Awareness Butterflies

Hello........... A few weeks ago now some friends and I were offered a tree to decorate at the Woollen Woods.   We all have various Chronic Health conditions so decided we would decorate our tree with flowers and insects in awareness colours representing our various health conditions.

I decided to make some butterflies as they represent transformation and hopefully one day things will improve for the better for all of us.  I used Bella Coco's butterfly tutorial and soon they were flying off my hook.

They are really quick and easy to make and would make lovely little brooches.

Ta-dah

It amazed me how they all turned out so different depending on the yarn, represented here we have ME Lyme disease, Thyroid disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease.

Now I think my little butterflies all flew away when I put them in the post as they took over a month to arrive in Scotland and completely missed there chance to hang out in the woods.

Lets hope all these Chronic Illness will also get lost one day soon, so I can fly again.

Happy Crafting 

Clare xx

Baby Blanket

Hello............ Back at the beginning of February I started work on this baby blanket for a neighbour, I decided to go for granny squares as I wanted to make a simple colour block blanket.

 The blanket is for a little boy, so traditionally would be a baby blue but I wanted to make the blanket quite contemporary so after much colour play I decided to go with duck egg, silver and cream, originally I was going to use white, but it really altered the look of the duck egg blue making it look very grey.  The yarn I used was all from the Stylecraft DK range.

I really enjoyed making these simple squares, round and round so relaxing, perfect as so easy to pick up and put down. I found the colours so soothing.

Little man wasn't due to arrive until the beginning of May, but I knew given my limited crafting time and energy levels I'd have to give myself plenty of time for my squares to mount up.

Over the next few weeks with lots of supervision from kitten crafting assistants Monty I continued making squares until I had enough.

It felt quite a achievement to see them all laid out,

Until it dawned on me I now needed to stitch them all together, la sigh

Once that was done it was time to start on the edge

I wanted to keep the border simple to go with the clean lines of the blanket. So I worked it in three rounds.

Ta-Dah

I finished it just in the nick of time. As it was a surprise I was a little concerned that I might not have opted for the right colours and style.

but thankfully my neighbours seemed to like it.

This make wasn't all plain sailing though, one morning I came down to find this wrapped round and around the lounge tangled around the legs of the chairs and dining table, note to self never leave yarn bag unattended with kittens about it took 'P' ages to to untangle it all for me.

Naughty Monty and Alfie looks like they had lots of fun, me I had to order another ball of yarn to finish my blanket.

It all turn out well in the end though.

Happy Crafting 

Clare xx

Lyme Disease Yarn Bombing

Hello..... Earlier in the year @living_with_lyme over on instagram asked me if I'd like to make some crocheted bunting pennants for a Lyme Disease Awareness yarn bombing project.

As I have a complicated medical history with ME and Chronic Lyme disease and a crochet hook I was only to happy to help, my health has been very poor but I manged to make five pennants one a week.

In of course all shades of green, Lime Green,

I then had a play around with some variegated green yarn which I double stranded with some Green style craft special DK 

and also the Lime Green yarn. Not realising I sent them off in the post to join with others pennants made in the UK, but that was just they start of there journey as my bunting pennants were winging there way all the way to America.

Now here's crafting Assistant Monty who was very keen on the Lime green yarn, and kept running off with it, can you believe it they are one year old now.

So sometime later they arrived in Newark  to join in with  @lymeyarnbombs  for Lyme disaese awareness month which is May. You can see more about the chairty here lots of lovely pics yarny goodness.

Then last week I received a surprise in the post a Tote bag as a thank you for taking part in the project.  I really hope it helps people to become tick aware as this illness is destroying lives, even here in the UK.

As for my Lyme disease story well it's ongoing, I've have severely relpased again and left the doctors last week with this little lot. six weeks worth of antibiotics, sadly it won't cure my Lyme disease but it's the best the NHS has to offer here in the UK, hopefully it will make my quality of life a bit better, for just a little while, once I get past the awful die off reaction that the Antibiotics will cause.

It's going to be a evening rougher few weeks here.

So please do  be Lyme Disease Aware when you're out and about in the countryside, parks or even you're back gardens these ticks are everywhere.

Clare xx

Eastern Jewels - The last of the Squares

Hello............. Today I thought I'd do a bit of a update post on the Persian Tiles crochet along, now that all the square are completed.

First up we have the peachy square,

I'm doing this crochet along with some friends all who have chronic Illness which means we are only making one square a week which is great for me, with my current health limits as that's about all I could manage, a few minutes crochet each day.

So it has been nice to see the squares slowly adding up from the start of the year.  I really loved the colour combination of square number eight.

Square nine was a little bit more of a challenge for me, with pistachio in the mix but I'm embracing the colours, I finished it skippy happy with glee as it was the last square, all done quite a achievement for me at the moment.

Ta-Dah time for the squares.

So onto a new challenge, corners

Only umm I got a little bit confused with my foggy brain and made a triangle instead, but at least I'll be ahead when we get to the triangles.

Now here's a corner and what I should have been making, so many dreaded ends

So that's about where I'm up too, with this colourful make, next step finish my corners then we are onto the Octagon, so exciting.

Talking about dreaded ends look, I've already filled up my yarn ends bowl.

Happy Crafting

Clare xx

Ragbag Butterfly

Hello ..............  As you have probably guessed health wise things have not been so good around here,  I'm not going to go into it now but I am going to share with you this scrappy butterfly picture I made a few months back for the craft club exhibition.

It was a bit of a last minute job as in a whole year I'd not made very much at all to include in the exhibition so was feeling a bit guilty that, I'd let the other members of the group down and we were going to have a bit of a empty wall.

 So the theme was butterflies.  I was in bed, as I am most of the time and suddenly realised I had the perfect template for my scrappy butterfly right in from of me on the duvet, so I traced one of the butterflies onto some card and then raided the ragbag.

I had a old tunic in there with lots of embellishments and sparkle and set to cutting it up, in search of pretty shapes I could add to my butterfly.

I then found a scrap of fabric left over from a patchwork quilt my sister made, which I used for the main body of my butterfly, adding a contrasting piece for the centre I simply added a little bit of stitching to define the wings.

You know me I just couldn't resist adding a little sparkle too, so I added some sparkly gems, for the antenna and to add a bit more decoration. The camera dosen't really pick it up but they are very sparkly.

Ta-dah

 That was about it, I simply found a backing paper and put the whole lot together in a frame.  One ragbag butterfly to flutter and sparkle on the library walls.

Happy Crafting

Clare xx

Eastern Jewels Blanket

Hello.......... I have a exciting post to share with you today, something very new for the summerhouse.

Yes I've actually ordered a colour pack and I'm going to follow a pattern and stick to it hopefully.  When I saw this little beauty by Janie Crow in the Eastern Jewels Colourway created by Lucia Dunn back in October I came down with a case of the wanties, yes I needed some Eastern Jewels in my life. 

So when some friends suggested we have a very slow crochet along I just couldn't resist ordering the kit.  The colours just make my heart sing.  I'm making the blanket with a group of friends with Chronic Illnesses, so I'm hoping I will be able to keep up, with one square a week, although I've found that difficult some weeks.

Now although I've fallen very much in love with the look of the finished blanket, some of the colours are proving a bit of a challenge for me, as they are quite different from the summerhouse's usual colour palette.  I've never made anything where I didn't pick my own colours before eek.

I felt quite happy with week one just the Tomato round gave me a bit of a wobble.

Week two was just perfect soft gentle colours.

In week three I had to confront my fear of Mustard, eek in fact I just couldn't face calling it mustard and spent the week calling it saffron ha ha whatever gets you through.

In the end I didn't mind it so much with the duck egg toning things down, so clever in a million years I would never have put these colours together.

Now as for week four, I just had to imagine I was in a Moroccan Spice market to get me through.

Week five was interesting too with Sage, Vintage Peach and Tomato in the mix.  I'm definitely broadening my colour horizons.

So at the end of the first month this is what I had, my exotic Persian Tiles

Week six had me on much happier ground, even with Saffron Mustard, the colours say Springtime to me and make my heart sing, my favourite weeks so far. Reminds me of one of my favouirte flower combo Yellow Roses and Purple Iris.

So there we have it, my colourful adventure for 2018.  A huge thank you to Janie Crow for the original Persian Tiles pattern and Lucia Dunn for this amazing colour way.  I can't wait to get onto the Mandalas.

Happy Crafting 

Clare xx