80s Goth gloves

Inspired by these lacy wrist-warmers from The Little Treasures blog I made these 80s style goth lacy black fingerless gloves. The original ones are made from a pair of socks and mine are made from some tights (I think I managed to buy a children’s sized pair by mistake! glad I found a use for them) and the only thing I did differently was pinching and sewing them together before adding the lace to create a separate thumb hole so they are more gloves than wrist-warmers - without that thumb piece I’d keep losing them up my sleeve :)

I originally saw the wrist-warmers on Pinterest – I just discovered it and I love that place. I’ve created a board called cult of crochet just for all the projects on this blog so do follow it if you want an easier way of finding projects on this site (the navigation around this blog is pretty poor I think – older projects disappear from view and unless you know about them already and can search for them then you’ll never see them.)

Filed under: Not crochet, black fingerless gloves, easy, gloves, lace, lacy, sewing

Sith Scarf

I’m calling this my sith scarf because it turned me to the dark side - that’s right – it’s knitting….

I’ve said before that the few times I’ve tried knitting in the past it’s been a horrible disaster and I found the whole thing very awkward and slightly traumatic but when I saw this leaf lace scarf from the purl bee I fell in love and had to give it another try.

I went back to basics; loaded up you tube, starting looking at different techniques and ended up knitting left-handed (moving the stitches from the right to the left needle, holding the yarn in my right hand). But I still found purling a bit awkward and got my mind in a knot trying to think about slanting decreases and if they would need to be swapped.

After a few more frustrated attempts I settled on working the knit rows from the left needle onto the right with the yarn in my right hand but then instead of purling I knitted into the back loop of all stitches and worked from the right needle back onto the left. This is much more comfortable and I never have to swap the needles over – just move stitches from one needle to the other and back again with the right side always facing me. Those of you who knit – is this a valid method? or are you appalled by the idea? Every odd row of this pattern is just purl so it works well but I don’t know if it would be any good for any other projects.

Anyway I’m happy with my scarf so far, it’s not perfectly neat but not too shabby and soon I’ll have completed my first ever knitted project!

Filed under: Not crochet, knitting, lacy, pink, scarf

Circle Scarf

DIY circle scarf – the easiest sewing project in the world.

Take a big rectangle of stretchy fabric, fold in half, sew the ends together and you’re done. wrap it around your neck twice and you have a stylish and warm scarf in less than 20 minutes. I’ve been meaning to make one of these for a while but seeing this tutorial from come on Ilene made me actually get the sewing machine out and make it today. Have a look at that tutorial for proper instructions. Not that you need many – mostly just getting the right length of material so that it will nicely wrap around twice. She also gives tips on different ways to wear it – as a shawl, wrap, dress (!) etc. I apologise for the poor photos – these were the best of a few terrible attempts to balance the camera and use the self timer :)

Filed under: Not crochet, easy, instructions, scarf, sewing

Experiments with a lap loom

The internet is a wonderful thing. A few weeks ago I posted a photo of something made of yarn and asked if anyone knew how it had been created; within minutes lots of you wonderful people left links with ideas and it turned out to have been created by something called a hexagonal lap loom. You can buy these online but they are from America and I was too lazy to look for suppliers in the UK… And they were expensive… And ordering one would involve waiting for it to be delivered and I’m very impatient. So I decided to make my own and while I’m not sure how much I actually like the results it was easy and works brilliantly so here’s how I did it:

To make a loom like mine you will need some nails/tacks (maybe drawing pins or similar would work if you can manage to push them securely into the wood) a hammer and an old picture frame that is quite wide. Also a ruler and pen for marking where to put the nails.

Use your ruler to mark the centre point on each of the shorter sides of the frame. Draw a line from this point to the corner of the hole in the centre of the frame and continue in a straight line to the edge (as shown by the red line/arrow above). Repeat this for all four corners of the frame.

Now mark on where to put the nails. You will need one nail at each point of the hexagon (so that’s 6 in total) and then the actual number all the way around doesn’t matter – the important points to remember are that you need the same number of nails on opposite sides of the hexagon (nails should be opposite each other) and if you want your patterns to have the same height and width then all nails need to be equally spaced so measure the length of the sides and choose a spacing that will fit nails in evenly (it doesn’t have to be very exact – you can fudge it a bit as long as opposite sides have the same number of nails). As you can see on my loom I ended up with 11 nails along the long edges and 8 nails on each of the short edges all roughly 2cm apart but yours will be different depending on the dimensions of your photo frame.

Now you have your frame you need to choose your yarn and wind it around. I got instructions for winding from LapWeaving.Info which clearly show where to start and how to turn the loom. This step is very quick and easy once you get the hang of it and you can keep going around as many times as you like to make the piece thicker. To create the flower effect in the photo from my earlier post you will need 2 contrasting colours. In the first colour weave around as you are shown in the tutorial but only use every other nail:

Change to the second colour and wind around the nails not used the first time:

From the front it now looks like this (the white tape is to cover up the nail points that poked through!):

All that winding should only take a few minutes but now it’s time for the painstaking part – tying all the sections together. Again detailed instructions are available on LapWeaving.Info. It is very time-consuming and I’m still undecided if it’s worth all the effort! I guess it depends how much you like the results:

I finished off this place mat by crocheting around the outside a couple of times but I wasn’t sure I even liked it at all! The pink and green colours are what attracted me to the mystery photo in the first place but here I think they look a bit too bright and gaudy.

I didn’t want to waste my very first attempt (when the nails weren’t even and the flowers ended up looking stretched) so I cut it up to create some coasters with loose edges and I like these much more than the place mat for some reason:

I also had a go at a more subdued grey place mat:

But I still feel like it’s missing a certain something that I can’t quite put my mind on. What do you think?

Filed under: instructions, Not crochet, coaster, flower, hexagonal lap loom, instructions, loom, placemat, wool

New Look!

I’m currently streamlining this blog a little – making it a bit more organised and hopefully pleasing to look at. So I thank you for bearing with me while I go through and alter posts/photos etc. to be displayed correctly in this new theme. Things are a little all over the place just now.

Filed under: Not crochet

Fun and Free Flower Loom

Whilst browsing patterns on ravelry I keep coming across blankets made up of beautiful flowers. I excitedly click on the pattern only to learn that they’re not crocheted at all but are in fact made on something called a flower loom. It all sounds terribly complicated and so I would close the page with dismay and continue my pattern search. Well this kept happening and so I thought I should find out exactly what these flower loom things are and where I might get one. It turns out they’re very simple and I found quite a few different instructions on how to make your own. The simplest of these was just from a plastic ice-cream tub (which I didn’t have so used cardboard instead).

The one on the right is my attempt to make a two layered loom – it works but is a little flimsy in cardboard (a good excuse to eat more ice cream!)

Winding the yarn sends me straight back to the 80′s and the joy of spirograph :)

There are instructions for lots of different styles and ways to finish the centre and I haven’t had chance to try them all yet. But I’m sure I will!

Winding the yarn (twice around shown here)

Sewing the centre in purple (backstitch method)

Finished flower

Double layered flower with button centre

My first attempt - what a mess!

It only takes 5 minutes to cut out a cardboard cog loom so why not give it a try. My first flower was a bit of a mess (shown above!) but after that it was really easy.

Filed under: Not crochet, flower, flower loom, loom, wool

DIY cycle helmet

Not much crochet going on this week I’m afraid. the weather’s been far too nice :) So instead I dug out my bike and thought about buying a helmet. I found some Sawako Furuno helmets online – flowers and wonderful leopard print!

Two things stopped me from buying that leopard print helmet – firstly no actual shops near here sell them and I’d really want to try it on before buying and secondly there is the huge price tag of over £70 (then delivery on top of that). So the other day I saw just some basic black skate helmets in my local cycle shop and I decided to get one and have a go at painting it. The result is above – I actually had an idea for a much more elaborate design but when I found my paints I realised I only had a couple of colours so this was a trial run until I get more. I think it looks quite good as a first attempt and the paint is acrylic so waterproof but also should hopefully come off quite easily when I want to give it a new look.

Filed under: Not crochet, cycle helmet, DIY, flower, paint