2014 Catchup

Happy New Year lovely reader! I hope it’s been good to you so far.

I was creating a page to summarise all my completed projects that have associated blog posts with information about them, which you can see here and I realised I’d done so much last year that I hadn’t shown you.  Unfortunately I think it’s probably too late now to catch you up on everything but here’s a gallery of pictures that you might enjoy. If there is anything you would particularly like to hear more about, please leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to oblige! If you hover over the image it shows the caption which you can use to tell me what you think of them. I’m going to try to write more regularly this year as I do enjoy sharing my crafty projects with you.

Upcycled drawers

Mandala for Yarndale

First sewn garment

Yarn bag

Pastels tissue box cover

Stripy socks made with Fivemoons merino

Scion Mr Fox cushion

V-stitch/granny square cushion

Simply Crochet poppy

Knitted goat

Crochet giraffe (pattern by Emma at I Love Buttons blog)

Needlepoint cushions

Simply Crochet magazine free kit owl keyring

Home Sweet Home bunting

Baby ripple blanket

Head band

West Yorkshire Spinners Knee-socks

Hanging hearts

Beanie hat with Toft alpaca pom pom

Curtain leftovers patchwork cushion

Crochet giraffe

Embroidered cushion

Card-making for mum

Bathroom tissue box cover

Mustard gloves

Emma the Bunny from Ed’s Menagerie

Pastel granny blanket

Granny square cushion

Baby shower cupcakes

Brights tissue box cover

Sunday Shawl

I’d love to tell you more about many of these projects but I feel like I’d never catch up. Please do drop me a line though if you would like to know more – I’ll happily write to request and add more photos if I have them! There are still more projects not pictured here. Hopefully I’ll get around to showing you them all at some point! Seeing everything laid out like this makes me realise how much I actually got done last year!

I hope to have lots more crafty projects to tell you about soon. I’m already in the middle of a crochet blanket inspired by Lucy at Attic 24 blog and also have a new pair of socks on the go which are a pattern from an old issue of The Knitter. I have lots of plans for more projects for 2015 and I can’t wait to share my progress here with you!

Best wishes for your crafty 2015 too!

Sarah x

Christmas reflections

It’s Saturday morning and it’s time for the last of our Christmas guests to head home. We had some snow fall last night that we hadn’t really expected and it was even settling. I excitedly looked out of the window this morning hoping for a winter wonderland; a picture perfect crisp sunny day with blue skies and clean white snow under foot. However looking out at 7:30 it was still dark for one thing and it must’ve been raining or milder overnight as there was no snow on the trees at all and not much on the ground, although the school field opposite looks quite nice.

It turned out to be pretty icy though and it took quite a bit of scraping before my unofficial father-in-law could set off on the drive home to Wales. It is a beautiful day though and if it wasn’t for the ice it would be a lovely day to go for a walk. Instead I’m sitting in the sunny dining room writing and planning! Here’s a pic of the sun rising earlier, just before it came over the houses at the back of ours…

…and the sunny reflection on the wall a few minutes later…

So all this means that Christmas is over for another year and its time to take stock. Overall I’d say it’s been a resounding success. I finally managed to finish the advent stockings on Christmas Eve-Eve, having managed to stay at least one day ahead all through December.

My boyfriend made a magnificent Christmas cake and used a picture from Pintrest as inspiration for the decoration. Here’s how it turned out…

Beautiful, don’t you think? I was very impressed. I helped with cutting out some of the stars. It was very fiddly work!

And now it’s time to look forward to the New Year. As you could probably expect, I got a few craft related presents for Christmas. R got me this beautiful knitting book by Kate Davies.

I’m very excited to start planning what I’m going to make first. Looking through, the author seems to have used some very well priced yarns, so I might actually be able to work the patterns in the recommended yarns for a change, instead of trying to convert them to a cheaper alternative! I the patterns in this book will help me to work on my approach to colour for the makes I wear. I’m often tempted to use brights as I worry that I’ll get bored and not finish things if I use a muted colour palette but I think working some of the designs from this book will help me to find the pleasure in working with more wearable colours.

Conversely I also received the “Cottage” pack of colours by Lucy from Attic 24’s blog. Not very muted! Rather than the Cottage ripple blanket she made, I’m going to make my own Cosy Cottage blanket like the Cosy Crochet-Along that she was doing before Christmas. I’ve been playing around with colour combinations with my colour pegs this morning as you can see here…

Lucy from the Attic 24 blog hit on such a great idea with these coloured yarn pegs, they’re great for this process of planning the colour order.

And here’s all that lovely squishy yarn, all ready to play with!

I can’t wait to get going with it, I just need to decide on the colour order for the first 15 stripes! Here goes…

Finally some baking!

Hello again. Hope everyone’s had a good weekend. We watched Sunday Brunch this morning and Lorraine Pascale was on, who’s latest book, “lighter way to bake” we got a few weeks ago. It made us feel like having a go at something. My boyfriend made the plum frangipane tarts last weekend which we had warm with vanilla ice cream and they were lovely, really light and very tasty.

Sorry for the rubbish photo!

Today we leafed through the book and both really liked the look of the blueberry and lemoncello drizzle cake, despite the fact that blueberries are so not in season! We didn’t have any lemoncello either so just used the juice from one of the lemons we had to zest for the recipe. Also, I don’t think we’ve quite got used to the oven yet. That or there’s a miss print in the book as we found we had to cook it twice as long as stated in tge recipe – I must have checked on it 5 times! Sadly I have to apologise for the photo again – I have to admit it was a bit of an after-thought as we were so eagre to dive in!

It is a very yummy cake so I would certainly recommend it. Very light too. I searched the internet to see if the recipe was available and it turns out it has been published in a Mail online food special here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2432092/Food-special-Blueberry–limoncello-drizzle-cake.html
Has anyone else tried it, or done any other baking this weekend?

In other news – we’ve finished the dining table so look out for a post about that soon!

Enjoy the rest of your weekend. Until next time…