Be my Valentine

Pass the sick bucket, it’s Valentine’s Day again. And while this year it seems you’re as likely to find loved-up couples getting their kicks from the DIY store as a Michelin-starred restaurant, the traditional February slush-fest is well and truly with us.

Of course, the crafters amongst you know that St. Valentine gives us another great excuse to get the needles and hooks out. We’re a creative bunch; so here are some of my favourite Valentine’s knitting patterns from Ravelry that hopefully won’t make you feel too queasy.

Tying in with the release of ’50 Shades of Grey’ this Valentine’s Day,
this “Spank me” heart-shaped cushion made me giggle.

For those of you weighed down by gifts and cards,
a little monster loot carrier will help you shovel them up.

A little bit broken but super cute ‘voodoo you love me?’ dolls.

The hilarious smitten – just
don’t go in different directions.

And for the doctors and scientists out there,
an anatomically correct(ish) heart.

Now go give your loved one a cuddle.

How to make a Christmas wreath

Nothing makes me feel more festive than seeing a traditional evergreen wreath hanging from my door at Christmas time. And ever since acquiring a garden with an abundance of holly and ivy I've been itching to try my hand at making one.

I'm also completely spoilt in having the wondrous Warley Woods on my doorstep. So if you went down to the woods a couple of weekends ago, you may have seen a crazy-looking lady furtively foraging from the forest floor and sneakily snipping bits off branches hoping to remain unseen...

After taking some inspiration from this oasis video tutorial (manufacturer of floral products, not the band), this is my simplified and slightly improvised version.

You will need:

• 1 oasis wreath ring - I picked one up from Wilkos for £3.
• Foraged goodies - it doesn't really matter what, anything green looks lovely.
• Florist wire
• Ribbon
• Scissors

Here's what I did:

1. Soak the oasis ring before you start. I used a water sprayer that I use for blocking knitting, but you can also soak the ring in the sink or a bowl of water.
2. Tie the ribbon around the ring to form a loop. I folded the ribbon in half and tied a knot. Then passed it through the centre of the ring, slipping the knotted end through the folded loop to hook it and leave a long end to hang the wreath.
3. Assemble your foraged goodies and trim them to the desired length. I went for 6-8 inch lengths for around the outside edge of the ring, 4-6 inches on the surface facing you and 2-4 inches around the inside edge.
4. Push each stem into the oasis ring. I started from the outside and worked inwards, alternating the different types of leaves.
5. To attach fir cones (or anything else without a stem) fold the florist wire in half (you might need to trim it first with wire cutters or scissors), place it over the top of the fir cones and push it into the oasis ring.
6. Hang the wreath from your door, step back and admire it!

Finally, my top tip - make sure you tie the ribbon on first. It was an oversight on my part to do it last; it was very fiddly and I have the scratches to show for it!

Christmas jumpers!

It's Christmas Jumper Day here in the UK today, where the nation is encouraged to don their most festive knitwear in aid of Save the Children.

In true Christmas spirit, I’m rocking a pudding jumper festooned with snowball pompoms and a few Strictly-style sparkly crystals for good measure. Meanwhile, workplaces across the country have been tweeting their seasonal selfies by the droves.

I love how Christmas jumpers have transformed from a hideous gift that your nan or a cat-loving aunt might have bestowed upon you, into something that is embraced for its kitchness.

So now that I no longer need fear the ridicule of being a crazy needle-wielding bearer of unwanted woolly presents, I’d love to have a go at knitting one. My ambition is to create one of those delicate fair isle numbers with beautifully crafted reindeer, snowflakes and the like. But I suspect I might need to start now to be ready for next year.

For now, if you're feeling inspired, here are the pick of my favourites on Ravelry.

The ultimate Christmas fair isle.

One day I'll manage something like this.

Mini Christmas jumper bunting from Save the Children.

This would look amazing hanging over my mantelpiece.

 The stylish snowflake from Rowan.
Which man in your life wouldn't want one of these?

The cutest Anders sweaters

Sophisticated Scandinavian loveliness.

Vintage fair isle sweater

Who said Christmas jumpers couldn't be glamorous?

Happy Christmas Jumper Day!

Lacing the streets

It's a wonderful moment when you discover something truly beautiful and utterly creative. One of those moments came to me recently while scrolling along the Facebook newsfeed of an evening (as you do), and stumbling across the work of a Polish artist who creates street art out of lace.

NeSpoon

In the most delicate of graffiti, artist NeSpoon decorates pavements, walls, brickwork and street furniture with beautiful lace motifs.

Embracing a range of media, her work has incorporated ceramic mandelas and huge stencilled paintings, to even using some traditional crocheted lace.

And it's not just the gritty urban landscape that gets the NeSpoon treatment, several projects have seen her working with tree hollows and stumps, in parks and on beaches.

A sucker for a geometric pattern, especially when it involves lace or tiles, I fell head over heels when I found this piece from her 2012 work in ceramics; a stunning design pressed into a cracked pavement filled with clay.

Ceramic 2012, by NeSpoon

Her latest collection 'Illegal city decor' sees her lace-bombing the streets of Warsaw with spray-painted stencilled doilies. My yarn bombing efforts pale into comparison!

City Decor 2014, by NeSpoon

See more of NeSpoon's exquisite work at https://www.behance.net/NeSpoon and show your appreciation!

The original discovery was made on http://www.boredpanda.com/crochet-lace-street-art-nespoon/.

Cross country knitting

A rather wonderful weekend in Devon with precious friends and a new baby meant that I have spent some seven or so hours on trains over the last few days. It could have been a recipe for abject boredom, but thankfully, I had my Yléonore shawl to get on with, as well as being lucky enough to witness some amazing views.

The Yléonore is a lace sampler - a circular piece of lace knitting that looks incredibly complicated but is actually deceptively simple, providing you take it one little chunk at a time. The pattern is from a designer called MMario KKnits (who I discovered via the wonderful Ravelry) and is based on crochet techniques from 19th Century Eléonore Riego de la Branchardiere.

I'm using Paton's Mirage DK for this project - a variegated double knit bamboo and cotton mix which I picked up from a bargain price in Wolverhampton's House of Fraser (note to Black Country yarn lovers). It's a mix of purple, blue and green which works beautifully with the expanding circles of the shawl's design. 

Clickety-clack go the needles. Clickety-clack goes the train.

Yléonore the first

This is actually my second Yléonore. I made the first for my mother-in-law as a thank you present for all the wool she had donated to me - erm yes, that did mean she got all the wool back again, but at least she had something beautiful to show for it! (see right)

My tip for this piece is to use stitch markers to break it up into manageable pieces. As the shawl grows, it does become easy to lose your way as the rounds eventually become several hundreds of stitches in length.

Each round is made up of a pattern block repeated several times, so placing a marker after each section or pair of sections makes it much easier to count back (and realise sooner) if you make a mistake. I spent so much time going backwards and forwards again on the first shawl that I often had nothing to show at the end of an evening's knitting!

I love the perpetuity of this pattern, with just enough variation thrown into it to stop it becoming repetitive, without being overly complex. Perfect for trundling cross country on a late Sunday morning.

Festival of Quilts

There is nothing more inspiring than an enormous room full of crafty paraphernalia that's packed to the rafters with people who share your hobby in abundance and are every bit as excited about it as you are...

I'm talking of course, about the Festival of Quilts. It's a heavenly day of stash enhancement (shopping), discovery of new techniques and meeting a multitude of like-minded souls.

I'll be writing more about some of the amazing quilts I saw, and that will hopefully spur me on to create some of my own, but for now, I thought I'd share with you the day's haul.

Oh Festival of Quilts, you make me so happy

Above you can see:

• The Hana bag kit and some delicious kimono fabric fat quarters from Japan Crafts. Their fabrics are so wonderfully unusual.
• Three sets of craft-specific needles from Redditch's own John James Needles - long and short beading needles, bent-ended needles (probably not the technical term) for sewing-up knitting and some patchwork needles. Perfect for my three current crafts!
• Some yummy motif cottons from Doughty's. From the sublime to the slightly ridiculous: a William Morris print, nautical shapes and cute elephants. Definitely check out Doughty's if you're in the west of England/east Wales - they have several shops in Hereford.
• A patchwork ruler from Creative Grids - I really don't have an excuse for not starting that log cabin blanket now!
• And finally, a beautiful metre of peacock feather ribbon from a French company called Tendance Ruben. New to the show this year, they have some stunning designs from the likes of Kaffe Fassett and Amy Butler. We were utterly spoilt for choice and could easily have bought hundreds of metres worth of exquisite ribbon.

There was also something fabulous from my local Spellbound Beads but I can't tell you about that just yet - it's supposed to be a surprise...

The Festival of Quilts runs until Sunday 11th August at Birmingham's NEC. It features a hall full of stalls as well several superb exhibitions from quilters around the world. Standard tickets on the door are £15.

Strangely addictive hexagons

After several years of stashing away sumptuous fabrics and saying I'd do something with them, I have finally made my first foray into patchwork.

I was lucky enough to secure a place on one of Coats Crafts' patchwork workshops at the Sewing for Pleasure show earlier this year, where I learnt a nifty little technique for hand sewing hexagons.

Brilliant for lazy (and less than perfect) sewers like me, it involved using little binder clips to secure your fabric as it was folded over a hexagon-shaped paper template. Each corner was then secured with a couple of stitches, unclipping as you went, with the thread run straight across the back. No pinning, no tacking and you can easily slip the paper template out again to reuse it.

So I came home and got myself a little bit addicted to hexagons...

Here I am preparing my materials - some gorgeous Amy Butler fabric and some do-it-yourself hexagons. For the templates, I searched for 'hexagon template' in Google's image search and found a handy one on Homespun Scrapbooking. Having settled on a 2.5cm diameter, I replicated this several times in Microsoft Word and made a useful print-out.

It's all in the preparation

Then it was on to cutting out all the hexagons. I settled on 15 of each colour - that's 75 lovingly hand sewn hexagons all together. Although I confess, I inevitably became less meticulous as I went on, and eventually settled for chopping the fabric into strips rather than carefully cutting round each template. It didn't seem to make a lot of difference to the final look.

Next steps - the fun bit: preparing the design. I laid out all my cut-up hexagons and put the fabric back together in a lovely new order. You can see my final design below - big enough to make a nice lap quilt.

I'll have a 'P' please Bob.

Right now, I'm still sewing the hexagons together - with very small and neat over-sewing on each of the sides where they meet. The repetition is incredibly therapeutic and there is something very pleasing about the tessellation of the hexagonal shape.

And for all you children of the eighties out there, I'm calling this my 'Blockbusters' quilt. All together now, der - der - di  - der - der, der - di - der ...