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.
This puffin is made from 2 pompoms. The yarn I used is Jamieson and Smith Shetland wool.
I made him during an online speedcrafting session with Helen Robertson, a designer from Shetland.
These sessions (I joined three series during lockdown) were so joyful, meeting new people, learning a new craft, having a chat. I hope Helen will host more online ones in the future 😊!
"Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile", Paul Simon sings on "The only living boy in New York" : there's no idea more calming, I think.
I imagined this happy feeling in mixed media, using textile, paper, paint, yarn, thread, beads, crayons, lots of hand stitching, machine stitching and even real flower petals. The bold warm colours evoke a real zest for life.
Spring, bring it on!!
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!
Best wishes to you all for 2023!
My wishes are accompanied by this embroidered piece, which shows four seasons in one day on this planet, full of luscious greenery and delicious clear water.
The design is my own, inspired by a workshop led by Livia Papiernik. It’s a relatively small piece, 20 cm x 20 cm, but it required a lot of stitching!
I used silk thread, Jamieson & Smith wool yarn and all kinds of other thread, with various stitches and beads, mostly recycled, some of which I made myself.
Let’s hope for a lovely and inspiring new year!!
A simple wreath I decorated with needle-felted holly leaves with beads as berries. Two pompom robins are resting merrily on a branch. For the pom-poms I used wonderful Jamieson’s DK from Shetland.
The birds I made during online speedcrafting with the lovely Helen Robertson from Shetland!
Happy Christmas to everyone 😊🎄💚
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.
These socks were knitted by my husband's grandmother, who passed away many years ago.
I could never throw them away because they are a labour of love but they got forgotten somewhere in a box in the attic.
When I came across them during a recent cleanup, I decided the time had come to do some serious mending. I used my cute darning tool and some colourful yarn.
I love this job and I love even more that we can use the socks again!
my cute darning tool:
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 decided to make a hanging plant pot from the glass shade of a broken lamp. I used a bit of the wonderful Ard-thir yarn from Kate Davies designs (in the Glamaig colourway) to crochet a structure in which the glass shade fits and added a small tassel for fun. Even small recycling projects like this deserve nice yarn in my opinion!
This is my take on a workshop with Jean Draper, a textile artist who makes wonderful sculpture work : a raised piece of textured work, consisting of three different layers of structured meshes.
The layers are separately stitched in frames. When they were merged I added some stitching, fabric and paper.
For now the piece is displayed on the wall, allowing the light to filter through, which creates interesting shadows.
I used the best part of a skein of soft and fluffy organic yarn (Pure,100 % wool, Creative Collection by Veritas - 50g/100m) to make this pompom snowman. I gave him a sweet colourful nightcap and his nose is made from a tiny scrap of fabric. Who doesn't love a cute snowman?
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!
This textured vessel wrap is my response to a workshop by Emily Notman.
I used textile strips and stitching, adding texture with textile scraps and thread.
I loved adding vibrant colours with ecoline paint.
The sun is created with a silk yarn, and the whole piece is enforced with backing fabric and iron-on adhesive.
It has turned out a happy sunny piece!
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 love glass and beautiful bottles I tend to keep.
Here is one of these bottles I decorated with a piece cut off a felted wool sock. I embroidered some abstract flowers onto the fabric. The yarn is a Nepalese hennep cotton blend, naturally died with walnut.
The result is quite stylish I think...
