You won’t see me write a title like that very often!

I’m in the middle of crocheting a bag from, er, bags. The company that delivers my groceries insists on using polythene bags instead of boxes, so I want to get a lot of use out of them before I pass them back for recycling. The polythene I am crocheting with is thicker than the usual bags and it also has a crisper texture, so the project is looking good – reminiscent of a supple basket weave.

When it’s finished, I’m going to use the bag for all my shopping in town as a sort of silent, private protest against our Official Reusable Town Bag. Honestly, it’s a lot of nonsense. A local shop arranged for an apparently very well-known designer to come up with a a reusable bag for our town. The result, which costs £10, is eagerly being snapped up by the town’s Yummy Mummy crowd (so lots of trade for the enterprising shop, then), but what they apparently haven’t noticed is that the design and materials are very reminiscent of similar bags you could pick up on a market stall for £2 back in the 1980’s. Big pink and white script on a big black canvassy tote. Remember those? Sheesh. It was OK back then, but isn’t the idea of just putting a bunch of words all over a black bag just bad design? Meanwhile, the majority of the people buying them are using them as handbags so they are still picking up more polythene bags at the supermarket checkouts, and the designer is knocking out these bags for any town or city that asks for them. ! Grah!

Breathe now, must find calm. Yes, hold something handmade, that feels better.

I’ve run out of these polythene bags for the moment, so I can’t do much more with this right now. …I have, however, got loads of purple bags, so I might start another one off while I build up my supplies of orange and green. The grocery deliveryman saw my bag-in-progress and wanted to know how to make one, so I found myself standing at the front door, teaching him how to crochet! He confirmed that he could take my crocheted bag away for recycling when it eventually wears out, but I think it should last for years so long as I don’t scuff the base by putting it on the ground too much…

The other picture is of the lovely geometric design Flame created one afternoon with her box of shapes. I think she might enjoy designing quilts.

Entry plonked in Crochet @ 12:53 pm
Tagged thusly: Crochet, polythene bags

After quite a bit of unpicking and re-doing (originally thought I was making a ‘top hat’ sort of shape, then a beret, but then finally what you see here), I’ve finished the hat I promised Pixie as a justification for buying the Glastonbury yarn. grin

The ‘Hazy Alpaca’ hat is double-crocheted in circles, increasing as necessary to make it the right shape, and I sized the hat for an adult because Pixie is growing very quickly and she gets upset when she grows out of things I have made for her.

Once the final incarnation of the hat was underway, I had developed the plan of making it look like the crochet had been done in vertical sections and then stitched together with the Kidsilk Haze. In reality, that would have been hard to achieve without a pattern because I would probably have ended up with an misshapen hat once it had all been sewn together! So… I started at the top of the head and then simply worked around in circles (not spirals), changing colour as necessary. This meant that I wouldn’t waste any yarn by leaving long ends, or have a screaming fit if I had to unravel some of the work because it wasn’t shaping properly!

Thus, the Inca Cloud colour blocking was done by dropping the current yarn and picking up the next one to change colour. At the end of each circuit, I chained three stitches and turned the work to pick up the right colour yarns as I came back the other way. To rotate the colours, I just crocheted on with the same colour I was using, passing passed by the colour I would normally have picked up. I passed the second colour up past the rows for which it wasn’t needed, and it seemed to work out OK because all the row-skipping yarn was passed up on the inside of the hat where it wasn’t obvious. I don’t know if this was the right way of handling the colour aspect, but it was certainly the simplest plan I could up with.

Once I was finished with the alpaca and all the ends were tucked in, I double-crocheted up the ‘seams’ with the Kidsilk Haze and then ran some more of it around the brim. Incidentally, I noticed the Inca Cloud yarn was slightly fatter/woollier in the Fuchsia than it was in the other two shades, but it doesn’t seem obvious when the hat is being worn. Texture-wise, I noticed a nice synergy between the Kidsilk Haze and Fuchsia Inca Cloud that suggested they’d like to get felty together. I might put them together again, as I have a good amount of each left over.

Oh, and I must mention the lovely tablecloth you can see here. We call it the Easter tablecloth because that’s when we use it most, but my mother used to bring it out on Sundays for tea when I was a little girl. It’s the most wacky design – lots of sunny yellow fish in silhouette on a bright white background. Completely crazy, but utterly fab!

Entry plonked in Crochet @ 9:48 pm
Tagged thusly: artesano alpaca, artesano inca cloud, Crochet, crochet hat, rowan kidsilk, rowan yarn

It was snowing when we woke this morning – I quickly grabbed the camera and took some shots from Flame’s bedroom window. As the first photo shows, the flakes were huge but the snow didn’t look like it would settle for long before melting. The second photo, also taken from an upstairs window, turned out rather interesting. The poor camera couldn’t cope with zooming beyond the falling snow and the end of the garden to where the sheep were standing, so the result looks more like a painting than a photograph. Cool. …Lambs have gradually been appearing in the fields with the older sheep over the past few weeks, and they are already having to put up with freezing rain and snow. Brr!

The girls hurriedly got dressed and scooped up snow to throw as it was melting, occasionally coming indoors to swap their soaked mittens for dry ones. They were not going to miss a moment of it! The pots of mud stew they had left in the garden were also ‘cooked’ to icy crust perfection:

Because she is seven, Flame dropped the chunks of ice on the ground and jumped on them until they were smashed to bits.

Entry plonked in Art • Life @ 7:00 pm
Tagged thusly: snow

Pixie loves hot cross buns. She would eat them every day if she had the chance… As today is Good Friday, and also because I do try to make all the bread products we need, I decided to get out of bed early and make some hot cross buns instead of buying this year. At the two ends of the spectrum that is my complete experience of various hot cross buns over the years, the bakery ones I had as a child are probably the best I’ve tasted, whereas the mass-produced ones you see in supermarkets these days are a bit cheeky to call themselves much more than ‘not-very-much-fruit buns with crosses’. Definitely a bit too much fruit in this first batch I’ve turned out, though, which is why you can see raisins bulging out everywhere, however these were definitely promising enough for me to have to taste more than one. Purely for the purpose of improving the recipe, of course…!

Have a great Easter.

Entry plonked in Life @ 11:54 am
Tagged thusly: baking, cooking and eating, hot cross buns

We went off to Glastonbury to visit my mother over the weekend. Her flat is currently chock-full of packing boxes as she is hoping to be on the move again soon, so we decided to ignore the rain and wander around the shops. Now, I do hold up my hand and freely admit to having an ulterior motive – I was on the look out for some yarn, hopefully hand-dyed and multi-coloured. Mm, perfect.

Unfortunately, although there were plenty of handmade crafts for sale (yay!), there didn’t seem to be any raw materials to be had anywhere. One of the charity shops had a bundle of knitting needles to choose from, but no yarn. Not even a single, 100% acrylic, pastel ball leftover from someones baby blanket project…

OK, confession time again. If you had opened up my handbag, you’d have found a skein of Debbie Bliss’ Maya (scrummy yarn from a few years ago, similar but nicer than Soho, in my opinion), along with some Sirdar of varying quirkiness and crochet hooks in assorted sizes. So… I guess I didn’t actually need any more goodies at that particular point. …But my bag was indeed capacious enough to accommodate quite a lot more yarn, and I did have a few coins set aside for spending…

Anyhoo, a lucky sideways glance at a shop tucked back from the main street set the pulse racing… Yarn. The good stuff. In the window. Right now.

Huzzah!

The manager of the little shop was attempting to lock up and leave for lunch, but she noticed us coming, and very kindly let us in. Inside there was a lot of (really, really nice) handmade stuff for sale, and garments were hanging all round the room, including over the doorway to the yarn section. Once aside, I rushed into the tiny room, all eager to forget the coins and instead to fumble in my wallet for The Naughty Plastic, but there wasn’t much there at all. Still, kudos to them for possibly being the only local yarn supplier to the crafting denizens of Glastonbury and I think they can order in any Rowan you might fancy.

I asked Pixie if she’d like another hat, she said she would, and so I ambled to the the till with some Rowan Kidsilk Haze in shade 590 Pearl, and Artesano Inca Cloud in 53 Plum, 57 Fuchsia and 61 Teal.

I’m afraid I’m not sure of the name of the shop, because the paper bag I was given (finished with a cute bow made of assorted yarn!) was plastered with inkjetted adverts, but I think the most likely name is The Cats Whiskers Clothing & Wool Co, which is a huge mouthful for such a tiny shop. Fab. Someone has clearly put their heart into that little place. …Not somewhere I would frequent for non-yarny purchases because I prefer to make my own handmade goodies, but there were certainly lovely things to see, such as dresses, accessories, and handmade fairy wings…

Back at Mum’s place, I started to crochet the lovely new yarn, and we chatted while the girls played with toys, fiddled with yarn and ate cakes, while Lam tried not to nod off (bless!). A perfect day with Granny.

Entry plonked in Yarn @ 3:24 pm
Tagged thusly: artesano alpaca, artesano inca cloud, glastonbury yarn shop, rowan kidsilk, yarn, yarn shopping