Domestic creativity

Radio silence, because this is what has taken up much of my creative, as well as physical and mental energy.

Many, many packing boxes. Note they are all unpacked.

On the upside, the boxes revealed this:

I'm in here

Which contains this:

See?

and this:

And here?

This came through while we were on the move, so I'd not had a chance to properly dwell on it before.

Nothing like seeing your name in print to tide you over some creative doldrums.

And the best thing is, there's another in the pipeline. 

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.



Chasing rainbows

For the past four weeks my sewing studio has been out of bounds – first filled with houseguests, and then packed up for the painters, (neither DearWife nor me being the sort of domestic goddesses who relish redecorating, our response to chipped walls being “get the little men in!”)  and finally carefully dressed and posed for sales viewings.

Well, the men have been and gone, as have the estate agents. I spent most of last night reassembling the space the way I really like it, and rather a lot of time simply fondling my stash, if you know what I mean.



Lovely rainbows



And all this led to me starting a bit of an impulsive project – a colour-sorting table mat for the BoyGoblin that I’ve had in mind for a while. Using spare charm squares from the Eye-spy quilt, and scrap batting too.



Coloured cars waiting for their parking spaces



I’m using it to practice quilting freemotion quilting, and I am truly rubbish at it. I’ve stitched and unpicked so many times that the cotton is starting to look like tulle, and I have a pile of threads the size of a pelican’s nest on the sewing table. Arrgh! and those threads are getting everywhere! I noticed one caught in my stockings yesterday at work. Whoops!

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.

A scrunch of ugly

Sometimes when I'm working on something I suddenly think Why? Why? Why?

This was one of those times

To be fair, it a prototype, and the real thing will be rather less lurid, but still...

Christmas countdown

 

Actually, Christmas started for me about three weeks ago when I dug this out from my WIP bag.

It’s a feltworks kit from Dimensions that I’ve been pecking at for the last couple of years. I think it will take a few more to be honest.

Although I’m up to the fun bit now – these little felt tokens are useless, and fiddly, and some of them are not even that pretty but there is something about them that is oddly satisfying

sparkly!



And I’ve even managed not to leave the floor scattered with beans and sequins (otherwise known as choke hazards). Needless to say, its not quite as portable as my usual handsewing projects...