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Thursday 29 January 2015

Goal accountability

I thought I would try to keep myself accountable to my crafting goals on my blog. 

They are: 
  • City and Guilds knitwear design course;
  • Quilt;
  • Try not to get sidetracked into doing anything else crafty.
 So far I'm doing fine.  I've been plugging away at the samples for  the C&G course: 

These are all to do with increases and decreases.





And I've sewn a few squares for the quilt:



I've also managed not to start anything else - although I think I'm about to change that as I'm going to make a tiger costume for Rory.


Thursday 22 January 2015

Module 2 finish up and a manicure

This week, so far has been about finishing up Module 2 of my City and Guilds course I'm doing.  And yesterday - hoorah...


It got boxed up and set on its merry way to England, hopefully to arrive in about a week's time.

To celebrate finishing this module I decided to do a little bit of sewing before I start the next module.  For Christmas Frances got a nail painting kit from my parents - lots of bottles of nail varnish and stickers and gems and bits.  She is chuffed to bits with it, but it came in a cardboard box, which wasn't very useful or pretty for keeping it in long term.  

Enter me, with some pink fabric, a bit of interfacing, a zip and this pattern.

 
And hey presto a manicure wallet.  Pretty?  I bought the outer fabric in a shop in Helsinki before we left and the inner fabric comes from my parent's local fabric shop.


It's got lots of spaces for her bottles and the zippered pocket for all the other bits and pieces.  She was very chuffed with it and I'm happy that we get rid of the horrible box.

The pattern was easy to follow, as you can see I went for the Velcro option rather than the snaps.  It took me an afternoon to make (not including cutting out, which I did a couple of days ago) and would have taken less time, but I put one of the pieces of Velcro in the wrong place and then managed to put the same piece of Velcro in the right place, but with the sticking together bit facing inwards. Doh.

Rory wanted to know what I'd made for him - so I guess I'd better come up with a plan.  Maybe some sort of car or Lego mat thing?

Tuesday 13 January 2015

spiral hats and goals for the year

This last Christmas my knitting was a few pairs of socks and also some spiral hats.  D asked for a new hat for Christmas, and once I'd finished one I thought I should make a couple more for the kids too. 


Here they are all modelling them together (I love F's pose!).  R looks sad, but it's not because of the hat (honest).

And of course once Grandma saw the hats she requested one too....

They're all knitted using the three-spiral hat pattern by EZ from the opinionated knitter.  D's is knit pretty much as written so it's quite large and sloppy.  The others I scaled down a bit, so cast on 34 stitches and altered the rest of the pattern accordingly.  I used some Bravo Big by Schachenmayr original for all of them.

They're all ravelled here.... D's, F's, R's and Grandma's

So, this year I have made some crafting goals - basically I'm going to try to make some progress on some large projects that have been hanging around for a while. 

First, I'm restarting my City and Guilds in Knitwear design that I started before F was born and then put on hold when we moved back to Helsinki and I was expecting R.  Now they're both at kindergarten some of the time I have time to start that again.  I'm trying to get the module I was working on when I quit back in 2010 finished by the end of January.

Secondly, I'm going to try to make a leap forward in the queen-size quilt I've been working on forever (well since 2000).  It's coming along nicely but I want to prioritise it so that I can get it finished.

So, they're my big goals - there's some other stuff I'd like to make - but I'm going to try to prioritise those two for now.