cake and drunk hot chocolate at little teashop and counted over 10 pubs in that one small village!!
There was snow everywhere, and heaped in big drifts at the sides of fields. It made the whole landscape was beautiful. The blue sky through the tree branches was particularly lovely. One of my favourite sights of all is tree branches sillouhetted in front of a sunset, but blue sky behind branches comes in a close second.
We also spotted a glider playing on the thermals! It's miniature in this picture, but it's there!
And we saw some AMAZING icicles on a lovely thatched house...
It was a very relaxing day. So nice to totally forget about work and just enjoy exploring little shops and looking and the views. During the evening I finished off an anenome flower, although I feel I may have made a small error on one of the petals - it's a bit diminuative!
Eventually, I hope to sneak into the school's sensory garden (which is currently just a willow fence) one evening and hang up lots of knitted and crotched flowers to surprise the mystify the children. I have got a whole bag of woollen flowers somewhere - just need to find them.
I've had a migrainey head all day, so have only managed to knit half a tiny butterfly, but it's feeling a bit better now, so I might try something else.
So proud am I! My kitchen bunting is finished!
It was a very simple pattern - just doubles on a chain of 12, decreasing each end of every other row and "fiddling" the top to make a point. Then I strung together on a chain (being VERY careful with te pattern). I am SO pleased with how they look. Every time I'm cooking or feeding our sickly piggie (guinea-piggie, not full size porcine piggie) I look at the dresser and smile.
I'm quite surprised that it is currently holding up find just with some blobs of blue tac. Actually, I need to take the rest of the blue tac out of the fruit dish, where it is currently keeping two bananas company.
Our dresser is definitely a "family" item. I love it. I forbade my Mum to sell it when she re-did her kitchen and forced her to store it all summer in her study while we moved house. I grew up with it so it's very nostalgic for me to see it every day. My littlist (interesting - that's clearly not a real word!) sister made me the beautiful white vase with flowers one Christmas, from papier mache of all things, and that goes beautifully with our green and brown kitchen. And the decorated plate I made myself at Center Parks (which, at time at decorating, I was convinced was spelt the French way - Centre Parcs).
There's a little green candle from a child I taught in Year 6 a few years back, the giant yellow cup and sunflower I also "stole" from Mum's house, the soup bowls we acquired from Rach's parents, the heart cup and saucers from my colleagues at school and the stereo from my cousin. Gosh...that makes us sound a bit cheap actually! We seldom bother to buy our own things! Tee hee! Everything has a story though, and that is just what a home should be like.
So very very pleased ^__^
Last night, after blogging, Rachel and I went for a late-night snow walk. It was lovely! There was a smattering on our front garden and the snow was blowing and drifting all over the place. It was very beautiful, but pretty uncomfortable to walk in, since the blizzard conditions were blowing the flakes right into our faces.
At 3:24am, when I woke up to check on the situation, it was still snowing. At 3:40am it had stopped, temporarily. At 6:05am, it was still snowing. At 8:30am, it had stopped, but we were officially SNOWED IN!!!
See? Several inches banked up against the front door. Very exciting. I've never been OFFICIALLY snowed in before. Apparently Mum can't even OPEN her back door! The back garden was looking very wintry too, with drifts up against the fences:
This morning we went for a long walk around the village and I have to tell you, it is pretty deep! Lots of interesting drifts and patterns, and plenty of other couples going for a walk, as well as children rushing off to do some sledging. Rachel was disappointed to find the trains are still running - she was hoping for a snow day tomorrow!
Now, Dora was really keen to encourage Putnum to go outside in the snow...
...and he had a lovely time of it too...
...but she totally refused to join him.
He did keep trying to scale the drifts, not realising that he would inevitably sink into them. However, he enjoyed digging out and eating some plants. Throughout the whole thing, Dora hid in the lounge. She doesn't like the cold. Wuss.
My finished jar jacket is looking nice in the snow-light. Much better now I've put a top on. I got inventive and made up my own way of making "spikes" rather than "bumps".
I've begun work on some bunting for the kitchen - so far I've got some orange and red triangles done. Now I'm working on two shades of green.
Oh, and I managed to take a picture of my finished granny square:
I'd better go and get on with levelling my class in their maths. I can't finish some of my jobs because my laptop is in my classroom, and since the school is all snowed up, I can't get into to rescue it. Bit of a pain, but I can at least finish levelling.
I've been so busy! Things have been typically hectic at work and every evening I've had to have a serious debate with myself about whether to crotchet or blog about crotcheting. Logically, I realised that if I spent all my evenings blogging about crotcheting, I would get no crotcheting done. Plus, I've been too excited about my projects to NOT carry on with them. Lots of wild cackling and excited clapping of hands.
See, I saw this idea on Attic24's blog. In fairness, not just her blog. Lots of people are into this at the moment. I called my Mum to tell her about it and she's even seen it in a magazine. As a crotchet patter, it's gone viral! I can totally see why though, when you make such beautiful little decorations!
Lookie! I started off with just a shiny tuna tin (thoroughly cleaned, I promise!):
I gradually built up my pattern...
... until...
So cute! I love the rainbow colours. It looks very cheerful on top of the TV.
Next I began a jar jacket in shades of green, yellow and blue. This is not the finished product - I'm not happy with how the top looks so I am currently in the middle of adding a spiky top.
My next endeavour was another tuna tin, this time all in green:
It's a shame the plant in it looks so depressed. Houseplants and I do not get on. I treat them well! I give them water, daylight, air, love, attention. But no. They all slowly commit suicide. I'm still holding out hope for this one though. It's on holiday at the moment on the kitchen windowsill. It usually lives in the downstairs cloakroom (posh talk for toilet). Here though, it is posing on the kitchen table.
My final project is definitely my favourite...check it out!
I wasn't sure about the buttons initially, but they make that yellow section much more interesting. I intend to plant some herb seeds I got for Christmas in it. Or maybe the wildflower seeds.
Rest assured, I have MANY more tins and jars in the recycling bin, just waiting to be rescued and turned into works of art! Tee hee!
Now, I have to go because I need to:
A: finish doing the top to this jar
and
B: go and relish staring at the snow which has FINALLY, FINALLY started falling here in Mid-Suffolk. We've only been waiting ALL DAY! (I love snow. Can't help it. Always have. Blame it on a childhood which between the ages of 3 and 14 was pretty much snow free.)
Tarah!
PS: I have finally finished my granny square blanket and it is VERY cosy!