Old project gets a new life

Many years ago I fancied a sweet little cardigan, bought the expensive Rowan Felted Tweed yarns and started crocheting the squares. Four color combinations, three different squares, each using three or four colors. It was such fun, so I just kept crocheting and left the yarn ends for later. Which turned out to be much, much later. I buried the squares and the pattern and the yarns and the hook in a plastic box.

Then Villa Cooper decided to exhibit Granny squares and other crocheted squares for this summer, and I gave the cardigan a serious thought. So serious that I understood that I don't really wear a cardigan very often, and one with 3D flower squares here and there would not be very practical. Quick rethink, and I found a perfect solution:

I would make a shawl/throw/blanket instead! Perfect for the winter on my lap when I watch TV and knit. I used the 4 balls of grey wool meant for the sides and collar of the cardigan to join my squares.16 rows of 8 squares was how far that yarn reached and I had some squares left over.

The joining of the squares was easy once I had the setting arranged. Only the beginning and end of each ball of yarn to weave in. Google gave several tutorials for Continuous joining as you go for Granny Squares, just pick your favorite.

I have been working on a Unicef doll again. When embroidering the face on this one, I hurt my finger on the needle.

Luckily the stain on the fabric was outside my sewing line!

The blood stain was like an omen, as this doll is a nurse.

Here without her surgical mask and hat.

She is going to the Villa Cooper tomorrow, and I hope she will get a home in a nurse family.

P.S. The yarn ends of the crocheted squares are almost all still there on the reverse, but they will not show when the shawl is on display.

Still here

Long lazy Summer ... I have just been busy doing nothing special and enjoying the sunny days we have had, and ignoring the rainy days. Reading piles of books, at the moment old paperbacks from my mother's childhood and school years. Charming innocence but also some expressions that don't look too good today.

I have finished the Granny square blanket using a new to me method of joining the squares in one go. It saved so many yarn ends! I was going to use only rest yarns for this, but ended up buying some balls of the light grey and the graphite grey for the joining. 

The blanket measures 4 squares by 6, and each square is about 11".

After this I had a long pause. No long cycling tours on TV this Summer, so I have not had a special "Tour" project. Finally my fingers were itching for some nice knitting, and I found this pretty pattern in a magazine.

My yarn is 100% baby Merino, so it is perfect for a pair of bed socks.

Remember the safety rules, wear your masks where required. I hope you have all been well and safe.

 

Flowers and yarn rest doings

I found a plastic bag with de-knitted skeins of light grey wool. It was once a mini dress I had knitted as a school girl, then outgrown  and abandoned. With it in the bag were two balls of green 90 % wool inherited from by grandmother, so what would be a better choice than to crochet granny squares with them and other, smaller rest yarn balls? Another dozen like these, and then I can start joining them.

I had a self-striping yarn I had used to make this pair of socks which I never really liked much, so I decided to tame the yarn

 with dark blue and the Broken Seed stitch, and I think I succeeded.

The Finnish Summer is short and intensive. Suddenly everything bursts into bloom and the air is full of lovely scents. The two darker reds of my peonies are withered already, but these pink flower heads are so big and heavy that the stems bend almost to the ground. 

All roses are in bloom except for the domestic Midsummer rose which only lasted a week, the Midsummer week.

These roses are doing so well after Mr K. moved them to the front garden.

My father loved yellow roses so I wanted one too.

This year my flower-box annuals don't look very good. For some reason I picked plants that are all the same height, but at least these two look good together. 

We are having a heat wave, almost all time record temperatures for June, and in our local +30 C I'm melting and tired.

New baby quilt, and yarn projects

Once I had the box with my father's old shirts out in the daylight when I repaired mother's old quilt, I took a better look at the ready cut 3½" strips and felt like making a little quilt with them.

It needed some more cutting but the 3½" squares for a 90 x 120 cm quilt were easily found. Now I have just the last white shirts left, and some striped squares. The blue fabrics for the star came from another project bag, the Business Class and Stained Glass quilts I made using my son's shirts.

This size is convenient for machine quilting on my domestic machine, so the quilt was finished in no time.

I even had the blue binding left over from some other project, and a light blue flannel with a baby print was in my stash of backings.

Octopus family has five new members!

Here is a closer look at the tubular cast-on I praised in my earlier post. It is easier to make every time I try, this is my third attempt now. I have tried it in a different way earlier, and I'm convinced this new to me way that involves crocheting suits me better.

The new pair of socks. 200 g yarn, two pairs of socks and still some yarn left.

Twelve and counting

Summer projects are preferably lightweight, small, cool and fun. It is also a good thing to use up small rests of material, and it would be nice if the result would be useful to someone. I don't like to waste anything, not even my time, so when I'm watching something on the TV that doesn't require my full attention, I usually knit or crochet.

I saw this book in the Summer Sale of the bookshop, so I bought it:

The book has patterns for crocheted and knitted octopuses for premature babies or other persons who like to fiddle, like dementia patients, and many ideas for creating different looks for the octopuses.

I had many small rests of cotton and bamboo yarns from dishcloth making, so I started crocheting with the Tour de France TV broadcasts. So far 12 little creatures are finished and some empty shells are waiting for stuffing. I have stuffed them with the polyester wadding I use for the Unicef dolls but my bag is empty now and I hope to get some more today.

The tentacles take a lot of yarn so some have bi colored tentacles when I have seen that there is not enough yarn left for 8 tentacles. The book's instructions are good and they give explanations for their "rules" too. For safety reasons the max length of the tentacles is 22 cm. The octopuses will also have a hot wash in the machine before they get donated to a baby ward so they will be ready to keep company to the smallest babies.

Dishcloths, African Flowers and UFO finishes

After all my sock knitting I needed a fun little project to knit and decided to make some dishcloths to use up the bamboo cotton yarns I have bought many years ago.

With this one I tried i cord edging and bind off. It was not difficult but would look better with a simple pattern without a frame.

The red was a smallish rest ball and I didn't know how far it would go, so I started in a corner adding stitches in the middle, so my knitting would be a square from the beginning. The green was knitted in the same size just to make them a pair.

In the same box with the yarns were 23 African Flowers I had crocheted with the tiny rests when I knitted the first dishcloths. Now I figured out how to make half hexagons, and joined them all to this little blanket for my dolls.

Another UFO were these chenille pieces. They only needed the binding which I made with extra wide bias tape from my stash. They can be pot coasters or something like that.

Finally, the baby hats I knitted with the soft baby merino wool I swapped on the KIP day. They will be donated for newborn babies. Same patterns as before.

Our Flammentanz rose is soon in full bloom, there seem to be dozens of buds waiting to open. This is a rose we both had at home in our mother's garden, so it is nice to have one of our own now.

Yarn bent on different curves

 My first attempt to make a shawl with a very hairy mohair yarn was a) too long and b) impossible to unravel, so I decided it will be a scarf for dark winter days, wrapped around my neck 4-fold and three times round. It looks rather like something you could draw from the vacuum cleaner hose when it is clogged, dust caught by a long piece of yarn.

The rest of the ball was used for this shawl. This time I started with the desired width and crocheted as far as the yarn reached. A nice mosquito net for cool summer evenings, don't you think?

The pattern is Solomon's knots or Lover's knots. Easy to crochet, but also easy to crochet too many loops or too few, and then you need to un-crochet.

I had this lovely hand-dyed merino/polyamide yarn for my birthday and found a nice new almost lacy pattern to try on. French heels almost done!

On the 3rd of May we had already tiny leaves on the silver birches but also new snow for two days. Some parts of Finland had more, up to 6", and it snowed on top of old snow so it must have felt like proper winter again.

But today we have a sunny day and the ground is covered in white again, but this time it is wild wood anemones. Where I grew up we didn't have them, but hepatica was what we picked for Mother's Day in May. Here wood anemone is the spring flower for Mother's Day or "just so". Sometimes I miss the beautiful blue and purplish shades of hepatica.

Stitched, appliquéd and pieced blocks, washcloths, mittens and some new socks

 A week ago I made a short visit to England, but after that I have been busy trying to catch up with the Splendid Sampler blocks. They publish two new blocks every week so it is easy to fall behind. Basic pieced blocks are a nice way to make the to do -list shorter:

The stitched blocks are a welcome change to my TV knitting, I can stitch while watching something not too demanding, like the Tour de France was.

Schools begin in a few weeks, and the shops are full of colourful bags, notebooks and my special love, pencils and crayons. This block is paper-pieced, without the nerve-wracking tiny bits that have three times as much seam allowance as there is visible fabric on the right side.

I mean this kind of paper-piecing, it is not for me:

We have some strawberries growing in the flowerbed, so small that they almost look and taste like the wild ones.

I try to keep my fabric selection limited, so my squirrel's tree has autumn colours already.

I have made some of the bonus blocks so I can skip the regular blocks I don't fancy doing. Here is a happy one with summer feeling:

This summer and especially during the three week Tour de France I faithfully watch with Mr K. (even when I have never ridden a bicycle myself in my whole long life), I have finished quite many yarn projects. First I refreshed my memory by crocheting a washcloth in Bavarian crochet, and then I thought I will learn something new, the Moss stitch. Well, it turned out to be something I had done before, just didn't know the name.

Bedsocks in olive  green merino wool, red socks with cables, and a small pair of basic socks using up a rest of self striping yarn, added with stripes in an off-white yarn of the same brand.

Then I knitted some mittens for a change, pink ones in a child size and yet another pair of Aino'S mittens in Finnish sheep wool in white, like Aino Sibelius would have knitted them.

At some point I wanted to try another new to me stitch and knitted these potholder/dishcloths in Cream 'n Sugar. The colour reminds me of milk chocolate with raspberry filling.

There it is, a post as long as the title.