Miaou

At last! My rainbow fish blanket is complete. I started it at the beginning of January and finished it a few days ago, so not bad going really. Here it is in all its glory:

I knitted an equal number of fish in each colour, half in a dark shade and half in lighter colours. I knew how I wanted to lay them out and spent quite a bit of time laying them out on the floor until I was happy with the arrangement. I then labelled them all (and didn’t have any sticky labels so this entailed 196 little bits of paper and 196 little bits of sellotape!!) with a column and row number, then bundled them in rows. It took me about an hour to sew a row of fish together and attach it to the row below, and there are 25 rows, so that’s quite a bit of time! However I was so excited about the finished project that I was very motivated to finish.

I then set to with a 6mm crochet hook (yes, I know what I said about crochet in my last post, but this kind of crochet I can handle!) and created a wavy edging with some turquoise yarn to suggest the sea. Four rounds of crochet later I was satisfied and handed over the finished blanket to my delighted daughter Eilish. (I have hopes that her bed might look as neat as this a little more more often, but they are not high )!

I think I am done with fish for now (there was a LOT of sewing up to do!) but it was a really enjoyable project and I can see myself making another one in the future.

Things have been rather quiet on the blog front - I have been busy putting together a dress for Eilish for a school project. She wanted a traditional spanish dancer’s dress. I used an old T-shirt of mine, 4 metres of plain blue cotton and 3 metres of spotty. I cut the t-shirt down, cut the polka-dot material into strips and hemmed them, then gathered them and added them to the plain blue fabric (which I had cut so that it was narrower at the top than at the bottom. Then I ran a seam up the side to join the skirt, gathered and pinned the top and sewed it to the bottom of the t-shirt (which I had cut shorter to make it waist length). The only spanner in the works was my *!?$&* sewing machine which would not sew through the t-shirt material and kept skipping stitches - I struggled through altering the body of the t-shirt, but when it came round to the sleeves and to adding the skirt, I gave up and sewed it by hand! Consequently, I ran out of time to add ruffles to the sleeves. Ah well.

It might seem like a lot of work to do for a school project, but Eilish had been wanting a long frilly dress for ages (and shops don’t sell them above the age of about 4!), and it will come in again for the Town Gala Fancy Dress Competition in the summer (for which I might have recovered enough patience to add sleeve ruffles). She is very pleased with it and it went down very well at school too.

A friend of mine asked if I would make her a beanie hat out of some “funky yarn” to keep out the winter winds. “But I have to tell you,” she said, “I have a very large head.” So I went up a needle size and made the The London Beanie for her using Sirdar Peru, which has a high wool content for warmth. She assures me it fits her much better than it fits my 10 year old daughter!

After steadfastly refusing my offer of making her a hat, Caitlin finally relented when she discovered that some yarn is really, really soft! I obviously knit with horrid scratchy stuff it seems :-/

This yarn was a bargain buy at my LYS, so much so that I got quite a few balls with the intention of making more things! She asked for an earflap hat with a bobble on the top and strings to tie it up with. So that is what she got!

Aside from making a matching scarf and mittens (which I will share in due course), I am continuing to sew up the huge blanket. It is lovely and cosy to work under with in this chilly weather.

Speaking of chilly, on Friday we went into town to see the turning on of the Christmas lights. Despite living in a fairly small town our lights are (in my parochial opinion anyway) rather modern upmarket affairs in rather good taste. I love the colour of these electric blue lights wrapped round the trees in the main square.

It was approximately -4 degrees on the night - brrr! Fortunately we were well wrapped up against the cold.

I know this is really a craft blog, but I just had to share these photos of our walk today in Dunnet Forest. Ahhhh, long may those blue skies last (well at least until my washing is dried anyway )

You can tell how clean the air is up here, the lichen grows very well on the trees!

The two C’s. (Little C was shouting “cheese! cheese!” as I took this picture )