Category: yarn

Shawl club has launched!

crochet, Shawls, yarn

So finally I can tell you a bit about what I have been working on.  Tonight I have launched a shawl club with Sam from Unbelieva-wool.  I am beyond excited – her yarns are beautiful and I have had great fun plotting this behind the scenes with her!  So the plan is that you can sign up for a series of yarn boxes, each one about 6 weeks apart, and each one will contain a skein of her yarn which has been dyed to suit the pattern I have written (all of which are new and have not been published before), and a extra something that will help you to do the pattern, plus the pattern itself.  The yarns will be either standard merino sock yarn or a luxury base.  And I am so giddy tonight with the interest in this.  We will do the club for about 8 months and then see if folk want us to continue.

The patterns themselves will be a mixture of styles and shapes to keep it interesting and I am really pleased with how they are coming out so far!  Once everyone has received their boxes I will do a little reveal on this page.

If you are interested in signing up, click the link here and complete the online form.  The first invoices will be payable by the end of March so we know what numbers we are working with.  If you live outside the UK, it is worth knowing that Sam is happy to ship overseas if you let her know on the sign up form so that she can tweak the price to allow for the extra postage.

In the meantime I am also working on some other patterns to go up on Ravelry on the 7th April, including the Moo-Ra dress, a hat pattern, a rather lovely wrap, and a few other bits and bobs.  And as a special thank you to you, my blog-watchers, I will be putting up some free patterns on this site over the next few weeks.

 

Having my cake…

crochet, yarn

OK, so today was a horrible weather day.  It rained heavily all last night and this morning I had to be up early for a very grown up meeting at work.  The sky was dark and it was still raining and miserable, and the roads were starting to flood as I drove to work.  I spent the day running from one part of the university campus to the other for meetings, becoming progressively more like a drowned rat as the day wore on.  And the last meeting was one of those ones that left me feeling a bit twitchy and agitated.  The small person was exhausted today too, so an early night for her, and a bit of yarn therapy for me.  Some new and beautiful skeins in the post to squish (shhh!  I have posted pictures on my instagram feed if you want to see them) and the chance to cake some others ready for a bit of a making frenzy.  The picture shows my latest yarn caking set up in my room, and the yarn pictured is ‘Psyche’ by Unbelievawool, which is just a little bit lovely.

I am due for some leave over Easter, so I want to have a nice pile of yarn cakes to take with me so I can get plenty of hooking in, and maybe even a pair of knitted socks.  And then when I am back I will upload some patterns to Ravelry and link to them here so you can see what I have been busy working on for the last month or so.  And I should be able to finally tell you about one of my top secret projects this weekend, I hope, so watch this space.  In the meantime, don’t forget to let me know what sort of things you struggle to find patterns for, or what sort of stuff you would like me to have a go at designing for you.  At the moment I have some ideas for clothing for children and adults that I want to have a crack at. But I am up for a challenge, and its a good way of getting a pattern named after you if its a good one!

One final note, thank you all so much for your support and enthusiasm so far!  The blog has taken off much more quickly than I had dared to hope it might. I have plans to reward you for your support so watch this space!

Tired, but not of yarn…

crochet, yarn

So, about an hour ago I hit ‘the wall’.  The week has caught up with me and I can barely keep my eyes open, and I feel exhausted.  After I have done this post, I will retire to my bed with a cup of tea and a blanket and try to get some rest.  And yet my head can do that magical thing with ‘work’ that small children can do with food.  Just as a child can complain of being not hungry but is ravenous for desert, my head might want to sleep and stop thinking about the day job, but somehow it also wants me to sit and write up the pattern to the retro granny square ripple blanket.  My crochet habit is clearly deepening, and I need a fix of something yarny before I head for bed.

I could, of course, spend some time fondling my latest yarn pets.  This week has been a bit of a treat on the postal front – my YarnMama purchases have arrived over a number of days, interspersed with yarn boxes that I ordered a while back but which arrived in the same week. So its been a bit like Christmas around here, with my daughter helping me to open the parcels and making appropriate ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ noises, and stealing any additional chocolate treats that might have been popped into the packages.  At 4 years old she already has all the yarn lingo down pat, best illustrated by: “Mummy, I can’t find XXX, can we look in your stash for it?”

The picture above is of my YarnMama haul from the amazing FleabubsByLala.  One of the constant sources of sadness to me is that I cannot use her beautiful hooks; the way I crochet means that I tend to drop hooks which have weighted handles. But her yarn is very special and I can indulge in that.  These skeins are almost too pretty to cake, and even my daughter gave a “Wow, THEY are beautiful!” when she opened the packet.  So these were able to comfort me as I put some of my stash up for sale last night to help to pay for the garage bill I earned the other day.  And the spaces created in my stash were filled by this new loveliness, that will be turned into something very special.  But I don’t think I will have the energy to cake them tonight.  I might have to squidge them one more time before I go upstairs though…