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Showing posts from March, 2011

Something for me and something to help...

Obsession crochet continues apace.  A friend from past recently posted on Facebook "does anyone knit or crochet"...turned out she was looked for people to crochet or knit tea cosies for a leukaemia fundraiser she was involved with.  Her friend's child died of the disease and hearing that made me need to do something for her event.  Happily this coincided with my other need; to crochet at every given moment of the day.  The result: Not quite a knitted tea cosy, but seriously cute and took very very little of my time.  More gems from the Arigurumi book previously mentioned.  So I very happily posted these off yesterday and am hoping someone takes a fancy to them and donates some money to the research cause at the same time. Meanwhile, the something for me cause still looms large.  So I have been working merrily away on Kim Miller's Infinity Scarf ( pattern here on knitpicks ).  This is a BIG experiment for me as I am using entirely the wrong wool for the job.  Her

Magic Ring and "jogless" colour changes

Courtesy of Eggbird designs ( http://eggbirddesigns.blogspot.com ) I just found this:   http://www.planetjune.com/blog/tutorials/magic-ring-right-handed/ .  Interestingly the magic circle instructions I have don't mention doing the DCs (Am SCs) over the yarn and  the tail.  Very much looking forward to trying this out... Now I just have to work out how to change colour on Arigurumi without a funny little step - I know there is a way!  And then I did some searching and found this:   http://needlenoodles.com/home/node/139 .  I haven't tried it yet but it looks a lot better than the colour changes I do so hopefully I can master this technique. Makes me want to start another project!  :)

Ultimately twirly skirts

One of the biggest disappointments I have had making things as gifts was when I gave a friend's daughter a cool (I thought) skirt made of Angelina Ballerina fabric.  She was delighted mostly, but put it on and moved and said "Oh, it doesn't twirl".  In that single moment I thought:  "Oh, you are right".  And she was.  The skirt was great but it really really needed to twirl and it didn't. So for my latest project I picked the brains of Jill from The American Patchworks in Hobart (our sewing guru).  Apparently the key to supreme twirlyness is to make a doughnut shape of fabric, rather than sewing straight bits of fabric together.  This makes the waistband and bottom edge harder to deal with as they are pretty curved and also sometimes bias along the edge.  However, as the picture to the left attests; this trickiness is well worth the effort. The skirt in the picture was cut from a normal width 110 cm long piece of fabric.  We folded it in half and the

Day Zero - Trip to MONA and upcoming crochet with a friend

So today seems like a good day to start blogging.  My husband and I took our first trip out to MONA (http://www.mona.net.au) which was wonderful and as an added bonus, I went wool shopping with a friend for more arigurumi projects.  I showed her Lan-Anh Bui & Josephine Wan's great book Amigurumi and she was hooked.  She doesn't even crochet yet but let's face it...if anything would get you started it's cute seahorses and ballerina bunnies (see cover pic below). Coincidentally, or perhaps not really, the friend I am teaching to crochet works out at MONA.  This is the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania and it is amazing.  A private museum full of fantastic art and it's free to visit.  We never had it so good.  Among the favourites were a labyrinthine section with binary numbers on the walls called Kryptome (I think), the most beautiful display of ancient coins ever (arranged like a night sky star burst in a jet black case) and the most unbelievably