Thursday 17 January 2013

The Crochety Rabbit

This week has been mainly taken up with crochety things. No, not crotchety - I'm not getting irritable in my old age! Crochety, as in the age-old hand-craft of crochet. Making things from yarn using a hook and one's hands. I find it relaxing and therapeutic, sat listening to a radio drama, whilst my fingers twist and hook the yarn to make shapes, which in time become garments or accessories.

This week I have been making crochet flower brooches, after a friend in Poland asked me about them. Late last year I'd made some hats which had a flower attached, so thought it would be fun to use the flower as a brooch design. They work well, so I now have a Quality Street tin (yes I know it should be a Roses tin but...!) containing pink, lime green and lavender roses (so far, more colours to follow!)  Making each one different has been fun too, some just one colour, others bi-coloured, some with a bead centre, and others with an attached leaf.

They look super on a lapel, a hat, or attached to a bag. They could also be stitched onto a blanket to make a flowery detail...  I can sense another design coming on!


My crochet items for sale are available from my ETSY shop:
or visit my website to contact me or see my other crocheted items


Tuesday 1 January 2013

Sharing the muck!

A recent comment on Facebook about muck-spreading, from my friend Sue Millard at Jackdaw E Books, reminded me of something which happened when I was a teenager and was dating a local farmer's son.

My mum was a passionate gardener and she and my boyfriend got on like the proverbial house on fire - she made fab apple pies, which he loved!  Anyhow I digress!  One day he'd arrived in his car (a VW Beetle) to collect me, as we'd arranged to go to a steam fair at Levens Hall, so off we went. It was a *very* hot August Bank Holiday afternoon, and we parked the car in the middle of the field allocated for parking, and went off to enjoy the event. When we came back 3 hours later it was to find the Beetle sat alone in a huge open space in the middle of the field - with a definite haze around it. As we approached we detected the smell... which got stronger the nearer we were to the car... looking puzzled I wondered what it was, and the boyfriend - looking very sheepish - confessed he'd brought two large sacks of farmyard manure for mum's garden, but instead of dropping them off for her before we went out, he'd left them in the boot of the Beetle - which, as you most probably know, is at the front of those cars - so we travelled home with an incredible smell of well-cooked manure wafting back over us!