Crafty bookmarks for August 25th through August 27th:
Crafty bookmarks for August 23rd through August 24th:
Crafty bookmarks for August 18th through August 21st:
Crafty bookmarks for August 15th through August 18th:
These are my links for August 13th through August 14th:
Objects in the mirror may be closer than they seem.
Fixing the blog up! :)
Because I’ve been asked for this recipe and I thought I should try to increase my food blogging (yes, yes, because I’m so good about blogging everything else). What this is, is a very robust, hard to screw up, incidentally-gluten-free* chocolate tart. The pastry shell is based on a 17th-century “pye” recipe and uses only nuts, egg white and a little sugar, which I got from Ann Willan’s Look & Cook Perfect Pies and Tarts
*Incidental, because there are no substitutions made– the recipe has no gluten and none of the usual starch substitutes, eg. potato flour, gluten-free flour, gram flour, etc.
The base recipe is this (below the cut):
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Look, crochet! I have achieved slight dominion over that damn hook, thanks to the lovely ladies at Make Do Mend, whose class at the Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green last week got me over the hump of frustration.
I’m still working on edges as if I’m not crocheting in the round – things go a bit trapezoid! But, after falling into John Lewis (perilously close to work) with one of my fellow librarians – also a beginner crocheter – to purchase some more yarn one lunch time, consulting a few videos about starting the round off, I have become a lean, mean granny square making machine.
I’m not sure what they’ll become yet but I’m enjoying seeing the improvement in shape and tension with each one – perhaps I’ll turn them into some sort of cushion or lap blanket!
Oops! I meant to start the knitting and crochet week yesterday, along with everyone else but, yeah, that clearly didn’t happen. But never mind, I shall combine today and yesterday’s topic into one!
How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting? was it a skill passed down through generations of your family, or something you learned from Knitting For Dummies? What or who made you pick up the needles/hook for the first time? Was it the celebrity knitting ‘trend’ or your great aunt Hilda? TAGGING CODE: knitcroblo1
My mom and her mother have always done something with yarn and I grew up with crocheted or knitted blankets – known in my family as Joseph blankets, due to their multicoloured nature – but oddly enough, I never learnt to knit or crochet from my mom or gran. I learnt to knit at Brownies in South Africa for my craft badge but never really got on with it as a kid. I picked it up again when I was about 13 and living in Ireland and knitted a few misshapen garter stitch bag-like things and scarves with random holes in them and then put it down again. Fast forward to age 22, when I moved from Manchester to the Czech Republic for a three month internship. Jam (the silent half of this blog…) had been talking about her knitting and got me interested again, so before I moved, I picked up Stitch & Bitch, some terrible acrylic yarn and some needles and started back down the route of relearning things like casting on in an actual usable fashion.
The first thing to come out of that was a two colour Garter Stitch scarf, which I no longer own and once I’d moved to Prague, I started cheerfully working my way through all the scarf patterns in SnB, particularly because my internship required spending three days a week in a town outside of Prague called Beroun, which meant a commute to knit on in the mornings. I got quite good at knitting related Czech and my knitting grew to involve hats, all done on straight needles because I couldn’t work out circs.
When I came back to Manchester, I kept knitting and moved on to shrugs, wristwarmers and socks and pretty much haven’t looked back since! My gran knitted blanket squares up to her death, although the squares from the year before she passed away show the ravages of dementia more and more and my mom tends to make crochet edged Joseph blankets for members of the family out of the many bags of squares my gran knitted before her death, which I assist with when I go home by sewing up the edged squares into strips.
A selection of early projects:
Blog about a pattern or project which you aspire to. Whether it happens to be because the skills needed are ones which you have not yet acquired, or just because it seems like a huge undertaking of time and dedication, most people feel they still have something to aspire to in their craft. If you don’t feel like you have any left of the mountain of learning yet to climb, say so! TAGGING CODE: knitcroblo2
A skill I aspire to is crochet – as I mentioned above, my mom makes Joseph blankets for the family by doing crochet edging around the squares my gran knitted and sewing them together with one big crochet border and I would like to join her in that endeavour because I like the idea of creating things that have a connection to my mom and gran and my family at large. I’ve just never got anywhere with crochet!
But, I am grasping the bull by the horns and have signed up for a beginner’s crochet class in a couple weeks! I will no doubt report back about that once it has happened.
Work and my life got really busy for a while there and updating this here blog kind of fell off the radar for a bit. But it’s spring and I’ve spent the bank holiday weekend starting a huge organisation of my stuffs, including going to Ikea with my other half and throwing a lot of stuff out.
I’ve been puttering along with my stash bust though. I’m currently knitting a Prairie Rose Shawl in some Malabrigo sock yarn in Botticelli as my commute knitting project and I’ve knitted Ysolda’s Ripley hat (I did the garter band with the closer fitting hat) in some Debbie Bliss Cashmerino aran & chunky for the gift box and a snood out of the remaining aran yarn (although, no photos of that one yet).
I’ve also finished my sewing class and the skirt that I was working on, although I need to trim the threads, wash and iron that before I can take photos. It was really good, actually to just have that safety net of someone else who knows what they’re doing being there. I’m already plotting my next skirt as my flatmate picked up an Amy Butler skirt pattern that is crying out to be made in some accidentally purchased floral cotton. I’m also planning to do some fabric buttons and a new belt for my spring mac.
And today, I started unearthing my rusty embroidery skills by making this feltcraft owl cushion. It took me about an afternoon to finish and some of that was spent youtubing things I couldn’t remember, like, uh, backstitch. My tension was also all out of wack with basket stitch so I ended up finishing the cushion off with a whip stitch.
