Giveaway winners

Hey there everyone. Thank you so much to everyone who entered my prize draw for the giveaway. It was so lovely to know there were people out there who wanted to win my handmade items.

So I got my hat (not made by me) and pieces of paper with everyone’s names on ready

 

And (drumroll……) the winners are :

First prize – kate from life tea and everything

Second prize – El from whirlingstone

Third prize – hannah from quiet water craft

 Congratulations to you all. Please let me know your address and I’ll get your prizes in the post to you. 

Sorry to those of you who didn’t win, but I’m sure I’ll do another giveaway sometime in the near future, and i really am grateful that you liked my prizes and took part. 

Giveaway-woohoo! 🌈

Hey  there everyone… My lovely followers who have got me to this point! I said I would do a giveaway when I got to 50 WordPress followers, and here we are. I never started blogging in order to get loads of followers, but I’ll admit it’s exciting every time I see that someone else has signed up to follow my blog. I’d had an idea that I wanted to do a giveaway, and 50 followers seemed liked a good reason to celebrate!

So here it is… A giveaway of some of the little things I’ve made, with 3 prizes.

First prize is:

A flamingo card and envelope, a sloth keyring, a crochet may rose and a pinky-red flower button ring.

Second prize is:

A flowery card, a puff stitch flower, and a dark blue flower ring.

Third prize is :

My first ever paper cut on a card and a rainbow coloured flower button ring.

I had fun making some of these prizes this morning while listening to cds of some of the bands I got into at chagstock, the music festival we went to in Devon last weekend. In case you fancy checking any of them out they are :

Raghu dixit– Indian guys playing seriously cool, beaty Indian music

Mr tea and the minions – a band from Bristol with a very cool female singer, playing bouncy music with balkan gypsy influence.

Skinny lister – another British band playing rocky folk music and sea shanties… They were the only band I’ve ever seen to have a head-banging accordion player and a double bass player playing it while holding it up on his shoulder!

Echo  town – 2 brothers who play music that I’m not sure how to describe but which includes harmonica (lush!) , slide guitar (awesome!) didgeridoo (so cool!) and other instruments. They have very cool lyrics including “fighting fire with fire only makes things burn… You can’t solve problems with war and hate coz the more you destroy the less you create” (seems appropriate for a creative blog!)

So, plug of my new favourite bands over… Here are the rules for the giveaway. If you’d like a chance to win one of the prizes then just leave a comment on this blog post. If you’re not sure how to do that then feel free to email me /text me and I’ll add your name to the hat. And I genuinely will use a hat… put all the names in it and pull 3 out. First out will get first prize and so on. The giveaway is open to anyone from any country.

You have until saturday 12th August to register your interest and i shall do the draw at midday UK time that day.

Ooh I’m so excited! Hope  you are too! 🤣

Hennafest!

Today I’ve come to stay with Rosie (my goddaughter) and her family for a couple of days (enjoying my summer holidays while poor mark had to go home  to work!). I brought henna with me and we spent ages sat in  the garden this afternoon and evening doing designs on each other. Rosie did a seriously cool elephant on my hand, and a lovely flowery pattern on my ankle. 

I then followed her request to draw an ankle bracelet, which was really hard to do evenly as you have to keep moving to access different parts of the ankle, and try to make sure the lines will join up. I was a bit disappointed with how wobbly the lines are, but Rosie loves it so that’s all that matters! 

Then I did a combination of two designs she likes, which looked pretty cool. 

After that Rosie did a lush little seahorse on her mum, and then her  younger brother got in on the act and rosie went with star wars designs for him. 

It’s been lots of fun as always! 

2 pieces of exciting news

Yippee! I finished the spring fields baby blanket that I was pattern testing for Katie from creating time. I’m so pleased with it and really happy I finished it before the end of July, which was the target. 

Here it is, photographed in the sunshine

And here are a few close ups. I love the colours on it, and the only thing I’m disappointed with is the fact that I have holes in the bottoms of the flowers where I didn’t do the stitches tight enough. They don’t notice a lot in these photos but are more obvious in real life. 

It’s  been a fun pattern to follow, doing lots of front and back post stitches, popcorn stitches and techniques I’ve not used before, and I’m proud of myself for learning so much through making it, improving my skills as I went along, and responding to the challenge of trying something new. I adapted the distance between the leaves and the flowers as I realised I crocheted some rows more than once, and learnt the importance of marking off the rows on the pattern! 

I really enjoyed crocheting the border and seeing how that brought the whole blanket together. 
Thank you to katie for giving me the opportunity to test her pattern… It’s been fun! 

My second piece of exciting news is that I’ve got 50 WordPress followers!! So  that means a giveaway of an exciting prize of things I’ve made! You’ll have to wait a few days though as I’m away visiting my parents and then my God daughter and can’t do a photo of the prize as I don’t have it with me, but hopefully you’ll like it when I show you what you can win! 

First ever piece of crochet

After Tina from kristabellashodgepodge commented that my blanket was likely to be significantly better than any of my first attempts at crochet I was inspired to venture up into the loft to see if I could find my first ever piece of work. 

As I recalled you could see more  strands  of wool than stitches, which is true, but i have to say that having found it out looks an awful lot better than it did in my imagination. Maybe there is a lesson for me here!! 😉

Here it is

Blanket WIP update

Well, I’ve done lots of the blanket, which unfortunately means I’ve made lots of mistakes! The blanket will be fine but I’m not sure how useful my services as pattern tester will be. 

This is where it was last time I blogged about it. 

Then I had a lovely evening crocheting with my friend lizzy while she knitted a hot  water bottle cover. It got this far then

Then I did the odd few rows, and then went to a crochet morning at our church. I did a couple of rows and realised I’d missed something out so frogged. But then I realised I hadn’t frogged far enough, and to get it right I’d have to frog back past my new ball of wool join and lose about 2 inches of work. Well, that would just be too disheartening, so i keep going and decided i’d have a pair  of leaves missing and a bigger  gap between the flowers. 

So tonight I’ve kept going and have appreciated they loan of a spindly spool thing that I put the wool onto so it unravels without going everywhere. Thank you to lovely Ann from church for lending it to me. I normally take wool from the centre of the ball, but i felt the colours would match better if I started from the outside of this second ball. 

Here’s where I’ve got to now after an evening of sitting listening to my sister reading a loud from little town on the prairie to my niecephews as I crocheted… I felt like I’d gone back in time! 

Just need to make the final flower and then make the blanket the right length and do the border. 

Here’s a close up of tonight’s flowers which look different to each other when they’re supposed to be the same, and which have big gapey holes in the bottom edges. Other than those two issues I’m quite pleased with them! 

I’m getting better at living with and adapting as a result of my mistakes in crochet, but I’ve realised that I overestimated my ability as  a pattern tester, and I’ve also learnt a very important lesson that it helps to tick off the tows on the pattern as you crochet them. On my defence I didn’t do that because I thought I would want to use the pattern more than once, but I’ve now realised that problem can be overcome with different coloured pens!! 

Birthday card

This evening I made a birthday card for a lovely man  in our church who has his birthday this week. He has significant learning difficulties and can’t communicate a lot but his mum was telling me today that he’s really excited that he’ll have balloons for his birthday. So, I thought that would be a good subject for his card. 

Having made the card, Mark and i have had a conversation about whether the strings would make it easier or harder for him to identify that they are balloons, but as i have no idea, I’m going with it, and I’m sure he’ll understand if someone  tells him what they are, as he definitely knows the word ‘balloons’. 

Whether he knows what they are or not i hope the card and little present I’ve got him communicate to him now much i think of him. He totally makes my day when his face breaks into the most massive smile you’ve ever seen, and he gives me a huge hug.