30 Friday Sep 2011
Posted in My ramblings
What does record breaking Summer temperatures in Autumn mean to me?
Al fresco hooking all weekend long! Yeah!!! (Maybe not a fleece blanket or the Identity Crisis blanket though… something small and cottony me thinks.)
22 Thursday Sep 2011
Posted in My crochet, My ramblings
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It was such a lovely morning today, instead of taking the bus I walked from Waterloo station through a little park, along the South Bank and over Blackfriars bridge to work.
My bag of crochet goodies came along and we both enjoyed the view.
20 Tuesday Sep 2011
Posted in Etsy, My ramblings, Other people's crochet
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Lots of people make crochet jewellery. I had a go with amigurimi balls that I threaded through ribbon. I’ve bought crochet earrings from FR33na on Etsy. Crochet jewellery are cheap and cheerful. Right? Nope.
WhiteFly, an Etsy seller from California, takes vintage crochet and casts it in sterling silver or gold! Gold people!
When I first saw the top photo on Pinterest I thought, just like the person who originally pinned it, that it’s grey yarn, or metallic yarn at the most, stiffened with fabric stiffener and shaped into a cuff. How wrong were we?!
This item is cast from real vintage lace in Sterling Silver, then plated with a thick coating of 14K gold. Every intricate detail is evident in the metal.
It is stunning to wear, a show stopper with any outfit.
Please note I cast all my items from an actual piece of lace, I use only the highest quality vintage lace and I can only make a limited edition.Flexible to fit all sizes, stiff to hold it’s shape. Very comfortable to wear. Fit size is a standard 7″ wrist circumference.
Available in 14K gold for $6,000. Please contact me for a listing if your interested.
Have you ever seen anything so exquisite and unique?!
If you want to know more about Whitefly, bikudesigns did an interview with her on her blog. You can read it here.
Crochet jewellery will never be the same again. Suddenly my amigurimi balls on a ribbon seems very drab.
16 Friday Sep 2011
Posted in My ramblings, Other people's crochet
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These beauties, and lots more, are available at Free People. Truly beautiful!
FP Spun Eighty Stage Crochet Dress
I love the idea of adding a crochet edge to the sleeve of a floaty top, and the circles at the bottom of the long skirt is really something. (I would prefer a longer lining though…)
I wonder of the Eighty Stages dress really had 80 stages in the making of it – quite possibly if you look how many seperate crochet parts there are to it. This dress makes my Identitiy Crisis blanket look like a hook in the park!
15 Thursday Sep 2011
Posted in My ramblings
You may recall that on the 8th of August I told you about the brand spanking new online boutique, Dorothy & Theodore, that asked me to sell crochet clocks on their website. Well…. the site is live! Please go have a look at all the beautiful, hand-picked, hand-made items for sale.
Dorothy & Theodore is an exciting online shopping boutique created specifically for parents who do not wish to wholly compromise on style in order to accommodate the needs and wants of their children.
The aim of Dorothy & Theodore is to provide a single place where you can find beautiful and practical products which meet the requirements and desires of both parent and child, as well as some truly special products to commemorate the arrival of a child, their christening, first birthday or other important occasions.
Every product we select to represent has been hand chosen by us, and many of them have pride of place in our own homes. We hope that you will love them as much as we do.
Apart from clocks – three designs of which are exclusively available on Dorothy & Theodore – I also sell fleece blankets with a crochet edge on the site! I really really really love making these blankets – in fact, a tiny bit more than making the clocks.
Depending on how well the blankets sell I may expand the range to include pram sized blankets, and also do the fleece in other colours, or even patterned fleece – all with a crochet edge of course.
But enough about me: please go have a look at the brand new Dorothy & Theodore website! www.dorothyandtheodore.com.
12 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in My ramblings
Do you remember I told you about wooden planters we had made for our lavender plants in this blog post? Well, they’re painted and in the garden!
Hubby and I did the first coat of varnish on Friday evening and finished it off on Saturday. It’s really easy to paint on the varnish and it dries in only two hours. To fill the planters, we had to buy 8 x 75l bags of soil, 6 of grit and 6 bags of pebbles (over two trips to the nursery). That’s a lot of carrying and very heavy lifting for hubby. The poor guy was pooped by the end of it all. Thank you so much Honey!
For extra colour (you can never have enough) we also planted daffodil bulbs in the planters! By Spring we will hopefully have masses of yellow daffodils peeking out over the blue rim. I can’t wait! For now the six lavender plants look a bit lost. They’re so small! Hopefully we’ve planted them with all the right stuff and enough love to make them grow into wonderfully luscious mounds of purple. Until then, we love looking at our blue planters.
12 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in My crochet, My ramblings
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The Identity crisis blanket is growing. I really think this could be the year that I finish it [she says hopefully].
08 Thursday Sep 2011
Posted in Etsy, My ramblings, Other people's crochet
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Last night in the Evening Standard I saw a picture of a knitted clock being sold at the Conran shop – for £350! That’s the price of my crochet clocks with an extra zero!!! This morning I couldn’t find that specific clock on the Conran shop website, but they do have these two knitted clocks, designed by Benedetta and Carlo Tamborini for Diamantani & Domeniconi.
The covers can be removed for hand-washing and are £130 each. It looks like it’s knitted in moss stitch so it has a nice texture, which will probably gather dust – hence removable covers for washing. I love the simplicity of it.
However….. the two Tamborini designers also make huge knitted clocks, called the Gomitolo Clocks, in six colours.
Gomitolo is the result of a collaboration between an industrial designer (Carlo) and a fashion designer (Benedetta). It’s beauty lies in the transfer of material and technology from the fashion industry.
The smallest of the huge clocks are 50cm diameter at £246.50 (my biggest clock sells for £50) and their big one is, wait for it, 90cm diameter – that’s almost 1 meter at £462.50!!!! But just look how amazingly it is!
I have no plans to crochet a 90cm clock – I’ll leave that to Benedetta and Carlo. I can however appreciate a beautiful thing when I see it, even if it is knitted 😉
You can buy the Gomitolo clocks at Nest, or you can buy (ten of) my crochet clocks at Etsy.
07 Wednesday Sep 2011
Posted in My ramblings
I’m excited and buzzy again today. You’re probably not even interested, but I’m going to share it with you anyway because I just have to put my thoughts down somewhere. Here’s what I’m all abuzz about (ooh, that’s a nice alliteration!). Anyhoo. Three things are causing the buzz:
Lavender
Hubby and I were in Norfolk this weekend. The highlight for me was Saturday’s visit to Norfolk Lavender where we bought 12 small Imperial Gem lavender plants. They really are very small, and we know they won’t start growing until next year, but we just had to have them.
I’ve always wanted a row of lavender in my back yard (visions of purple lavender fields) and we did have lavender plants when we first moved in. We planted them against the garage wall so that I could look out of the kitchen window and see them neatly arranged in a row of purple. Unfortunately they didn’t last. Now I know it was because 1) the neighbour’s tree was so big that it blocked the sunlight and 2) the ground is too clay-e (is that a word? You know what I mean.). Since then the neighbour has trimmed his tree which means lots more sunlight, and after a chat to the lovely man at Norfolk Lavender, we know we should mix pea shingle and gravel into the ground so that the lavender plants can keep their feet nice and dry.
However…. in stead of planting the lavender in the ground again, we are going to put them in long wooden planters! The planters are being custom made for us by the lovely James of Goods from the Woods in Devon. We bought two of 1m each, which we are going to shove side by side so that it looks like one 2m planter. But wait – in stead of varnishing the wood a sensible brown, we’re varnishing it in Bluebell blue!!!!!! So even in winter when everything stops growing, and in the first year while the lavender plants are still very small, we will have a burst of colour in the back of the garden! Our front door is already painted “Hawaiian Blue” so we definitely have a theme of bright blue running through our garden.
Afraid of colour? Who me? No way!
Crochet cowl wrap
In the Talking Crochet newsletter I saw a very small picture of a red draped cowl this week. I actually saw a woman in Fleet street last week wearing something similar and I immediately loved it. Of course I had no idea where she bought it but I did do a quick search on the internet and then gave up. Low and behold, the newsletter arrives and there is the perfect long draped cowl for me to crochet! This one is even better than the lady in Fleet Street’s, as hers was fabric, and this one I can whip up myself! The pattern contains three cowls, but I think this one is the best!
Unfortunately Annie’s Attic will only only post patterns to US or Canadian addresses. What is a girl to do? Write a wall post on the CrocheTime facebook page! Now I’m just hoping someone from the US (postage to Canada seems to up the $ price considerably) will agree to buy the pattern on my behalf (of course I will refund the purchaser) and send the pattern to me by email/post. Fingers crossed.
Drive-in
Hubby and I will celebrate our 10 year wedding anniversary this December, but we’ve never been to a drive-in movie together. Never ever. That’s all going to change on Saturday. I’m sooo excited! It’s feels like we’re going on a date! Slumdog Millionaire at Stubbings Nursery, with Papa John’s pizza delivered to our car. Soooo looking forward to it!
It probably won’t go down very well with my date if I take along the Identity Crisis blanket to crochet in the car… Nope. Better not.
02 Friday Sep 2011
Posted in My crochet, My ramblings, Pattern
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Okay, so I have this blanket that I’m working on….. since November 2009! It’s coming up for its third Winter as a WIP. That’s just wrong man! The blanket is meant for a our double bed. Double Bed. No baby blanket or even single bed blanket for me to try as a first crochet blanket. Nope, I go big! Double bed big!
The blanket has gone through some life changing events in its lifetime. I started off using Lion Brand Yarn’s Spicy Delights Afghan pattern (you will have log into their website to find the pattern) and I used Biscuit & Jam’s Random Stripe Generator for the colour sequence. The pattern is very easy to do – just shells of 5 dc, with no chain in between the shells. Later I realised that the omission of the chain between shells sort of pulls down the rows into each other so it doesn’t grow as quickly as you would expect. If you look at the slideslow below (a.k.a. timeline of the life of the Identity Crisis blanket) you’ll see what I mean.
I did 72 rows of the blanket in its first Winter and gave up. I was hooking and hooking and hooking but it just looked like a very big scarf. So I packed it up and started again in May 2010.
This time I planned on doing a granny square version of the Babette blanket in the middle. I made up loads of 2 round, 4 round and 6 round grannies. I attached a row of 4 round grannies to kick off the Babette and then I packed it all up. Again.
Last week – year no. 3 – I got the blanket out again and decided that I actually like the look of 4 rounds grannies neatly arranged in a row. By this stage the poor blanket started off as a proper Spicy Delights Afghan, had a brief spell as a granny square Babette, and now it’s actually going to end up as 97% Spicy Delights blanket and 3% granny squares. Can you see where I got the name “Identity Crisis blanket” from?
So here is what I will be doing. No really. This is it:
72 rows of Spicy Delights pattern, a row of 4 round grannies, 20 rows of the Spicy Delights pattern, a row of 4 round grannies (that’s where I’m up to now), 20 rows of the Spicy Delights pattern, another row of 4 round grannies and then end off with 72 rows of the Spicy Delights pattern.
Then I have to weave in all the ends.
And add a border.
This may take a while….
crochetime 