Spot the difference

When my friend Beth left for Dubai I made her a little felt 'chicken of destiny' to take with her, hang on a door handle and look at & smile. As Jam has expressly forbidden me to bring the Arucana babies into the house there was only one answer...

Not quite as handsome as the real thing, but not half bad!

A severe case of finish-itus

This week it's been head down, finishing some of the projects I started a while ago. First up it was the wedding commision from my friend at work. seven cravats with matching hankies for her main men (I got a bit behind with this as the day I'd set aside to finish the hankies we had a plumber round to fix the hot water, instead he turned off the heating and my fingers were too cold to sew!). Here is just one set. All weekend I was looking after top dog Holly, but on Sunday night after 'walkies' I managed to curl up in front of countryfile and finish Amelia's blanket. Now I find myself with nothing that pressing to finish, or so I thought until I looked at the pile beside my bed and found the scarf I started for my brother last Christmas. Lets hope the finish-itus lasts and I can get that off the needles too (I'm going down to visit my nanna at the weekend & Kip is coming, getting it finished for then however may be pushing it... :-) P.S due to some highly useful knitting time whilst watching Scotland get trounced at rugby I did manage to get Kip's scarf finished. Here he is wearing the finished thing :-)

A stitch in time

So (or should that be sew? :-) all I seem to be doing lately is sewing for various different people (all of whom are lovely so that's okay). The first project was a delayed valentines present for the boy. He is a bit of a tea fiend so what better than to give him some hand made heart shaped teabags? Why not have a go yourslf all you need is some loose tea, a bit of muslin, needle & thread and quite a bit of time/patience. Cut out lots of hearts from the muslin (cause it is so thin you can do a couple or more at a time), it's worth making a template for this bit as that gets them a bit more uniform & also then you can make sure you have enough room to put the tea in. Put two together and stitch round them till you get to the top part of the heart, fill with tea & then stitch up the gap. After that you can add an extra bit of thread to the top so the tea bag can be fished out. I made the box for mine too, but I'm sure you could put these in all sorts of containers and give them as presents. I don't think he has used them yet so I'm still not sure if my workmanship will stand up but the finished things were really pretty (and I think he liked them so that's good :-).

Second project is for my friend David (we met as undergraduates at Lancaster and then when I came for this job guess who was already working here?), he and his wife have just had a little girl (Amelia, photo below, we think she is gonna be a bit of a heartbreaker). so I decided to crochet her a blanket, nothing too fancy just double crochet all the way homemade and big enough to keep her warm/wrapped up from those summer chills. When I started we weren't sure whether she was going to be a boy or girl so I wanted to do purple, but there were no nice colours in that so I went blue instead but I'm sure she'll be able to carry it off.

Final project is my latest commission. After the sucess of Lisa's wedding dress I've been approached to do several more bits for weddings. This latest one is my first foray into menswear making the hankies and cravats for a friends wedding (so the men match the bridesmaids, aww matchy matchy). We (in this instance me and physicist/should have been a dressmaker, Malcolm) managed to figure out a pattern so now it's just the hard work of sewing the things. The material is lovely (green but in some lights yellow, some lights purple) but it does seem to be having a tendancy to shed everywhere. Also as usual Mabel is trying her best to convince me that she should be the one doing the making (she has always been facinated by my knitting/crocheting (she likes the wool and has the tendancy to try and pick it up in her mouth and run away with it, not so helpful when you are doing it, especially if you haven't noticed, she also used to have her own stash/nest under my bed. I had to raid it and take most balls back however as she has quite expensive tastes). She also thinks the sewing machine is magic, and just sits and watches (which is quite nice if it's 2am the garment has to be finished by 8am and your housemate has gone to bed with earplus in (yes it's happened before)). Hopefully we won't be in for a repeat experience on this one, I've been trying to stick to a schedule and have been allowing myself some breaks so I don't get tired and have to redo stuff. The other definite advantage is on this partiular commision although there is still no money (one day) we are swapping crafts, so I get a cross stich done for me in exchange for my labours (I have patience yes but not the amount needed for that :-)