Mass Production

I like to think of craft as a peaceful relaxing activity, preferably accompanied by a pot of tea. In reality though, it often degenerates into something like mass production with me determinedly making lots and lots of the same things and regretting my initial enthusiasm. Luckily, I'm normally re-enthused once I see the finished project but in the meantime it can be a bit of a chore.

Would you like to see some of the projects that are currently filling up my days? This year I'm on a mission to actually make all the cards I send, rather than just think I'll do it right up until about mid December when the penny drops.

In the first three months of 2025 I made all the birthday cards I needed for this year. I can only show you the ones that have been sent so far. These are all cross stitch, a mixture of kits and patterns from magazines.

There are a couple of canvaswork designs in this next batch and the red one is Lagartera embroidery.

Having made the birthday cards I moved on to Christmas preparations last month (Don't laugh, I'll be the smug one later in the year). I started by making lots of Christmas gift tags, some in cross stitch and some blackwork. They're now packed away in a pretty tin with this year's mini stockings that I always design and knit in January. I tie these to the outside of the presents and fill them with little chocolates.

Next I stitched the cards I make for the four people in my immediate family. Which left what we call my mass produced Christmas cards. Every year I work out a design for a handmade Christmas card and then make an awful lot of them.

Last year I sewed together strips of scrap fabrics and then cut them into tree shapes and added a felt pot and a sequin star.

This year I decided on papercraft cards and found some nice cutting dies in the shape of baubles. This is what 50 Christmas cards in kit form looks like.

This was after I'd cut out all the various pieces. Now I'm on to the gluing stage which is fiddly but, by doing one small stage at a time, I'm getting there. 

These are the essentials for this year's cards. Well not Tolly obviously but he does like to join in. First, my Sizzix Big Shot machine. This is so good. As well as making cards I also use it to keep my daughter and I supplied with thread bobbins and to cut aperture cards for our cross stitch. The little bronze shapes are two of the dies I used for my bauble cards. You can cut out the basic bauble shape and then re-cut it with the detailed cutter. I'm using shiny card but I also tried it with felt, thinking it would probably be too thick but it worked perfectly. Think of the possibilities ...

The plastic thing with a snowflake pattern on is an embossing folder. You put a piece of card inside it, run it through the machine and end up with a pattern of snowflakes embossed into the card. You might just be able to see some of the card at the top of the picture with all the pieces in. When it comes to gluing small pieces of card together I find my fine tip glue bottle from Petite Properties is a must. I fill it with ordinary PVA glue. The tweezers were a present from my son; they're reverse action tweezers which means that, once you've got them holding whatever little thing you want, you can relax your hand, only pressing when you want to open them again. As well as holding tiny pieces of card to be glued, I've also used them when painting miniatures.

So, that's one lot of mass production but, obviously, there's always a production line of knitting and crochet going on here too. Out of my many unfinished projects that need working on, I'm currently trying to concentrate on three different lots of crochet. 

This is my box of corner to corner blocks; I need to make 64 of these all together. They'll go together something like this ...

Then there's my box of African Violet hexagons too.

These are fun to make, mostly because of that pretty yarn. I don't know how many of these I'm going to need but I know I've still got lots to make.

Then I had the bright idea of making some crochet flowers on sticks (as you do) and I seem to have got a bit carried away.

I'm producing these at a rate of six a day, mainly in an attempt to get them finished before I go off the idea. I think I might need to give them some leaves too.

The only bit of mass produced knitting I'm working on at the moment is these little pouches.

Last year I decided to work out how to make my own crackers using thin card, wrapping paper and ribbon. I made a dozen, six for here and six for my daughter's house.

The inner tubes and the ribbon can be used again and I made notes on how I made them so this year's set should be a lot easier to make. I wanted to put something nice in the crackers and, after much searching online, came up with the idea of little jigsaw puzzles. The most economical way to get them was to buy one of these.

This is the Christmas Village Advent Calendar, 24 little 50 piece puzzles. It cost about £30 and gave me enough puzzles for two year's worth of crackers which I thought was pretty good.  Also, isn't the box pretty? I'm going to keep it to turn into a special advent calendar one day; there are little pictures in the back of each drawer too. 

The puzzles come in plastic bags but I decided to knit little pouches for them too, just in case those plastic bags split. I used my old Gift Wrap pattern and oddments of plain and variegated yarn left over from knitting socks.

This year I'm knitting plain pouches but, every time the yarn changes colour, I knit a round or so in K1, P1 - stops me getting bored.

Although it's very satisfying to be getting ahead like this, it will be nice to get back to making just one of something. 

Meanwhile, the decorating goes on. Over the past month or more, I've been working on the bedroom on the middle floor. 

Looking good you might think but, if you look at the other half of the room ...

... you can see that it's not finished yet. Once we've moved this lot, I've got to do it all again. Mind you, I'm not varnishing the floor under the bed. I might give it a clean but that's it. The second lot of painting and varnishing might be a bit quicker as there's less wall to paint. The built in cupboard, fireplace and window take up quite a lot of it. Of course, that does mean I've got to paint the window frame. Maybe by the end of the summer I shall be able to show you another finished room. See the bags on the bed? They're my Mum's quilts, waiting for new storage in this room once it's finished. I'm really looking forward to showing them to you once I can get at them properly. There are masses of them and they're all beautiful.

Ten Stitch Rectangle

I regularly get messages from knitters asking me how to use my original Ten Stitch Blanket pattern to knit a rectangular blanket. Often they have tried by knitting a rectangle to start with but then the finished project hasn't turned out to the proportions they'd wanted. So, finally I've got round to writing up instructions on how to do this. It's actually quite simple to explain but, being me, the pattern somehow grew to sixteen pages. Why does that keep happening?

Anyway, as normal, you can download this new pattern for free from my ravelry store. I knitted three different rectangular projects to illustrate this technique, all with different proportions and using different weights of yarn. There's a chunky rug, a long thin table runner in DK weight yarn and a very nearly square placemat in thin 4 ply. That last one took me ages to knit despite being the smallest. Possibly the fact that I was knitting it on 2.25 mm needles had something to do with it!

Over the last year or so I've published two different ten stitch hats and two ten stitch cushions so you think I'd be getting fed up with this particular knitting technique wouldn't you? But no, somebody commented on this blog recently saying that they'd love a ten stitch lace pattern. I'd been thinking the same for a while but kept putting off trying it as I suspected it would be tricky. It was and I'm still not sure about it.

It doesn't help that I'm working outside my comfort zone of bright saturated colours and using lots of pale pastels. The idea is to work each 'round' in a different colour to make a baby blanket. Whether or not it's successful, only time (and a lot more knitting) will tell.

Baskets and Pocket Lace

Have you ever noticed that, as you get older, you find yourself drawn to things that you would have scorned in the days of your heady youth? When these were still around in the 1970s I wouldn't have given them house room.

Bright workbaskets woven with plastic strips on a wooden base. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes and now I just can't resist adding to my collection whenever I see another one. They tend to be quite pricey online but, luckily, Orinoco often has them for a few pounds.  

I like to make use of my pretty things so the baskets all hold craft supplies of various sorts. Like a closer look?

I've had these two little ones for so long I can't remember where I got them. As you can see, they both have handles (of a sort) and the darker one has a lovely catch shaped like a butterfly. I've just got a few redwork supplies in the tiny one - I forgot to take a photo - and the other one is full of fancy threads.

Isn't that ruched lining great? As you can see, it's missing some of it's braid but is otherwise in good condition. This next one looks fairly plain on the outside ...

... but comes over all flowery on the inside.

Inside are my Natesh Rayon threads, a collection of gloriously shiny colours. These go with this book which I bought many years ago.

It's full of exciting ideas for combining simple stitches with glowing colours to give you all sorts of beautiful geometric designs - all my favourite things. The stitches are all clearly explained and, although there are projects in the book, it's easy to use it to just stitch a little panel, perhaps for a card.

That little unfinished square fell out when I opened the book; I was obviously trying out colours.

Right, let's get on to the two bigger baskets. This green one is quite a simple design. I do like the striped plastic edging on all these baskets by the way.

I've got a collection of felt kits and supplies in this one; I really must get more of these made. The braid inside is in a sorry state but it's still rather nice.

I especially like baskets with a bit of a different shape. Not only does this red one have sloping sides but it has a proper handle too.

The lining is pink and I use it to store my hardanger supplies.

For years I thought hardanger looked very difficult and time-consuming to do but I was drawn to all those geometric designs again. Then I got these booklets and found out it was easy, quick to do and not at all scary (even though, yes, there is cutting of fabric involved).

I'm a big fan of Mary Hickmott so I knew these would be good and I wasn't disappointed. She takes you gradually through the different stitches and techniques involved and many of the projects are small and can be turned into cards. The instructions are clear and well illustrated; I'd thoroughly recommend these.

I got this old hardanger magazine from the free shelf at Orinoco because of that beautiful cloth on the cover. Isn't it lovely? One day maybe.

Meanwhile, here are a few of the hardanger cards I've made. These all use designs from 'Easing Into Hardanger', except the yellow one which was a kit (Orinoco again).

Look again on those shelves though and you can see that a new basket has been added to my flock and it's probably my favourite so far.

I love the bright blue of this one, it's got bulgy sides (haven't we all?) and it even has a plastic tray inside.

I haven't really decided what I'm going to keep in this one but I think it will probably have something to do with tatting.

I've been concentrating on improving my basic tatting skills lately and thoroughly enjoying myself in the process, even if it does keep giving me a headache. Tatting is sometimes called pocket lace because, well ... it fits in your pocket. All you need is a shuttle or two and a ball of thread and off you go. It may look delicate but it's actually very sturdy as it's made up of lots of tiny knots.

The thing about tatting books though is that most of them don't include the modern techniques that so many designers use now. You can find youtube instructions for them but I don't like learning from a video. This meant that I could do the basic rings, chains and joins but was stuck when it came to things like split rings, self closing mock rings and the like. So, I decided to learn all these things slowly with lots of practice.

I've found three things helpful in my search for tatting tutorials. The first is Craftree which is like a clunkier version of ravelry but which specialises in tatting. You can look up patterns and tutorials by technique here and lots of them are free to download. The ones I'm using most are by Jennifer Williams who has many free tutorials and patterns available as pdfs so I can print them out. These are all her designs.

And I was very pleased with this woven snowflake which is made in two pieces and then threaded together. It's from her book Twenty to Make: Tatted Snowflakes.

Not a great photo but the snowflake is nice.

So Jennifer Williams s my second useful thing and the third is my collection of newsletters from the Ring of Tatters. They include lots of patterns, many of which are suitable for beginners and they're a good source for help with different techniques too.

This week I've branched out into trying a pattern from an actual book and by a different designer.

I'm working on the first design from Jon Yussof's book Elegant Tatting Gems. I'm learning so much from this pattern. I've even managed to join in two new threads, something I'd been dreading. Mind you, I'm a bit worried about the end of the pattern when I have to join the last repeat to the first ...

One thing that has made a big difference to my tatting is my new picot comb. Up until now I'd been trying to use the blue picot gauge and I couldn't get on with it at all. With the comb you can make picots of different sizes within one ring or chain just by taking the thread over one or more teeth. 

I can't say that I'm at the stage of putting my tatting in my pocket and working on it anywhere yet. It's more a case of sitting over the table and counting every stitch out loud at the moment. I'll get there though. When I feel more confident I'm going to treat myself to some more thread and shuttles and a new book. I have my eye on Robin Perfetti's Four Dozen Tatted Snowflakes. She also has another one which is equally tempting called Four Dozen Tatted Bookmarks. I think I'm going to need to re-think my tatting thread storage soon though. At the moment I'm using another vintage workbox, this one is embroidered and looks like it might be home made.

There's a removable tray inside (and a little bit more embroidery) but it's getting rather full.

Before I go, I thought you might like to see the latest splash of colour in my garden, my Ceanothus.

It's that time of the year when I'm waiting for my roses to flower too. My 'Kew Gardens' was the first again but, so far, it's only giving me one rose at a time, despite being absolutely covered with buds. I've had a word with it about upping its game so we shall see.