Furzedown Gallery

I've recently had a new order of the little cards I use as notelets and I thought you might like to see them.

They are from Furzedown Gallery and are printed from original watercolours by the artist Kitty Herridge. Her subjects range from animals and flowers to dragons and gnomes - all set amongst beautiful countryside. You can buy the cards in various sizes but I always go for the smallest.

Ten of this size card are £10 and postage is free within the UK. This time I bought two sets of ten, including a set of snowy ones which I thought would be appropriate to send during the winter. Here are the non snowy ones ...

If you click on the picture above you can see the cards in more detail. Aren't they beautiful? I love them all; they're nostalgic without being too cute, if you know what I mean. As you can see, there are two cards with donkeys on. These will be sent to my daughter's partner who is particularly fond of donkeys. There is one called Clover who lives at Hackney City Farm, near where they live in London and, when he is well enough, they visit her and the other donkeys there.

Clover is the donkey at the back of this photo.

I haven't bought any of the snowy cards before; they'd make lovely Christmas cards, wouldn't they?

Only one donkey in this batch but Hedwig makes an appearance. I especially like the one with the red tractor; the artist lives on her family farm and tractors often appear on the cards.

I was pleased to discover that Furzedown Gallery is based on a farm of the same name near  Kings Somborne in Hampshire. As a child I lived in Longstock which is in the same part of the world. I went to school in Stockbridge and my Dad's family come from (and still live in) Broughton. It's particularly nice to be able to support and recommend a local artist.

In other news, I have started painting what will be my new craft room, although I'm tempted to call it the Room of Requirement as it can whatever I need it to be. Also, the cats aren't entirely sure that it exists as the door has been kept closed for years. When I go up there, they think I've left the house (I know this because they tend to stay indoors when I'm out and only venture out to the garden once they know I'm back).

Anyway, before being ill, I would have done a coat of paint on a room easily each day. Now I have to pace myself and can just manage one coat on one wall. So far, I've finished the ceiling and done the first coat on two of the walls.

The ceiling only needed two coats, despite the fact that the colour I painted it before turned out to be much darker than I remembered.

I suspect that those red walls will need three coats though. I shall get there in the end. 

Tying up Loose Ends

For my latest pattern, that's exactly what I've been doing - tying up loose ends. Please tell me I'm not the only one who regularly finds this when going in search of a particular colour of yarn ...

My large collection of Stylecraft Special DK in particular, often ends up like this. At least it did until I took it firmly in hand and wound it all into cakes (but that's a story for another day).

When I'm looking for a colour, I can never be bothered to tease out the ball I want and often resort to pulling a big chunk out and then cutting it off which, of course, leads to more mess and confusion further down the line.

Anyway, I decided it was time to do something about this so I set to and untangled it all; I have 92 shades of this yarn so you can just imagine how long it took. I ended up with a pile of leftover lengths of yarn, most of which weighed less than 10g. Now normally I'd be tempted to throw these away as they'd be the ones that would unwind and tangle themselves up the easiest. There were an awful lot of them though.

This little lot weighed 97g - that's nearly a whole ball of yarn - so I decided to make use of them. After lots of cutting and knotting lengths together, I ended up with this.

This ball of loose ends used less than half of the yarn; isn't it pretty? I quickly learnt to wind the yarn into a ball as I went though. All those knots wrap themselves round each other, leaving you back where you started, untangling a mess.

From that first ball of loose ends, I knitted this little pouch which is about 10 cm / 4"². It's lined with fabric to hide all those knots which gives it a bit of body.

My favourite thing about this little pouch though is that you can button it up in three different ways. There are four buttons and four buttonholes which can be buttoned straight as in the picture above, sideways to give you a humbug shape ...

... or (and I really like this one), so that the top forms a cross on the top ...

I know, I can never do things the obvious way, can I? Here's another photo showing the top of the pouch.

Apart from liking it just because it's different, this way of buttoning leaves a little hole in the middle which is just right for your knitting yarn to come through while the ball is held safely in the pouch.

Yes, that's a different pouch in that picture. I knitted three different sizes before I got bored; instructions for all three are in the pattern. As normal, you can download Loose Ends Pouches free of charge from my ravelry shop.

I suspect that there will be more 'using up oddments of yarn' patterns coming from me in the future as I try to corral my stash into some sort of useable order. In the meantime, I've still got some of those original loose ends left to play with. What shall I make?

Bigger and Better

The snail-like progress towards having a craft room of my own continues. This past weekend Rose and I (mostly Rose) powered our way through a massive list of 'things to do so that I can move on to the painting stage', paying particular attention to things I can't manage on my own. There was a lot of filling holes; Rose did lots of little ones, like these round the window ...

I only had one hole to fill but it was a big one ...

A bit rough and ready but at least you can't see the brick wall through it now.

We also painted the shed and Rose painted the high up bit of the back wall that I can't reach.

I'm now wrestling with paint colour choices; luckily I can order that to be delivered as I can't walk very far again at the moment and definitely couldn't carry a tin of paint.

The thinking and planning for what I want in the room is a continuous process. I want to upgrade the things that I use for work regularly so as to make the difficult things easier and more efficient. With this in mind, I have just bought some new, super-dooper giant blocking mats.

For many years I've been using a set of children's play mats to block all  my knitting and crochet.

They do the job and are easy to store but they're a bit thin and the letters have a nasty habit of falling out and getting lost. Also, the bright colours mean that I can't really use them as a background for photography which is a pain. My new mats are thick, white and huge; this is just one of them with the old ones on top.

Look at those lovely square edges. The mats come with sets of edging strips so that you can use them right up to the edge.

As you can see, there's plenty of room to block four squares at a time on just one mat and I've got eight more, enough for the biggest blanket. The mats came from Provenance Craft Co., an exciting new (to me) online shop and you can get them in various sets. I'm also trying their blocking pins which are made of black enamelled steel. Even the pretty little tin came from Provenance.

The fact that the mats are thicker than most makes them easier to move around when linked together and I think you could stand them up too. With a bit of wadding pinned to them this could turn them into a quilt design wall. 

I joined four mats together to lay my mosaic crochet squares on when planning my colour layout but I shall need more mats once I've added the border.

I'm very excited about this particular project. I'm crocheting the squares together now and, as I add each row, it's really coming to life.