The Turtle Moves

It's Owl Right Now

Happy Hogmanay to you all!

Here we are at the end of the year and we're having a relaxed and cosy quiet time in together, just me and my Lovely Husband. I thought I'd show you these sweet little Owl decorations before everything gets taken down and cleared away for another year. I do get quite frantic to clear everything away and get Back To Normal as soon as the last vestige of festive jollity fades away. That's usually 2nd January!

Anyway, the Owls are hanging among the Christmas cards on the dresser in the kitchen/dining room. I made them this year from a pattern in this lovely book. (I also made a splendidly Swedish - looking Christmas cake frill from the same book.) It is full of easy and effective decorative ideas and of course was also recommended by Lucy in Attic 24, a creative lady with a splendid eye for colour who I mention on a regular basis. Apart from anything else, you can follow links and Flickr feeds from her blog and get lost in worlds of colour for hours on end - a useful resource when you are at a loose end, but with no particular energy to do something creative yourself. There is always justification for browsing inspirational material, whatever form it takes. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Anyway, it will soon be 2012 - a whole new year in which to make more felt/crochet/cuddly things, play with our grandchildren, go for walks, sing songs and generally enjoy life. I wish all the very best of whatever you need to you all.

Happy New Year!

Season's Greetings

 

Happy Christmas!

The tree's been brought in and festooned with home-made elves and angels, the holly and ivy is twined around the door and splendid husband has gone mad with fairy lights round the trees in the garden. To put us in the festive mood even more thoroughly, we attended our gorgeous grandchildren's school nativity service in Falkland Church  this morning.

Teeny children dressed as angels, shepherds, wise men, Mary and Joseph. There was not a dry eye in the house. Gorgeous Grandaughter did one of the readings, and very beautifully too.

Bless.

Stars in the house

Hello everyone,

I've been crocheting stars in every spare moment over the last month (the Craft Fair on the evening of our town's  Christmas Lights switch-on is upon us this week).

I've been crocheting stars while travelling to and from Cheshire and Wales (mentioned a couple of blogs ago). The drive from Llandudno to Westmoreland Services is an 8 - star journey. (My Dear Husband was driving on that leg of the trip, and then I took over, so no stars between the Lake District and Fife.) I've crocheted on trains and buses, in the living-room and in the kitchen. I've got lots of stars now!

I do hope the Fair goes well. I think I have the absolute Acme of sales gimmicks this year - my lovely grandchildren are going to man my table for me. I will be free to run around making sure everything else is okay, and two gorgeous moppets are going to sell all of my Christmas crochet and needlefelt. How can this possibly fail?

Oh, I've been needlefelting Santas and snowmen and punk angels as well.

Chaps like this all sold well last year, so I must stab wool assiduously all day tomorrow and Build Up Stock.  Maybe.

Or maybe I'll go out into the garden if the sun is shining like it did today. We have to grab all the daylight we can up here in the Dark North you know. Otherwise we retire to the back of the cave and hunker down until Spring.

 

 

Happy Easter to you all!

Hello again! I'm sorry I haven't blogged for more than a month - but the sun has been shining!

Yes, after a December and January of wall-to-wall snow, ice and slush and a February of miserable wind and rain, Scotland has at last been allowed to thaw out. Half-way through March it began to look as if spring might actually arrive, with snowdrops and aconites hurrying to make up for lost time and daffodils rushing to catch up. We have had three weeks of warm dry weather now and the garden is looking cheerful, so we have been out in it, waging war on dandelions and constructing raised beds for vegetables.

 

My exceedingly handy husband is now in the process of constructing a greenhouse, so that hopefully I can add tomatoes and sweet peppers to the (keep your fingers crossed) bumper crops of veggies which are beginning to raise their heads in the new beds.

See those broad beans grow!

Even with all this garden-related activity, I would have posted a blog before now, but I've had a little technical difficulty to sort out. The other day I downloaded Internet Explorer 9. You know how those cheery little pop-up boxes appear when you log on, telling you about updates you should be using? Well, I tend to do as I'm told and install the updates, on the grounds that the IT buffs must know what's best for my computing pleasure. Let me tell you, dear peeps, that ain't necessarily so. These dratted IT fellas can be too smart for their own good, and advance one thing at the expense of several other things which have been working just fine, thanks. So it was with IE9 and the uploading of pictures into this blog - the new security settings (designed to protect you from pesky adverts) insisted on protecting me from uploading my pictures (from MY computer, to MY blog) - now I call that Nannyish in the extreme, so I've changed to Firefox as my web-browser. Yah, boo, sucks to you Internet Explorer, and just for good measure, here's another sunny picture of my spring-time garden.

Have a lovely easter weekend, everyone!

Little Easter Chickies

Hello!

I was getting totally carried away knitting ruffly scarves with the lovely CanCan tape yarn we got at the SECC "Creative Stitches" show, and messing about with the heat gun and friendly plastic we got at the same show, and trawling through various multi-media books and magazines getting all dizzy with lovely gorgeous pictures and possibilities - when I remembered! Eek! I've got a table at a Craft Fair this Sunday and Easter's just around the corner! So drop all that experimental fiddle faddle and create some characterful wee birds to decorate the Easter breakfast tables of the nation (oh, okay, Fife - I'm not really a megalomaniac).

It's seems like ages since I've done any needle-felting and it was great fun to get the wool tops out again. I made these five little fellas yesterday - it's hard to believe they all start out as a ball of wool approximately the same size and shape as each other and end up such different characters. But that's what I like about needle-felting, you never know exactly who is going to emerge! I was busy today, but I'll get a few more little chicks done tomorrow I'm sure.

Little Stripey Mice

When I was getting a Bunting Kit for my lovely daughter last month from Clothkits, I picked up a kit for these little stripey mice. They were a good way to get back into the sewing habit, and will probably be easy enough to reproduce if I decide that every windowsill needs mice! In fact they were an excellent distraction from pesky knitting, miserable weather, a not-very-well husband and the big bloated post-Christmas indulgence feeling. Go find yourselves a bit of cheery material and make something frivolous! It was also an easy lead-in to making some soft toys - pictures to come in the next post.

Little Flower Boys and Girls

As a change from wrestling with yarn, I thought I'd get stitching and sticking with some felt. These little people are the first of this year's Easter Decorations. Well, the shops have got some Easter Eggs in already, so it can't be too soon to start amassing a stash for the Spring Craft Fair. These little chaps are very easy and quick to make. The body is a pipe cleaner, the hands, feet and head are different sizes of wooden beads and the felt coat is just folded over and blanket-stitched up the sides. The flower decorations on the coat and hat are "Fuzzy-Felt" shapes stitched on.

I like the sweetie colours, and I think they'll look quite good as decorations interspersed with felted Easter Bunnies and the like. Got to get that old needle and balls of unspun wool out and start stabbing again soon, although my sewing machine is also shooting dirty looks at me, so maybe I should get crafty with fabric and thread as well. Oh, choices, choices.

Lights! Action!

  The Craft Fair we've been organising finally happened yesterday evening. It was a success! All the stall-holders turned up on time and there were loads of people coming through the venue for the whole three hours that we were open.

 Outside in the streets the Christmas Lights got switched on successfully with no blow-outs. The DJ did his stuff and the kiddies' rides people didn't fight with the Glow-sticks sellers. Upstairs in the venue, the various school-kids sang their carols and danced their dances without falling off the stage. A total result.

Even better, I sold every single one of my daft needle-felt Christmas angels, santas, snowmen and penguins along with a good few crochet snowflakes. All those hours of various types of preparation were well worth it.

We might even do it all again next year.

Crochet Snowflakes

There are many many free patterns out there on the internet for knitting and crocheting all sorts of things, but by far the most reliable that I have found, for clear accurate instructions, are those on the Lion Brand website. They have many patterns for snowflakes, stars and angels to make as Christmas tree decorations. The snowflake pattern I chose suggested you use white wool , but I reckoned they would be more interesting in a sparkly yarn so I used Twilley's Goldfingering. The picture shows a few of them pinned out on a cork board to dry after having been soaked in a stiffening solution made of a 50/50 mix of PVA glue and water.

I made white, silver, gold, red, green, blue and pink ones and there are more Goldfingering colours to choose if that's not sufficient.

The pattern is easy to follow and works up in less than an hour per snowflake, so pick up your hook and go!

Well, hello girls!

  Over the course of the year I've made several "seasonal" fairies as in the picture on the left - that's Fourth of July Fairy (WonderWoman goes woolly), Halloween Fairy (she of the Pumpkin skirt) and May Day Fairy (decked all out in Spring green), but I thought perhaps a slightly simplified shape might be needed for a whole "flock" of fairies/angels for the Christmas tree, so I experimented with a simple cone shape, and tried a different shape of wing, too - slimmer and more "feathery". They were reasonably swift to make, which is quite important if you need to do a few, and I think they look quite Christmassy. Maybe I should sprinkle them with glitter, what do you think?