Category Archives: Other Craft

Hot and Colds

Thirty-eight degrees and I do not get along so well (that’s °C, aka 100°F). So this weekend has not been so fun. Three of them in a row!!! Yuk :yuk:

Yesterday was the worst. Hot days are even less fun when taking care of a sick and over-tired babe. Especially when feeling kind of sick yourself, and especially when the babe in question is also painfully cutting more teeth 🙁

We all came down with sniffles and sore throats over the last couple of days, probably courtesy of a certain pre-schooler. Getting a ‘cold’ in the middle of a blistering summer is really odd. The usual ‘rug up under a doona on the couch and drink chicken soup’ rule doesn’t apply. Instead all we want to do is lay about wearing as little as possible (!) and doing as little as possible.

But that was yesterday. Today, we have been much better. Niamh has returned to her favourite hot weather pastime – playing in the foot of the shower and getting thoroughly soaked. Finn has returned to… well actually, perhaps he’s not completely over it, he was super-cranky today. But we also fitted in some shopping (mostly me), some cleaning (mostly OtherHalf) and an unexpected visit from my little sister (yay!), all despite the continuing heat. Also, I made a little something. I tried to get pictures but the light was crappy so I’ll try again tomorrow. Here’s a little clue. It’s my latest colourful addiction:

Crafty Fabric Tower

Pretty, no?

Colour Sweet Colour

Mmmmmmm
Heads up, Angi, Jenna, Debbi, Jinger and Tash… your pay-it-forward packages are in the mail:smile:. I hope the recipient of the particular items shown above doesn’t mind that I have appropriated their image for my new Yuku avatar :giggle: I had a lot of fun putting together five lovely packages of colour, and I hope you all enjoy them when they reach you (Tash, yours might be there by tomorrow, I’m guessing)

Gone Fishin’

Thankyou for all the fabric-and-floss love. It’s very encouraging to know people like what I’m doing. I’ve more to show you, actually, as I’ve been playing some more over the last few days, dyeing my first opalescent fabrics and my first perle coton. The results of both are beautiful – I have modified my thread-dyeing method a bit, and I’m really happy with that now. I’m looking forward to stitching with some of my new pretties now. And when I get back, I’ll be finishing up a little bit more for my very patient pay-it-forward recipients, and hopefully getting those packages out.

Get back. Yes. I’m about to walk out the door and not return for six whole days. Yippee. We’re off a’camping. Niamh’s first camping adventure… should be fun! We’re going to a small music festival until Sunday, then most likely to visit my father-in-law. I may or may not have Net access in that time, and even if I do, it will be dial-up :yuk: ! So I’ll probably be back next Wednesday. You all behave yourselves while I’m gone!

Rain, Glorious Rain

Moods around here are very much improved following two days of steady rain. The drought (and it still is, despite the rain) has been very depressing on so many levels, and watching our garden wilt and die has not been fun. The ground is actually wet now, and I’m beginning to feel the mild stirrings of inspiration to plant for winter crops. We’ve never yet managed to have a winter vegetable garden – I think it’s because planting needs to be done while the weather is still sweltering, then tending/harvesting needs doing in the misery of late autumn/winter. Blah. But we’ll see. It would be nice to have soup vegetables at the very least.

Speaking of harvesting, we have managed to keep a few things going… on Saturday I picked beetroot, cucumber, cherry tomatoes and leeks. Then last night we had pesto on spaghetti, courtesy of our own basil and garlic. Yum. (We also opened wine, it was terribly civilised around here after the small people were finally in bed :giggle: )

Other delicious produce from the weekend:
DyesJan07-lg
Niamh was very accommodating with her naps, and I got quite a bit done, replenishing a few colours of my sale floss and dyeing some fabric for myself and others. There is one monstrously ugly piece of fabric hiding in that pile though… not sure what I’ll do with it yet. If you think you could use a fat quarter of Belfast that kind of looks like army-camo, drop me a line :giggle: (OtherHalf was more generous and said it looked ‘kind of foresty’. Yes. Like camo!).

Other people were busy on the weekend too… we found out this morning that my mother and stepfather snuck out and got married yesterday… finally legal after nineteen years together! Congratulations you two :drink: !

Paying It Forward

In the absence of much advice from you, dear readers, I had to make up my own mind on what to spend my recent earnings. I decided in the end to add to my dyeing stash rather than my stitching stash (is it actually possible I’m approaching SABLE with my stitching stash?) So I bought some more white fabrics (including opalescents), and have some new dyes coming to me from Kraftkolour. I’m excited about the prospect of returning to some dyeing, and I have some ideas brewing.

Which leads to my next item of business. I’ve spotted this ‘paying it forward’ concept on a couple of blogs lately, and tonight I decided to join in, on Christine’s blog. So here goes:

I will create some ‘piece of art’ for the first five people to respond to this post in the comments below. I’m interpreting ‘art’ fairly loosely here. Given my recent purchases (see above), you can probably guess along the lines of what I would like to create. So if you’re interested, comment away. Next, drop an email to me, letting me know your postal address, and I’ll be in touch 🙂

The catch? You need to blog this too, and ‘pay it forward’ in your own way. Go on… it’ll be fun!

Remember These?

Friendship braceletWhen I was in primary school (or was it early secondary school?), these friendship bracelets were all the rage for a while. I built my first (small) DMC stash making these. Some time after, hair-wraps became the in-thing, and I used my floss stash for those as well. So DMC and me, we go way back!

I made this one today for Finn, as a replacement for a peyote stitched wristband I made for him a while ago. The beaded wristband has broken twice, and I figure this will be more durable for a small boy. I only realised how ‘Halloween’-y the colours were when I started tying the knots. Looks pretty cool, don’t you think?

The ‘Aha’ Moment

(This is where I prove myself a liar, because I have actually been doing something crafty amidst all the clutter!)

Once upon a while ago (or ‘Back the days a bit’, as Finn likes to say), I taught myself to crochet. I think it was back when there were a lot of people joining in the 63-Square Crochet-along on The Wagon. I figured it couldn’t be as difficult as all that, right? Wrong! I just didn’t get it. I was splitting the yarn with the hook, and losing stitches with every row, and couldn’t figure out where. Being left-handed, it is always that bit more fun trying to interpret diagrams. (I know, I know – mirror-image the diagrams, then print them out – I just seem to like doing things the difficult way!)

Anyway, more recently, I have got my mum hooked (ha!) on amigurumi – crocheted stuffed toys. She gave me a lesson in crochet-ing in the round, and bought me some plastic hooks. And I was pootling along, crocheting in the round, and the plastic hooks made it so much easier to avoid splitting the yarn (though I did break a 4mm one on the way)… and, suddenly, I got it! I figured out where I had been losing stitches in flat crochet, and suddenly it all made sense. In about half an hour, I was happily single, double, half-double, triple, and twisted-double crochet-ing away. Whoo!

SweeneyScarf
So I made Sweeney (Niamh’s Very Special Bear) a scarf (teddies are great for small projects). Not the most amazing ‘crocheted thing’ in the world, but a good start! Maybe now I’ll get back to the amigurumi-ing, and make myself a teddy cupcake, or… um… one of these (what the…?!) :giggle: !

I’m Loving…

Being addicted to Flickr :giggle:

Inspiring01

Originals here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9!

I’ve been avidly reading a number of craft blogs for a while now. It’s interesting to observe that while the stitchers as a group are largely blogging on Blogger and hosting their images on Webshots or similar, many of the crafty girls (and boys?) are hanging out with Typepad and Flickr. Are they a more progressive bunch?

Anyway, the crafty blogs have been making me itch to do something more than stitching for quite some time. Because, you know, I just need a new hobby, I have waaaay too much spare time on my hands :giggle: So lately I’ve been hanging out on Flickr too. I’m loving the Pools and Groups over there, it’s an ever-inspiring place to be. The above is a little put-together of just some of the wonderful things that have grabbed my attention lately.

Small Stuff

The Hiccup Stuff
Or more accurately, the hiccoughs. They have started. Finn hiccoughed in utero for about the last two months. (Didn’t stop for about a month afterwards, either). Looks like Small will be following suit. I think it’s so cute! Much cuter than my abdominal bits are feeling and looking lately, anyway.

The Wall Stuff
The Wall, it comes down this weekend. Be afraid. Be very afraid. You know, I’d really like to take Before and After photographs, I would. If only I could get the kitchen and living areas clean enough to do so first! (Actually, I’ll probably have to, since the tearing down of said wall will necessitate some tidiness, after all).

The Dyeing Stuff
#1 – I’m very sad at the loss of my dyeing space, due to Wall-goings-on and the rest of the kitchen ‘rearrangement’. Am going to see if I can manage enough space in our stupid tiny laundry area to set up, but it may well be that my dyes go away for the forseeable future.
#2 – Hoping to squeeze this in before packing the dye-bits’n’pices away. Mum gave me some yarn to try dyeing. I picked up a couple of Landscape dyes (easy-peasy no-extra-acids-needed wool dyes) from Kraftkolour on the day they were closing their doors (sob! They went mail order only, how sad). So I’m going to try a couple of vareigated yarns. I don’t really knit – I can manage a scarf or a cushion though, so I’ll let you know how it turns out.
#3 – Also on the dyeing, I just wanted to remind those of you who’ve bought some floss that you probably should rinse it in cool/lukewarm water prior to stitching with it. I do rinse fairly extensively after dyeing, but there is always a chance of some excess dye left clinging. I’ll add this suggestion into my sale page shortly.

The Employment Stuff
You may remember a bit ago I decided not to take on the offer of a job, as documented here? Well, my lecturer has come back to me with a modified offer – would I like to do some marking? This can (mostly) be done from home, and it won’t begin at the very start of semester, so Small should be 2-3 months by the time I start. I said yes, I’m interested. I’m probably going to slap myself later – my university is not renowned for its generosity s’far as remuneration is concerned. Nor does the time allotted to mark assignments come anywhere close to the actual time that marking takes. But… I figure, it keeps my brain alive, keeps my toe in the water. It could be a good experience.

The Stitching Stuff
Um… no :blank: Must try harder.

Meep. Where does the time go? Finn has been at kinder all morning and I have acheived nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. Except a very ordinary blog post. Sigh.

New Stuff

Christine, your comment about crazy stash acquisition made me smile… since going off the Wagon Challenge at the end of ’05, I’ve been a bit crazy myself. I haven’t always fully confessed, but needless to say, I haven’t stuck to that ‘goal oriented’ plan I had 😳 My latest temptation was the SB&B Easter Sale, and I’m waiting on a couple of The Cat’s Whiskers charts, Enchanted Mermaid, a Drawn Thread chart and some mesh bags. I think that’s it!

purple_fabric

Anyway, all guilt aside – first off today, a new fabric I dyed up recently. I adore this. It’s a fat quarter of 28-count Lugana, and I dyed it with Mirabilia’s Midsummers Night Dream in mind. I have just plugged it into the fabric viewer, and it does look lovely with that design, but there’s a number of other Mirabilias it looks great for too – oddly enough, Enchanted Mermaid is one of them. I never envisaged a purple for that design.

I have a bunch of other white fabric just waiting for inspiration to strike – 2 FQs of Quaker (my personal favourite), 3 FQs of Cashel, and 2 more of Lugana. I also have a piece of Belfast I dyed but hate the results of, so I’m going to try over-dyeing that to see what I can acheive. Hopefully, if I get a bunch of satisfactory fabrics out of this lot, my desire for stash expansion will subside a little!

md-motdb20
Next is my newest start – yet another Mirabilia – Mermaids of the Deep Blue. I seem to be going through a very definite Mirabilia phase at the moment 🙂 I’d estimate there’s about 20 hours put into this so far, though I didn’t record times so far. There’s two weekends away worth of work in it, put it that way. I’m stitching this on hand-dyed Babbling Brook Jobelan – my first large piece on Jobelan, and I like it more than I thought I would, actually.