A new Experiment!

Domino Knitting!

I've heard of this and there was no particular reason I decided to have a go at it besides the fact that I have a few balls of left-over sock yarn in my wool room and the plain truth that the other thing I was knitting was in a heavier gauge of yarn and I liked the idea of something delicate...like 4 ply. I mean, it's not like I have any lack of sources of sock yarn to fall back on!

Anyway, I found a really helpful tutorial on Pinterest on a blog called Loose Threads all about how to do it to produce beauties like this!

But I didn't like the jagged edge. I wanted a straight edge. So after reading about half the instructions and quickly flicking through the pictures I grabbed the top ball of left-overs, a 2mm circular needle (a really short one!) and dove in!

First I knit the four on the right and worked out how the placements of the decreases worked. I really like the way the slip 2, knit 1, pass 2slsts over knit st make a really neat line in the centre. But I still had a fair amount of yarn left so I decided I'd make a square twice the size to sit next to the smaller ones. I quite liked how that looked and decided to surround this rectangle as I went around.

I mean, how hard could it be?

See? Isn't it pretty? And a nice predictable pattern developing too. Always a large square beside the 4 smaller squares.  I really quite liked this kind of joining as you go along and with the fine yarn it's not too hot to do while it's uncomfortable warm either!  Okay, moving on...

All going along really well although it's hard to know whether to try and match the colours better but I decided in the end to just go with whatever I grabbed next.

And right here! Right here I suddenly realized I may have outsmarted myself. I had discovered earlier that there had to be an order in how you knitted each square or else the line down the middle could end up pointing the wrong way but I didn't thing it would really be a problem...until I started trying to go down the right side of the centre rectangle. To do the little squares with the line going in the right direction I had to some how join THREE sides instead of the usual two.

Pause...Think...Grind Teeth! (buggerbuggerbugger!!)

So I decided that I'd just have to come up with a way of doing that. Not that it was difficult, just a little fiddly! And now I know why there aren't any examples of small and large squares in a straight edged blanket like this!

So, using a single double point 2mm needle I picked up 15sts on the third side and every back row I knit together the first st on the working needle with one from the third side. It works pretty well. It's not quite as smooth a join as the normal one used through out the pattern but it functions and for that I'm prepared to be thankful!

Of course all this is still in progress and my aim at the moment is to finish the large square I'm doing and make a cushion cover with it. And then I'll sit back and contemplate the wonders now at my fingertips of greater and larger things... Like maybe a sock yarn blanket myself. Yes, that might be nice...

Well, one day maybe anyway :)

Anyone else ever experimented with domino or modular knitting?

See you later!
Dx

Family Photo Shoot

Let me just say one thing up front...
I hate having final responsibility for anything.
Anything at all!
I will happily be your second man (or woman, whatever!) your lieutenant, Beta to someone else's Alpha. Perfectly comfortable in this role.
Just don't make me the final authority because I will either run, throw-up or quietly melt-down as I panic about something going wrong and it being ALL MY FAULT!

Okay, little disclaimer done, now onto the story.

I organised our family's latest photo shoot...largely on my own!

And several times I really wanted to die...for a day or two at least.

It's difficult getting all our family together now the kids are all adults. Because of Hubbie's work, we move about every two years or so and at the moment are in the western Australian wheatbelt. Our daughter's partner is an officer in the Army and they're based in Brisbane, Qld. And the two boys both house share together in Perth. Even with 4/5ths of us in the same state, it still isn't the easiest thing in the world!

Finding a photography place that would make us look like a family as opposed to 5 strangers who just walked off the street was hard enough. I wanted some place where they would make us look good and no-one would be able to escape! And I had to get it done while daughter was over here for a friends wedding and her yearly visit. So a kind of tight time frame, really...(panic,panic, sweat!!)

I found Exclusive Photography and they sounded like they ticked all my boxes and were really lovely. I had to make a date to go and then tell everyone what was expected and what to bring, (hyperventilating a little, panic, panic!!) and then meet up in Perth.

And...it kind of worked!

Brianna getting the pretty treatment!

And then my turn...

...While the boys went out clothes shopping because Jordan had worn his favourite clothes to shreds and couldn't understand why his father wasn't going to let him get photos like that...Ben didn't really help by wanting to get done in his boardies and ugg boots! But they managed while we girls were made look lovely.

It was great fun. It really was and the only fly in the ointment was how much it cost but that's just because any numbers with a $ in front of it makes me immediately break out in a sweat and want to throw up! But all things put together it was pretty reasonable and fortunately they organised a really easy payment plan spread out over the year. And now I have over 50 gorgeous photos of my three adult children, all vibrant and lively, in their various degrees of development together with their father and I.

After it all, I can breath!

I'm a little pleased with myself...just a bit. I'm sure that something will come along and cloud my confidence, but for the moment I'm quietly relieved that everything is over and it didn't blow up in my face...

...I'm proud of my family...

That's all.

See you later.

Dx

Still kicking along

We're on holidays back home again for two weeks which is lovely. Back home in Albany where I don't have to have the air conditioner on all the time!
But despite the heat I have managed to get some knitting done.
It had to be small, preferably seamless and in a light gauge yarn...and I found this gorgeous little onesie on ravelry. Sunnywear Romper. I've been knitting the 0-3 months size and using up some of my stashed 4ply baby yarn. I don't know anyone with a baby or about to have one but I guess I can always donate them to charity or keep them till I get grandkids of my own.
I've knit two already, in yellow and blue and I'm in the process of knitting a pink one. I really like them and it's a excellent pattern too. Here's  what I've got so far...
What do you think? Cute, huh?

...A Little More Sewing.

I meant to do this ages ago but Life (in general) and Holiday plans got in the way and I figured that visiting Hubbie's parents and mine in our hometown while the commemoration of 100 years since the first fleet of soldiers to fight in the First World War sailed from our port and then spending a week with our daughter in Brisbane was probably more important than cobbling together a short spiel about another crafty do-dad of mine.

Needless to say, both weeks were wonderful. But now we're home.

Before we left I'd been experimenting with gifts to make for family instead of buying everything...unfortunately we have a lot of men in our family. It's relatively easy coming up with a gift I can make for the women in the family but I don't think there's a man in the world who wants a tatted lace doily or a knitted garment in the middle of the Australian summer!

So I just concentrated on our Mothers. Both knit a fair amount, both for personal pleasure and for charity and I thought a knitting roll to store their knitting needles and oddments in would be a good idea. So I looked around Pinterest and found a lovely tutorial by Made By Loulabelle for a simple but pretty roll. And I had all the material on hand so I drew up the template and started.

The first one was a bit rough but I got better as I tried to take time and not rush them as I tend to do with sewing projects. I made up 3 rolls, digging through my boxes of fabric. It's astonishing how you can have a lot of fabrics but never just the right colours to blend nicely together while offering a bit of contrast. I needed a solid or semi-solid, a small print and a large print. Was much harder to find than I ever thought it would be!

But the final result were well worth the effort.

The First Knitting Needle Roll

 I learnt with the first roll that the decorative ribbon I chose wasn't a great choice. It isn't double sided and the back of the ribbon doesn't look as good as the front. But everything else worked really well.

Second Knitting Needle Roll

So with the second all I changed was to make the ribbon from the bias binding I used around the edges and that worked fine.

Third Knitting Needle Roll

So my final one I used up all the pinkest stuff I could find and made up one overloaded with devastating cuteness. I love how cheerfully bright it is and although some of the stitching is a little dodgy I'm still quite happy with this.

Actually, I'm happy with all of them and I'm looking forward to being able to gift these to people I know will appreciate the time and effort I've put into them.  And it wasn't so difficult getting the sewing machine out even though I had to pack it up again when I was finished. Our house is too small at the moment to leave anything like that out. I feel like I've achieved something worthwhile and it might be the first Christmas I'm almost prepared for before December.

But let's not get too hasty! Now to recuperate from all the travel and try and get my bearings...

I'll have more later. Don;t know what. I'm at a bit of a puzzle at the moment with crochet, cross-stitch and knitting all cluttering around me.  I'll clear my head eventually!

See you all later!

Dx

Broadening My Horizons

I've been looking through all the beautiful crochet goodies on pinterest and slowly being eaten up with envy until I finally broke down and decided to give crochet another try.

I can crochet. I can even do it fairly competently...but I don't really enjoy it and I can't read the patterns, regardless of whether they're written or charted. And I don't like being made feel stupid by a short length of metal with a hook at the end! It's just rude!

So I decided I would use up a bunch of small acrylic balls of nice colours and make granny squares. I found some instructions I could understand on the bog Little Tin Bird and headed off!

It actually worked out pretty well. I loved the colour combinations. I even managed to figure out the end joins of each round to my satisfaction! I made 12. Now to join them up!

I was going to try and crochet them together but none of my attempts looked nice and they were lumpy. In the end I just whip-stitched them together. I sat back and admired my work...

I had a really small...REALLY small rug. Mmmm....?

Since I still had quite a bit of the yarn left over I thought I would crochet around the edge, tying everything together and make a (quite small admittedly) lap rug.

But the experience with the squares had taught me to be cautious.  I did NOT want to have to sew in hundreds of ends from knots tying each of the colours together.  So I Russian-joined them. Sort of splicing the yarns, cutting off half the yarn bulk and loop them together and passing the left over thread up through the working yarn. It really worked brilliantly! It meant I could just crochet around the squares and watch the colours appear!

I can crochet. And maybe with a bit of practice I might even enjoy it. For now, this was fun. But I think I'll pick up the knitting needles again...

We understand each other a bit better!

I'll tell you about some other forays into different crafts next time. Bet you can't guess what!

See you all later :)
Dx

Boxes, Little Boxes!

I love boxes!

Little, big or medium, the linear pleasure of being able to put things away and put lids on and then create neat little forts of organized tidiness makes some corner of my inner OCD self warm and happy!

So , of course, I had to try and make some out of felt!

Because of the limited size of the felt I have (as well as the limited ability to get any more once I use it up!) the boxes had to be small. The first one I tried was from How About Orange which is really good and uncomplicated. And this would probably have been where I stopped looking except I couldn't get my printer to copy out the template to scale! I tried working it out but it wasn't what I was looking for. Partial success but not quite close enough!

See? I couldn't get the lid tight enough. I struggled with the printer, trying to wrap my numerically illiterate brain around percentages (Failed!) and finally gave up and started looking again.

I found a template for a paper exploding box. I didn't even know that's what these things were called and after looking at it for a while, I was sure I could make something like it with my felt. So...off I went!

I cut out 2 layers of felt for the outer layer and the inner layer, that way I could hide any untidy stitches between the layers and cut out the bottom template and the lid template. Then I running stitched around the square centre at the bottom and the lid so everything wouldn't move any more. Next, because the inner folds would need to fold inwards I cut the centres of the triangles (where the dotted line denotes fold lines) and re-sewed the edges together so the were permanently pointing inwards. I thought I was really clever as I sewed all the pieces together. It looked so nice! And then I tried to put the lid on the folded box...

I didn't like it! 

When I tried to fold it, all the flaps were either piling up against each other or pointing the wrong way so I had to sit back and think again. There had to be a way to line up the inner folds so it looked like a box instead of a screwed up piece of felt with a square hat!

I finally came up with a solution. I pierced the 2 opposite faces of the box with a skewer and sewed a flower over the hole and edged it with button hole stitch. Then I sewed 2 loops (the sort you use when you put a hook and loop on the top of a skirt to help close it as you do up the zip.) on the 2 inward pointing folds and then thread some thin cord through the loops and out the hole in the side and tied a knot in the two ends.

Now with both sides done I found that by pulling them up, the box developed a nice firm form and I could tip the sides up, place the lid on, wrap the cord over the top and tie it down. Viola! A felt box!

Isn't it the cutest thing you've ever seen?? I can think of so many things I could use this for! A sewing needle caddy immediately springs to mind since it's made of felt. A box to hold a special gift. Something to hold thread bobbins in when stitching. And it's so embellish-able!

I enjoyed the details in this and having to adapt the original pattern to make the end result still useful as well as beautiful! And it's so pretty! Never a bad thing. So I decided to make another one, just to see if I'd worked out all the bugs in the assembly.

I really liked the impact of the navy against the red and the little pop of green at the thread holes. I thought I might have done some sashiko design on the top but I didn't really have the patience to slow down and do it. I wanted to finish!

I really like it, especially the beaded ends to the ties. I love details! I love anything glittery and clink-y. I've really enjoyed exploring this box form and now I have one more string to my bow for handmade gifts! Huzzah!

I think I need to give the felt a rest for a little bit though. My fingertips are sore and I'm covered in shredded bits of felt. In a fortnight we'll be going on holidays so I need to figure out what craft I'm taking with me. Especially anything that I can do to distract me on a 5 hour flight! 

What do any other crazy crafty's do on flights? 

See you later :)

Dx

Coin Purses and Felt!

Because I don't have enough mess, right??

But since I had the felt out already I thought I'd try some coin purses...but I didn't have the necessary zips required so I wanted something that I could just shut through a loop or a button...something easy!

                  I knew I'd find it if I looked!

Also I received a lovely order of felt squares in heaps of colours. It's awful but I'd forgotten I'd ordered them and I'll have to look up the order to figure out what the company was I ordered them from but they're perfect for these little purses. The felt is just a bit stiffer than the stuff I have which works great!

I got it!! The felt came from Little Blue Box is located in Perth, WA. I bought it off ebay.

This is the first one I played with before I got the new felt. And while I do like it (it's so cute!!) there were aspects I was sure would improve it. Firstly the two short sides where too low. Coins could (and did!) escape out of the purse in the rough and tumble world of my handbag. Not what I was aiming for, obviously. 

And as a brief side note, the die-cut flower shapes are from bettyoctopus on Etsy . Absolutely scrumptious little things and so many different varieties of shapes attainable depending on how you layer them!

So, now with the new stiffer felt I made some modifications to the original design and tried again!

I was really happy with this one! Even though I had to refine the process as I went along! The pattern was too big to cut out the design in one piece with one piece of felt so I retraced the purse into pieces. The front flap, the bottom flap, the rectangular bottom and the two short sides. Then I had to trace each shape on the felt I chose, twice. For an outer cover and an inner insert. Which meant I had to assemble it a different way to how I'd done the first one. I ended up sandwiching the four pieces of felt (joining two sides which included the inner and outer felt) with a tight running stitch. It actually looks really nice. You can see the layers of colour peeking through.

I also found that while the sides were now high enough, folding the thing down flat was almost impossible because the extra fabric kept wanting to fold over under the top flap when I buttoned it up. Fortunately I hadn't started the blanket stitch around the top edge yet. I found it I scooped out the middle of the short sides, it folded up much better. As you can see from the pic though, not yet perfect...but close!

 And now to the lasted edition! On top of all the other adjustments I'd made up to this point, I also slightly scooped out the rim of the bottom flap. And as you can see above, it folded up pretty much the way it was supposed to! No bump where there's obviously an excess of fabric. And it looks so damn cute!! Lovely bright happy colours! 

I've really enjoyed making these and will definitely be making more. But I thought you'd be interested in the process. Felt is such a wonderful forgiving material and it lends itself to so many beautiful things!

What do you think I should try next?

See you all later!

Dx