Little things

Thank you for your kind comments on my posts!

As my working days have continued to be long and tiring, I've had little energy for new projects at home, but have savoured all the more the elements of a simple life which are already built into my surroundings.

The flower seeds I sowed last week have germinated with a much higher success rate than the herbs earlier this month - the sunflowers in particular are racing upwards and will very soon need planting up. The herbs are just about showing their first pair of true leaves - although several oregano seedlings feel afoul of a pest I identified thanks to t'internet as fungus gnat larvae, which I suspect are due to overwatering. (When I noticed the dead seedlings and the transparent wormy-thinks, and then found out what they were, I became a bit paranoid and spent longer than is healthy stooped over my seedlings with a tissue in one hand and a wooden toothpick in the other, removing and squishing all the larvae I could see.)

Though the days are warming up, the evenings are still cool. Most of the blankets are now in the linen cupboard but this one is draped over the back of the sofa. It makes me smile everytime I see it. This is the first blanket I ever made. There is a bit of a story - when my mother was little, she started making a crochet blanket to give to her grandmother. She never finished it - she gave her grannie a bag of squares, the rest of the yarn and the pattern - so making up a whole blanket with the pattern felt like finishing something inherited. It's mostly made from scraps from never-finished projects which I carried up to uni with me, all different weights of wool and totally different colours, but I love it.

My knitting and cross-stich tablecloth embroidery sit by the sofa in their new basket, which means they are tidily collected together but easily to hand if I feel up to a bit of crafting in the evenings. Somehow, I've still been able to put aside a few bits and bobs (spare coffee mugs we never use etc) for decluttering, and every day I am grateful for Project 333, as staying on top of the laundry and ironing, as well as getting dressed every morning, is kept manageable.

Finally, the daily tasks of doing the washing up and making the bed keep me grounded, reminding me that the stress at work is (hopefully) transient while the rhythms of home and family go on. (Don't ask that me about the rest of the housework.) 

How about you? What is making you smile today?

Top tip: Weaving in the ends as you go

I recently shared this tip with Kate over at Purple Pear Farm and some of her readers came nosing round here to find out more. If that's you, welcome!

This is a tip I developed because I am a lazy crafter and I hate weaving in all the ends after a big project - especially as many ends as you get from a stripy crochet blanket. There are two methods - the simple and the slightly more complex - but both will work well in any pattern in which you are crocheting a row in colour A and then a row in colour B.

The easy method

Change yarns as normal. Once you have a loop of the new colour on your hook and are ready to begin the first stitches, hold the two yarn ends (old and new colours together) along the top of the last row of stitching. As you crochet the next row, these ends will be caught in the new stitches (see below.) After a few stitches, just trim the stubby ends sticking out and carry on along the row.

The slightly more complex but still easy method

The reason for the second method is that if the two colours are strong contrasts, the end of the new yarn can sometimes peek out visibly against the row of old yarn it is now held against.

This time, hold the yarn end of the OLD colour along the last row and catch it in the new stitches as above, but AT THE SAME TIME hold the yarn end of the NEW colour along the 'active yarn' and use them together, so you will effectively be using a double yarn for the first few stitches. (The picture below should make that clearer.)

I hope these work for you - let me know if they're not clear and I'll post some more pictures. My preferred pattern is Lucy's ripple pattern from Attic 24. If you haven't stopped by, it is a haven for all things crochet so go check it out.

Do you have any favourite tips for finishing as you go?

Ta-da! (And only one week late...)

Ta da! Very thin edging, as I only had a teeny tiny amount of my dark handspun yarn left but it definitely brings the whole thing together more and defines it a little. All in all, I'm quite happy with this. I hope my friends and their little baby will agree.

A slow Saturday

:: Shelling more pumpkin seeds - this is two pumpkins' worth ::

:: Winding homespun yarn into a ball ::

:: Edging the baby blanket ::

Pretty...

It came out pretty well, all told - I love the textured, patterned squares in one colour, they came out really well. I think that if I were going to use a contrast colour, I should probably have used more of it. I'm pondering whether or not to crochet a border around the edge in the dark brown, maybe bring the colours together a little more... But all in, not bad. A lovely gift for our friends and their young son, and more stash busted - which is decluttering but more fun!

Crocheting a baby blanket

I am currently crocheting squares for a baby blanket. The baby in question is growing very big and will be one year old this weekend, so I have a bit of a race against time. I'm hoping I'll have enough yarn to do three-by-four, but it might end up being three-by-three.

The parents of this child, friends of ours, are very into homemade, environmentally-friendly and natural, and there are lots of handknits in that home. His mother Jo knitted me a pair of slippers for my birthday so I really wanted to make something for them and I thought a baby blanket in 100% undyed wool would do the trick.

 The dark brown wool is handspun - some from my stash, some from my first ever attempt at hand-spinning. I've been wondering what I can do with thick unplied singles, but this seems like a perfect solution. I have tried to choose raised patterns, so that there are some textures for the little fellah to explore. The off-white yarn is treated so that it can go in the washing machine, as well - handy for babies with sticky hands and multiple risk factors for making a mess.

Just peeking out in the corner you can see the DVD case of The 1940's House - one I will definitely NOT be decluttering! I'm really enjoying this series (again) - the journey and growth of the family who participate is really interesting to watch.

Crochet Cafe

The key to progress in crochet or knitting is hot chocolate. That's my theory. A knitting circle that knows how to pick a good cafe becomes an excuse to sit, chat and drink hot chocolate for a couple of hours. Don't know about you, but that there is my perfect Friday evening.

This French-language circle meets in Arthur's, opposite Schumann station, every Friday evening. They are extraordinarily friendly, and oo-ed and ah-ed appreciatively when my crochet was revealed, which is a much-welcomed boost to my crafting ego.

My blanket is just the perfect project for this time of year, reminding me of the seaside and sunshine and summer. The blanket was very popular, and was spread across the knees of several knitters - making it slightly awkward when I had to change directions at the end of each row!

Unfortunately I didn't get a photo of the hot chocolate, but believe me - it was good. I'll definitely be going back.

Week 4: The bedroom

When I normally try to have a clear out, usually what I do is gather up all the useless bits and bobs from around the house and dump them next to the bed. As my bedside table is next to the eaves of the roof, stuff shoved under said table or under the bed is pretty much out of sight, out of mind.

Not this time! And just to mix things up a bit, I'm going to start with the AFTER picture - because it's so lovely!

Discovering the secrets

I have discovered the secret to a clean and tidy home with no effort! This miraculous revelation really is having a huge impact on my life - I can't stop reorganising, sorting and streamlining my stuff.

1. Don't allow pile-ups - doing the washing up every night before I go to bed and wiping down the surfaces means that I basically don't need to clean the kitchen - it's always clean. (Well, apart from the floor).

2. Every item should have a home - if things are in cupboards and on shelves, you can hoover the floor. This sounds so obvious, but it's been such a pain keeping the living room tidy with stuff everywhere. Now that (nearly) everything is on a shelf, it's so much easier to keep mess and dirt under control.

3. Not all homes are created equal - by this I mean that, again strikingly obvious, if I either never put things in their home or never get them out of it, it is almost certainly because I'm trying to put it in the wrong place. I have found that by moving things to where I want to use them, and putting stuff I don't use in storage or giving it away, I suddenly have a lot more space and I am using it so much more effectively!

These three simple things are so obvious, but I have not always been very good at following them. Over the last month, since our big clean out, I have been sticking to them more and the flat is actually tidier and cleaner now than it was when we moved in... And I keep getting more ideas! I actually woke up in the middle of the night last night, thinking about how I could store my fabric and wool stashes more effectively so that my sewing kit would be more useful. I tried it out first thing this morning, and it's looking good. Now I have space for more fabric, rather than so much fabric I can never find what I want.

In other news, I finished the first ever dress!! It's a bit big, so I will adjust it. Pictures to follow. I am also making a lining for the drawer dividers I made yesterday with some scrap fabric. Is crafting addictive? I can't seem to stop...

Has anyone tried crocheting baskets or anything out of raffia? I'm not sure how durable it will be, but want to use something cheaper and more neutral in colour than wool or cotton.

Craft Workshops

Hello! I am still alive, you can breathe a huge sigh of relief. Life caught up with me, so I do in fact have a long list of blog posts I'd like to make on various topics, some of which are looooong overdue. Like this one.

As part of my interest in the journeys that our possessions take from the extraction or production of the raw materials through to the disposal of the used product, I am just a little bit interested in craft. I work with wool, and I am interested in all of the stages of the process from fleece to jumper. When I started working with Sunbeams, a Brussels-based charity promoting ecological issues in the English-speaking expatriate community here, I mentioned my interest in craft, and eventually we organised a Christmas Craft workshop.

It was a really good fun afternoon. There were several different activities going on, and the group of children moved naturally and easily from one to another as each was completed. Most of these involved using items that would normally end up in the bin - the insides of toilet paper rolls, scrap paper, and especially Christmas wrapping paper. My own contribution was introducing them to crochet, making creations vaguely resembling snowflakes. I did find that teaching crochet to that age group was rather tricky, as you can't do any of the fun stuff, but that's just something I need to work on.

I really enjoyed learning to make, for example, plaited heart-shaped bags to hang from the tree, using old wrapping paper. And I loved sharing my passion with a group of little people, who were all really proud of their creations. I think what made the craft afternoon so successful was that there was a range of different activities, so that the pressure didn't fall on any single person to keep people interested for the whole afternoon, and that it had a fairly specific focus. The range of activities also meant that people could arrive and leave whenever suited them, and do as many or as few projects as they wanted to, as quickly or as thoroughly as they liked.

I have attempted to get a craft workshop focused on crochet up and running, but I think the brief has been too vague and I haven't reached my target audience very effectively. Looking back at the success of this workshop, I think it would be advisable to choose a specific brief and bring together people interested in different crafts for a similar afternoon. Hmmm... It's a shame I missed the boat for Easter, but perhaps a Midsummer festival theme would work. Feel free to contribute suggestions.

Happy Imbolc!

Tonight is of course Imbolc, the pagan festival that falls between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. In a perfect world, I'd have had a mahusive party with loads of friends, an array of seasonal (organic, locally produced etc) dishes, candles, a big fire in a fireplace and far too much homemade wine. With that in mind, I made a Moroccan dish with lamb and apricots cooked in orange juice, honey and cinnamon. De-licious.

Imbolc is a time for creativity and inspiration, and I have been very creative in the past week. Coming up soon will be details of the range of home-made toiletries I've been making, but the highlight of today was making hummus for the first time. It worked! I made HUMMUS! And it tastes NICE! And I made it the low-tech way - almost every recipe I found basically ran, "Step 1. Place the ingredients in a food processor. Step 2. Blend until smooth." I used a potato-masher-thing. It worked surprisingly well, and my hummus has a delightfully rustic, homemade texture to it. Definitely one to repeat! I also added some cumin and coriander for extra flavour, but I was a bit too careful. I think I need to be more daring with the spices next time.

Other creative projects currently on the go:

• A crochet blanket. Not particularly fancy or complex, but something comforting for my bluesy days.
• Valentine's Day cards for my lovely, lovely friends who should really be told that they are beautiful people more regularly.
• Crochet flowers for keyrings, and other simple demos for the crochet workshops I am setting up this month.
• A bookmark for my mother's birthday. Don't tell her. I made her one last year and it got lost in the post (Sod's law!) so I plan to make another this year, and supplement it with a book. And maybe a cake. You can never go wrong with a cake.
• Many additional crafts are in the UK awaiting my return - including a couple of simple, beginner's dress-making patterns and my mother's sewing machine, the Cath Kidston 'Sew!' book which I am dying to get started on, and many other brilliant books of recipes, patterns and crafty ideas. (Soapmaking and churning butter are on the list...)
  

Little things

Long time, no blog.

I have been thinking recently about how much difference the little things make. As Sherlock Holmes says in the new film (which was *ahem* rather creative with the original characters), the little details can be the most important.

In this case, the things that have cheered me up in the last few days have included: polishing my boots with half an onion (woohoo! No need to buy polish), drinking multiple cups of tea after The Day There Was No Milk Anywhere, and beginning to crochet a blanket with the wool in my bag. Why is that, whatever is on my mind, I feel an immense sense of peace as soon as I pick up a hook? The world somehow makes sense when I'm crocheting. I don't care about the large pile of marking, the current state of my finances and the fact that all the people I care most about in the world feel terribly far away from me (yes, I know, it's no distance at all really, but it feels far).

Partly the black cloud is due to the natural response to a fantastic Christmas/New Year period, full of family and old friends and dangerous things like elderberry gin. The fun times were paced out by volunteer work for Crisis at Christmas, which was immensely rewarding and thought-provoking. It really makes me appreciate what I have, and it's definitely something I'll be doing again.

Anyway, I'm off to rearrange things and otherwise pretend to myself that I'm busy. I wish you all a productive January!

Do you see that grin?

That's the grin of a mad person, as my parents will readily tell you. I'm back home for a couple of days during the half-term holiday, and I've taken this opportunity to treat myself. Ignoring the bag of half-complete crochet projects, the piles of yarn waiting to be worked, the stacks of fabric and patterns, I embarked on a completely new craft - spinning.

Spinning is something I've been interested in for a while, if only for the historical world it seems to open up. For centuries, nay, millennia, spinning was a constant in the lives of women. While you're gossiping, you're spinning. Rocking the baby to sleep? Spinning. Hence the distaff sex (a distaff being a stick used to hold unspun, prepared wool). At university, I studied fairy tales, in which the symbolism of the wheel or spindle is more complex than might at first appear. I learned how to spin at a Viking history event in York, aimed at people approximately ten years younger than me, and I've been dying to have a proper go ever since. Thus the purchase of a spindle and some wool.

I've actually got a spinning wheel upstairs - it's very old, bought from a local charity shop by my mother for my 21st birthday (best present ever!) but before I work out how or even if it works, I wanted to learn the basics with a drop spindle. Which is very appropriately named, I find. But the great thing about spinning is if you make a mistake, it's relatively easy to fix it (although very hard to fix it neatly).

Now my yarn is thinner and more even, with fewer slubs, and I'm starting to plan all the fabulous things I can make with it. I really should finish my last blanket before I embark on a new one, shouldn't I? But craft isn't supposed to be sensible!

The rest of my trip has thus far consisted of crossing many things off my to-do-list (currently several years long) and enjoying the very welcome luxuries of: Georgette Heyer, bath-tubs, Haagen-Dazs ice cream and my own, fabulous bed. In various permutations and combinations.