Knitted Yo-Yos

After my short and simple Tropical Scarf pattern, I'm back to normal with my new pattern which is sixteen pages long. They just seem to get longer and longer. To be fair, this one explains a new technique (well, new to me anyway) and then illustrates it with several sample projects. You can't do that in a couple of pages.

Knitted Yo-Yos

Fabric yo-yos (or Suffolk Puffs as they are traditionally known here in England) are gathered circles of fabric which are simple to make and can be joined to make lovely quilts. They are easy to sew by hand but you can also buy Yo-Yo Makers if you fancy a new gadget. 

Yo-yos make lovely scrap quilts but the circles can also be arranged into planned designs or appliqued to a background fabric. I particularly like this pattern from Kim Diehl's 'Simple Graces'. 

She also uses yo-yos to make a matching door hanger. I love her designs; she has a really good eye for colour.

These little circles turn up in toy patterns too. Jean Greenhowe calls these 'Rosette Dolls' in her classic toy book 'Favourite Dolls & Toys'. 

I bought my copy of this book years ago because I wanted to make her little doormouse tree trunk house for my daughter when she was little.

I wrote about this years ago; you can see pictures of the inside in this blog post.

There are various patterns out there for crochet yo-yos too which I have tried over the years. I bought Melody Griffiths' book 'Crocheted Throws & Wraps' purely because I spotted the Puffs Baby Blanket on the cover. There are some other interesting designs in this book too.

Isn't it nice?

I couldn't find links for any of these books so they are probably out of print but second hand copies would be easy to find, I'm sure.

Anyway, back to the knitting. All you need for a knitted yo-yo is a strip of knitted fabric with drawstrings at both ends. It took me quite a bit of experimentation to come up with a drawstring cast on that matched the one at the other end of the knitting. Instructions for this cast on which may or may not be new are in the pattern. I had a lot of trouble both trying to explain how to do it and taking the photos.

Once I'd sorted out the basic pattern I knitted lots of them, using some of my little balls of leftover yarn. Each one only takes about 2g of yarn and they're quick to knit.

After I'd worked out various ways of sewing the yo-yos together I knitted some different sizes ...

... and then several sets of flowers.

Can you spot the difference between the two pictures above? It turns out that you need the right number of petals if you're going to be able to sew flower yo-yos together to make a flat shape.

I also found that you can turn a yo-yo into a heart (with a bit of tricky sewing).

Next I had a play to see what I could make with my knitted yo-yos. First, inspired by Eric Carle's book, I made a Very Hungry Caterpillar. Like the Jean Greenhowe toys, he's threaded on to elastic so that you can shape him a bit.

I thought a more traditional project was called for next so I set about knitting lots of four patch blocks of yo-yos, using two shades of one colour for each block.

These were pretty but I thought they needed something more so I knitted tiny black yo-yos and sewed them into the middle of each block which really set off the colours.

Eventually I stopped playing around with them and arranged them into four rows of three and sewed them together, adding more little black circles in the gaps between the blocks.

What I love about this layout is the way the black circles turn into on point squares once they're sewn in place. There's a hint of the hexagon about the inner coloured ones too. All this is because of how the yo-yos are sewn together; you can play with it to achieve different effects. 

I hadn't got a plan for this rectangle but it turned out to be exactly the right size to go on top of my cross stitch workbox so that was a bonus.

I hope knitters will find this a useful pattern. You can download it here and I look forward to seeing some exciting knitted yo-yo projects. I might make a yo-yo bag next ...

New Year, New Room

As regular readers will know, I am slowly (very slowly) sorting out my messy house and making it my own. This involves a lot of decorating, shifting of furniture and huge amounts of stuff going to charity shops. At some point it's going to look emptier surely? 

I say that I'm doing it but I couldn't manage without my two adult children who do all the heavy stuff as well as any thinking or planning that's too much for my covid affected brain. We started at the top of the house - there are three storeys - and plan to work our way down. In 2022 we turned my son's old bedroom into my craft room and last year we started work on my daughter's old room which was to become my new bedroom. There was quite a lot of sorting to do before I could even start on the painting.

Although I can manage painting I can only do one coat on one wall per day so it takes a very long time to re-decorate a room. My daughter painted the ceiling for me as even one coat of that was too much for me to do. Then I had to have help with cutting the fabric to make my new curtains - complicated thinking - and again when it came to hanging them and measuring the hems but, by the end of the year, the room was ready for its furniture.

As it's the smallest of the bedrooms I decided to get a new, slightly smaller bed to give me a bit more floor space. After an awful lot of measuring and debating the pros and cons of this, I ended up with this.

It's a small double bed which means that it's six inches narrower than a standard double (4', rather than 4'6") and I also decided to have it six inches shorter. You'd be surprised what a difference that makes to the room while still giving me (and the cats) plenty of room to sleep. I bought the bed and mattress from Bed Guru who make beds and mattresses in custom sizes.

Once the bed was sorted we just had to move in my chest of drawers and clothes rail which were the two other essential pieces of furniture. This wasn't as simple as it sounds. Moving furniture between floors in this narrow, steep house nearly always involves taking it apart and putting it back together again. Luckily, we had Tolly cat to help us at every stage.

Tolly exploring the frame of the chest of drawers.

Choosing a new rug and working out where to put things took weeks but finally, about a week ago, the room was ready for me to move in.

I chose a shaggy cream rug from Dunelm which arrived a few days ago and makes the room much cosier. Tolly isn't sure about it as his paws sink into it which he hasn't encountered indoors before; I suspect he thinks it's grass. Linnet meanwhile (who is a very suspicious cat) contents herself with collecting me from the bedroom door in the mornings. It's taken her a year to start venturing into my craft room and even then I have to stay in one place if she comes in or she immediately leaves the room. 

My new bedroom is much quieter as it's at the back of the house, away from the road and I'm enjoying finding things to go in it. I'm making it a much more old-fashioned room than my super modern, white craft room - in fact, it's really my childhood bedroom. Or the bedroom I would have liked if we'd had more room. 

That's my old dolls house on the chest of drawers which became my daughter's when she was little but has now come back to me. I still have some of my original furniture and am planning to find other pieces from about the same era to bring it back to life. Neville, the dog on wheels was a birthday present about ten years ago; I never had one as a child but we did have a wonderful wooden horse on wheels.

This is my brother Stephen with it in the late 1950s and here's a close up of it in colour ...

I would love to find one like this to replace our old one but I haven't even been able to discover the make. If anyone recognises this old horse I'd love to hear from you.

Anyway, back to  my new room. There are some other old friends in this corner.

The built in shelves hold my children's picture book collection (bought as an adult) and the biggest of the three bears is my old teddy bear. His name is Monkey (don't ask) and he's very threadbare and worn. Always a good sign with an old bear as it shows that it's been loved. The other two old bears came from antique shops.

The most exciting part of the room so far though is the bookcase on the other side of the bed.

This is one of the shallow bookcases I made for my children when they were little; it's less than six inches deep. Have you ever noticed how so-called 'bookcases' are mostly too deep for actual books? Anyway, this one fitted perfectly into this space and I've filled it (mostly) with childhood books and treasures. Let's look a bit closer ...

The wooden mushroom on top of the bookcase is my new bedside light. There's only one plug socket in this room and it's nowhere near the bed (another of the joys of old houses) so this is a rechargeable lamp.

Nearly all the books on this bookcase are my original childhood ones, with one small and one big exception. The small exception is the second volume of 'Tales From Shakespeare' (the green one) which I bought to match volume one which was a prize from primary school in 1971. Next to those books are my old poetry books and my A A Milne's. I've had the tin kaleidoscope as long as I can remember and played with it a lot. Colours and patterns - very much my sort of thing.

My daughter made me the felt toadstool from a kit and it's sitting on my Mum's Milly Molly Mandy books from the 1940s. I absolutely loved the book of verses by Mabel Lucie Attwell which I was given by my godparents for Christmas in 1962. Attwell had an interesting life as I found when reading the biography of her written by Chris Beetles.

The little kewpie doll was actually my daughter's but she gave her to me to replace one that I had when I was little and I think she goes well with the Attwell style. At the end of this top shelf are the Ladybird Books I had as a child. I've written before about how important these books were to me in a time before colourful picture books. You can read more about them here. 

The second shelf is mostly full with my old story books, including the 'What Katy Did' series which I've recently been reading. Thanks to someone on my ravelry group, I've recently discovered that there were five books all together so I've now go the other two as ebooks. Other favourites on this shelf were Little Women, The Little White Horse, The Borrowers series and the Mary Plain books. Again, I discovered Mary Plain through reading my Mum's old childhood copies.

The blue hardback near the end of the shelf is a copy of The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy which I may have stolen from the library. I loved it so much even though (or perhaps because) the setting was quite strange to me at the time that I couldn't bear to part with it. 

Before moving on to the next shelf, I must tell you about the two little hedgehogs at the other end of this shelf. They are old hedgehog toys from the 1960s which my daughter bought me to go with Georgie, my hedgehog nightie case who I got for my seventh birthday and still have. All of them were made by Merrythought.

Two more shelves to look at. The third shelf has my Enid Blyton books and the rest of my childhood story books. I'm gradually re-reading these and have particularly enjoyed those by Jenifer Wayne which I think are all out of print now.

In the middle are my small collection of Polish Peg Dolls. The one in the red cloak was mine as a child, I bought the other two in recent years as I thought it was about time she had some company. There's something rather special about these little dolls I think.

The bottom shelf is where we get to the big exception about this being my childhood books. The half dozen or so at the start of the shelf were mine and I read and re-read them. They were all originally my Mum's and most of them were school prizes. They boasted exciting titles like Jane Runs Away From School and 'Bracken Had a Secret'. I can't remember now what the secret was; I shall have to re-read that one. My absolute favourite though was Queen of the Abbey Girls which I didn't realise for years was just one of a huge series of Abbey Girls books by Elsie Oxenham. As you can see, I've gradually added to my collection over the years, starting in the 1970s ... and I still haven't got a complete set. I think I might have to read them all in order this year, some of them for the first time. Does anyone else know these books?

One more thing to show you before I go - a corner of cuddly toys. With a lot of measuring, cutting and sticking, I managed to contrive some basic cardboard shelves out of an old box to house a few toys in the corner next to this bookcase.

I found the two old  toy dogs separately at Brackley Antiques, the source of many of my treasures when I was able to travel. The rabbit standing next to them is my brother's old toy who he christened 'Bottle'. He also had a penguin called 'Gate'; as you might gather, our Mum believed in letting us name our own toys. Bottle had to have a new body sewn for him by me years ago, hence the clothes.

The pretty toys on the top of these shelves are Emily Button and her friends Bobble the Cat and Mousey the Mouse. These were sold by Marks & Spencer here in the UK about ten years ago which is when I bought mine. They no longer sell them but you can find them secondhand quite easily. I love their pastel patchwork style.

And now I must stop. I hope you've enjoyed a look round my new room.

Autumn Bunting Pattern

After a glimpse of my new Autumn Bunting last time, you might like to know that I've got the pattern written up and published. You can download it for free on Ravelry. As normal, if you like it, I do encourage you to make a donation to the Children's Liver Disease Foundation, the charity that I support through my work. I started doing this back in 2008 and, over the years, knitters and crocheters around the world have helped me to raise over £25,000 for this very deserving cause. You can donate directly to the charity or via my fundraising page here.

So ... would you like a closer look at the new pattern? Like my Spring Bunting, there are all sorts of details to find.

It's a very long pattern - 24 pages - the proofreading alone took hours. What you get though is lots of little patterns: two sorts of flags, the knitted letters and then five decorations. These could be knitted separately and sewn on to scarves or hats or, in the case of the hedgehogs, used as toys or ornaments.

I got a bit carried away with the hedgehogs and, as well as the slightly flat one used on the bunting (think road kill, only less kill and more mildly squashed), I included a pattern for a smaller hedgehog too so that you could make a family of fatter ones as little toys.

I rather like the toadstool too. It's not easy to design something small and simple to knit that still looks like what it's meant to be. The trick with this design is not to make it too regular; it turns out that a leaning toadstool looks much more natural than a straight one.

My favourite part of this pattern though has got to be the fox's head. This was the most challenging thing to design; in the end I built it up in knitted layers and then added embroidery to bring it to life.

I hope people won't be put off by the embroidery; it's really not that difficult to do. Those fur-like little stitches around the edges of the knitted shapes make all the difference. Before I added them, it could just have easily been a deer's head.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this latest variation of my bunting patterns. Next year, when I've recovered from writing such a long pattern, I'm hoping to complete the set with some Summer and Winter themed bunting.

Marmaduke and Stanley

Today I thought I'd introduce you to two friends, one old and one new. First of all, meet Marmaduke.

As you can see, Marmaduke is a mouse troll with orange fur and he's a very old friend that I thought I'd lost. He turned up in a box of various small toys when we were sorting through a cupboard last weekend and, after a clean up, he really looks good, considering he's over fifty years old. I'd forgotten his name but, as soon as I picked him up, it came back to me. I suspect I named him after Marmaduke Stanley, the cook / housekeeper in one of my favourite books, The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge.

Marmaduke is special because he brings back a nice memory of Mum and me having 'spendies' on a shopping trip when I was little. I remember being very excited at being able to choose things, just like that. This is where we went - Andover High Street in the 1960s.

I have no idea what Mum got for herself but I do remember choosing a red bouncy ball and then spotting Marmaduke. He was in a clear plastic box with a hole in so you could feel the fur and I can still remember how soft he felt; I thought I'd never seen anything so wonderful. Mum and I would have fun shopping together for many years but this was the first time that I remember.

Moving on, I bet you're wondering what sort of toy Stanley is going to turn out to be. Meet Stanley the Vice ...

Stanley the Vice - isn't that a great name? He only arrived yesterday and is already proving to be a very useful sort of friend. And no, he didn't come with the eyes already fitted; I have to say, I think the manufacturers are missing a trick there. This is what he was helping me with this morning ...

... drilling holes in lots of little wooden shapes. My daughter Rose and I bought a big bag of wooden shapes for £1 at Orinoco, our new scrap shop. It's full of donated and recycled craft supplies and yes, it's named after the Womble of the same name. All together now:

                                            'Underground, overground, wombling free,

                                            The Wombles of Wimbledon Common are we.

                                            Making good use of the things that we find,                                                                                     Things that the everyday folk leave behind.' 

I think these wooden shapes will make great gift tags or decorations, they just needed holes to hang them up by - hence Stanley's involvement. 

I predict a happy future for Stanley and me. I think he's going to be very useful for all sorts of crafts.

Before I go, look what else I bought from Orinoco.

Don't get too excited - they're empty (although they do sell old knitting patterns too). These three files would have come from a yarn shop and cost me £1. I'm planning to fill them with some of my collection of old knitting patterns. Isn't that a fitting use for them? In fact, I may go and do that now.

Two Georges

My seventh birthday, over fifty years ago, is one that I remember particularly clearly. Partly because it was the first one I'd had to go to school on. My birthday is at the end of October which means that it often falls at half term. I don't think I normally had a party for my birthday but, that year, I had two. 

There was one at the weekend for my friends ...

That's me at the back in the blue dress and alice band, next to my best friend Heather (also wearing an alice band, that's how you know we were best friends). Heather emigrated to Australia about five years later and I haven't seen her since. If you look closely you can see the yellow Harlequin plates that were part of my Mum and Dad's wedding china. I still have some of that left and use it regularly.

Anyway, I also had a very special party on my actual birthday although, sadly, there are no photographs. I got off the school bus to find all my favourite dolls (including Hoppity the Space Hopper) grouped round a table full of miniature party food for me to share with them - tiny sandwiches, baby cakes ... I can still picture it and remember how excited I was when I saw it. My Mum was good at that sort of thing; I can also see her on another day, holding up my Tiny Tears doll to show me that she'd made her a new dress during the day.

I still treasure my Tiny Tears who now has to rely on me for new dresses.

You may be wondering where the Georges come in to this story. Well, the first was actually Georgie and he's a nightdress case. He was my seventh birthday present from Mum and Dad so he was an honoured guest at my dolls' birthday party. Here I am with him ...

You can just about see my 'I am 7' badge.

And the second George? He arrived in the post last weekend as a Mother's Day present from my daughter. I didn't know that Merrythought made other hedgehogs in the same family but meet small George ...

Isn't he lovely? He seems to have made friends with my original Georgie and he makes me smile every time I see him.

As you can tell, I was one of those children who really love their dolls - they were (and possibly still are) real to me. I might show you some of the others that I've kept one day.