The Turtle Moves

Young Groot

There is a new Guardians of the Galaxy film out in which, so I'm told by my offspring, Baby Groot has grown up a bit and hopped out of his pot.

So I thought I'd better keep up! I looked for images on line and mostly found pictures of plastic toy Groots. I haven't seen the film yet, so I don't know if I've made him the right shape or not. Anyway, it's the first pattern I've done absolutely and completely from scratch rather than adapting existing ones, so it's an achievement of some sort.

I did front-post half double crochet round the top of his head and the ends of his feet to try and get some sort of bark-like texture. The yarn is Rowan Felted Tweed because the splendid nubbly yarn I found for Baby Groot is now discontinued. It's a little bit too dark in colour for the texture stitches to show up well, but it's a very nice yarn - an alpaca/wool mix which crochets nicely - not too liable to split.

If anyone wants the pattern, post a comment with your email address and I'll type it up for you. At the moment it's in the form of scribbles in my notebook. I'm from the paper and pencil generation!

In other news, we're off to Orkney (Rousay, to be precise) later on this week, so hopefully there will be pictures to show you in due course. Here's hoping for good weather.

Moorland Blanket

Well hello there, and Happy Easter! This week I finished the Moorland Blanket. Lucy from Attic 24 really does have great colour sense, doesn't she? This beautifully evokes moorland, heather and sunny sky. I can almost hear the skylark.

This week's been wonderfully warm and sunny and the broad bean and pea seedlings are sprouting merrily in the greenhouse. I hope it continues next week so I can get them into the ground before we toddle off to Knapdale for a week's holiday next Saturday. At the Farmer's Market this morning there was a stall selling tomato plants and suchlike - once again I marvel at how robust and mature the professionally grown plants are compared to the spindly little tomato seedlings I've got. I was quite pleased with their progress until I saw this lot! I suppose it's all down to polytunnels and lots of feeding. Ah, well. Don't give up the day job.

After I finished the blanket I got down to making a Niffler

As I said in a previous post, I tried using eyelash yarn, but simply couldn't see where my stitches were among the long strands, so I used ordinary Stylecraft special DK. There isn't an absolutely perfect pattern out there in web-land so I adapted one and then needle felted some merino onto his back and tail to make him a bit furry. He's okay, but could be better. I will try to make a bigger one at some point, and will use alpaca or merino wool, so it can be brushed a bit to make him furry.

Anyway, here he is - all I need to do now is find a 'gold' coin to put in his pocket.

Crocheting the zeitgeist

Well, I did say I was going to crochet some little critturs to use up my stash of Stylecraft yarn left over from blanket-making, and where better to start than with the latest craze?

The craft community out there in internet-land are a wonderful bunch, and if you enter 'crochet pokemon' you're overwhelmed with generously free patterns for various weird and wonderful characters. The baby bulbasaur is from this excellent person, who also suggested using needle-felting to do the eyes. Brilliant idea! I wish I'd read that suggestion before doing Picachu - he'd look much better with the more detailed eyes (and flatter cheeks) that needle-felting would give.

My fabulous Grandson is inordinately fond of the films from Studio Ghibli and so My Neighbour Totoro had to be done too.

I do like his open and guile-less face.

And as for the Minions ......

So I'm having fun, as you can see.

Spice of Life

Hello there.

I finished this 'Spice of Life' blanket last week and today the sun obliged by lighting the back garden sufficiently to take a picture. It's crocheted in Stylecraft yarn again - there is just such a wonderfully complete range of subtly graduated shades in this top quality, budget priced acrylic yarn that to do a big workaday project like a blanket in anything else makes no sense.

The blanket is quite a small one though, about cot blanket size, so it didn't use up a complete ball of any of the colours. So I've added to my stash - aaargh! Here's where doing cute little amigurumi figures can come in handy.

This wee fella is a zebra - oh yes he is - and these three colours left over from the blanket work quite well, don't you think? I'll need to find lots more critturs like this to make to use up all the half balls of Stylecraft I seem to have accumulated. It's a mountain of yarn, I tell ya.

This pattern is from a booklet of toy patterns which was a give-away with the latest copy of Crochet Now magazine. This is a new monthly publication which features lots of well-written and reasonably simple crochet patterns.

The first edition also had an article about my Most Excellent Daughter-in-Law's new venture and the podcast she is putting out each month with

Lynne Rowe.

Check it out!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Splashes of colour

It may be cold and grey today, but Spring is definitely trying to appear. The birds are certainly in their finest 'wanna come and nest with me?' finery - as witness these two smart-as-paint siskin on the seed feeder today. You may also notice something slightly different about the background - that's right, no tatty greenhouse! We decided that the cheapo greenhouse with acrylic window panes was finally getting so rickety and had such cloudy windows that we would buy ourselves a proper one with real glass as a 40th Wedding Anniversary present to each other. Who needs rubies, right?

So it's been stashed in its hundreds of component parts in the garage, waiting for the weather to improve so m'dear husband doesn't get frostbite while working on it. At last, we had a decent weekend and the old one has been cleared away and taken to the tip. The paving slab base has been deemed to be level enough, so construction can begin! Watch This Space.

In other news, I finished the Lily Pond Blanket. It's small, but beautiful, and I now feel confident to take on much more complicated flower patterns than I did before.

 

 

 

I can now think about smaller projects for a bit, although I'm sure the blanket urge will steal upon me again soon - they're just so impressive when they're finished!

I thought I'd carry on with my forays into the Nintendo Game characters and created this little fellow in a couple of evenings. It's Mario, of course. Letsa Go!

I've ordered some grass-green Stylecraft DK and as soon as that arrives Luigi will also appear. He's cute, isn't he? I think they will prove quite popular on a craft stall.

Pink Mouse

Here's the second of the baby toys I crocheted for my daughter's lovely friends and their soon-to-be firstborns.

This is much more of a traditional Amigurumi pattern in that the head is larger than the body and it has a sort of cartoonish feel. The pattern is a free one from Little Muggles.

Take great care when you are following the pattern, as some of the instructions start out by seeming to be the normal ' increase evenly throughout the round' sort of thing, but when it comes to things with an asymmetric shape, like the feet, the increases are on one side of the circle only.

The tail, I have to confess, is not as written in the pattern. The instructions blithely said to make a magic circle, crochet 4 DC into it and then continue crocheting 4 DC on each round for 21 rounds. Well I'm sorry, but I tried several times and after about half a dozen rounds my hook seemed to just pick up the opposite stitch as well and I ended up with 2 stitches in a flat shape rather than 4 in a tube. Therefore the tail does not stick up all stiff and curvy like it does in the pattern. Maybe you need tiny little fingers to cope with a tube only 4 stitches round, or maybe I should have put the work under a bright light and a magnifying glass! Never mind, I expect it will get chewed enthusiastically all the same.

Bunny business.

 

Hello!

This chap is my first large-scale Amigurumi crochet project. He was made using a free crochet pattern from All Free Crochet.

Amazing Daughter's friends are finally getting into the 'having-a-family' act, and there are two babies expected this September, so I thought I'd better get busy with some baby-related hooky. I've chosen cotton yarn to make this rabbit from because although the pattern suggests wool DK yarn, I reckon that if a baby sucks a woollen item it is likely to result in a mouth full of fluff - not a safe outcome to my mind. So Bunny may not be soft, but he has got an interesting texture and his ears seem to me to be the sort of thing that will be tactile and chewable. The eyes are of course the 'safety eyes' with a big press-on washer at the back - I defy you to take them apart once they're snapped on.

Hopefully this chap will be a friend to someone. Now I am going to embark upon a mouse, or a dragon, or a fox????? What do you think? Pinterest has some good ideas.

 

Colourful Quartet

Hello there. I realise it looks as if nothing much is happening round here, but that's because the craft project I've been spending most of my time on over the last couple of weeks is Top Secret. It's all connected with the competition that Number One Son has devised for this year's family get-together, a.k.a. Party in the Park 2. I mentioned Very Silly Games in the Park this time last year - well we are about to do something similar, but different, next weekend. I'll tell you all about it after the event!

Anyway, the other day I realised that I have a Fair coming up in three weeks or so, and I would like to have something other than many, many ruffled scarves (nice though they are) to sell on my stall. It's a sort of Vintage Fair, so I clicked along to the queen of vintage fabric Donna Flower to see what inspiration she could provide, and as luck would have it, it's Sale Time! These cute little printed cotton animal kits were half price, so I snapped them up. They are designed by Nanette Regan of areathriftyone. They only take minutes to cut out and stitch, so they can be sold at pocket-money prices for the kids who come trailing around with their mums to these things and are kind of excluded. That's also why I always have some of my enormous stash of beads threaded simply into elasticated bracelets that look pretty but don't cost a fortune - as well as our Very First Invention, the Turtle Beanbag.

As seen in previous craft fair pictures - a simple shape in green cotton,  filled with rice and decorated with fabric paint. They are surprisingly popular, and have been from the very first fair my gorgeous daughter and I did back in the 1980s at Pontardawe Folk Festival.

By the way, if I haven't made something completely from scratch, but is a kit simply sewn together by me, I do make it clear on the label! No plagiarism here, folks.

Patterned Penguin

Hello there!

I made this charming chap today. Isn't he cute?

The pattern came from a lovely web-site, The Purl-Bee Penguin where they generously allow you to download pattern and instructions for free. And very clear, comprehensive instructions they are, too. I made this little fellow in about 2 hours this morning, and he's destined for my gorgeous grandson's collection of cuddlies, because the penguin seems to be the favoured creature du jour for him.

I was alerted to the web-site by my discerning and talented daughter who is always concerned that I should have enough to do in my retirement! No, actually  it's just that she wastes hours looking at lovely gorgeous things on-line when she should be writing her best-selling novel and when she finds something irresistible she shares it with us all.

So now I pass it on to you. Go on, make yourself a penguin or two! Perhaps you could go along with the interior decorating trend of having little bird decorations and make them in different colours. A row of technicolour penguins along the mantlepiece - you know you want to.

Retro Cuddlies

Hello folks,

While I was trawling E-Bay for soft toy patterns several months ago, I came across some kits from the late 70s. I couldn't leave these potential chaps languishing in the virtual auctionhouse so I made my very small (but successful) bids, and so they've been waiting in my workroom for me to bring them to life. This week, having finished with the mega craft-fair/Christmas lights/doing stuff for an ungrateful populace things which filled my time in November I thought I'd better clear the decks of this year's projects. So I made a Clothkits Giraffe and Pocket Doll and these splendid 1970's vintage Microkits of an Owl and a baby Hedgehog.

I have to say that sewing the back and front of the Owl together was the biggest leap of faith in the patternmaker's art that I have yet undertaken - it was very difficult to picture the final reverse 3-D effect. But it worked!

These chaps are not going to any craft fair stall - they're probably quite rare by now - and they've cheered me up after a week of feeling a bit wrong-footed. So hopefully my lovely grandchildren will tell me I've Done Good.      

Now to prepare for Christmas. My fabulous family are gathering here this year, so it's time to get out the decorations and put batteries in the singing Santas (splendid grandson can't have grown out of the fun of creating Noise in the Hall, surely?)

Have a lovely festive season y'all.

By the way, this blogging is being accompanied by the sound of the Incredible String Band - My Lovely Husband has brought a tranche of our beloved vinyl down from the attic to convert it to CD and i-player versions. If you haven't encountered this wonderful music and invention, can I suggest you check out three recordings: the eponymous first LP; the 5,000 Spirits or the Layers of the Onion; and The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter. On Elektra Records if I remember rightly.

This is what we were doing in the Sixties - and I was there, and I can remember it. Peace, friends.