Crochet snowmen heads

I finally made the snowman head that set me on the path of crocheting. Last year around the same time I came across this awesome Christmas ornament.

from an equal cool site . Unfortunately I did not posses any crocheting skills. My mother had tried to teach me the basics on several occasions but this had always ended in much laughing (mostly from her side) and no results.

At the same time that I spotted these great snowmen I also spotted ornament knitting with Arne and Carlos. Which ignited my current creativity wave. The child sweater that I knitted after Christmas re-acquainted me  with the art of  crocheting. After knitting the ornaments and the sweater I got a been-there-done-that-feeling with knitting for a few months. I seized the opportunity and decided that I had to change my lack of crochet skills and started to search on you tube for patient teachers. I found a bunch of them with one particular favorite . The lady in these movies explains very clear and the image quality is great. I was wondering if I could recommend these movies to a non-dutch speaker by using the automatic capture button. The results were very funny but far from useful. In the first few seconds you tube came up with word suggestions like "hike" and "holocaust". After having a quit productive crochet year filled with several cactus and stuffed animals, yesterday I finally made a snowman!

The nose is a bit to low which resulted lacking some space for a happy smile but all in all I am quit satisfied. I will keep you posted on the development of some companionship for my lonely friend.

The very hungry caterpillar

I have some trouble with buying gifts now a days. In the past when I was still a student my friends (and me) cloud not simply buy every (small) thing that we liked. Now that we are all working it is harder to find a good present because all the "good" small things we simply buy when we realize we like them. In such a case a personalized hand made gift is ideal! My first hand made gift was to my sister, I made her a crocheted cactus and loved it.

After that I decided to give the option of a hand made gift whenever I ask what somebody would like to get as a present. My niece was creating a "very hungry caterpillar" room for her son and could use another caterpillar. This was a very easy project, I created the caterpillar by increasing and decreasing like if making a round shape. I added some wire to be able to fake crawling position. A friend of mine pointed out that I reversed the leg amount (oops), well lets call it creative expression.

New dresses

Since my daughter goes to school she has decided she only wants to wear dresses and skirts. until the age of four she did not have an opinion about her cloths and I usually dressed her in trousers. I considered trousers to be much better suited for playing. Me, I also only regularly wear dresses or skirts. Now, she apparently disagrees with my clothing ideas and prefers something in which she can twirl. I looked online and saw some great dresses but their price would prevent me let her play in them.

Looking trough the pictures of dresses online the thought occurred to me that I might be able to make a dress (or three) myself. I had inherited a sewing machine and knew how to use it.

I occasionally had sewn some things but I never got infected with the sewing fever. I decided to try again and bought a universal pattern Butterick 4842 and used a piece of fabric that I bought about 7 years before to make myself a skirt. The whole process was much quicker than I expected (probably also because I skipped finishing the sides of the fabric) and within two evenings her dress was finished.

I felt the dress was a bit short and too wide and decided to try again. I bought some new fabric made the bodice less wide and the skirt longer. This time the whole thing was spot on and I created two more dresses from the same pattern in two weeks. In the second picture she is playing me, apparently this would also have been a great pregnancy dress pattern.

I bought some more patterns and some more fabric (that is how it starts right)  and created another dress and then my sewing skills went in hibernation for almost a year. Than I discovered the fun of jersey and since then I have not gone a week without sewing something.

Hooked/zpagetti bag

One of my colleagues told me she was making a toy storage bin with Zpagetti or Hooked yarn and it was going very fast. I got intrigued by this thick material and with my birthday coming around the corner I found myself the perfect gift suggestion.

 I got four different cones and started with making a small pink hand bag for my daughter. Because of the thickness of the material the bag was really ready in a jiff. I just crocheted a rectangle  in single crochet and crocheted the whole thing together to form a small bag. The strap is made from a chain and one dingle crochet in every stitch from the chain. I crocheted a flower to function as a length adjuster for the strap. The blurred flower fabric is my daughters skirt while she was dancing with joy. The thing in the right corner, is indeed my foot. Do other people have the same problem that if you want to take a picture from something lying lower than you your feet often end up on the picture?And the blob on the left.. No idea... Now I am more serious in documenting my creative adventures I am at least trying to take better pictures, but also this early history artifact got misplaced somewhere in the past. 

Knitted girl sweater

Arne and Carlos restarted my knitting activities, but after Christmas I did not want to make more tree ornaments. Although the tree was far from full, creating Christmas decorations looses its charm if you have to wait 11 more months before you can use them again. So, I needed a new project.

I had some green yarn lying around, which was already waiting for years to get some purpose. I had bought it probably ten years earlier but never came around to use it. I felt that I had to use the old materials first before I could buy new ones (another habit that I got rid of for which re-installment wouldn't hurt).

Around the time I bought the green yarn I also had a subscription to a knitting magazine. I kept all the magazines and after browsing (through the seemingly very old fashioned models) I found one I liked. I did not feel up to knitting an adult size sweater yet, so I knitted one for my eldest daughter.

The green yarn I had was really very green... so when I finished the sweater I felt it needed some extra color to spice it up. I decided I wanted some light green accents and some crocheted flowers on them. I had never crocheted a flower, so thank god for the internet! Flowers really are a great, very small scale crocheting project. They only take a few minutes (not counting the hour you need to finding out what single, double and triple stitch are...).

Forgive me for the extremely poor quality of the picture. This is the only picture I have of the sweater. The yarn I had was 100% polyester and I really did not like the feel of it, so after lying on the shelve for a year I just threw it out. Although I do not have a garment to show for it, I did learn a very valuable lesson from this project: always use good materials which in my case means cotton. I realize this is not a universal lesson for everybody, but I love to knit with (good quality) cotton. If you decided to try out cotton start with Phildar cotton 3. It really has every color you can imagine and it has a nicely woven threat. The sweater also steered me onto the crocheting path, so all in all a very successful sweater I would say ;)

Knitting tree ornaments with Arne and Carlos

Chronologically this was not the first post I wrote, but I consider the content to be the match that lit up my creativity.

When I came across this book I was immediately intrigued. And started to think for who I could buy this book. For myself quickly came to mind... This blog is slightly back dated and at the time I saw this book I was far from creatively productive. If I started something at all, I usually did not finish it. Therefore I did not feel that I "deserved" this book just for fun. In present time by the way I have no trouble at all to treat myself to a new creative book or pattern (although maybe I should).

Back to the question who to give it to, I decided that I could give it either to my mum or to a friend (who did not knit, but could always use an very cool book on her shelves about knitting gay guys) to whom I was her Secret Santa. But when the book arrived, and I took a sneak peek my self resistance caved  in. I simply had to have this book for myself! Judging from my enthusiasm you would almost think I get commission on the book because besides giving it to both my mum and my friend I have been promoting the book ever since. Just browsing through the book puts you in an instant happy holiday mood even if you can not knit.

I had learned knitting from my mother but I would never wear the sweaters that I knitted, because I was not ready to reveal my knitting skills to the world (a very common teenager thing at that time when knitting was far from cool). As some of you might know, knitting sweaters takes a relative long amount of time and you have to have quite some perseverance to finish it. These Christmas ornament took me about two evenings each, which makes them a great condensed project to start up knitting again. I say start up knitting again because if this is actually your first knitting project these balls can be nerve racking. The balls start out with a very small amount of stitches over four needles and for the beginner this might be hard to handle. But two of my friends that did not have much experience tried, succeeded and loved it (not the friend who got the book though, she prefers to keep these guys on the shelves, but you never know for the future..)

Most of the balls I made I gave away as presents. Where I have some pictures of a few that I kept.