Lariath- Live a Little.

String art is getting more popular at the moment. I've been wanting to try it for a while now, I just needed an excuse to give it a go. A friend and I make gifts for each other each Christmas so this was my excuse. However I didn't get to see him until April so this post had to wait. It took me a while to decide what picture I wanted to try with string art. I didn't want my first string art project to be something really complicated but I also wanted it to look good, as it was a gift. Trying to find something that my friend would like, that wasn't too complicated, was difficult. He loves wolves so I was determined to make a wolf. I think I spent more time trying to decide on a picture to try than actually making the thing. I also spent ages trying to find some wood. So I ended up buying a chopping board... may not have been the best idea though as I will explain in a bit. So what I used: -nails -poster paint -thin string -chopping board -paint brush -hamm...

Who doesn't love a bit of Studio Ghibli? My favourite of them all being Howls Moving Castle. I decided to make Calcifer for a friend after she got a tattoo of him on her (as she calls it)'Geek leg'. If you don't know who Calcifer is then: Boo! I couldn't find a pattern for Calcifer that I liked on the Internet so I decided to give it a go myself, it seemed simple enough. I started by crocheting a tear drop shape with yellow in the centre gradually moving to orange and then red to get the fire effect. The end result was a multicoloured teardrop which didn't really look like fire. Luckily I'd seen a few days before that brushing crochet projects makes them fluffy. Perfect. I gave it a go. Brushing crochet (without a pet brush which is what your supposed to use apparently) takes a LONG time. So I sat for a while brushing this colourful tear drop, trying really hard to make it look even slightly like fire, until my hands ached and I had to give u...

I've been looking forward to posting this for a while, I made it as a Christmas present for my friend however life has got in the way and we haven't seen eachother. This is now my favourite amigurumi that I have made! He is adorable! I may be biased though because I do love a bit of Studio Ghibli. I think this is the biggest amigurumi I have made so far. It took me a while to make but I enjoyed every minute of it and as it's a gift I was thinking about my best mate the whole time :). The only bit I did not enjoy was sewing on the appendages but thats a personal opinion because I hate sewing and always panic that they are in the wrong place. The instructions for this are very easy to follow and there isn't any complicated stitches. If you can single crochet, decrease and increase your sorted. The size was a bit bigger than I expected and I ran out of stuffing half way through... here are the dimensions of my finished product: Hight (Inc. ears): 9.25 inches Wi...

I have completed my second blanket for Sixty Milion Trebles. (Find out more information about this charity Here ). This is a 36x36 inch blanket made by crocheting corner to corner (c2c). After struggling with the first blanket being so heavy to handle and my yarn holding finger getting tired I used my  DIY Crochet Accessories  for assistance. I have never tried a corner to corner blanket like this, I love it. It worked up a lot faster then my Charity Granny Square blanket . I love the colours and I quite like how random it is aswell. As I have never made a corner to corner blanket before I didn't know what pattern to do. It would annoy me if the pattern didn't finish perfectly when I got to 36 inches. I probably could have worked it out, if I could be bothered, but nah. So instead I used a  Random Number Generator  to choose the number of rows of each colour for me. I think it turned out really nice, and no annoyance of a pattern not being perfect. Anyway eno...

The past few weeks I've been concentrating on making crochet blankets for the charity  sixty million trebles  and I am really not used to making projects this big. I normally make Amigurumi or other smaller type projects. So making larger projects is something new to me and it was putting a strain on my 'Yarn holding finger' which I have never really had much experience of before. Luckily I had already made a finger saver (find the pattern for my finger saver  Here ). The finger saver has been a literal finger saver and after messing around with it for a while I realised I could change the tension with it! I am not the brightest spark so if this is nothing new to those who crochet then accept my apologies. So weaving the Yarn through the finger saver once like this: Gives very low tension which was not enough tension for my liking so I thought what would happen if I weave the Yarn through it more, surely the tension would increase, so I gave it a whirl: Alas...

I have completed a 36x36" crochet blanket for the Sixty Million Trebles charity if you missed my blog with the information about this charity  Click Here . I have never made a blanket before what's a better excuse than charity. The blanket took me longer than I anticipated. It is made of all the scrap Yarn that I have. I've used up most of my scraps now which is great, I've already gone out to buy more Yarn! The blanket is made out of granny squares. Instead of making the granny squares separately and sewing them altogether all the end I joined each granny square to the blanket as I went...anything to get out of sewing. All the squares didn't make the blanket to 36" so I made a border carrying on with the granny square theme. Lastly I finished off the blanket with a row of a simple crochet stitch for ease of attaching to other blankets. 15, 615 trebles have now been added to the 60 million count. We have just passed 18.5 million! I am planning on st...

Be warned this is not a very exciting post it was an experiment for my own benefit but I decided to share just incase, by chance, someone may find it useful (also if I make more of these I can read what I did...). If you don't care about blocking but want the pattern to these shawls  Click here  for a link. I made 3  Fortune's Shawlette  as gifts for Christmas. I really love the pattern and how the shawl falls ect. It looks gorgeous when it's finished. My only issue is that as I'm giving them as gifts I don't think my giftees will want to block the shawls after they have been washed. So I just wanted to see the size difference in the shawls after blocking/stretching and not doing any blocking/stretching. I left one as it was without blocking or anything, I blocked one after wasing it and the 3rd one I washed and stretched with hangers... I used hangers as weights on the corners of the shawl (don't judge me). The picture shows the purple one (the largest...