Janie Crowfoot's Crochet Club 2014 - February

At last I have time on a Sunday to sit down and show you the first part of Janie Crowfoot's 2014 Crochet Club.  Unfortunately, the reason I have time on my hands is because I am sitting at my mum's hospital bedside, occupying myself whilst she sleeps, so there may well be a few mistakes littering this post, as my mind becomes preoccupied by other things.  

The observant of you will note that these are photos from the February pattern, which I've got round to writing up on 30th March, so I'm sure you can imagine how far I am along with the March parts of the pattern - hardly at all!  However, this in no way reflects my enjoyment of the club; whilst initially I was a bit worried about the whole tension thing (amigurumi allows me to have the free reign to use whatever hook I like with no consequence other than  larger or smaller toys at the end of it!) it was nice to actually push myself to use the right hook at the correct tension to go forward for an end purpose.  

I was surprised by how many pattern pieces there were to make.  I've done a few kits and CALs and am usually underwhelmed by what you are given to do, but not this time.  Oh no, this club could easily fill a good few weekends if you want to do a nice job of it all.  Here are the first few (sorry about the colour overload):

This presented another challenge - blocking.  I don't think I've ever really blocked anything, I perhaps have half-heartedly attempted it on a couple of things but this was the real deal; making sure things were the necessary size and shape for when they finally come together as one big piece.  I scoured the Ravelry Group looking for advice and decided to try a hot steam iron hovered about 1 inch above the pieces and luckily it worked out very well.  

There was one part of the pattern that I was particularly hesitant to make a start on, the Quant Flower.  Partly because I hate working up and down the stems of flowers (chains, how I hate you) and partly because it looked almost lacy (slip stitches, I hate you too).  Eventually though I made a start and eventually ended up with a curled up, scrumpled looking colour ball.  But, with a little bit of blocking...

It looked just like the pattern picture! 

March's patterns involve bead work which I am very much looking forward to.  Now just to find the time to make a start...

Embroidery Love

Whilst I am certain my heart will always belong to crochet, a little chunk of it is slowly being given over to my newest hobby; embroidery.  I know it sounds pretty old-school, but I can't get enough of it!  So imagine how excited I was to win a Twitter competition and 20 skeins of  beautiful bright threads!  It was simple enough; Cross Stitch Crazy Magazine were giving away some DMC embroidery threads if you correctly guessed how many boxes of threads were in the picture and I managed to get it spot on (Yes, I had a lot of time on my hands that day and it was a combination of counting and clever calculation).  When Cross Stitch Crazy Magazine tweeted me whilst I was at work to tell me I was the winner, it absolutely made my day!  

The threads arrived quickly afterwards and there was some really lovely colour choices in there:

Today I made the most of the lovely little hint of sunshine that has covered the UK and spent some time in the garden organising my stash which has quite quickly spiralled out of control.   But oh how time consuming it was!  It's surprising how long it takes to wind these little bobbins and about half way through I wondered if I really needed to do it or if I could just shove the skeins in a drawer and pretend they weren't getting tangled, but knew that really that wouldn't work.  I stopped after I'd finished the pinks, purples and yellows...

But there's still a heap of blues and greens to go... (even with my furry little one 'helping')

So that should keep me busy for the next few nights after work!  How do you store your embroidery threads?