Family slippers

Here they are.

Pleasing pile of alpaca

Half of them at least.

Imagine this picture with 7 pairs. *sigh

And you have to trust me that the other half were delivered because I handed them over, and then remembered to photograph them.

In a bad case of Absolutely not Learning My Lesson About Furry Yarn, I tried to make myself a pair in this.

Moda Vera Flurry. Feels nice around my toes, nasty on the hook.

 Once again, couldn't read the stitches and failed to count them accurately so I have no hope in hades of  replicating the one sad little slipperish shaped object that is slumped in a heap at the bottom of my crochet bag.

Sulky flurry rodent.

You know those slippers...

Well, there is progress being made, but these, these, have taken up more time that all of them put together.

Little doll slippers. Made of scraps of merino. And yes, that is knitters elastic you see worked into the top stitches... 

... and treble crochet detail in thee instep. don't tell the cousins...

He looked cold, ok? With his little bare plastic feet and shortie onesie...

So yes. there was a cardie too.

Note co-ordinating edging and toddler-easy popper fastening.

There now, doesn't that look nice?

 And honestly, Andy does sort of stick his arms out - his pose above has almost nothing to do with the construction of the garment. Almost. Nothing.

Oh, and worth noting that Andy came with socks and shoes, but they were lost within days. This had nothing to do with the construction of the socks, and everything to do with the apparently funnel-shaped feet on our favourite doll. Did i learn from this? Why no, I didn't even notice it. so, all round a good investment of time... (as in, its only a matter of...)

soul eaten.

The soul eater is finished. 

Did I mention finished?

 I made the final push this morning, as boy goblin and i were snuggled up on the couch with his snots.

Pretty, but tough going.

(The pattern is a good-un - its entirely my doing that its been such a long haul - see "soul eater" above.)

And this evening it was wrapped around the dear wife on the sofa. 

Not this sofa, but this one was in better light.

I think we have a winner.

WIP or UFO

This is a project that is inhabiting that limbo land between WIP and UFO. Which is it?

This is when I started having doubts. 

Even Dearwife is finding it hard to stop laughing be encouraging, and she is usually extremely supportive of even my most misguided creative endeavours.

Its the beginnings of an elephant, and it was to be my first softie.

It looks less like a poo now i've attached the ears.

But, you know, I'm not sure about the pattern. Im still reserving judgement, because its hard to tell until its finished, but I'm not chuffed that the animal will be top heavy. Rather than weight it with beans, which means it cant be washed, I foolishly stuffed it with toy pellets, which are now working their way out between the loops and shedding all over the floor. Poor thing looks like it has some awful disease.

My softie's shedding choke hazards. I see here he is mysteriously covered in cat fur, so someone in the house must love him.

The yarn is just awful to work with - its flocked, so it gives a lovely soft fabric, but the stitches are impossible to see, which makes the work impossible to read. That means there was a lot of rework going on, and I found it nigh-on impossible to reuse the yarn that had been frogged.

So, I  ran out of the yarn which I bought in the UK, and is not available here, so he's going to have to have pale purple legs. And possibly eyelids. (and oh jeez, don't even talk to me about safety eyes. Safe for whom, exactly?)

Disaster all round, but I'm not quite ready to give up on him.

I am going to have to do something about his pellet problem, though, and I fear it might be terminal.

Patient feet

Cosy alpaca toes for the littlest, who also astonished me with his forebearance, allowing mummy to slip his feet in and out of partly completed slippers throughout the hot afternoon. (I think he was actually more tolerant than his mumma.)

Not sure how long these will stay white when goblintoes inhabit them...

 I bought a pattern for the applique alphabet, forgetting that as I'm left-handed, I've had to reverse them all - either working backwards up the pattern, or reverse engineering each letter. 

f is for faff

I've already given up, and all the cousins will be getting stars appliqued on their toes. 

Unseasonal slippers

I must be looking forward to the cooler weather, as I've spent the last week or so as Ive broken up work on the soul eater with hooking up a series of slippers.

I've now got a long list of requests, so here's hoping the mood stays with me, otherwise this could get very tedious indeed.

First up a test pair for me, from the simple cable slipper pattern.  

Cosy alpaca. Perfect for February in Australia.

These are in the most gorgeous, easy to use, and affordable alpaca yarn, sourced from, of all places, Spotlight. On clearance is was only $2 a ball (about 47m) so these sample slippers cost less than $4. 

I used them to test puff paint as a non-slip sole. The result is too ugly for words:

Words fail.

For a start, it never occurred to me that this colour choice would look less like a design decision and more like the innards of a small marsupial.

But, it works, and the stretch paint works best. Obviously. I didn't know it existed until too late.

Next, a jersey pair, better for the climate here. Not sure how comfy they are though. I can't decide.

Jersey slippers are slightly more seasonal. Slightly. 

Then cosy posy toes for DearWife. The pattern is really elegant, with the flowers added as you go. DearWife was extremely patient in surrendering her feet to fittings, allowing me to modify the heel a little as i went. 

The yarn was suprisingly lovely to work with - a cotton weave that is light and firm, but seems to retain its shape.

Pretty toes

Next up, five nephews, one niece, one son, and five assorted in-laws. Simple.

Soul eater

With amazing timing and incredible self-knowledge, I began a large Wool eater blanket at the height of my first Brisbane summer. Apparently the hottest, most humid summer in quite some time.

Daunting pile of blanket

The horrendous, and perfectly obvious thing about blankets in the round is that the closer you get to completion, the longer each round takes. Its like a maths problem from school - something about a frog? Anyway, I'm almost finished, which is to say, there's a way to go.

My state of mind is not helped by the fact that I started one of these a couple of years ago, in amazing candy brights, but the yarn was so horrific to work with I frogged the lot, and, wait for it, threw away the yarn. Yes, it was That Bad. 

Jolly colours. Jolly awful yarn.

Revising a rewritten fond memory

So, you know when I said I had cracked it – a crochet motif that would make up into a cosy and lacy blanket?


These feel to me like currency when I stack them like this.

Turns out I hadn’t. When I laid them out, they didn’t pass muster. too small and bitty looking, but more importantly, DearWife thought they were too solid.


What seemed to be a promising start, wasnt...

Now, though, I think I’ve cracked it. I added a round of well-spaced trebles and chains. Fiddly, and it’ll be a ‘mare to sew together (I hate working into chains, but forgot that until it was too late) but I think it works.

I think they'll come together nicely.



Fly away home

I found this on my autumn coat this week:



Simple little crochet corsage



It’s the very first thing I crocheted, at a course led by Catherine Hirst last year.

The first time I wore it a lady on the Tube kindly told me I had a bug on me.



Ladybird button



It’s not that realistic, though, is it?

Side tracked

The Boygoblin has started to pretend. Which is lovely, especially when I find him firmly smooshing his stuffed rabbit face-first into the catfood bowl.

Or when he dissolves in heartbreak because he can’t get Andy, his boy doll, into its fiddly little doll-sized sleepsack.

The catfood I’ve just had to get a bit zen about, but the sleepsack? That I can solve.

So last week I pulled some yarn scraps (Cath Kidston Book of Crochet since you ask) and made a good old old-fashioned granny blanket.

Old style granny blanket

Apart from being doll-sized, its just like the real thing – its as ugly as you’d expect, and catches on little doll toes. DearWife loves it, and says its just like the ones she grew up with.  I won’t be making another one, for pretty much exactly the same reason.

Doll sized

And boygoblin? Fewer tears, because he can easily put Andy to bed.  

Andy's all snuggled in

And then zoom  him around the house.

Check out those drivers...

Did I mention Andy sleeps in the lorry walker?

All snuggled up on the flat"bed"

Fancy a quick nap?

Updating a fond memory or two

DearWife remembers a couple of old-fashioned granny blankets she grew up with, and asked me to make one for the BoyGoblin.

I had an old-fashioned granny blanket when I grew up too, and remember the gaps in the crochet making me feel cold and catching my toes.  DearWife remembers wrapping her fingers through the holes in her blanket and feeling cosy.

So, my challenge was to update the granny afghan, making it solid and cosy and lacy and cosy. It’s going to a hot climate too, so it needed to be fairly lightweight. Oh, and not scratchy – we’re all sensitive to wool over here.

And, of course, I still have a thing for hexes.

Lacy centre and solid border

And I think I might have cracked it. And Best of all, I can make 2 or 3 or these a day on the train to work.

Lovely yarn

I’ve picked a set of grey foamy greens from Red Heart’s Bamboo Ewe. Not easy to get hold of over here, but a delight to work with, and quite reasonably priced.

I wanted blue greys, like the colour of a dark twilight sky, with a red or yellow highlight, but you can see here how the oceany greens won me over.

The yellow yarn is for some the sky-themed motifs that will be appliquéd on the bottom corner when I’m done.

Here are the prototypes – the plane is just how I imagined it (just need to extract the pattern now) but the balloon needs work.

The pink protoype yarn was binned last night -
its horrible to work with

My studio assistant has the final word...

Yarn Vision

I have a confession – I don’t have yarn vision. That is, I don’t have the knack of spotting a beautiful fibre, and knowing that I could use it someday. To be frank, I’m often not even able to tell if I like a yarn or not. Maybe it’s about experience, but there seem to be so many variables – tension, fibre, size of hook, pattern.

That’s quite helpful actually, because it means I don’t (often) buy yarn on spec. I need to have a specific project in mind.

Except that we’ve just got through sales season here, and I thought that if I was able to exercise a bit of yarn vision I would save myself bucketloads, and keep my hook (and hopefully needles) busy for at least part of the year.

So here is at least part of the result.

Rowan silk twist

To make a shawl. Possibly this one. 

I may have bought too much. Or not enough. Who knows?

The last time I did this, I ended up needing to go back to the shop three more times to top up, and eventually worked myself into a panicky froth and bought too many extra balls at full price online.  

(as an aside, I do have fabric vision, which has resulted in a number of boxes of neatly folded fabric nestled deep in UnderTheStairsLand. So many that I’ve now banned myself from buying on spec.)

Big hexes, small blanket.

This is why I don’t buy yarn on spec.



Cosy chunky hexagons



I bought two balls each of the blues and pink in the post-Christmas sales, and sort of immediately knew I wanted some sort of throw, possibly hexy.

My inspiration was this  Amy Butler quilt I had come across months ago.  I did some sketches, and sample hexes, and the dug out the picture, to find that it was much more piecy that I remembered, and really not much like the blanket I had in mind. Which really, is exactly what inspiration should do – suggest a direction, and send you on your way.

Then I got all anxious about the amount of yarn I needed, and took another trip to the sales to snap up whatever I could find – a measly two more balls of pink and two of grey.

To make the border, I needed to buy extra yarn, and bought too much at full price.

I’ve just managed to scrape together the yarn to make and assemble this large large-hexy hex.

Its an ok blanket. I guess. I’d really like to make a biggish floor cushion, with a plain colour single-hex backing.  But by my calculations that requires another 10ish balls of yarn for the back. And that will cost upwards of £50. Which is pushing the cost of the project towards £90. and that’s’ without lining and stuffing the thing…

So I’m sitting on it (or rather, BoyCat is) and thinking I might make the cushion back and liner out of dark blue jersey.

Cat photos won't become a theme, but really, could you disturb that little bundle?

A Hex on all your houses!

This would be a very clever title for this post, except that a good portion of my hexes are actually pentagons, and “a polygon on all your houses” is less catchy, somehow.

Hexes and Pents

Four corners just aren’t enough for me at the moment. Three very different projects have conspired to make piles of polygons in our house. More later.

recycle-bin refugees

These little guys are at the heart of one of the patterns I'm picking away at at the moment. 

Two bottle caps with a shirt button ready to go inside.

The blue cap is from a 50cl buxton bottle, and the green is a 1.5L highland spring cap. The fact that with a bit of gentle coaxing they fit so neatly together is possibly the most pleasing thing I’ve done all year.

Shrek and chips

This scarf is made from naturally handdyed Scottish wool.

Two thirds green, with a deep self-coloured fringe

I bought it at Shilasdair, on the Isle of Skye, before I had tamed the crochet troll. The pattern is adapted from the "blocks and shells" block from Jan Eaton's "200 Crochet Blocks" - a great source book, and one that is looking decidedly weatherbeaten!

The yarn is dyed with British plants, and reflected for me the colours of the landscape in September when we were there. (It was a late Autumn last year, hence the rich green.)

The subtle variations in the dye echo the colours in the landscape



Lots of  pinkish brackens, and deep green scrub



Big problem – its not colourfast. My hands looked like Shrek after 40minutes of working on this.

So. Tonight’s job is to simmer the thing with a shot of vinegar. And then work out how to get it to stop smelling like a fish shop.