Overwhelmed

I’ve been thinking about writing here recently. Right now, I could write this exact post all over again – Knit therapy

Life is all just a bit overwhelming right now. Mostly it’s good, very good, but very full and busy.

Last week we were on holiday in Cornwall, which was honestly the best holiday I’ve had in a long while and the most relaxed I’ve been for ages. We enjoyed seeing a different part of the country, and Cornwall is truly beautiful.

The boys being that little bit older now, we were able to get out and do some slightly more adventurous things together – long walks, a 20 mile bike ride and even a spot of parkrun tourism. We spent lazy afternoons crabbing in the harbours and eating fish and chips and fudge at the beach.

We nosed around craft shops and art galleries. I even found a yarn shop, though it was closed when we got there. The cottage we stayed in was lovely, spacious yet cosy, in a beautiful location. I really felt like I had space and time to breathe and relax. I read a whole book while we were there – Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier.

Coming home, with a return to clutter and chaos and a busy week of work and activities felt overwhelming and oppressive. I forget how therapeutic crafting can be, yet somehow it’s also part of the heavy weight of physical and mental clutter. I have so many projects half done, half abandoned, half intended, waiting in the wings for the right time or the right tools or the right space. I end up in a brain fog where I can’t get motivated to do anything at all, but just waste any free moments scrolling idly, uselessly through my phone instead, finding inspiration without motivation, ideas but no decisions. But yesterday I picked up some knitting that I hadn’t touched in months. I only added a few rows, but it felt good.

Equilibrium

Today is apparently my 4 years blogging anniversary! Over the years, crafting has given me fuel to blog and blogging has motivated me to keep crafting. Recently I’ve had less time and motivation for either because my creative energies and time have been increasingly directed towards my theatrical pursuits, which is less suited to writing about. Rehearsals don’t make for many pretty pictures! Here’s some pretty tulips instead!

I’m currently rehearsing for my third show of the year and I’m hoping to take part in a couple more before the year is out. Not only that, but I have also recently gone back to work after nearly 9 years of stay-at-home parenting. I wasn’t planning to go back to work just yet, but when my dream job fell in my lap, I couldn’t possibly refuse! I’m currently in the rebalancing phase – hopefully I’ll find my way back to crafting and therefore blogging once I’ve found the new equilibrium. There’s still plenty on my making list!

 

Mr Incredible

I thought I’d show you another quick make I did for Christmas.

Pumpkin has never really been interested in the idea of dressing up. A pirate costume cobbled together out of clothes he already had in his wardrobe was about his limit. But when he watched ‘The Incredibles’ a month or two ago, he swiftly started talking about being Mr Incredible and telling me he wanted a Mr Incredible costume.

For those of you who need a reminder, or simply have no idea, this is Mr Incredible.

Incredibles picture taken from imdb.com

There are plenty of tutorials around on other blogs for making an Incredibles costume, but I thought the quickest and easiest way to do it would be to gather a few items of clothes and chop them around a bit.

Good ol’ Primark came up trumps for pretty much everything I needed.

A red T shirt

A pair of red leggings

A pair of black leggings

A pair of black gloves

I also bought black, orange, yellow and white felt from a craft shop to make the logo.

It’s a very simple make, really. First, I chopped the black leggings just below the crotch to make the top part into the ‘pants’ that are worn super-hero style on the outside. The legs of the leggings became long sleeves which I hand-stitched into the existing sleeves of the T-shirt.

I used a template for the logo which I found on this blog, and cut the pieces out of the coloured felt. Annoyingly (given that I ended up doing the majority of the work on Christmas Eve, having been wiped out by a sickness bug in the run up to Christmas) I found it really tricky to machine sew the logo – I think because the felt was very soft and the angles were too much to manouver round – so I had to handstitch the whole thing onto the T shirt.

I ran out of time to do a mask and a belt, though I hope to get round to doing both at some point soon. But the look on Pumkin’s face when he opened the present on Christmas Day was just priceless. He was absolutely over the moon, and pretty much insisted on wearing the costume for about 3 days straight! Definitely worth the effort!

Paper Craft

October is a busy time in our house. There are birthdays galore, and I’m getting to the final stages of rehearsal for the musical I’m involved in, not to mention usual school activities and the rapid approach of the Half Term Holiday.

For ease of organisation, we’ve booked a party at a local Soft Play centre for my biggest Pumpkin’s 5th birthday. Not wanting to leave everything to an off-the-shelf feel though, I decided to hand make the invitations. The Soft Play centre has a castle theme, along with wizards, dragons and princesses, so I thought I could pick up on some of that for the invitations, and then hopefully later on, for the cake as well.

I wanted to keep things fairly simple, so it would be straightforward to produce around 15 invitations the same.

I started by sketching out a basic castle shape onto some card from an old cereal packet, which I then cut out to make a template. I wanted them to still have a hand-drawn quality, so I traced round the template using a pencil and then went over the lines freehand using a broad black felt-tip.

The stones were printed on using a small offcut of foam from some packaging material, which I cut to size. I used white paint, and then went over some of them again with black paint to give a bit of texture. When they were dry I outlined them using a fine black felt-tip.

The drawbridge was made using a piece of brown card cut just big enough to cover the print out with the party information, and glued in place. The finishing touch was a flag flying from the ramparts. Pumpkin wanted both red and yellow, so I did some of each. I cut a narrow triangle of thin coloured paper with a flap at one end for attaching, which I curled one way and then the other by running an open scissor blade along the paper to make it look like it was fluttering. They will no doubt get squished in the envelopes, but they looked good when I put them together anyway! Most of the castles just got one colour flag, but I had some left over, so some got a double one.

There were some other details that I considered adding – a number 5 on the flag, grass along the bottom of the walls, maybe a vine growing up a wall, but I ran out of time, and I was reluctant to do anything that might spoil them.

The other school mummies may think I’m nuts for going to so much effort for a party invitation, but I enjoyed the excuse to do a little design and crafting, and Pumpkin was delighted with them and so excited to give them out to his friends at school today, so I think it was worth it. Now I need to get thinking about his cake!

Crochet

My Granny taught me to crochet when I was around 10 or 11. Granny squares. For years, all I knew how to crochet was granny squares! I liked the motion of it, the rhythm of counting stitches, the way they grew quickly from one loop to a small square and bigger. It was faster than knitting, easier (I’d never been able to cast on or off when I’d tried knitting before) and there was only ever one stitch to drop.

I made a blanket for a new baby I knew.

Then stopped.

There’s definitely a limit to the number of granny square blankets I wanted to make. Besides, I had plenty of other things to move on to…

Then, in 2009, when I was expecting my first child, I pulled my old bag of yarn from the wardrobe and made a start on a new baby blanket. The blanket grew and was finished. I wanted to do more. Youtube is a brilliant resource for learning just about anything! I made a hat. I made a bootie. I had a baby boy. The hat was too small. The second bootie never got started. The blanket was all the wrong colours for my baby boy. I made one more blanket for a friend’s baby girl, and then back into the cupboard it went.

Roll on 3 years and I was expecting baby number two. I needed something I could occupy myself with whilst sitting down. I found a pattern for a monkey hat on pinterest (another great resource) and fancied having a go, but didn’t have anything like the right colours, so decided to make it as a polar bear hat for my son. I vaguely followed the pattern, but found it easy to understand the construction and therefore easy to adapt the pattern to suit my ideas and my son. By the end of the day my son was proudly wearing his brand new hat and demanded another – a dragon hat! Said dragon hat duly followed, inspired by pictures I’d seen, but entirely my own design.

I browsed blogs and discovered Attic24, and decided Lucy’s ripple pattern would be great as a baby blanket and started work. A cardigan came next, then matching hats – one for a boy, one for a girl as we did not know what our baby would be – a car seat blanket, then a cake for my son’s kitchen toy box, complete with a plate on request and a slice of cake.

Two weeks overdue and desperate for anything to keep my brain occupied I started a giraffe soft toy and was invited to join a crochet group on Facebook. Baby boy eventually arrived and time to crochet was limited, but the giraffe did get finished. I discovered Ravelry and learned about blocking and frogging, new stitches and tried new patterns, and there have been a few more projects since then – a second giraffe, a Heidi Bear Happypotamus, a doll’s blanket for my niece and a beautiful shawl that is very slowly taking shape. More hats and boots and even an attempt at writing a pattern.

I very much enjoy crochet, but I am quite selective in choosing my crochet projects. I don’t have the kind of house that lends itself to rustic, pretty homemade decorations (they’d just get buried under all the clutter) and I’m not always confident that homemade gifts will be appreciated in all quarters, so I largely stick to making things that I know I will use.  That said, there are the occasional projects I’ve undertaken just because I fancied having a go at something a bit different that caught my eye.

I will be keeping a record of items I’ve made – even just writing this post has made me realised that I’ve made more than I thought I had – and maybe posting a pattern or two should inspiration strike.

Let me know how and when you learned to crochet, and tell me what your favourite pattern is and why you like it.