I know, I know. I'm sorry.

Bad blogger. January! That's got to be the longest I've gone without a post since I started this blog. In my defence, it's been a kerazy few months with new job, passing my degree, DD starting pre-school and generally struggling to keep on top of all the everyday mundane stuff that goes on.

However, I have been taking photos. January brought snow. And I practiced my skills with the macro setting:


Then came February. More snow. Or rather, the snow that never went away. We finally bought a sledge of sorts and had some fun in the sun:


Then March, and rain. But the best thing to do when it rains is....


dress up. Oops, no sorry. I meant:


run through all the puddles. But seeing as I don't have any wellies, I just took photos. Lots of them!

But then I've also been crocheting a bit, and I've finally finished sewing together the first block of 24 squares for THAT bedspread that I've started on. And bought another 16 (Eek) balls of silver, as I decided to add another row of the silver around the edge to stop my eyeballs vibrating with the bright colours.


(The above photo is with the bumpy seams. The one below is with smooth seams)

And I love it. It might take me the next two years to finish it, but I know that when I do, I'm going to want to pat it smooth each morning over my bed, which might even encourage me to make it each day.


So what have you been up to? I know I've been bad at visiting people these last few months too, but I aim to catch up soon! Oh, and please have a guess at who my darling man was dressed up as...

Design Your LIfe layouts week 1-2

So, as well as crocheting my little hands off, I also signed up for Cathy Zielske's Design Your Life class over at Bigpicturescrapbooking. I like her teaching style, she's really quite amusing, and her simple style of linear scrapbooking does appeal to me. I'm doing it digi though - I've packed away my paper scrapbooking stuff 'til we sell the house, and the class comes with all the digi templates needed to complete the assignments (3 a week). And let's face it. I barely manage one layout a week normally, so 3 would be most definitely pushing it!

My pages are very simple, I intend to gussy them up before I get them printed all at once, here: 12x12 LOs printed at 75p - bargain! I'll let you know what they're like once I've sent off the order.

First 2 weeks are all about balance and symmetry. All layouts use templates from the class by Cathy Zielske, and all paper is either from the freebies or the shop area of Shabby Princess.





What do you reckon to digiscrap? DO you want to try it/have you tried it? Do tell :)

Oh, and for those of you watching for more crochet squares from my gorgeous yarn... here you go. I'm planning on sewing them up as I go.

How much?

So last night, I thought I'd better get realistic with this entire-crocheted-bedspread idea, and work out how many balls I'd need. I'm not working from a pattern, just making lots and lots of granny squares then sewing them together.

Here is where you discover my second love: numbers. I think I must have been an accountant in another life. Close your eyes if calculations scare you.

I measured my bed (80 inches) and then measured a granny (just under 4 inches), so that makes 80 divided by 4 is 20 squares wide. I added a couple extra for the "just under" , so my bedspread will be 22 squares by 22 squares. 22 squared is 484. (What? How many?? 484 squares at a rate of 3 a night, so that's 162 days give or take. Blimey. Then another week or so sewing them together. Sheesh.)

Anyway. Back to the amount of yarn needed. I weighed 6 grannies, then divided the weight of my ball of yarn by the weight of the 6 grannies. It worked out that 1 x 50g ball makes about 12 grannies. So divide the number of squares you need by the number of grannies per ball (484 divided by 12) makes 40.3 balls. I had 20. Then I'd need about 8 more of the silver to stitch them all together (this is a total guess). Eek. This yarn is £3.85 a ball. You can see that my original £200 estimate for using the yarn when it wasn't split was waaaay out. It'll cost me £200 with splitting the yarn!

But I've committed to the idea in my head, because it looks just stunning. Just look at those six squares up there with all the combinations with teal in the centre. There's another 6 for chocolate, 6 more with purple, and 6 more with green. Yum. I cannot wait. Luckily, half an hour of searching on the net located somewhere selling them at 20% discount. Even with £5 postage, I still saved £15.

What is the most expensive thing you've ever made/started on? Do tell :)

Granny Delightful

Finally managed to take some photos of the finished baby blanket. I went with sewing up the seams, and it came together over a couple of evenings. I'm so pleased with it, I don't think I've ever been so chuffed with anything I've made for a long time.


The sewing method produced two different sides of the blanket, one with a little raised border round each square, the other is more or less smooth:


I like both. That's obviously a good thing! And after all the build-up about the wonderful yarn that I've bought for my highly-ambitious-second-crochet-project of an entire bedspread, I have made three squares:


Aren't they just gorgeous? The only pain is having to sew all the bloody ends in. When I was doing the one-colour squares, I could churn out one every 20 mins or so. These little beauties took me around half an hour each, and I spent a good hour beforehand splitting the yarn in two so I can make it go further. If I used it as is (10 ply cotton), I reckon the bedspread would cost around £200 and would weigh a good few kilograms. Warm though!

Just one more gratuitous close-up for those droolers. I know you're there :)


So I showed you mine, will you show me yours?

Another "thing"

I'm hoping that I'm not alone in this, but I love learning. And I'm always up for learning new crafts. My latest thing is crochet; I had an old needlecraft book and some really useful videos from mikeyssmail on Youtube. With these tools in hand I picked it up quite quickly, though I'm already a knitter. After a few practice granny squares in dishcloth cotton, I got cracking with some remnant wool from my baby clothes projects.


And here is the work in progress. I am in the process of sewing the 48 squares together; I tried to crochet them, but it was too fiddly for my liking, so I "cheated". I'm hoping to finish it this weekend, so will post finished pics then.

I am enjoying this new craft so much that I've inadvertently spent my Christmas money on some really funky yarn for an entire bedspread. I think I've lost my mind. Though really, with these colours, could you resist?


Glorious aren't they? Once I start on the squares, I'll post some pictures. There are something like 24 different square combinations with the main colours being leaf, teal, purple and chocolate. I'm going to make all the outer rows silver, to pull them all together, and hopefully make your eyes go kerazy :) If it looks half as fab in real life as it does in my imagination, I'll be very pleased.

What other crafts do you do? And which is your current favourite? Do tell ;)

Merry New Year!

May all you desire be realised through just the right amount of hard work to make it feel worthwhile!

May you have...

...a very merry Christmas, full of love, life and happiness. And turkey, if that's your grub of choice!
I wish all my readers and friends the best of everything for 2010, and I'll see you all very soon.

'Tis the season...

... to take silly pictures! Or rather, to improve my photography skills. I'm taking an online class by Cheryl Johnson (I've seen her work in Scrapbook Inspirations, and submitted some of my layouts to her for the readers' gallery!) (class registration is closed - unfortunately the class numbers were limited).

It's a class called "12 days", and it aims to improve my Christmas photography skills, which is perfect, because I have some pretty ropey Christmas photos. All that indoor lighting, bleurgh.

First challenge - take a festive self-portrait. Done. See above. I'd love for you to take one too, and post it, and then tell me :) Go on, I dare you!

12 days part 'a'

Do you remember that other class I'd signed up for this November? This one here? Well, it's started, and wow, there is an incredible amount of ideas and it's only been running four days. Only 2 official class days, but we got another bundle of tips, tricks and tutorials to keep us going this weekend. One of them was for a rather cute christmas banner type thing, but once I saw the flag images, I just had to do this:


(let me tell you, I'm so envious of Kirsty's colour sense. It's awesome. Just look at those colour combos!)

It's the flags all printed out together, resized to fit an A6 card and frosted stickles traced over the lettering. I really like it. I also did a large square one here:


but I don't like it as much. Might sneak the sewing machine out at some stage and stitch a grid inbetween all of the tiles. Any other ideas gratefully received!

Lists and links ahoy!

I made this ^ :)

Lists. Now I love lists (see Hallowe'en post for a good example). In fact, I'm often heard saying that it's one of my favourite ways to procrastinate. So, I thought that I'd give you all a glimpse into my surfing world, my other favourite way to procrastinate, blogs that I look at regularly. So here are 5 that are nearly always updated every other day. Perfect when you're feeling less than inspired.

It's A Creative World is a blog contributed to by a number of very talented people. At least one of the team blogs each day, and I still haven't made my way through all the wonderful stuff I want to make just from ideas from this site. Plus, my gingerbread recipe is featured on it today, so I figured I'd return the favour :)

Banana Frog makes gorgeous acrylic stamps, but their design team have some amazing ideas that could easily be done with existing stamp stash.

Tollipop is a blog written by a very creative lady who illustrates her own delightful tales. She has a very dry sense of humour, which I most definitely get.

Craftastrophe is possibly the scariest collection of crafts ever. They trawl the web looking for those handmade objects which only a mother could love, if you know what I mean. It's always good to see others' crafting disasters; makes me feel a whole lot better about mine :)

And finally, It's all fiddle fart is a blog I found quite recently. The lady who blogs here posts regularly with pictures of her creations, mostly cards at the moment, though she does have an eye for bargains that can be gussied up to look pretty darn tooting. There're so many ideas here, you're bound to find something to inspire you!

There are many more blogs that I find inspirational, some are in the linky bit to the right, others perhaps I'll talk about another day.

(Two posts in three days! Now I'm sure a regular reader of mine might take the mick a little for that, but I'm pretty pleased with that count. It is theoretically day 4 of the "Blogging for scrapbookers" class, but I'm just going to work through the prompts as and when I feel like it, what with the dissertation blah blah blah :) )