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!