crochet strawberry leaves with a tiny spider

it's almost halloween! and my mother has lovingly crocheted me a spider brooch for the occasion, so naturally, i have made a little something for her in return:

a spider brooch! ok, so i wasn't having the most original moment when i decided to give a spider brooch to someone giving me a spider brooch...but i think it's cute. the leaves are strawberry leaves from caitlin sainio's 100 lace flowers to crochet which i did in size 30 variegated green with a 1.5 hook. the 'web' bit i did in white sewing thread with a 0.6 hook (it's just a cluster of treble-trebles and a length of chain). and the spider is four bits of size 30 black thread, knotted together in a double knot for the body, with single knots for the knees:

yep, i'm pretty happy with this.

embroidered hermes wing shoes

anyone who follows this little blog closely, or anyone who looks too closely at my feet, will realise that i have a thing about putting wings on my heals. i don't know why but it just has to be done. here's a little recap for those of you at the back of the class who weren't paying attention:

 

 

 

now i'm in a new city, new streets, new shoes... and here's what happened this time:

 you will need:

el cheapo tat primark flats £4

gold metalic embroidery thread ~£2

a strong needle

to make:

embroider some wings on the heels of your cheap, thin shoes.

enjoy.

(i'm afraid that i did just make it up as i went along with these. 'free form stitching' i think it's called, or stitch doodle if you're me.)

 

crocheting in a convent in london

ok, i'm giving up any pretense i had of blogging on any kind of regular basis. sorry about that. life got in the way, as it usually does - i've moved house yet again, only this time i've abandoned scotland all together and ended up in london, which i can't really afford on my shop girl pay, so i'm crashing in a convent until something else comes along.

the usual kind of crazy then.

i miss scotland. i miss my friends, my work mates, my old laid-back job. i miss having the freedom to do whatever i like, whenever i like, without having to worry about a curfew or upsetting nuns or upsetting my mother. i haven't been myself here yet; new job and strict home life mean that i'm on constant egg shells, all smiles and good behavior. and i'm reminded of the life advice a much loved maths teacher once gave me in the street, "do what you're good at".

so here i am in a quiet corner of london holding a crochet hook and building my life back up again, one treble at a time:

yes, that's my bedside table in the convent, and yes, that is a lacy heart shaped coaster for my mug. it already has tea stains on it, but that's ok.

you will need:

size 30 white thread and a 1.75 crochet hook

meathod:

now, i was a bit cheeky with this one so i'm not going to put a link to the pattern. you see it was part of a vintage booklet of heart shaped crochet lavender pillow patterns which a wonderful fellow is/was selling on ebay...and included in the photos of the product was the page featuring the entire pattern for this heart.

oops.

i did modify it a bit, opting for a row of clusters around the outside rather than the big frilly thing it had going on. anyway, if you search the internet hard enough you'll no doubt find the pattern as well.

have fun.

tissue paper flowers - floofing tutorial

i am a (rather sporadic) letter writer. when sending letters i like to include a cute flat thing to make up for the potential lack of content in the actual letter. in my most recent bout of correspondence i sent many people a tissue paper flower, ready to be floofed up to full glory. yes, ok, when i say that i sent them tissue paper flowers, i do in fact mean that i sent them some coloured tissue paper which i had loving concertinaed, trimmed, and stapled in the middle. what they got looked much like this:

the very technical floofing process seems to have stumped some people though, so here's what you do.

1. expand the concertina like a fan:

2. pull up individual layers of tissue paper, it should start off looking like this:

2 continued. and go on to look like this:

3. now do the same thing to the other side, and, wait for it.....you've made a flower! well done!:

 

now to make this particular flower i used 4 sheets of pale orange, two sheets of dark orange and two sheets of red. layer squares of the same size in that order, concertina, staple, floof. 

pompom edged pillow with a little butterfly embroidery

still on theme of trying to make my blank room a bit more homey - i got it into my head that pillows were the way forward. lots and lots of pillows. this is mostly because i hate the headboard on my bed, and it's not mine so i can't just paint it or upholster it or something proper like that. anyways, i only got around to making one of these pillows in the end which has turned out to be a good thing as i'll be moving house YET AGAIN next month...as always, i find i own too much stuff.

here's a pillow:

now, making pillow covers is really easy - it's two rectangles of fabric sewn together with some sort of overlap and fastening thing going on so that you can put a pillow inside...usually. i however, cheated. this one doesn't have a pillow on the inside - it is literally two squares of fabric, sew together and stuffed like a really boring square teddy bear. this does of course mean that when i eventually do spill red wine on it i'll have to throw the whole thing into a washing machine and prey, but that's ok. The underside which you can't see started out life as an electric blue silk scarf, there's purple pompom edging along two sides and the top is from a tim holtz fat quarter with moths on. to make it slightly less beige i picked out one of the butterflies in embroidery:  

 i honestly defy anyone to try and tell me that i don't know how to have fun in my spare time.

speed sewing - wine bag

i have a tendency to leave things to the very last minute so that there's a mad dash to get everything sorted. this can be a little stressful but also very good fun! recently we lost one of our part timers at work as he went and got himself a proper job, i had said i would make him a wine bag with the canvas fabric he gave me at some point...so naturally i waited until there was 20 minutes before i had to head to out to work my last shift with him before starting the little sewing project. here's what he ended up with:

 

all things considered, it did turn out rather well. i mean, despite my little cheapo sewing machine having real problems with the thickness of the canvas, and the fact that i was sort of making it up as i went along, and that at the last minute i realised i didn't have thread which matched the fabric.... other than all that, it went pretty well. it's basically a long rectangle with french seams up the inside sides, hemmed at the top, and with two handles sewn to that. 

help! i'm a grown up making loom band chokers

my best friend got me into these - i swear it's not my fault! although...her work mate got her into them...so i guess it's not her fault either. blame the workmate of my friend who i've never met before! that way, the blame is kind of dissipated, and we're left with these fab 90's-esque chokers:

the purple one is of the standard use-the-mini-plastic-faux-crochet-hook variety, the yellow and orange one is much the same but with a second layer of bands, and the pink and blue number is of the fish tail variety. now, i have just enough dignity left to not have actually purchased a loom, so i used a fork:

 

and then i had a hunt around pinterest and saw that people are making cool things like daisy chain bracelets and wanted one! but those are pretty complicated so actually need a loom....or do they...?

FORK DAISY!!!!! basically i followed the instructions on this youtube tutorial while substituting a loom for two forks held back to back : ) oh yeah- fork win.

book treasure box

i always liked the idea of a book box to keep treasures in (or a book clutch, although i can't imagine they'd be big enough to fit all the standard handbag stuff in...), but i never seemed to get around to making one. then my mother asked me for one for her birthday, here's how that went:

they're not difficult to make so much as time consuming - you want a fairly thick book so that you can actually put stuff in the box, but that means that you have more paper to cut through. and no matter how sharp your craft knife is, you will most likely get half way through and get annoyed and start just hacking at the pages you have left to cut through. DO TRY AND AVOID DOING THIS as you really want the inside walls of your box to be neat. i cheated, i mean, i hacked away at it and then concealed the mess by lining it with card covered with an old map. you can do this too as it totally worked out fine.

this is one of my 'here's one i made earlier' things so there's no step-by-step photos i'm afraid. it's pretty much how you might picture it though - be smiley and polite to the ladies in the secondhand bookshop as they scowl at you and tell you cutting up books is sacrilegious, get book, cut a hole in the pages of said book, hold book shut while applying glue to the edges of the pages, panic when you realise that you didn't put a sheet of greaseproof paper between the top cover and the pages so that it wouldn't all stick together, carefully pry the top cover away from the rest of it - damaging it in such a way that you now have to paint everything to conceal the gluey mess, line book box with a snug, much thinner and prettier card box, glue that in place, then pretend it was all intentional as it turned out rather well in the end.

good luck.

pompom garland

i have, yet again, moved into something of a blank-canvas flat and am now  in the process of prettifying my new room. this process obviously involves pompoms. obviously:

 

ok, so i got swept up in the pompom craze that's been on pinterest and then i got my free pompom maker courtesy hobbycraft and mollie makes and things got a little cute. I did not in fact use my new high-tech pompom maker, but a fork, so...

you will need;

- wool in various colours (i got a pack of eight 10g balls for £2.50 in hobbycraft)

-a fork

-scissors

-some ribbon or something, to hang them off of

to make;

wrap you wool around your fork until it looks a little something like this:

 

then tie it up so that it looks like this:

then slide the whole lot off of the end of your fork and trim until it's a pompom. make a fair few of these (they only take like 5 minutes each) and tie them at intervals onto ribbon. 

pretty easy really : )

i'm back!

yes i know it's been a while and there's really nothing i can say to make up for it. sorry anyway.

here's a little montage of some of my crafty goings-on since i last posted:

i got into amigurumi ... and made a tiny cactus for my sister.

i started, but never finished a 'settlers of catan' set of hexagons, where each is made out of the resource it represents.

i designed my first crochet pattern from scratch - a buttercup, which i promptly lost the pattern for.

i went through a phase of making horribly difficult puzzles...

and things made out of puzzle pieces.

christmas came and i got my craft on - i made box nets for most of the blocks in minecraft for my siblings to put together.

and i got a little bit better at amigurumi - here's a pikachu.

there was a lot of other stuff as well, but as i had no internet most of it didn't get photographed at the time. there may be some 'stuff i made earlier' type posts in the not-too-distant future. enjoy.