I might have mentioned this before now and then 😅, but I love knitting small projects, like this hat.
It’s the Firewood Cap, a design by Lindsey Fowler, and features in her fantastically beautiful book “Salt & Timber, knits from the Northern Coast”.
I used Soft Donegal, from the Irish company Donegal yarns.
Love the design, love the wool, love my new hat!
I knitted this narrow curtain for my bedroom, using wool yarn I spun myself. It has an irregular thickness, which I like a lot for this kind of application.
That narrow window kind of functions as a night light now, filtering the light that shines in from the street.
Here's a force to be reckoned with : the menopausal woman, full of plans, energy and wisdom! There, I said it and that's what this piece is all about!
I knit the background from Rowan wool and felted the fabric in the washing machine. This way it feels sturdy and slighlty carpet-like.
The powerful woman and the ladder are embroidered onto the background, and I added fairy lights (off course!). It is quite a big wall hanging which I installed in our hallway: very happy with it!
Last Christmas I joined two speedcrafting sessions with Helen Robertson.
On the one evening we knitted an owl:
The other we made a Christmas pudding, which started us chatting about Christmas traditions and food from around the world. We were a group of people from the US, Shetland, Iceland, Sweden, England, Scotland and Belgium, so it got very interesting, we all got hungry and we had some great laughs! This is the World Wide Web at its best!
I used Shetland’s Jamieson’s spindrift yarn.
I gave the Christmas pudding to my little bear, who was very pleased:
It’s been a while since I finished a shawl, but here it is: the Linus shawl, a free pattern you can find here on Ravelry.
I used a recycled bourette mix yarn (cotton and silk), bought at Bart&Francis, who specialise in all kinds of yarn, thread and fiber. It’s always an adventure to browse through their shop, with lots of discoveries!
This is a very easy knit, it’s relaxing and I love the result.
It has been a while since I actually finished a knitting project and I enjoyed it immensely.
This free pattern is called "Brick Sidewalk Beanie" which you can find here. It's an easy one, but stays interesting because of the repeating pattern. I used Hedgehog Fibers Merino DK in the absolutely fabulous colourway "Fool's gold".
I loved knitting this hat, both because of the lovely yarn and the pattern being right up my street. Very happy with my new favourite hat!
I find myself collecting small crocheted and knitted Christmas ornaments, some of them gifts from friends. I decided to make them into a garland, lightweight and easy to transport to wherever I will be celebrating Christmas over the years, taking these friends with me! I hope I will be able to make the garland longer and longer and longer!
This is the Plum crazy wrap, a design by Shannon Dunbabbin. It is a very easy pattern, for which I used an aran weight yarn : Rowan Fine Art Aran, so that it knits up pretty fast.
I wear this wrap with my beautiful shawl pin that I love!
EmPower People is a craftivism project aimed at uniting crafters in all mediums to engage people across communities, so as to spark conversation, engagement and action to uphold social justice and human rights. The project launched a call to knit, crochet or sew a purple bandana and to wear it proudly, while you speak and act against injustice. This crafting community is committed to embrace humanity and family, to embody community, and to emphasize equality.
I am all for this and also feel strongly about craftivism. So I knitted this bandana, a pattern by Casapinka. And I wear it proudly, at the moment while I am doing my social distancing. I knitted it in Noro Tokonatsu (a cotton, silk and viscose blend) which I have found a wonderful yarn! Aport from its significance, this bandana is also beautiful and warm!
You can find the patterns for the different bandanas here.
I had a sweater that was still in reasonably good condition but had become too small. I loved its fabric and colour so decided to walk the recycling path here.
I should have taken a photo of the original sweater, but I cut it up before I even thought of that.
From the sleeves I made long fingerless gloves. I cut them from the main body, picked up the stitches with my circular knitting needle and cast off neatly, cutting an opening for the thumb and sewing round it. Really happy with them!
The shawl neckline of the sweater was kind of special so I cut it off in its entirety and made it into a cowl. By sewing round the edge with a nice yarn (Manos del Uruguay Serena alpaca cotton blend) I managed a ruffled edge. With the same yarn, I embroidered some flowers. I added an invisible press stud so it stays well in place. Not completely my style, but I still think it is a successful project and hopefully will make someone else happy.
Then there was the body of the sweater, which I cut into broad strips, sewing them together into one loop cowl that wraps around the neck twice. Again I picked up the stitches, and added a small knitted edge in a colourful yarn (Mayflower Egyptian organic cotton Print). The colourful edge makes this a really pretty cowl, I think!
In 2018 (you can read the blogpost here) I dyed some yarn with onion peel. 4 of the skeins, all of a different shade of yellow, I knit into a piece with wide stripes.
This piece I washed on a high temperature and high spin cycle, to get it felted. It worked : the fabric is firmer, smaller and thicker now.
And this week I decided to make it into a handbag of my own design.
I chose a nice fabric for the inner lining. It’s all hand-sewn, because I wanted to do some slow, meditative stitching. The wooden handles fit perfectly, in my opinion.
This project is is a good example of slow crafting: hand-spun and naturally dyed yarn, hand-knit and hand-sewn into a bag. It reminds me that the journey is so much more important than the goal. That it turned out to be a nice handbag is a bonus 😊
I have been working on this hat for quite some time. It was my travel knit and since we are not travelling at the moment, there was little progress for some time. But at last, it got finished, just in time for some cold spells this spring. It's a Purl Soho pattern which you can find here. It's a double-layered hat : you start knitting the first hat from the top down with colour 1, then continue right on with the second hat in colour 2, bottom up. You tuck one inside the other and connect them with a little tassel. It's reversible, so two hats in one!
The yarn I used is Ashford Tekapo 3ply (brown and off-white). I bought it at Wolboerderij Blij Bezuiden, a small sheep breeding farm in the South of the Netherlands. Besides their herd of merino sheep they have a wonderful, friendly shop and lots of knowledge and energy. Here I learned how to spin and I’m so happy with this skill, it’s a very relaxing thing to do!
In an earlier post I mentioned that I joined some speedcrafting sessions, hosted by Helen Robertson. One of the projects we did was knitting these tiny houses (or as they say on Shetland: peerie mootie hooses)
I truly fell in love with this project and ended up knitting 10 of them! 3 I filled with a match box so they can easily stand on their own and make a tiny village. The other seven I filled with some yarn scraps to give them some body and turned into broches. To the façade of each of the brooche-houses I added an embroidered flowering climbing plant.
I used the yarn Helen sent for the project and also some HotButterYarns colour mini balls DK. This is beautiful , locally sourced British wool. I bought them at Tribe Yarns in Richmond-upon-Thames, a truly lovely shop with great customer service!
This is by the way also a lovely way to use up any leftover yarn!
I had some skeins of Garthenor Organic number 3 in my stash, including 10 mini skeins. I could make a fairly big project with this. Lots of different natural colours require a simple and pure pattern, I think, and so I searched for something with a lot of garter stitch (which I love!). I chose the Herb Garden Shawl pattern (very easy and free pattern on Ravelry). I could already see myself strolling around in the garden, warmed by this shawl and a cup op tea...
It was lot of knitting, but with this DK yarn things went on fairly quickly and all the different colours made the project interesting.
Garthenor is a small Welsh company that has been producing breed specific organic yarn for over 20 years. Their customer service is great and there is such a positive energetic vibe around them! I found the yarn great to work with, it is sturdy and soft at the same time. The natural colours are lovely and work well together.
I ran out of yarn and still wanted the shawl to be a bit bigger, but instead of ordering more yarn, I decided to look through my stash (However much I love to support Garthenor and other sustainable businesses, I also try to use up my stash where possible, which also contributes to sustainability) and found this skein of Bleetingbecka Derbyshire Lopi, a very rustic wool from Derbyshire Gritstone (they don't have their own website, but you can find them on Facebook). This is the white top edge of the shawl.
It turned out to be the lovely warm big shawl I imagined, so let's go for a walk!
the shawl, almost finished:
the lovely (and interesting!) card I got with my order from Garthenor:
the Bleetingbecka yarn:
Jo March has been one of my heroes since childhood. In "Literary knits, 30 patterns inspired by favorite books" by Nikol Lohr, I found a pattern for Jo mittens and really wanted to knit them. Partly because I like Jo so much, but also because of the practical boyish look of these mittens.
I struggled with the pattern, to be honest. I don’t think it 's written clearly enough for a not so experienced knitter and I had to frog more than once. I didn't seem to be able to make the pattern work, so in the end I modified it. Overall, sometimes a bit of a frustrating experience but, in the end, also very rewarding.
I like my Jo mittens a lot and am happy I persevered! I love the look of the knitted fabric, its warmth and the way the mittens fit and feel.
The yarn I used is Rauwerk 100% merino (100g - 220m), an eco-friendly and ethical yarn from Germany. this is fantastic yarn, soft and rustic at the same time, in wonderful colours, a real favourite of mine! I bought this skein at Yarnporium in 2018 (you can read my blogpost on Yarnporium here) at the booth of Wild Woolly (a super nice London yarn shop)
And a little shout-out to the knitting needles I used, Lykke driftwood double-pointed needles : simply super! The combination of the yarn and the knitting needles made this a lovely project!
the wonderful yarn and super needles :
