Harrison's Baby Blanket

Time for another crochet post I think :)

Harrison's blanket was the first baby blanket I crocheted, until that point the only blankets I'd finished were small ones for teddies, which were colourful and fun to do, but didn't exactly require much commitment or staying power. I also wasn't blogging at this point so sadly I don't have very many photos of it.

I had seen a blanket crocheted by a friend of a friend, it was beautiful in its simplicity - one single large granny square.

I decided on a colour scheme of white, pale blue and oatmeal. I wanted a pale blue, but not baby baby blue, more a sort of bright pale blue, if that makes sense. The yarn I used was 3 different brands but all were a soft acrylic Baby DK. I wanted this blanket to be used and therefore be practical and easy washable.

The blue was the colour of the first few rounds, a single round in the middle would have been a bit lost or a maybe even a bit hypnotising...!

After that, it was just a case of keep going round and round.

Dolly very kindly offered to model it for me. Aaah, doesn't she look relaxed.

The look I was aiming for was of random order of colours, and random stripe widths. However I found random quite tricky to achieve! I crocheted about 35-40 rows of granny-ness, and then finished off with a scalloped edging, and that was it :)

I love this blanket. Its so unfussy, uncluttered, unencumbered by detail, and just pure and simple. As my first completed baby blanket, I will always remember it with great fondness :)

Bellissima! Part 2

Yesterday I posted about Little Miss and I having a girly shopping day on Saturday at our local Craft Village in "Bellissima!Part 1". Well, on Sunday the whole family went on a pasta-making workshop also in the Craft Village. Little Man was very distressed, he doesn't like new things, and really didn't want to go, however you'll be relieved (I was) to hear that he LOVED it. As did all of us.
The pasta-making takes place at a large table in the middle of the shop. Customers come and go at the same time, so its a bit of a spectator sport, but none of us minded and it certainly created lots of chat!

Each of us had a bag containing 100g of durum wheat flour. We tipped it directly onto the table and made a well in the middle, into which we poured two spoonfuls of tepid water....

.... and then gently mixed in the flour until the water was all soaked up ...

We repeated this process 3 or 4 times until we had added between 6 and 8 spoonfuls of water and the mixture formed a nice soft squidgy non-sticky dough. We tested it by poking it with a finger and seeing it spring back.

Here are my 3 Little Chefs, dressed for the part,smiles all round

We put the dough to one side and left it to rest while we had a refreshment break ..... squash for the Little People ... (and Daddy who was driving)

.... and wine for Mummy - don't mind if I do .... plus rosemary crostini for us all ....sooooo delicious

Since having the children, having a glass of wine in the middle of the day has become a very rare event, so I felt extremely decadent, and had that on-holiday-nothing-in-the-world-to-do-except-relax feeling ...looooovely !

Snacks and drinks consumed, soon we were back to the pasta making.
We split the dough in two with a knitting needle (yay, there HAD to be a yarny connection somewhere)

... I can't exactly remember why it was a knitting needle (remember I'd had the wine by this point) but I think Jackie was demonstrating how to make spirals around it. We decided it was more fun chopping with it.

Once mostly chopped in half we pulled it apart like so ....

Now came the fun part - using the past machine ......we had to feed in the piece of dough and turn the handle to flatten it out, a bit like a pasta mangle .....

This part took the longest, each piece of dough had to be rolled about 10 times, getting thinner and thinner as we set the rollers closer and closer together.

Then the SUPER fun part ....  we got to feed the dough into a sort of play-doh attachment ....

... oooo!!! look!! Tagliatelle!

"Perfecto!" as Little Man kept saying. He was so funny, he kept putting on an Italian accent and saying "Expresso Pasta!". When he found out expresso was a type of coffee he thought it was very funny :)

We also used a little crinkle cutter to make rectangle which we then nipped in to make bows ..... 

... and we used another play-doh attachment to make angel-hair pasta...

.... our final plates of fresh pasta (plus a very messy table)....

Off home we then went (no clearing up to do - hurrah), with our pasta shapes in bags, clutching a brand new shiny pasta machine and a bag of durum wheat flour. We'd decided to treat ourselves to the machine so we can have fun making past at home.

We had the workshop pasta for dinner that evening, I am truly amazed that flour and water (note there were no eggs in this recipe) actually stayed together when boiled, it's a miracle that it doesn't all just dissolve into gloop. We were so eager to eat the end result that I forgot to take any photos of it! But we all enjoyed it with a little bit of tomato and basil sauce, a fresh salad and a sprinkle of cheese! Bellissima!

ps. I am pleased to report that I have since used our new pasta machine at home - it was a roaring success so the first lot wasn't just beginner's luck - phew!

Bellissima! Part 1

Hello bloggy friends! I had a top Top TOP weekend, but only just now had time to write about it. I decided Bellissima would be a good title - part of the weekend was spending time with my beautiful eldest daughter, Little Miss, and part of the weekend had an Italian theme (more on that later). I think Bellissima is Italian for beautiful, but it also sounds like it should mean happy and fun too, and that's what our weekend was - happy and fun :)

On Saturday Little Tomboy had a party to go to in the afternoon, so it seemed like a good opportunity for some Daddy-Son bonding time (they sat in different rooms playing on different x-boxes - go figure), and some Mummy-Daughter bonding time with my Little Miss. We both like a good mooch around the shops, and going for coffee and cake, so we decided to go to our local Craft Village, Holme Grange

Holme Grange has lots of wee shoppes, all perfect for browsing and oohing and aahing over Lovely Things, and squealing " ooooo!! Look!!!" every 5 seconds.

We visited the craft shop and bought some decoupage papers for a Future Project....

... and Little Miss spent some of her Christmas money on a little dog - she is a sucker for a cuddly toy.

She's named him Sandy. We had lots of fun taking photos while Sandy photo-bombed them .... naughty Sandy!

That last one was taken while we took a pit-stop in the Tea Shop .... they have an amazing array of home-made cakes and biscuits, it was hard to choose ... but we managed .... Victoria sponge and fizzy orange for Little Miss, and coffee cake (my favourite) and a pot of tea for Mummy ... yummm

.... we even used the little forks to eat our cakes ... how posh :)

Refuelled, we then went to Possibly My Favourite Shop In The World - The Little Craft Barn. I adore this shop. Firstly it has yarn. Well that in itself is enough to make it FAB. But it also has fabric, trim, buttons, craft kits, baby gifts, wooden toys, oooooh its just Lush. Love love love it. There are lots of bits and pieces for sale that have been hand-made locally by, well, people like me, I suppose. Home-crafters who just need an outlet for a few items. The picture below is the outside of the front of the shop. It faces onto the courtyard which has loads of tables and chairs for lounging in while consuming cake and tea from the cafe :) Gorgeous in the summer :)

Anyway, back to the yarn. Did I mention they have Yarn!  I need more yarn in the same way that the Sahara needs more sand, but it would have been rude not to buy any, don't you think ? I bought a big squashy ball of James C Brett Marble Chunky - destined for a cushion cover, and a few balls of cotton. I haven't used cotton a great deal, but I love the stitch definition that it gives, so I thought I'd buy a few balls just to have when the mood takes me :) 

Little Miss also chose a piece of fabric (it's meant to be butterflies but we decided it looked more like sweetie wrappers :) that I'm going to use to line a bag for her, her favourite bag is now too small for her, a perfect excuse to crochet a new one then! I might even use the cotton yarn for that, as the colours go together with the fabric so well.

One thing that brought a tear to my eye was this little present for me that Little Miss chose, and paid for out of her own money ....

.... a beautiful little hand-painted wooden heart :)  Such a simple piece and yet the message so heartfelt as she read it out to me and pressed it into my hand. Sigh. I don't want her ever to change. The heart is now hanging on the board next to my sewing table, and makes me smile every time I catch sight of it :)

Next up was the Gallery - again lots of gorgeous works of art for sale. Paintings, sculptures, silk flowers, bowls, cards, all produced locally by amazingly talented artists. I spotted a lovely clock which I pondered over for aaaaaaaages, we went out of the shop but my thoughts kept returning to the clock so I decided to just buy it. It was only ten pounds, not exactly breaking the bank, but we didn't really need it so it felt a bit extravagant. But I do love it :)

It looks grey in that photo, but it actually a pale sagey green. It goes really well with my green jug, and those roses were a present from hubby :)

We made a quick (but apparently Very Necessary) stop in the sweetie shop on our way to the car, purchased some lollies, and then dashed into the Italian deli shop, Delights of Italy, mainly to get out of the rain. Whilst waiting for the rain to stop I was chatting to the lady who runs the shop, Jackie, who reminded me that she runs pasta-making workshops. I thought "why not?"  and booked a session for the whole family the next day (now you see where the Italian bit comes in). 

The pasta-making will have to wait for my next post, this one is already long enough:) So for now, I will leave you with another picture of my beautiful roses! Ciao!

Easter is Over

My Easter tulips finally gave up the ghost today, they'd done pretty well lasting nearly 2 weeks. And the last piece of chocolate was consumed this afternoon (a bonus chunk found in a box about to be recycled - lucky Little Miss got that piece!). Easter is Officially Over. So it seems fitting to show you some final Easter fun photos.

The Little People went back to school on Wednesday after a pretty long break of two and a half weeks. I really enjoyed having them at home for so long, they are great fun at the moment, still happy to spend time with boring old Mum, but independent enough to not need constant attention, so I can get a few things done round the house as well. Including some crochet of course :)

Easter Sunday was great fun. You may remember I had bought some little eggs to crochet covers for, I blogged about it here. Well, I also bought a load more that I wanted to fill with teeny chocolate eggs, and then hide them all round the house for an Easter Egg Hunt.
Now, I've been here before and learned a valuable lesson - do not just let 3 children of different ages on the loose to find as many treats as possible: at least one, and quite possibly all, of them will end up crying because one of them will find nearly all of them leaving none for anyone else....

So I bought 6 different colours of plastic eggs .....

... yellow and orange, blue and green, pink and purple. I popped some chocolate eggs and sweeties inside the plastic eggs and then hid the plastic eggs round the house....... and it worked perfectly:) No arguments, tears, or fighting, they were all very good and didn't even tell each other if they spotted someone else's colour of egg.

Some were quite tricky to find, involving much shouting of "Warmer! Warmer! Colder! Warmer! Boiling!" and so on. They all seemed to enjoy their loot, and it didn't last long ....

... they loved their not-so-egg-shaped Easter-eggs, like this one ....

and of course not forgetting the extras that come with Easter eggs ....

... and who remembers "Pez" and the associated Pez dispenser (or the "Pez-inator as Little Man has decided it's called)....

... and massive personalised eggs from Grandma!

....  but it wasn't all about the children, I was a very lucky lady and my lovely husband gave me some really sweet thoughtful gifts. I love chocolate (yay) but I can't really have it because it triggers migraines (boo), and he knows I like little tins for putting things in ...... so he gave me this ultra cute bunny rabbit tin with little eggs in ...

.... I'm now using it to keep my stitch markers in :)
... and he also gave me this tin of scrummy shortbread .....

... not sure what I'll use this one for yet, but the biscuits were De-eee-licious :)

In case you're wondering I was a Very Bad Wife and didn't get him anything - too busy arranging the children's bits and pieces - he was seriously unimpressed - oops!!

Hope you all had lovely, relaxing, stress-free, calm and happy Easters :)

Playing Hooky

Today is Thursday and for me that means Crochet Day .... HURRAY !!!  On Thursday mornings I go along to friendly group "The Barkham Hookers", run by local legend Gaynor White of Confessions of a Barkham Hooker. Gaynor is a crochet queen and runs loads of weekly crochet sessions in our area. She also makes wonderful bespoke helmet covers under her own label Pistehead Hats (don't you love the name! genius!).

So this morning as I was sitting crocheting, chatting and drinking coffee (my 3 favourite things all at once) I was pondering the wonderful array of differing projects being furiously crocheted in the room (between chat and coffee of course). So I thought I'd show you some sneaky peeks of what we're working on ......

Claire is working on a 365 (one-square-a-day) blanket .... gorgeous bright sunbursts .....

Carolyn joined us for the first time today and is working on some motifs from the Crocheted-Granny-Squares (Twenty-Make) book .... so pretty ....

Kelly is rustling up a green and white motif (totally forgot to ask you what it was for Kelly, sorry!) ... love that appley green ... luscious .....

Kelly's Mum, Claudine, is working on some little ducks for a mobile ..... sooooo cute .......

Claudine has made several mobiles in these lovely pastel shades, and sells them at one of our local craft shops The Little Craft Barn, go Claudine!

Nicky is finishing off this fabulous zig-zag giant rug/blanket (she hasn't decided which it will be yet :) made in really chunky yarn .... look at the size of it!

 Emma is making a beautiful lilac top for herself ....

Emma has been subscribing to the magazine The Art of Crochet and has pretty much every edition. I think she may also have made every single thing from every edition! She's made a vast array of squares (yet to be joined), including my favourite ......

.... it sort of has "holes" left by doing trebles but skipping a few stitches and instead doing a few chains (or something along those lines). The "holes" are then hand-finished by sewing blanket stitch round them. I Love this, so it's up there on my never-ending wish list of things to make :)

Chief hooker Gaynor is working on African violets which will become a tortoise like the one in her Turtle-Tales blogpost ... great little pile of flowers there ...

... and last but not least I, like Claire, am working on my 365 blanket, but my squares are teeny-tiny and its going to be a runner (I think that's the right word?) to go on my bed. Its the picture at the very top of this post.

So that was my morning: lovely, relaxing, chatty, and fun :)  Things had a woolly theme this afternoon as well .....

Oof just check out those colours! I was really lucky today to be given a load of "spare" wool by a friend. I don't understand the concept of "spare" wool. In my life there's no such thing .....

My lovely friend Mandy, who gave me the wool, is an all round craft-person extraordinaire. Knitting, crochet, gardening, painting signs, painting furniture, painting anything that doesn't move really. Mandy does the lot and does it all beautifully. You can follow her adventures on her facebook page Special with Scraps. Not content with craft for craft's sake, Mandy also makes various items which are sold via her local gift shop Mes Amis, like these gorgeous wooden signs and plaques....

Anyway Mandy popped round today with the said spare wool (there was loooooads more than in the photo, a lot of black and lots of the pink) and some other bits and bobs with which I'm planning to do some craft stuff with the children. I've got lots of ideas floating round my head that will make great use of those colours but I MUST try and be GOOD and finish other projects first!