Well, noble folks of a fibrous persuasion, I have good news, and I have... good news. Which would you like first? The good news, you say? OK then. Well, I've finally finished writing the pattern for the crochet house bag. Hurrah! I'm excited to share it with you (for free), probably tomorrow unless the universe maliciously interferes. I'm conscious that people don't want to download/print patterns with over a million photos, so the other piece of good (I hope!) news is that today I have put Continue Reading
Mostly Crocheting The Vegetable Patch
September. The season is on the swing, towards autumn here in the UK, but towards spring if you're in the southern hemisphere. There's a hint of chill early in the day, regardless of whether or not the later hours become warm. The logs are stacked beside the fireplace and the kindling bucket is full. It's so tantalisingly nearly time to light a fire. There are blackberries to be gathered from the hedgerows for crumble-making:- As the temperature falls, it's spider season, and those of us Continue Reading
The Challenges Of Pattern-Writing
Gosh, this is complicated. Whilst I dither about the garden of the big crochet house project, I’m writing up the pattern for the crochet house bag, because I want to offer it (free) to those of you who are crazy enough to want to make one yourselves. And hey folks, guess what? Insanely complicated fiddly piece of crochet translates into insanely complicated fiddly pattern. Who’d’ve guessed?! One of the things I love about knitting/crochet is that a relatively short list of instructions on a Continue Reading
Just What I Need: Another Crazy Idea
And.... voting is now closed for the Stylecraft colour competition. All of the shades that we shortlisted were in their own ways scrumptious, but now that the poll is done, I can come out of my shell and say that I so hope that one of the greens will win. A soft, nature-inspired green. Or a vibrant one like this, maybe? Anyway, we shall see. I was thinking of all the shortlisted shades yesterday in a yarn shop (where else?) in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Below, you can see their racks Continue Reading
The Bag Lady
The crochet house-bag-thingummy is done! Want to see it? (Please say 'yes'. Or at least, 'Oh all right then, if I absolutely must.') I began construction of the crochet house around the same time that men in big boots and hard hats arrived round here to build far too many new houses on the periphery of our previously lovely village and buy up all the best sandwiches from the village shop for their lunch each day. And I can now report that building a house takes a couple of months, regardless of Continue Reading
Spring! Don’t Jump Out At Me Like That!
WOAH-there. Spring, where on earth did you, um, 'spring' from? That was a bit sudden. A few days ago I was pondering whether our log supplies would last the month at our current rate of huddling in front of the log-burner, and whether I could afford another lorry-load of logs, and whether my stinking head-cold was turning to bubonic plague (being prone to diagnostic melodrama), and now I'm sitting in my parents' Herefordshire garden, enjoying these colours whilst the Toddler Twinnage rampage Continue Reading
Notes From A Crime Scene
Woe, 'tis a dark day, here at the 'Yarn. A heinous crime has been committed. I've been working on the crochet house-bag (doing the boring stuff; weaving in dozens of ends - an ideal job for when you've got a stinking head-cold.) I have to say, it's going extremely well and I'm rather excited about the finished product. It's gone from this:- ...to a proper 3-d house-bag with shoulder strap, but I'm hanging back from showing you until I can ta-da it properly. Thank you to commenters who Continue Reading
Crochet Therapy
...And then there are days that don't quite work. Do you know the feeling? I think I'm still raw from intense hours with patients' harrowing stories at work this week. And the Toddler Twinnage were a leeeeetle bit relentless in their Mummy-Mummy-Mummy-Mummy-Mummy all day today. And I possibly ate too many of the choc chip cookies that I baked this morning. And my first attempt at crocheting my bag strap in the round went all Mobius on me and had to be ripped out. Yes, yes, I've got these Continue Reading
House!
T'was a beautiful clear night last night. The sort of night where you amble along in the peaceful blackness gazing up at the starry heavens... and then walk slap bang into a wall. Who put that stupid wall there, anyway? It's a ridiculous place for a wall. Only an idiot would build a wall right there. Given the rate at which they're building too many new houses in this village, you do have to watch out for sneaky new walls when you're out and about. Anyway, back to last night. I was on my way Continue Reading
The House Of Crochet.
Hmm, it seems that the house-bag I'm crocheting and the real houses being too numerously built in our village are neck-and-neck in terms of progress. That said, I'm tempted to just whack a roof on what I've hooked so far and call it a bungalow. Would you like to see some progress? (Thank you for your lovely comments on my previous post about it, by the way. :-) ) There's a long way to go. Upstairs, for starters, and that door needs a handle. And those little balls of red/green Rowan Fine Continue Reading