Sunday 31 July 2016

Tissue Paper Pom-Poms

I've spent most of my spare time lately making tissue paper pom-poms for an up-coming party.


The birthday-girl doesn't like balloons, so this was an alternative to bring colour to the hall.  A lot more work than blowing up balloons, though!

There are plenty of tutorials out there for making these, so I won't go into instructions here, but do let me know if you have any questions.  They are fun to make, in small doses - but I have made 73 of them, so I'm pretty much pom-pommed out now!  55 large ones, and 18 small ones - you can see 5 of each below.


I went for warm fiery colours - tissue paper in burgundy, red, orange, yellow and hot pink.  I was nervous about my colour choices at first, but I'm actually really pleased with the bright colourful look!  Someone on Instagram mentioned that it looks like a fiesta - well, that's ideal!  (Thanks Chrissie!)

Here are the 55 large pom-poms stacked up in the spare-room (they were taking up most of the living room floor as I made them!)...


I wanted to give you an idea of how big the pile was - but it seems a lot bigger in real life!  The next challenge is transporting them to the venue and stringing them up somehow... eeek!



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Sunday 24 July 2016

Jenny's Blanket of Hugs

Kate over at Just Pootling has taken on the mammoth task of organising a big crochet-community project as a gesture of love and support for Amanda Bloom (of Little Box of Crochet) and her daughter Jenny, who is fighting a battle against cancer.  You can read more about this here - she puts it all into words far better than I can.

To sum up, crocheters in this country and around the world are all busily making crochet squares following Kate's gorgeous patterns, which will together make up a big comforting blanket for Jenny, in her favourite colours.


My three squares have been made, as you can see above.  I've never tried bobbles before - and I love them!  I definitely see more bobbles in my crochet future!

If you would like to take part, the pattern and all the details can be found here.  Kate uses a 3.5mm hook, but I found that to get my squares to the right size I had to go up to a 5mm hook!  I am clearly a very tight crocheter - it makes you wonder how tense I am?!  The stripy and plain squares also came up a little smaller than the bobble square, but they are not too far off.  With so many different crocheters involved, the square sizes are bound to vary slightly, but I'm sure when everything is crocheted together it will all even out.

I'm glad that I got the chance to contribute to this lovely kind project of Kate's.


Check out my other crochet projects here.

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Sunday 17 July 2016

Instagram Crochet Hook-Up - Part 2

As I mentioned in Part 1 - I took part in a crochet hook-up on Instagram, organised by Lazy Daisy Jones.  You can find more information in that post.

I showed you half of my pictures then, so here is the other half...













As I mentioned, I went to Cost Rica on holiday so couldn't finish the month, but I had great fun doing the days I did do!  Thanks to Lazy Daisy Jones for organising it and looking forward to the next one!

I'm over on Instagram here if you'd like to see more.

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Sunday 10 July 2016

Tapestry Crochet Chevron Phone Case

I got a new phone at the beginning of the year.  Despite being all excited about making a new phone case for it - it's taken me until now to finally do it!


I used a technique I've never tried before - tapestry crochet.  Using this I was able to create the zig-zag (or chevron, as 'zig-zag' doesn't seem to be a fancy enough name these days!) design.  It was quite fun to try, and there are all sorts of design possibilities.

It does give a kind of jaggedy edge between colours, but I think that is all just part of the effect.  Although there may be techniques to make a smoother line - I'll have to research this if I do another tapestry crochet project.


I used a pretty mint button to hook a crochet loop around, to secure the phone.

My previous crochet phone case, I crocheted in a continuous loop, rather than ending each row with a slip stitch and chaining to start the next row.  It creates a very neat fabric.  For this one, I thought that the design might get muddled if I did it that way so I didn't use the continuous method.  You can see in the picture that this has created a diagonal join 'seam' on the back, where each row ended and the next began.  I prefer the look of the continuous crochet, but it's not too bad.

Front
Back
Below you can see the pattern I created in Excel to use when making this...


Each square is a single crochet stitch and a row covers both sides of the case as the whole case was made in one, rather than making each side and sewing together.

I think I prefer my previous phone case, but I still like it and it was fun to learn a new crochet technique!  What do you think?  Have you tried tapestry crochet?


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Sunday 3 July 2016

Instagram Crochet Hook-Up - Part 1

It's a little bit delayed, but I wanted to let you know about a 'Crochet Hook-Up' I took part in on Instagram back in April.

It was organised by Lazy Daisy Jones who blogs here.  I'd not tried anything like this on Instagram before, but I really enjoyed it.  You post a picture a day, following a subject prompt.  It's great as it gets you thinking in different ways and means you take pictures that you might not have thought to take.

We went on holiday to Costa Rica before the end of the month, so I didn't complete the full month, and there were also a couple of days I missed.  However, I thought I'd show here on the blog the pictures I did take, as it was such good fun!  Half of them are shown in this post, and I'll show the other half another day.


A photo posted by Maria (@dinki_dots) on











I'm over on Instagram here if you'd like to see more.


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