Tawashi

Have you heard of tawashi? The cute way of washing things!! I recently wandered through Ravelry looking for quick things to crochet. I needed something quick and easy to do if I wanted a break from rippling. I found lots of tawashi patterns and decided that these would be fun to create. Have a look at this flickr pool called Tawashi Town II.

In the end I chose this one. It is a great little pattern and I have made several. The first two were from cotton and the only difficulty I have was getting the size right. The first one was too small so I doubled the cotton and found that this created one that would be just right for in the shower.

Next up I experimented with some nylon net and ended up with the above cute dish scrubber. Much prettier to look at than the very practical scrubbers found in the supermarket aisle. It has been good - wearing out slowly but no more than anything else I have used to scrub my dishes. I have washed it in boiling water with no damage and the only difference now is a change of colour in some places because of the washing of curry containers.

Happy Crafting!!

Pause in Page Creation

Just taking a little pause in the felt book page creation to think about what to do on the next pages. Meanwhile inspired by the hoop sewing from The Creative Family book which I have borrowed from the library I made this.



I found some lovely bright orange hessian in Spotlight the other day, along with some cream and natural colours, and also got some of the wooden hoops that I have seen on several blogs for creating wall displays of pretty fabrics. I had just been reading The Creative Family where Amanda had described using burlap and a thick needle to teach embroidery to children and had also seen the stitching she had shown on her blog shop update post and this idea just flowed on from there. Also check out this Flickr pool - Swatch Portraits.

I stitched on the flowers with a small circle just around the middle and then used stem stitch in two greens of floss for the stem of each flower, reversing the colour combination on one of the stems. Just to finish it off I did a running stitch around the hoop with some of the hand dyed wool. After I had finished the stitching I loosened the hoop and removed the inner circle from the back. I put a piece of calico over the back of the stitching and replaced the hoop. This hid all the knots and made the background a little more solid. Last of all I trimmed the fabric flush with the hoop and glued some trim over it to hide the edges of the fabric. A little piece of ribbon and it was ready to hang!

Back view.

Here it is - hanging in amongst all the other assorted bits and pieces I like to look at in my creating room. Incidentally it is also where I do the ironing (when I have to!!) and I have lots of lovely things to look at. The dreamcatcher was made with my kids when they were much younger that now and I still love to have it hanging where I can see it. The cat is from the book I referred to in my post about the bird Christmas ornament. All much nicer to look at than a painted brick wall.

Flowers for Friday

Just a quick post - Friday has come quickly this week!

Here are a few photos I took recently of a flower in the backyard. I have cropped the original shots to get these images.



I loved the rows of water droplets on one of the petals and so cropped the image very heavily to get this picture.

Just liked the fuzzy bud waiting to burst open with luscious golden yellow!

The sun was shining through the jonquils and so I thought a back shot would be interesting.

Hopefully at the weekend I will get another page designed for my little felt book and maybe make a few bibs for the onslaught of babies arriving later in the year!

A Little Sewing and Pretty Flowers

I got time this week for a little sewing. I have wanted to try out this little pattern for a while now. Leanne posted a tutorial about creating a thread holder for all those little scraps that accumulate when you are stitching. I had the post bookmarked and had time this week to make my own. It is a fun little project and Leanne's instructions and photos are nice and clear. Thanks, Leanne for posting the tutorial.





I have given this to my lovely daughter to use when she is busy cross stitching so that she has somewhere pretty to put all the little waste threads. It is nice to be able to surround yourself with pretty but practical things.

A picture of some flowers to finish this post. These beautiful flowers were delivered to us during the week. I am enjoying the colours so much as each flower bud opens. It is not a common thing for us to receive flowers so these were very much appreciated. They were sent by my husband's work as a 'thinking of you' gift. His father is still very unwell from a brain injury sustained at Easter doing home maintenance. There has been some improvement but there is a long road ahead to recovery and there may well be long term damage - more testing and rehab is needed yet before any final outcome will be known.

New Cards

I have not created any new cards for quite a while and it felt really good to sit down and create these the other day. I was looking at the flowers that I had crocheted and decided that they would be quite nice on the front of a card. I used a piece of hessian for the flowers to sit on and a little bit of fine line pen detail to finish them off.



We are still enduring computer woes - everything else on the computer is humming along it just doesn't want to talk to the internet at all. It is weird as our little old laptop is still quite happy talking to the internet through the very same modem but this one just wants to have hissy fits constantly. We have tried all sorts of suggestions with no change and are now at the head scratching stage of not having a clue what it could be!!

Coasters and Flowers

Here are a few pictures of the finished coasters. I have had the opportunity to repeat the coaster creating with another group of children and this time I remembered to take a few pictures.



The colour combination in this one does not show up so well in this photo. The green yarn on the purple hessian looked quite good and was contrasted with a pale cream yarn as well.



I also played some more with dyeing my crocheted flowers and also dyeing some wool before making the flowers. It is addictive!!

Lessons learnt this time:

* do not put little flowers out in the hot sun to dry out. End result sunburnt, faded flowers that were re-dyed to try and make them look pretty. The vibrant colours turned very muted in the hot sun. Front and back photos were taken to try and show the difference. I still like the muted flowers but was very surprised at the rapid rate of fade.
* exploding dye in the microwave can make a mess that needs cleaning!
* plastic cling wrap is your saviour - it contains the mess.


The back view is much brighter and clearer in colour tones than the sun exposed front. I suppose I could argue that nature can look like this often so it is a good thing for my flowers to look like this.

The flowers look very different when they are crocheted with the pre-coloured wool. I made the wool multi-coloured and then crocheted the flowers. What do you think?



And last of all an arty shot of the a few blooms in a row! I love playing with my camera and feel incredibly grateful for having been given it as a Christmas present.

Finished Flowers

Thought that it was about time I got around to posting the pictures of the finished crocheted flowers that I posted about earlier.



I was very pleased with the end result. The flowers were crocheted out of some cream wool and then I dyed them using some lace dyes and some ink. The ink gave some very vivid colours and I will be interested to see how colour fast they will be. When I dyed them I rinsed them until the water ran clear, added some more dye for highlights, zapped them again in the microwave and then rinsed them again before leaving them to dry.

The blue and red dyes combined to create some very nice purple tones.

The last batch were very orange and I liked how bright they looked. What do you think?

For the centres I dyed some strands of wool yellow and then stitched lots of French Knots. I like how these contrast with the texture of the crochet.

Each flower was then put onto a coilless safety pin so that it could be pinned to a place card. That leads to a quick explanation of why I was experimenting with these to start with. I was asked to do some place cards by my MIL for a birthday celebration she was having and she was not looking for anything in particular so that gave me free reign to try something new and dyeing wool is something I had not tried before. The flowers were something small to practise on.

I was pretty pleased with the result and will have some more fun soon making some more flowers, dyeing them and tucking them away for later use. I was also pleased to get in some practise with French Knots - something that I often avoided stitching. Repeated practise sure helps to perfect the technique!

Happy Easter

Belated Easter greetings to you all. The blog silence was because we went away for Easter. Easter this year was also Avid Crafter's birthday - a double set of celebrations. She is definitely not lacking in chocolate supplies!

A little crafting happened on the Easter break but no photos yet. I had time to experiment with dyeing some of the little crocheted flowers that I make. I found some very cheap 100% wool in Spotlight and crocheted the flowers first and then dyed them. I tried out some lace dyes that I bought last year and some ink. The ink was an experiment following some information I picked up at last year's craft fair. A little ink in some water, put in the wet flower and zap in the microwave for a short time to heat set the ink. I have yet to rewash the flower to see if the dye has set. I will post pictures soon but have not yet had time to take any and today is revolting weather with no good light for any picture taking!!

Instead I will post this shot - taken in my back yard recently. Ballet dancer is what I thought off when I saw it.

Spring cards

Today I created some cards from some co-ordinating paper packs I got free with a magazine. I have now got this same pack twice from two different magazines so I thought I'd better start using it!

From Avid Crafter'...

Here's the first one - my daffodils card. It's very simple, with the various papers cut to size and stuck on with double sided tape. I used foam tape to give the raised up effect. The plain papers and blank card came from the stash but the others papers came from the pack.

From Avid Crafter'...

This is the second, well actually I made it third but it's second in my Picasa album so it's second here too. This one is made the same way as the last with the word 'FRIENDSHIP' coming from the pack too. The yellow strip down the side wasn't intended to be there at first but the orange striped paper wasn't quite wide enough to cover the card. This yellow paper matched so on it went and it covers the gap quite nicely.

From Avid Crafter'...

This is the last one, which shows the other colour scheme in the pack. The purple/green colour scheme is very Mother's Day orientated in its embellishments and tags - these three are the least motherish.

Looking at them now, these cards all seem very 'Spring-ish' which probably isn't surprising as down here in Australia, Spring is just around the corner.

I also made another card but I wont show it until after fathers day, so no surprises are spoiled. It may be quite a while after fathers day though, as we are going to Queensland in two days. It's so exciting, I've never been before! We get a few days sight-seeing and shopping as well as two days watching the Robocup Junior Nationals Competition. My brother's team won their state heat so are competing in the nationals, which are in Queensland this year. Instead of just him going, we are having a family holiday. It should be fun, but it does mean that the crafting and blogging will get put on hold!

Art Rage 2.5

Oh boy! Am I having fun exploring the new ArtRage drawing program. Ambient Design have just released version 2.5. I am overwhelmed by their generosity as it was available as a free upgrade for owners of version 2. Even without this it only costs $25 US to purchase - incredibly cheap for what it does. There is a great review at Cartoon Monkey.

Today I stumbled across this blog after reading the Ambient Design forums and liked the style of these illustrations very much. Pity my son is too old for pirates!

Here is one of my scribbles using ArtRage's ability to create a stencil from a layer and the new layer transformation tools.

Busy cross-stitcher

While Crafty Things has been taking a break from crafting, I've been busy cross-stitching. I have finally completed the butterflies, yay! Two more projects have followed. The first, a buzzy bee card, has all the stitching done and I just have to turn it into the card. The second is a daisy that is being done on gingham fabric with waste canvas. For those of you who don't know, waste canvas is a type of fabric that gets tacked onto other fabric and is a guide to help you place your stitches. Once you have completed the stitching the waste canvas gets pulled out thread by thread and you are left with your stitched design on a fabric you couldn't normally use for cross-stitch. Waste canvas is ideal for putting stitchings onto clothes, baby bibs etc. The daisy currently has 3 and a half petals out of 6. Hopefully it will be done soon. I don't know what it will be put on yet but it's looking like being a bag of some sort.
Pictures will come soon, promise!

Bravely Sharing My Own Pattern

Having had so much fun re-discovering crochet by making all those different owls I decided it was time to share my own pattern. I created these flowers for some beanies that I knitted a couple of years ago. I needed a little something to add to the beanies that were destined to go as presents to the girls in the family. The beanie pattern was a very simple one with a nice wide fold up brim. The flowers were attached to the brim of each beanie with a brooch pin so that the beanie could be worn plain if desired. I didn't take any photos of the beanies at the time so I will have to take some one day soon. I found the beanie pattern on the web but cannot remember where. I have also attached the flowers to a hairband and just used them as a brooch.

From Crocheted Flo...

Crocheted Flower Pattern

4 chain to make a loop
Round 1: 5 single crochet into loop and slip stitch to 1st single crochet to join, 1 ch
Round 2: ( single crochet, 3ch, 1 single crochet) into 1 single crochet. Repeat 5 more times to form 6 petals. The last petal will be formed in the joining stitch of the first round. Slip stitch to first sc to join, 1 chain.


Round 3: [(1 sc, 2hdc, 2dc, 1trc, 2dc, 2hdc, 1sc) into 3 chain loop. Skip 2 sc]. Repeat 5 more times to form 6 petals. Slip stitch to first sc to finish.


Stitch in the ends. Photos are also in my Picasa album - Crocheted Flowers
Please let me know if these instructions make sense or not by adding a comment.

Have you looked at the photos and gone "?? - the hook is the wrong way - has she flipped the photos?". No I haven't flipped the photos - I am a leftie and all my crochet goes in the opposite direction. I taught myself how to crochet after watching my Mum. She is right handed so I just must have looked at what she was doing and done it in the opposite direction. I could never pick up something of hers to finish and she could never finish something of mine. This showed up so much when we both spent lots of time making Granny squares.

I think all the abbreviations in my pattern are correct for the US versions of stitch names. Here is a link I found to a simple chart with the comparison between US and UK stitch names.

Little Flowers and Crafting Go Slow

Work has picked up just recently so the crafting time has been a little harder to find. I am eagerly awaiting a pattern purchase on Etsy. It is called The Patchfolio and is created by myapple. I also purchased another owl crochet pattern by a different Amy. This is sitting in the to do pile while a little baby owl is finished.

A little project that followed on from the spool knitted garden has been finished and given away. Spool flower on a much smaller scale, with no stem and a button centre. This is attached to a brooch pin.

From Corking

I made a purple one for myself but have not taken a picture of it yet. A cheery little touch on my jumper when I go off to work for the day.

Easy Papercraft

Assorted Papercraft

A quick and easy task late last week were these bookmarks. I needed a thank you for some very helpful children. I used punches and little pieces of hand decorated papers to create these. Lots of lovely coloured wools were plaited for the tops of each one. The best bit was making each one just a little different.

The Garden Grew

From Corking

Making these flowers was fun and so the garden grew a little. I tried one with a piece of spool knitting done with very thick wool on one of the spools I create with a class of children. I then tried out two in DK weight wool on the same spool and then used lace dye on these after making them. I now have a nice full pot of flowers that will never need watering!

Corked Flowers

Here is my latest experiment. Corking, spool knitting or french knitting is something I have shown lots of children how to do using an empty cardboard tube and four paddle pop sticks. Over the years I have collected a variety of spools. I am always interested in what can be done with the metres of cord produced by eager children. I stumbled across this beautiful flower bookmark (edited in 2011 to say sorry but as is the case in webland the link no longer exists) and that inspired me to create a flower in a pot. I have created it in a larger size and it has a skewer threaded up through the stem so that I can poke it into one of my indoor pots. I have used an aran weight wool and the corker I used was this clever Clover design. I will have to create a bit of spool knitting on one of the kids spools to see if it can be used to create these.

A great book that I found all about spool knitting with children is called "Corking" by Judy Ann Sadler. It show various sizes of corkers made from tins with nails attached and has animals created with pipe cleaners threaded through the various pieces of knitting.

A great web page all about corking tools that I have found is "The Lost Art of Knitting Nancies". It reviews quite a few interesting designs. Then just recently I discovered "Spool Speak" and "Hankering for Yarn". I am itching to make a red hat one day soon.

More pictures of my bookmark inspired flower are in my Picasa album - Corking.

Cards Galore

I am definitely in a card making mood at the moment. Here are the latest two - made today. I am having great fun trying out the new acquisitions from the recent craft fair. The dragonfly stencil is showing great potential. I used thick card and mica ink and then cut it out with a sharp blade. The ribbon has wire running through it and was fun to bend. It didn't go through my sticker maker very easily!

The flower stencil is another new one. Here I have been experimenting with some new sparkly stuff. It is very fine, round particles that roll everywhere. I watched a demonstration of stencilling using PVA glue and then adding the sparkle but I think I need some more practice. My first try was horrendous. With this stencil I tried adding the glue with a q-tip and then sprinkling. It sort of worked. I definitely need a sprinkle board. Pity I didn't buy one.

More ideas are rolling around the brain so stay tuned.

Latest Cards

These are three of my latest cards.

The first two have ribbon flowers that are stitched as loops in a circle. The ribbon is silk ribbon that has been hand dyed using Ozecraft dyes. The idea for the ribbon flowers came from the February 2007 copy of Quick and Easy Stitch and Craft. In the magazine they used a diamante for the centre of the flower but I tried a button and quite liked the end result. A visit to the craft fair at the weekend reminded me that I had the dyes and I purchased a small amount of silk ribbon to experiment with. Using the dye also means you can create unique background paper to match the ribbon. The silk ribbon is probably not quite robust enough for the flowers as dragging it through the holes made the last loops a little more bedraggled than the first.

The dragonfly was a new stencil purchased at the weekend and I also played with Sparking H20's to give it some sparkle. Background paper is Heidi Grace - garden flowers. I think maybe next time I try the dragonfly I will place it on an angle.

Unfortunately when I scanned these cards the colours have not quite come out the same as the originals. I tried to adjust them but was still unhappy with the hessian. It is more muted than it appears in the scanned image. Oh well, I just need more practice at editing images.