Tuesday 27 June 2017

Beige and white baby jacket

Motoring along through June making these gorgeous little baby jackets that are taking me a couple of days each to make.

Back to the sparkly beige yarn, again with the same fluffy white yarn that I've used with the others.


This one isn't a colour change yarn, its a solid colour even though it is from the same range as the other yarns I've been using.  I think it looks better with white than it does on its own.  The construction of these little jackets is quite simple and its the edging that brings it all together into a jacket shape.



Time to move onto a new design and different yarn.

Tuesday 20 June 2017

"Aqua" and white baby jackets

I still can't believe that they called the colour of this yarn "aqua".  The mind boggles!  I loved making those baby jackets so much that I've decided to carry on making more of them in different colours, again using the same white as I did for the last batch.



I made enough motifs to be able to make two of these in the same colour but noticed that some were very dark whilst others were a lot lighter in colour so I separated them out as best as I could into those two groupings and got to work.


Dark Aqua


Aqua


I hope that from the photos that you are able to see two different colours of jacket.

Monday 19 June 2017

Lavender Wands

If you have bought a shawl from me you will know that if you're based in the UK you will find a small organza bag of dried organic Lavender in with the packaging of your item.  If you're outside the USA you fill find a small organza bag of scented gel beads in with your item.  I don't send these packaging extras with baubles, that just doesn't make sense.  Lavender is disliked by moths that like to eat wool so it protects the shawl and makes it smell nice, although that depends on whether you like Lavender I guess.

The reason that I only include Lavender in with the UK parcels and not the worldwide parcels is purely an ecological one as we are not allowed to send organic matter to other countries as it will be seized and destroyed when it arrives through Customs and undergoes biosecurity checks to ensure that no pests or diseases are imported.

I'm trying something new this year.  Instead of just harvesting the Lavender, tying it in bunches and hanging it upside down in a cool dark place to dry and then collecting the dried flower parts this year I am going to try weaving them with ribbon into Lavender Wands.  You can buy these online but they are seasonal items, hard to find and quite pricey!  I have a ready source of organically grown Lavender, a reel of narrow ribbon and pockets of spare time, and hopefully a lot of patience.

These are my main two English Lavender plants that are in the back garden but I do have a few small ones dotted around the front garden and another one planted by the back door but these are mostly young plants and won't necessarily produce a whole load of flowers this year.  I even have a few  young White English Lavender plants to see how they differ from the traditional blue/purple. Our garden is quite small but we have a lot in it and do a lot with it, we like it to be pretty but make it work for us too.


The above photos are of the same small piece of garden with the two Lavender plants, just taken from different angles.   The Lavender stems need to be long and they need to be dry when you harvest them else the flowers will more than likely rot rather than dry out and the flowers need to be ready to open but not actually open, its a difficult one to judge and don't get upset if you say "tomorrow it will be ready" only for tomorrow to come and the flowers are open.  You need an odd number of stems too and depending on the size of the flowers you can use 13, 15 or 17 stems for a decent sized Lavender wand and you need to make these as soon as you harvest the Lavender so its best to only harvest enough Lavender for one or two wands at a time as they do take a while to make.

I use 3mm ribbon and 15 stems, tied tightly at the base of the flowers with the ribbon with a decent length of ribbon hanging down with the flowers so once its woven it will meet with the working end of the ribbon and can be tied in a bow.  The working end of the ribbon is still attached to the reel as I don't know how much each one will take.  Very carefully and gently fold the stems back on themselves to form a "cage", as can be seen in the first photo.  You then have to start weaving the ribbon over, under, over, under, all the way round.  It is very tricky and the first few rows are probably the hardest as those loose stems that you have gone under can get mixed up very easily but after the second row and the stems are secured in their "place" it does get a bit better.

Taking it slow and easy is the way to go, these cannot be rushed else you will break the stems and will have to undo and start again.  You have to weave all the way down past the last flowers, making sure the ribbon is not only good and tight, not death grip tight though, but also butted up to the row above.  These are fiddly to make but once done you hang them to dry upside down to dry like you would if you were drying bunches of Lavender and then after a few weeks, once the flowers have dried and shrunk, you can tighten up the ribbon, tie a proper bow and trim off the ends of the stems and excess ribbon.


They look really nice, smell great and store well for many years and if they loose their scent, in the first instance you can just give them a gentle squeeze and when that no longer works you can always add few drops of Lavender Oil to refresh them.

Over the course of a ten day period, as the stems became ready to harvest I made a total of 25 Lavender Wands with more to make in the next few weeks and as I became more experienced they became better looking too.

Saturday 17 June 2017

What are we growing in the garden this year?

Last year we had a bumper crop of runner beans, a few potatoes, carrots and beetroot.  The cabbage and cauliflower growing was a waste of time because it became caterpillar feed.

This year we are trying dwarf beans in the hopes that we will have a crop of beans but not be over-run with them.  We are also trying beetroot again with a variety called Pablo, some multi-coloured carrots which are basically orange, yellow and white and then we have tomatoes, potatoes and strawberry.  We have had strawberries growing for a few years actually but they always get eaten by the slugs and snails so this year we have put them in a hanging basket to see what happens.  Slugs and snails can't climb up thin air can they?


I didn't actually take a photo of the hen house last year to show you what it looks like, I just took photos of the hens.  It has a run which goes underneath the sheltered house.  The beans this year are in the big red tub that used to have the strawberries growing in and the strawberries are in a hanging basket.


A couple of bags of potatoes and the chickens being nosy as always.


We also have flowers in the garden.  I won't show the lavender as that's in another post but here are some of the flowers we have growing too.  First is a scented rose that I've had for years, so long that we bought it with us from our first house to this one as it was in a big planter originally.  Its now planted in the garden properly and gives us a good display every year.


We have a massive shrub/semi-climbing rose from David Austin Roses called Spirit of Freedom.  Its beautiful, the flowers are ginormous and  heavily scented.  The only problem is that the flowers are so heavily that they usually hang down towards the floor and you can only see their beauty when you lift them.  I have a multi-coloured Spirea, it flowers white and pink on the same shrub and then that is Cranesbill Geranium and both are usually covered in bees.


In this last photo, I have two photos of a pink flowering plant that I have no idea what it is or where it came from.  Its not invasive, so I've ruled out it being a weed, when its overcast or dark the flowers close up tightly like they've been rolled up.  Then we have Campanula, which is pretty in masses of clumps but is very invasive so has to be controlled a lot.


Sunday 11 June 2017

One colourful yarn, three baby jackets

I've spent a bit of time making 60 motifs from a colourful yarn that I have for another baby jacket design.  I started out thinking that I was just going to make the 20 motifs needed but as I worked I noticed that they were coming out in pretty much distinct colours, a few were a bit "muddy" in the colours but most could be defined as "blue", "green" or "pink" and so I have separated them into these colours as best as I can in lots of 20.

So the pattern is another vintage pattern, this time from Patons for their Fairytale yarns and the original was all white.  I'm going to use the different colours as the centre of the motifs and join them together with some white brushed acrylic that I have that was originally on a cone but I have skeined up, washed and measured.


I started off with the green motifs and added the white around the motifs and joined them all together, followed by the pink and then the blue.  A nice quick make but really annoying with the amount of yarn ends needed to be sewn in when it was finished.


I really like these, they're certainly different from anything else around.

Greens


Pinks


Blues


I like these so much that I may use up the left overs of other colours of this yarn and make a few more.