budgie project

When I remarked the other day that our knit and natter group was not solely women I was referring specifically to Andrew, who learnt to crochet at one of Paper Village’s classes earlier in the year and launched straight into making a crochet budgie!

The first budgie was Bert, soon to be joined by Bessie and they have their very own Facebook page. This has now evolved into a full-scale project to create a flock of budgies which, it is hoped, will be installed in a local museum. The idea is to raise money for charity, but also to create a community of people working on a fun (some might say daft) project. Andrew has got all sorts of people working on it from the regular knit and natterers to older people in residential care.

Each maker is encouraged to name his/her budgie and photograph it. Most people also go on to create some sort of budgie persona. One or two of the budgies are very adventurous and have been hang-gliding or climbing Mont Blanc.

As my budgie took shape a very different character emerged, however. This is Peter. He works in a hair salon and he likes nothing better than watching The Great British Bake-Off.

(If you have a yen to make a crochet budgie for this project you can buy a kit costing £5 at Paper Village, which contains 2 balls of yarn; some odd bits of yarn to create eyes, beak etc;. a pattern and a label to attached to the finished bird that you return to the flock. There is plenty of yarn left over to carry on making your very own aviary)

knit and natter: a very good yarn

After a morning of technological meltdown yesterday trying to reinstall my wireless printer (unsuccessful so far), it was a relief to leave the house for the refuge of Wednesday afternoon’s Knit and Natter group.
We meet at Paper Village our local craft and yarn store, owned by the redoubtable Vicky - all round artist, crafter, trainer and social entrepreneur.

She welcomes a mixed group of knitters and crocheters every Wednesday afternoon just for the cost of a cup of tea. People come and go over the course of the afternoon and the range of projects is even wider than the range of people working on them (not exclusively women, by the way).

It’s hard to say what is so enjoyable and just plain right about sitting around yarning in the company of others, but it is – give it a try.

enough is enough

Having been brought up to believe that you shouldn’t start a new project before you finish the previous one, it came as a bit of an epiphany for me about twenty years ago when someone giving a talk on creativity suggested that it was actually good to have more than one project on the go at the same time. Some people might suggest that I have taken this advice too literally and gone a bit far in the opposite direction.

On the whole my creative stash lives in my workroom in the basement, but knitting and crochet are sociable crafts that can be practised sitting on a comfortable chair while watching the telly. This has meant that my yarn craft project bags were beginning to silt up at one end of the sofa. It was getting difficult to find what I wanted and generally stressful. So a large part of today has been devoted to sorting out this horrible space.

In the process I discovered that my main current project was in a bag far too small for it, so extra balls of yarn were lolling around here there and everywhere. That has now been sorted into one large bag.

There's a large bag full of the knitted squares for blanket-making that I blogged about last week. These need to stay at hand or I will forget to do anything with them.
I also found at least three bags of random/leftover/spare yarn; a scarf project started and (probably) abandoned; and a bag with two colours of recycled sari yarn which I have yet to find the right project for.

Then there was the bag that holds my in-between-other-projects/use-up-leftovers project - a crochet sampler blanket that will eventually be sewn together in strips.

This is definitely not abandoned, but needs to be on the back burner at the moment because of other things on the go. That and the random bags have been relegated to the basement depths.

As has this little project bag with the yarn and pattern for Fugue tam and mittens by Kate Davies. I have actually knitted one of the mittens, but it came out too small so I need to start again. I can't risk relegating this one for too long or I will miss the hat and mittens season.

Also begging to be sorted was my needle bag and another tube of needles. When it's organised this bag is incredibly useful as it also contains a ring binder for patterns. While Steve was at the cinema this afternoon I sat on the floor with all the needles and a needle gauge sorting out pairs and batches of double-ended needles. All my printed-from-the-internet patterns are now in plastic sleeves in the ring binder.

Hiding under all sorts of other stuff was a jar of buttons that I didn't know was there and would definitely have been looking for sometime soon.

There were also two sewing projects that had come upstairs for one reason or another and now need to go back below stairs.

All has now been reorganised and restored. To the casual observer it probably doesn't look too different, as there are still two large project bags and a work basket in the corner, but I know what's there and I can lay my hands on it, so this post it brought to you with a smug sense of relief and I can spend the evening knitting!

cuddly blankets

Finishing off other people's work seems to be a bit of a theme in my life at the moment. I have just handed over these two completed baby blankets.
St Mary Redcliffe Church have an active group of people knitting squares for blankets which are then sent to Ukraine. They were short of someone to sew them together, so I volunteered.


I have completed three so far (didn't photograph the first one) and have just picked up several more bags of knitted squares which I calculate should make another three. I have to confess that it's more time consuming than I imagined as there are lots of yarn tails to be sewn in before assembly can begin. Putting the blankets together can be fun, though. I played with colour-blocking on this one

and went for a more traditional patwork-style with this one.

I'm using crochet to seam them together and adding a crochet border.

gothic melodrama

Finally another finished object to blog about.

This shawl was a secret as it was a 50th birthday present for a good friend. I had pursued one idea for a while before realising that I was making something that I wanted rather than what would suit my friend D, so had to do some hasty pattern-trawling on ravelry and hunting for lovely yarn. I reckoned that crochet would make it quicker than knitting, which is probably true, but lace-weight yarn in a complex pattern grows pretty slowly whatever technique you use!

Eventually settled on Annette Petavy’s lovely Arrows pattern and chose 100% silk yarn, Glister, from Skein Queen in colourway "Gothic Melodrama".

I started it mid-July and presented it when we all met up for a birthday lunch in September. D is someone who really appreciates handcrafts and I was pretty confident that the colours I had gone for were "her", but it’s always pretty nerve-wracking handing over something so personal. She would never be so rude as to let me think she didn’t like something I made for her, but I think I got it right!

The photo colours are a bit hit and miss. The picture of the skein of yarn is pretty accurate of how it looks in daylight. If I were to do this pattern again I would use a semi-solid coloured yarn rather than the multi-colours as it would show off the pattern motifs better.

25 random things

The 25 random things meme has been tagging its way around facebook for a while now. After I had been tagged twice I thought I'd better give it a go. It turned out to be easier than I thought as one idea led to another. Then I remembered that last summer I had been tagged here on blogger by Just Gai to come up with six things about me and ducked it. So, in the spirit of re-use, recyle, reduce (well maybe not reduce) I am reproducing my list of 25 here. I haven't got a huge blog circle, but I think I may tag a couple of people whose blogs I read, but don't know in person.

1. I had a very bad squint as a small child. As a result I never developed binocular vision. I had four operations to correct the squint when I was 5, 6, 7 & 8. I am very grateful that something could be done for my eyesight as reading and needlework are such an important part of my life.
2. I’ve always been a bookworm. When I was a child my friends used to hide their comics before I went round to play!
3. Being a mother to our three lovely daughters has been my best achievement.
4. I grew up in a nominally christian family and made my own commitment to christian faith at the age of 15. Since then my faith has taken a variety of different forms, but has never completely deserted me. I wrestle continuously with faith and doubt. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and think the whole thing is barking mad, but at others it is a source of great comfort.
5. I have a very sweet tooth and can easily eat condensed milk straight from the can with a spoon.
6. I’m very untidy. I think this is because my mind is dashing on to the next activity before I’ve finished what I’m doing.
7. I wish I had carried on with A level maths. I was talked out of it because I was planning to apply to study French at University.
8. I’m frightened of old age. My father had dementia and my mother had a neurological condition that robbed her of language relatively young. Equally, I have no desire to die young – I’m too interested in finding out what my children and grandchildren are getting up to. I aspire to being a healthy and still intelligent old woman like my maternal grandmother who lived until she was 101.
9. I am completely uninterested in sport of all descriptions, especially team games.
10. I did actually once win a race. It was a three-legged race with my best friend at primary school. We disproved the theory that you need to be well matched in size to do well at this event. I was a good deal smaller than her in both height and weight. Neither of us was particularly athletic, but we did practise. I tucked myself in under her armpit and we had practised starting together on the middle leg and staying in stride; so we powered up the track while all the athletic, well-matched pairs who had been winning the individual sprint races tripped over each other’s feet and fell over and shouted at each other.
11. My mother taught me dressmaking when I was fairly young and I made a lot of my own clothes during my teenage years. We used my grandmother’s old hand powered sewing machine which stitched everything so tightly that it couldn’t be undone.
12. I love all textile pursuits. I learned to knit when I was about six and a lovely neighbour, called Mrs Turner, taught me to crochet a couple of years later. I got to know her because she had a lovely mongrel dog called Sally and I wanted to be allowed to take her for walks.
13. Discovering the world of contemporary embroidery and textile art in the early nineties was a real epiphany for me. In a family where I was intimidated by the considerable drawing talents of my husband and daughters it was wonderful to discover my own means of expression.
14. We used to visit my grandmother every Tuesday. When I was little I used to get bored with adult conversation over the lunch table and I disappeared into my own dark mysterious world under the chenille tablecloth. This is where I first smelled real coffee brewing in Gran’s spirit-burner Cona machine. Although I love coffee I have always thought that the smell is better than the taste.
15. I love the sight of allotments on the edges of towns and villages, there’s something very appealing about their tumble-down, messy orderliness and the evidence of so much industry.
16. I was born and grew up in Lichfield, Staffordshire, which is pretty much as far from the sea as you can get in any direction in England.
17. Over the past 37 years I have accumulated almost enough credits for an Open University degree. When I retire I’ll give it one last push and finish it!
18. I love crosswords and sudoku.
19. When I was 11 I wanted to be a vet. Thank GOODNESS I got talked out of it!
20. I need to spend time alone. I’m an introvert and naturally cautious, but nevertheless I love spending time with larger-than-life, try-anything-once friends.
21. People think I’m calm and serene, but they can’t see my feet paddling under the surface.
22. Steve and I will have been together for 40 years in October this year. On the face of it we don’t seem very compatible (if you compare his 25 things with mine!), but we have shared values and the differences in our personalities complement each other. Clearly, love conquers all!
23. I used to collect and press wild flowers with my mother. It’s something I would like to do with my grand-daughter.
24. I am living proof of the theory that "Dieting Makes you Fat". Despite numerous and frequent diet regimes I have managed to gain at least a stone in each decade of my adult life. This is not something I am proud of.
25. Self-deprecation comes to me as naturally as breathing and I have had to make a real effort not to make this list a litany of my faults and failings.

I'm tagging:

Flutter-by

Poshyarns

Roobeedoo

photo-montage of me aged about 3, 16 and 18