I stumbled across some beautiful pictures this morning, and an amazing giveaway. Bespoke Press has given 10 young illustrators a chance by producing a set of limited edition prints, and they are giving away a set of all 10 prints here. It was so difficult to pick a favourite to enter the giveaway. I love “The Sugar in your tea, …” and “Treasures untold” but I eventually decided on “The smell of the sea”.

… for a friend’s Etsy shop and a giveaway.  Melanie (wiccked on Etsy) makes really beautiful things.  I have some of her ATCs but, until I looked at her Etsy, I hadn’t realised she did PMC – check out the Sun Pot, Bugs on a Screen door and By The Rivers of Babylon in particular.  This week, she has donated the prize for The Aussie Handmade Giveaway, so check that out too.

Before I get on to what I am doing today, I want to mention that a friend from Swap-bot, lisajhoney, is doing a blog giveaway. She makes wonderful felt food and other felt items.  The giveaway runs till September 2nd, but if you are reading this too late, please visit her blog and Etsy shop anyway.

So, back to me … today I am making mini-book charms for a series of charm swaps on Swap-bot.  I made the first one a few weeks ago using traditional sewn signatures (groups of folded pages), but cutting the pages accurately enough for such a small book is a slow process, so now I am experimenting with mini accordion books.  If this works out, I’ll post pictures soon.

I’ve been interested in quilting for a long time, but my previous attempts to get started have faded away.  I still have a half-finished lap quilt top from too many years ago to remember.  Then I joined Swap-bot and discovered fabric ATCs and postcards, and I’ve been having fun ever since.

Last year I finished my first quilt, also for a swap. It is only a doll-sized quilt, but it was a start. I chickened out of quilting that one and just used buttons to ‘tie’ it, but …

I was going to relaunch this blog on my 60th birthday a few days ago, but  I didn’t meet that deadline.  I have been working on it, though, with a new layout which still needs some tweaking.  In the time I’ve been ‘away’, I’ve broadened my art/craft interests a lot, so I will be including art, paper crafts and quilting along with my fibre crafts, but it will still be primarily a craft blog.

I am unlikely to post every day, perhaps not even every week, but I will try not to leave too long between posts, so I hope I will eventually get some fairly regular visitors.

… and still making stuff – sometimes more successfully than others.  The silk scarf I was working on for the competition and exhibition didn’t work out, but I’m hoping to salvage it in some way.  I hope to have pics of it on the loom in a day or two.  I’m still working on tablet-woven bookmarks for the exhibition too.

Meanwhile I am also working on swap stuff, such as this hand-dyed yarn:

 

Some of the tablet-woven bookmarks will be for swaps too.  I just finished another bobbin lace one like this one:

 

and I am working on 2 more snakes.

I dug out my neglected lace pillow to make some bookmarks for a Swap-bot swap.  As I didn’t have much time, I decided to do some old favourites, the snakes. 

They are fun to do, and seem to be popular.  I might make some ‘lacier’ bookmarks to have ready for future swaps.

What I really should be doing is making some things for our guild challenge and exhibition.  Entries are supposed to be in by April 21st, which doesn’t leave much time.  I have some ideas, but I’m still procrastinating.  I do have some finished items for the exhibition, but I’d also like to make some things for the ‘small sales table’ there.

 

I was given some Rowan Cashsoft DK in Sweet (that really is the colour name) and decided to make a Liesel scarf for a friend.

 

When I swatched, I liked the shape of the start, which forms a nice curve, but not the ending, so I decided to knit the scarf as two halves and graft them together.

The grafted section does not like quite as good as I hoped, but I think it is OK.  I considered stopping each half 2 rows before the end of the pattern repeat to make that section shorter, but that would cause problems with the purled centres of the leaves.

I used 4.5mm needles, and the scarf took 132g (375 yds).  The scarf was blocked to 7.25″ wide and 77″ long, but shrunk to 6.5″ by 72″ once unpinned and allowed to relax.  Even though my friend likes long scarves, I thought that was plenty long enough, but I still had some yarn left, so I decided to make some fingerless mitts to match.  I knitted them ‘top down’ to use that nice curved edge over the back of the back of the knuckles.  I did them on 4.00mm Brittany dpns, as I thought they needed a firmer gauge.

My friend’s hands are smaller than mine so they should fit her a little better.without the cuff creeping over the base of the hand.  I did the thumb gusset slightly towards the palm – you can see the shaping better on this picture, which also shows that the ‘straight across’ top on the palm side doesn’t interfere with bending the hand, while the curved top on the back gives a bit more protection to the fingers.  They only took 30g (85 yds) of yarn for the pair.

And here is a picture of my friend wearing them:

Just a quick entry to say that I have updated my sock page.  Some friends were discussing socks and sharing pictures and I found some old pictures that I didn’t have online, so I added them to the end of the page, with brief descriptions.

As for current craft work, I finally dug out my Icarus-in-progress, after putting it aside for Christmas and other gift knitting, and I’m still knitting the Opal socks for myself … more on those later.

Anne Dixon visited our guild this weekend – a very entertaining and informative talk yesterday which focussed on the history of inkle weaving, then a workshop today.  One of the great things about going to follow-up workshops is that you get a chance to look at the tutor’s samples in much more detail than after the talk.  Another is the chance to work alongside friends, swapping ideas and having fun though working hard.  A bonus this time was that Anne is a friend too, through the Braid Society and through other workshops at which she was a fellow student.

Today we were given a choice of 2 warping plans.  I chose what she calls Baltic-style pickup, a technique used all around the Baltic Sea – Scandinavia, Latvia and so on.  I’d already pretty much decided to choose that one, but seeing her samples yesterday confirmed I’d made the right choice as I loved her Baltic designs. 

 I warped up my Ashford mini-inkle loom last night using 3 colours of #8 pearl cotton.  (The third colour was white - you can just see a line of it on each side separating the borders from the main pattern area.)

 

 Yes, that tiny sample is all I have to show from a 6-hour workshop, but I am still very pleased with it.  I wove enough to convince myself that I now understand the technique, and that is what I needed to do today.  I spent a lot of the time there watching Anne demonstrate other techniques on the other warping plan, but I couldn’t try any of those on this warp.  I also spent a long time looking at her samples, and making notes of things I want to try later.  Overall, a very enjoyable day!