Project-a-month resolution: February

Only two months in, and already the challenge has gone off piste somewhat. Lately I haven't been working on a neglected project, but a new one that needed to be completed in time for a birthday.

I started out wanting to do some beaded knitting, but I couldn’t find a pattern that seemed right, so I ended up inventing my own pattern for a crocheted scarf instead. The first step was to string quite a lot of beads onto the yarn. This was a no-brainer task for craft night, when I tend to be too distracted by alcohol, friends and funny stories to be able to concentrate on anything complicated.


(I was thinking while stringing hundreds of beads that it would be very helpful if yarn came pre-beaded. I've since found out that it does – Artyarns Beaded Silk Yarn is one brand, and jolly lovely it looks too.)

Although beaded crochet isn’t difficult as such, it’s slow. I've never done it before, and it seemed to involve a lot of pushing beads down the yarn to get them out of the way when I didn’t need them, and an equal amount of pushing them back up the yarn when I did, and not much actual crocheting.

Every second stitch on every second row has a bead added to it. The base fabric is
double crochet (or single crochet if you're North American.)

Things started to speed up when I got to the unbeaded lace part, though, which was encouraging. I chose a fairly heavyweight lace pattern so that it wouldn’t be distorted by the weight of the beaded ends. It’s a four-row pattern (called shell or fan, depending on which source you use) that’s pretty easy to remember.

The edges were a bit ragged, so I tidied them up with a row of double crochet. 

I also put some scalloping on the ends, which were looking a bit naked and wrong. 

I finished the scarf with about 30 cm of yarn to spare – lucky! I probably should have blocked it properly, but as I only finished it at 10 pm the night before it had to go in the mail, it wouldn’t have dried in time. Instead, I steam-blocked it with the iron.

And here it is, before being sent to its new home in Melbourne. Happy birthday, Louise!

  

Shameless self-promotion

I've always envied people who are good at selling themselves (except for the really pushy ones – I just want to slap them, of course). I'm a self-effacer, not a self-promoter; it's all I can do to send my CV to people to ask for freelance work. 


I've often wanted an outlet for my craft, though, in the hope of selling the odd bit of it. The idea of hanging out at Saturday markets and spruiking my wares in person fills me with dread, however. So today my clever and obliging friend Kitty came to the rescue by photographing some of my stuff –

Craft and the city – the view from Kitty's rooftop.

Japanese hexagons quilt top. (Someone pass me my sunglasses.)

William Morris lattice-patterned quilt top – out of the Chest of Shame
and on its way to a new life, I hope.

Arty shot, dahlings.

One of my knitted hot water bottle covers.

The Four Hotties. Like the Three Tenors, but woollier.

– and then setting up a MadeIt site for me.


So as of now, I will be selling stuff here. 


Thanks for tolerating this act of self-promotion. I hope it hasn't made you want to slap me.

Too many quilts!

My most recent task has been to attach the borders and mark out the quilting design on a quilt I started several years ago. This provoked me to wonder just how many unfinished quilts I have, so today I dug them all out of the Chest of Shame. There are six. 


These are just the completed quilt tops, mind. There are partially finished quilts and stray blocks all over the place, too, plus all the fabric.

The one I'm working on at the moment.

The oldest one I have lurking about, started about 15 years ago.
I still like this pattern. The thing's massive, though, and will take a lot of quilting.
Fingers, be warned.

One I started twelve or so years ago, to use up the scraps from the project above.
But there weren't enough scraps for a whole quilt, so I bought more,
creating more scraps. The vicious circle of crafting ...

Started about twelve years ago. The feature fabric is from my seemingly bottomless stash of William Morris fabrics. I was disappointed with this quilt, which is why I abandoned it. Although I like the lattice pattern and the feature fabric, the Goth black and lollipop pink are way too strong and create a licorice-allsort effect that I don't like. I'm going to try to sell this quilt top on Made It or eBay.

This is about ten years old. I started machine quilting it, as you can see,
but didn't like the effect. I still like the design, though, so will re-quilt it by hand instead.

  

The most recent of the unfinished batch. I made this as a sample for a quilt book
I was working on about six years ago. Some of the fabrics I like, others I really don't
– those spotty ones make my eyes go woozy. Overall I don't like it enough to want to put
more time and money into it, so it's also destined for Made It or eBay.

Out of curiosity I did some sums. These six quilts total more than 20 square metres (or 218 square feet, if that's how you like it). That's about a third of the floor area of my flat! 

I'm not putting them back into the Chest of Shame. They're staying on display to force me to do something about them. 

I can't afford to work full time. I've got too much craft to do.