Christmas presents catchup

Another long gap - but one of my excuses is that I spent a lot of time making things for Christmas presents! I now have more people to make presents for - including a grandson and a granddaughter which has really inspired me.

I decided to make a ball with a bell in it for baby Hope, with patchwork pentagons as I did for Julia, but this time with all the letters in felt. The material I used is a heavy-duty cotton which started life as a cushion cover and provided different mixes of blues and greens.

For Noah I branched out with my knitting and made a teddy bear in a lovely soft velour-type wool which I found in a sale. The knitting and making up were quite intricate but I was pleased with the result. I added features with embroidery wool and paws with brown felt.

The pattern suggested finishing the bear with a ribbon round the neck but I felt that with a baby in the house this might not be safe so I constructed a jacket with one button instead from some red and black wool which had not worked as i-chords.







As well as presents for children I also made another book cover, in a more conventional log-cabin patchwork.

And finally I made four brooches, all in the same kind a pattern with a central bead or button and a more of less symmetrical arrangement of beads going out from the centre to the edge, although I did vary that a little.

I made them in four colours, red, blue, violet and green, and decided to echo this blog by mounting them on card as you can see.

So that is what I have been doing since I last wrote but I am determined to keep up with making things and will be back when I have decided what to do next. 

Knit one, purl one - very slowly

My mother taught me to knit but neither she nor I were very good at it (unlike her sister Phyllis who could knit Aran sweaters while watching television!) so I have always confined myself to basic stitches and small projects.

I have knitted squares (along with other people) to make up into blankets and when I started having children I tried knitting things for them. I could manage small cardigans and dungarees in stocking stitch using random wool to make the enterprise more interesting. My pattern bible was Knitting Fashion by Pam Dawson, the book of the BBC2 series which came out in 1976 - as you can tell by the cover! It is still a good basic book though and obtainable through Ebay.

I even managed to knit a couple of simple sweaters for myself. Perhaps the most complicated design I attempted was a sleeveless tunic which in 1982 became a maternity smock in dark green with a pattern of chevrons in brown and yellow.

Usually I stuck to much simpler patterns in interesting random wools. This is one I knitted for myself in green and at the same time I managed one in blue and one in purple using the same wool and a similar pattern with wide sleeves. 

But as the children grew up and life got busier I did not find time for any knitting projects except occasional scarves. I was sewing and doing patchwork and I did not really miss my knitting needles. Sometimes I thought about learning to crochet but never found a teacher or a book that I could follow. Eventually, a few years ago, I went on a course at Glenthorne in an attempt to learn. I was taught the rudiments but I also really enjoyed knitting this quite complicated scarf.

I really enjoyed putting the colours together and the way in which following the pattern produced this lovely wavy shape.

The Glenthorne course was a revelation in another way too because it was here that I learned to make i-chords - of which more in the next post.