By Helen

making friendship bracelets...

Thank you Mollie Makes for reintroducing me to friendship bracelets….

It reminded me of spending afternoons when I was younger;  knotting embroidery thread  and making bracelets.  I had to dig out my thread and see if I still could make them. I could!  The patterns that I was making, made me think about the braid  I make when I am on re-enactments...

It got me thinking, and I decided to use the fifteenth century technique that I use on re-enactments and give the finished bracelet a modern twist, with beads and buttons…

I am really pleased with how this meeting of old and new has turned out.  The range of bracelets that I could make using the finger-braid technique is endless, all the different patterns, all the different colours, all the different buttons.  So many thinks to try out.

 NB – In the last two posts I have blogged about crafts other than crocheting: please don’t think that I have hung-up my hook.  I am still crocheting away and will have tome treats to show you very soon.  But all crochet and no play makes…. 

fabric flowers...

Do you remember that I mentioned, when I visited Grace and Jacob a few weeks ago, that I booked on a course to make fabric flowers?  Well that course was last Sunday.  It was brilliant!  No other word to describe just brilliant. Our tutor the very talented Bryony had made these to inspire us…

Then it was our turn.  The day started with a very difficult choice, of choosing three (yes just three) different fabrics to make our flowers out of.  The choice…

...was tricky, so many colours, so many patterns.  In the end I decided on my three…

All of the flowers we made started in the same way: by cutting out circles of fabric.  The circles were the folded in different ways and stitched together to make the petals of the flowers.  Then finished off with a fabric covered button. 

So, these circles…

Became this…

These circles…

Became this…

And these circles ….

Became this…

I am so, so, sooooooooo proud of what I made! Everyone on the course was so talented, are you ready for a group ta-dah moment?  Here goes…

The day was made even better when Aleksandra arrived with her Cake Pops…

They were almost too pretty to eat.  I did say almost, and they tasted just as good as they looked!

It was a wonderful way to spend a Sunday: surrounded by fabric, making flowers, meeting other talented crafters.  Now for the real challenge making more lovely fabric flowers, solo: without the safety- net of Bryony!  I’ll let you know how I get on.

 A massive thank you, thank YOU, THANK YOU to Bryony and Fiona: for starting my love affair with fabric flowers. 

 Sorry Si – that does mean fabric in the house, as well as yarn!

sweet treat…

York is full of wonderful tea-shop; you are literally spoilt for choice.  If you only have time to visit one: then you would have to go to Bettys.  I can spend ages stood in front of Bettys' shop window, with their mouth-watering display of cakes, biscuits, breads and teas.  Yesterday as I was walking passed the window I spotted these…

Aren’t they the most adorable cakes you have ever seen?  They reminded me of the bees I crocheted last year, when I opened my back-yard.  The bee cakes had to be (sorry) Friday night’s sweet treat.  And, oh boy, they were good.  Chocolate heaven.  Inside the gorgeous chocolate decoration was a chocolate ganache, sat on a layer of chocolate cake.  Chocolate heaven! 

They did remind me that I hadn’t baked for a long time.  So that is how I am spending today: crocheting and baking.  Enjoy your weekend, and if you can make it to Bettys…

bad, bad yarn…

Okay this post comes with a health warning, about bad yarn.  I probably only have myself to blame.  I don’t follow crochet patterns very well: choosing to see them more as guidelines or sources of inspiration rather than something which must be crocheted to the letter.  I don’t read about which yarns are best for this, and which yarns are best for that.  I choose my yarn by its colour, by its texture and by how I think it will looked crocheted.  Sometimes I am caught out.  This was one of those occasions!  I bought this…

 

Loved the colour.  Loved the texture.  Thought wow, that would make great flowers.  How wrong was I?  I sat in the garden, out in the sunshine, cup of tea in hand, Monty (next- doors cat) at my feet,  ready for a happy afternoon of crocheting.  Things didn’t turn out that way.  Oh no.  This is simply some of the worst yarn I have ever crocheted.  Anything more than a double crochet is impossible. Don’t even think about taking your crochet back – it simple won’t happen.  After an hour of frustrating crochet, I had produced a tangle…

 

Okay they are flower shaped tangles. But they are still more tangle than flower and I am just not happy with them.  The yarn had/has so much potential…

If anyone has any thoughts or ideas about how to use this yarn, please, let me know.  Otherwise this is one yarn that will make its way to the charity shop.  One person’s trash…

 NB – the guilt yarn is Persia by Sirdar – you have been warned!

crochet for Yorkshire Day...

In honour of yesterday been Yorkshire Day, I thought that I crochet a Yorkshire Rose to wear proudly on my dress…

…and celebrate all things Yorkshire, of course!

I crocheted the rose by adapting a pattern from my go-to flower book. My Yorkshire Rose is loosely based on Lesley's pattern for a wild rose: but I wanted to give it a more Yorkshirery feel.  I had to spend a happy few hours re-learning how to do a French knot without them disappearing.  I persevered and I was really please with how they worked for the yellowery centre of the rose.

 Here’s to all things Yorkshire! 

crochet sun-flower…

I did it!  I found the time to crochet July’s flower of the month: and I am so, so, proud of it.  Ready for a serious ta-dah moment…

Do you like them?  I really hope so.  I can't begin to tell you how happy, hap-py, h-a-p-p-y, I am with how these turned out...

I thought that they were the perfect flower to crochet, in celebration of the sun-shine returning.  I love how the double crochet really looks like the centre of a real sun-flower and the chain crochet makes the petals...

They are all my own design, so I will share the pattern with you in a few posts time.  That way you can crochet your very own bit of sun-shine.  That will give you time to gather together your things.  This is what you will need…

I also found the time to start crocheting flower brooches and now only have twelve granny-squares to crochet.  A weekend well spent! Happy, hap-py, h-a-p-p-y!

mind in a yarn tangle...

I’m back to with reality with a bump.  Not a massive thud, more of a gentle bounce back to reality: definitely back to reality.  I have soooooooo much to do!  This is what the inside of my mind looks like right now... 

A tangle of thoughts, a web of ideas, a confusion of not know quite where to start.  Okay.  Stop.  Breath.  The inside of my mind doesn’t actually look like a massive tangle of yarns, that is the inside of one of my yarn stash draws.  My mind just feels like a massive tangle, there is a difference.  So lets make a to-do list:

• Make pasta salads
• Make sweet salami, see Hairy Bikers' book for recipe
• Made potato salad
• Find pan big enough to cook potatoes in
• Crochet twenty-four flower brooches
• Crochet eighteen more granny squares for cushion cover
• Crochet flower, for July’s flower of the month
• Find way of display crochet projects in something other than a Tupperware box
• Start to tidy house (for something very exciting, which I’ll tell you about another day)

 Wow, that’s it.  Not too bad, all lovely things, just lots of them.  Lots of lovely things.

 Oh yes…and tidy stash draw..! :-)

Ps - I am not intending to east all of the food that I am making over the next couple of days: we are having a party...

grand days out in the Welsh Marches…

We’ve been away on holiday….

We’ve been to the Welsh Marches, having a wonderful time. The holiday was wonderful, just what we needed, a good mix of doing not-a-lot, visits to castles, cathedrals and abbeys, tea-rooms and pubs! We stayed in Hereford and used that as our base for exploring the lovely borders between England and Wales.  We visited cathedrals such as Worcester…

Abbeys such as Tintern…

And castles such as Chepstow…

I have to give a massive thank-you to Si at this point for allowing another man to join us on our holiday.  That man was William Marshall, a knight from the thirteenth century who I have been a little bit in love with since reading Elizabeth Chadwick's novels and then the translation of his auto-biography.  Poor Si had to put up with me declaring that William Marshall could have walked here every time we ascended or descended steps, or walked along any path – come to think of it!

Of course there was plenty to time for relaxing and  doing nothing.  I have to confess I didn’t crochet as much as I thought I would have, or would have liked to.  I went with the intention of crocheting lots and lots of granny-squares: something easy to crochet, but results in something really rather wonderful.  I only made ten…

Instead, I got lost in a book.  One of the best books I have read in a long-time A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, even if the final few chapters were setting-up for the next book in the trilogy!

It was lovely just to spend the time mooching from place to place with no particular place to be or time to be there by.  Going where we felt like: influenced only by our whim, and a little by the weather.  The holiday wasn’t as far-flung as last year: visiting Florence, but sometimes English (or Welsh) strawberries and cream are just what you need…

a grand day out in York...

Si and I were meant to go to the  Yorkshire Show.  I was so looking forward to it, seeing all the sights, tasting the food, thanking the sheep for giving us yarn.  Last year's show was soooo good: I was very excited about going again.  The weather had other plans; and for the first time in 154 years the show was cancelled because of all the heavy rain; think Glastonbury style mud with extra animals.  Si decided that he would go into work and take the day off later in the year.  My head was already on holiday, so I decided to take the day off.  A whole day off to myself: this is not usual as I work part-time, but my none-working days are usually full of other things.  This was a treat day; not to be filled with house-work and other stuff that is no fun.  The day was to be a fun day.  I decided to have a day out in, my home city of York!

I started the day with a visit to a friend who is very unwell at the moment.  Rather than walking through the streets, which I love to do – nosing in peoples’ gardens, I walked in the sun-shine (yes sun-shine) around the city walls...

After visiting A, I popped into Grace and Jacobs...

If you have never visited Grace and Jacobs, you need to.  It is a gorgeous little shop full of yarns and fabric….

It also has a small studio where classes are held…

I did manage to leave Grace and Jacob’s empty handed, something of an achievement!  I did book myself on to a course for making the prettiest fabric flowers.  I don’t feel too guilty, I like to have things in my diary to look forward to and this is just one of them!

Then I went to the Quilt Museum...

Again, if you have never visited: go.  I have the upper most respect for the quilters: as I stand in awe, I fully acknowledge that I will NEVER have the patience or accuracy needed to quilt.  The exhibition was fantastic: really inspirational.  I was instantly drawn to this purple quilt…

I loved the subject matter of this…

And thought this one to be very appropriate…

The best thing about the Quilt Museum is that the exhibitions change every three months, so there is always something new to look at.

I needed a pick-up up of coffee and cake so went to a new café, which I have wanted to go to for a while, The Flax and Twine...

The tea-room was sooo pretty…

And the coffee and cakes were AMAZING.  Another place you will have to visit in York.  Feeling full I mooched around for a bit, popping in to shops, saying hello to friends and taking more photos…

 

York’s most iconic building York Minster, taking the photo I realised that I don’t visit the Minster anymore.  I volunteer at the Minster as a guide showing visitors around, but I don’t actually visit myself.  By then my feet were getting tired, so I headed home for some serious hooky time…

I loved this day.  It wasn’t the day I was expecting: but it was a grand-day out!

crochet a to z….

I’m crocheting the alphabet!  There is a reason: I didn’t just wake-up and think I’ll crochet the alphabet, all twenty-six letters…

You will have to wait a while before I can tell you what I am crocheting: it is a gift and I like the gift to be given before I share it with you.  Before I crochet the actual gift, I thought I’d better get some practice in, just in case I came across problems.  I took, and adapted, the pattern from Melody Griffiths’ book…

201 crochet motifs, blocks, projects and ideas.  This book is one of my go-to books, if it isn’t already on your bookshelf I would recommend it.  In fact I would recommend any of Melody’s books: the're great.

Once I’d crocheted the letters, I quickly realised that I needed to block them.  I thought about using the same technique that I used for blocking my Starflakes, using pva and water.  But I’d didn’t need the crochet letters to be quite so stiff or quite so shiny.  I opted to starch them…

This worked.  The letters are a little bigger than I was expecting, so next time I’ll be crocheting with a smaller hook.  Ms and Ws were a bit of a pain to crochet – not surprising you follow the same pattern for each and turn one upside-down!  Cs and Gs weren’t much fun either…

…hay-ho I can crochet the alphabet!