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 blocks and a finish

 A finished project for January! When I was making the QAYG blocks for Australia, I had to disqualify some of my blocks. One for using the same fabric in it twice, one for too heavy batting and one for using the finished size (10½") for cutting the backing which made a too small block. So I just needed to make one more block, cut them all to 8" and so I had this bright new cushion for a kitchen chair.

This week's 9-patches are in red and blue.

In the evenings I have crocheted some granny squares for Oz Comfort Quilts, and I will send my parcel tomorrow. The grannies are 10 rows making 10" squares.

We have still no real Winter as you can see. We had two new visitors, European Roe deer, never seen in our garden before. Sorry for the reflections, this was taken through the kitchen window when we all were having breakfast. The boy, on the left, has little antlers.

That little snow from Friday is gone again. No snow means depressingly dark days, cloudy days with rain instead of crisp snow with proper frost, blue sky and sunshine. I'm thankful we have not had those slippery wet ice conditions, but would love to have at least some weeks of real Winter before Spring can come.

Tour de Baby Hat, second day of rest

The cyclists are reaching the Alps and enjoying their well earned rest today. Many have been hurt in crashes during the first stages, many continue the race with bleeding limbs patched on the road and later properly. Last night I experienced some dangerous moments with hard cheese and a cheese slicer:

My grip slipped, and I sliced away the scar on my thumb from a previous cheese slicer accident some years ago. There was a lot of bleeding, but luckily I just missed a proper vein. This picture is from this morning, with a new dressing on the wound. I'm just showing you how far I was with the next baby hat before I had to stop for the night.

Here are the week's hats, the last bits of the light green and the white I used during the Giro, and a collection of the tiniest rests in the green, blue and multi colour hat. On the right is the first hat with the Sirdar Kisses baby acrylic, the second one is on the needles. I found a bag with six balls of this yarn, in green and blue shades. This will look a bit boring but keep me busy for the rest of the Tour and beginning of the Vuelta d'Espagne.

In celebration of the 50th year since I hurt my knee I'm on the waiting list for a knee replacement. My old stick from the school days didn't look too great, so I decided to do some yarn bombing. I didn't want to look like an old granny with a walking stick, so I crocheted some bright granny squares to cheer up my stick and maybe to get a smile or two when I limp around.

Close-up of my grannies:

I was wondering if the doctors would give me a smart looking knee after all the years I have been walking around with chubby knees and a huge scar in one, but I can forget about mini skirts for the rest of my life: they will only replace the damaged surfaces of my old bones and add another scar to the knee. Now it is just waiting for Winter and my turn on their long list.

Autumn Break

This is the beginning of Autumn. See how bare the young aspen already are! They didn't even have time to change their colour properly.

 

 

The Summer flowers have been replaced by Chrysanthemums.

 

The rowans are full of berries. That was good for our apples, no need for the bugs and worms to attack them when they had enough of their natural food in the forest.

 

 

I have crocheted half of my granny squares for my cardigan. The other half must wait until I can use both my hands again.

 

 

Another baby thing knitted, to go with the Princess Estelle's cardigan.

 

I'm prepared for the weeks with idle hands:

 

 

Here is about half of the books I have kept waiting. Some of them are too big or heavy to read in bed, some were just new hand-me-downs, and some especially borrowed for this special occasion of having the chance to read all day long. About a dozen of the Elm Creek novels are waiting on the shelf for me to I finish the triple volume that comes first in the series.

 

This is it, dear friends. I'll be back some time in November or so ... keep posting about your lovely projects and I will visit your blog when I can. Comments I can't promise for quite a while.

Squares

This is the beginning of my Rona cardigan with the Rowan yarns I showed a while ago. I have been testing all colour combinations and the three different square patterns that make the biggest part of the cardigan.

 

 

These are all my favourite colours.

I still need to practice on this square to get it the same size as the others. I love the 3D flower!

This is a new project, to support the New Children's Hospital 2017 charity. Villa Cooper will have a closet full of bird theme items donated by the members of our club. The proceeds will go 100 % to the fundraising, just like the price of my Happy Scrappy Spring quilt.

 

I decided to make a low price product, a mug rug. Little birds appliquéd on linen with a heat and bond type material, and just machine stitched a couple of times around the edges with straight stitch.

 

I kept the shapes simple but noticed how easy it was to change the look by changing the wing angle

 

or playing a little with the legs to give a busy look.

 

Luckily I had an almost full reel of 20 mm bias binding to finish the edges. I made some careful measuring and sewed the bindings in loops before attaching to the square. Easy!

 

Look, there is a hint of green in the young birches!

 

Lovely Wool

Last week I had a chance to go to a class at Lentävä Lapanen, The Flying Mitten knitting café. The class was about knitting in multiple colours, and we all learned many tricks about tension and avoiding holes. Tangling yarns is just something we have to learn to live with, I think, and naturally it is good to have a pause and untangle one's yarns after a few rows. The sales representative of Rowan yarns was there all day before the class, and their yarns were 20 % off the normal price.

 

I knew I had seen a cardigan pattern I wanted for myself, but we just couldn't find it, not at home and not in the knitting café. The staff kindly promised me the yarns at the reduced price later, when I knew what I needed. At home I found the pattern: it had been hiding in plain sight in the shop, on the previous page in a magazine displayed for our class! On Monday I went to the Flying Mitten with my wish list.

 

Here is the pattern and my colours on a little stone wall in our back yard. Three kinds of granny squares in different colour combinations. The yarn is Rowan Felted Tweed DK.

 

Close-up of the colours. I changed some of the blue for green and a pink for the fox red. The cardigan is mostly granny squares, and my preliminary plan is to knit the parts that are in plain crochet in the original pattern. This is a huge project for me and it may take years to finish. I look at it like years of fun. Also, as the main body of the cardigan is made with granny squares, I can always add a row of them on each side if I happen to be bigger by the time it is getting finished.

 

March is the perfect time to clean the birdhouses for new takers. Last year we put up some new houses so there were 11 units to clean. We knew only 10 were used last Summer, but found that one of them had been used twice as there was a new nest on top of the first one. Only one birdhouse was from a shop, and it was the only one no birds had wanted. Naturally we thought that Mr K.'s houses were more beautiful, with roofing felt and protective plate around the door opening.

 

 

It turned out that there was a simple reason why no bird wanted that factory made house: it came with a "nesting contraceptive copper device":

 

 

 

There was this piece of plastic coated copper wire inside the house, meant to be used to hang it in a tree without nails. Mr K. used his own wire and didn't think of looking inside the house when installing it last year. (Explanation  why we thought about contraception immediately when we saw what was in the birdhouse: All IUD are called "spirals" in Finnish, and this was obviously a copper spiral, and a very large one too.)  Now the house is made clean and safe for a new couple, and we wish them a large family and happy nesting!

One more appeal

Last week I found yet another appeal for crafters anywhere in the world to help people who lost what they had in the Australian floods :

Sarah London asks for granny squares of five rounds, and she will add a final round and join all the squares to lovely blankets. Here are the answers to frequently asked questions, but I think the most important thing is to make 5 rounds. The size should be about 11.5 cm or 4.5" across, but when there are hundreds of squares, Sarah will find matches for almost any size. You can use any colours you have, just one or five, and the yarn can be acrylic or wool or mixed fibres.

I used all my colourful yarns for the two little granny blankets I crocheted in 2009, but I still had some of the red yarn I bought to join the squares, and some white yarn, so last night I made these while watching Eurosport with Mr. K. How about you? Any tiny yarn balls asking to be used for a good cause? Just follow the links to sign in so you get the e-mail with instructions where to send your squares. These are a lot quicker to make than the QAYG quilt blocks. This project will last until the end of 2011.

If you follow the first link to Sarah London's blog, you can see that she shows pictures of some cool stuff!