Advancing my crochet

Although doilies look really tricky, I don't actually think they are - you just get lots of bang for your buck by going around and around doing different stitches. To me getting increases and decreases in the right places and remembering how many stitches you've done is far trickier so I was quite nervous when I started out on Rada the Rat by Lydia Tresselt on Ravelry.

I needn't have worried though, it's a great pattern and I'm so pleased with how it's going. I only have a photo of the legs so far, although I've done the (super cute) head and ears, hands and tail as well. I'm just really chuffed to have produced actual feet! I did the decreases and then suddenly there were feet and they looked even better stuffed. And then I managed to join the legs together and begin the body and it looks good! Well sort of, if you don't examine between the legs too closely - but then you woudn't would you because you're not a perv.



I've had to stop at this point though, as I ran out of wool! I need to get to the shop again and am crossing my fingers and toes that they still carry it and that the colourway isn't too different to what I have. Mat suggested I could just start a new colour and make it look like he's got a top on and I guess that would be ok too, although I'd like to go all the way in the same colour.

Scrappy tripalong pillow

I realised when I came to parcel my swap items up that I tend to craft large, and if I ever do another swap I need to work on my small items! Kristel was much more savvy and sent a wonderful array of little things in a padded envelope, I sent a gigantic box. What actually took up the space and required a box were the two tin can lanterns we sent, but also this pillow case - no I didn't send the inner but it's quite bulky sewn up. I had some blocks left over from putting together my scrappy tripalong quilt top and coincidentally four of them were exactly the right size to make a pillowcase that fits what we call a Euro pillow (not sure what Europeans call that size...)

I came across the technique of quilting the scrappy tripalong blocks with a line either side of every second seam on Red Pepper Quilts, and it works really well. I also went diagonally to try and emphasise the diamond pattern which wasn't particularly obvious on just a cushion, partly because of the prints and also because one of the blocks was put together slightly wrong but it was a pillow by the time I figured it out. Can you spot where I stuffed up? It was backed with plain linen quilted with wavy lines. Hazel was very dismissive of that technique, felt it wasn't attractive and was appalled I was going to be sending it to poor Kristel who could not fail to be displeased. Children, they are so free with their opinions! I haven't had any complaints back btw ;) She liked the front though, and so do I. I'm not sure if I have enough blocks to do one for myself, not that they take a long time to make up or anything!

Talking about the Euro pillow makes me think of a topic I often wonder about - here in NZ, and in Canada from memory, furniture and other items are often advertised as "European design" or "Italian design" or "made in Germany" and all these terms are used to tell us that it's really stylish or that it's well-made, or both. So what I always wonder is how those items are advertised in those countries - do Europeans assume that things made there are stylish like we do here? Or that if it's made in Germany it won't fall apart in 2 weeks? Well actually that's usually true of the stuff that gets here, but I bet they make crap stuff too. Do Italians like to be told shoes are made with Italian leather? Drat, now I've got Ricardo Montalban saying "rich Corinthian leather" in my head, over and over again...

Doilies

A little while ago I did a crafty swap with Kristel (one of my favourite bloggers) in the Netherlands, and as part of my parcel I made her a runner sort of thing with doilies scattered across it. The pattern is from Simple Crochet, although I didn't do all the doilies and the runner isn't quite as long I think. I still liked how it turned out (apologies for the poor photos, some were totally out of focus when I came to look at them but the runner was long gone!)



That photo was taken at our old house, makes me feel a bit nostalgic and sad!

The doilies were all done in either Perle 5 or crochet cotton #10 (or was it #20...) and I really liked the contrast in texture that gave. Some of the patterns in the book didn't seem to work right and I had to add or subtract stitches to get them to sit flat, but in general the results were great.













The last one is via Instagram, which I still love, because the orginal sitting on Flickr has been squashed down and is all distorted. Does anyone else have this problem when exporting images from iPhoto? It happens to some images and not to others, sometimes not at all, sometimes really frequently - always compressed vertically. It's weird.

Bee blocks

This poor neglected blog, I feel bad! But I just haven't felt the desire to blog recently, not sure why. I think perhaps I'm just not finishing things the way I used to, and feeling like I don't have anything to blog and then getting anxious about not blogging so I don't blog and so it goes. I might try and see if I can break the vicious circle because I do actually have a few things to show off.

Doing bee blocks for our Monday Modern group really does let me finish things which is always a nice feeling!

The first two I did were for Louise, out of this delightfully gothic fabric by Tula Pink. I don't know that I'd want a whole quilt out of it but it was fun doing two blocks! That's the best thing about bee blocks I think, you can just love something on a superficial level without committing to a whole quilt. The block itself was also great - big and easy and very effective when put together with the others. I gather it's also Tula Pink.





The second lot of blocks were for Cris, and she gave us a pile of solid strips and told us to go for it, keeping a log cabin in mind.



This was a lot of fun to put together. The first one was pretty straight-forward, and I kept it fairly traditional. There was quite a lot of fabric left over so I thought I'd just make another one, but ran out of long enough pieces towards the end. But I liked the pieced strip I made for one side, in a desperate attempt to finish it. It wasn't quite enough though, so I had to add a couple of strips out of my stash to get it to size. My husband wasn't at all sure why I was doing that "just give it to her like that" he said, but I really wanted to finish it for me! Which probably says a lot about why we all do blocks - not necessarily out of the goodness of our hearts but because we like the challenge and playing with other people's fabrics - all fun care and no responsibility!

I'm determined to get out another post in a few days, so check back soon!

Emerging from the fog

In less than two months we've bought a house, put our old one on the market, sold it, packed, moved, and largely unpacked, kept the cat in for 10 days, tried to clean cat pee out of carpets (our old house was all polished floor boards), and after a drought dealt with constant rain and no covered deck or garage to keep things dry until we find a place for them. Yeah. And now I am starting to think about things artsy crafty again - it really does feel like emerging from a fog of packing and boxes and general logistics. When I got to stitching group on Wednesday, after about a month off, I really felt like I was returning to real life!

I've also started back on the Monday Bee blocks which I'm shockingly behind on. I had four to do, and I've just finished Carolyn's 'Cheery Canary' improv block. The brief was only 25% of the block in prints, and a canary must appear once. The others had done such great blocks I really didn't know what to do, although I did know I was jealous of Megan's effort which put small triangles and then squares in mind. Eventually I had this mental image of yellow squares tumbling across the light grey, gradually turning into dark grey triangles. I think I came fairly close, although it's not quite as I'd imagined. I think that's partly due to the number of seams in the block which I find kind of distracting, but hopefully they will be less noticeable after quilting.



It was quite satisfying to put together!

I also found the photos I'd taken of Laurina's and Linda's blocks, both of which were nice to do - I thought the technique for Laurina's hexagons was fascinating, especially the way you end up with two very different-looking blocks from the same two sewn-together strips of fabric.



Now on to Shelly's, Mel's and Karyn's!

It's painful but...

So Reader is closing down and I need a new RSS aggregator. What a pain. It seems like Blog Lovin' is the crafty blogger's choice at the moment, so despite the incredibly painful name I've decided to "claim my blog" and if you are making the switch over in that direction you can Follow my blog with Bloglovin by clicking the link. I actually just imported everything lock stock and barrel straight from Google, so much for good intentions of whittling it down a bit!

Packing and general insanity proceeds apace here. I've got a swap to send off to the Netherlands on Tuesday which is largely done but I have two bee blocks to do for my quilt group that are due in a few days too so I'm going to try and continue the juggling act of sewing and packing and painting Hazel's new room. I am woman, watch me multitask!

Here is Ollie this morning, about to fall asleep on my lap. Dogs just don't do laps as well as cats, it's awkward all-round, but he does love being as close to us as he can get! 

This and that

Hey there poor neglected blog! It's been a chaotic couple of months at chez nous, my father-in-law died, which threw us all for a loop even though it wasn't unexpected, then we put in an offer on a house, which was accepted the day we got back from the funeral, so it was all hands on deck to get our current house ready to go on the market at the same time as we were dealing with all the details involved with finalising the sale of the new house. Whew! The hardest part was living in our immaculate house and keeping it that way so people could view at short notice. It was sold 5 days after we put it on the market, the real estate market here in Auckland is insanely over-heated at the moment but I guess I shouldn't complain too much should I! We'll be moving on the 6th. My desk and computer were packed away in the decluttering frenzy and I've been without it for about three weeks now, aside from not backing up my phone properly, it's amazing how easy it is to cope with just an iPhone!

Anyways, what with all that the crafting has gone on the back burner to a large extent, but I have managed a few bits and pieces. The hat is a skater beanie from Ravelry and the crochet is one of a few I'm gradually doing for a project.