Catching up with my crochet

I haven't shared any crochet pictures pretty much all year long and it's almost halfway through April already- eek!. But that doesn't mean I haven't been reeeeeeally busy crocheting, oh no! Quite the opposite in fact. Today I'm going to share some pictures of a finished project that was hitherto classified as secret as I made it for my mum for her birthday (I shared a wee peek here). It's a giant granny square blanket in shades of pale greens, pinks and creams - a colour scheme which I wouldn't normally choose for myself but which fits right in with the decor in my parent's home. Plus my mum loves to garden and I liked the idea of making a blanket that looks a little bit like a garden, with sandy paths through the grass and leaves, with pretty pink flowers peeking out - at least, that was the idea in my imagination!. So to get you started, here's all the woolly goodness...

I found these colours extremely relaxing to blend together, they are really soothing calm colours and a delight to hook up during the stressful weeks of January and February as I packed up all my belongings back in London. The greens and creams are all cheap acrylic wools and the pinks were more expensive wools from my former local haberdashery, but despite the differing qualities they all worked together to form the softest blanket :)

Every square is a different combination of colours...

Some are big and some are small - there is a giant centrepiece square...

I even learnt how to make circles inside granny squares (I love the way they look but I much prefer the process of hooking up granny squares the simple square way). They look like giant flowerbursts!

I also did some strange patch squares (which reminds me, I need to show you this finished blanket from last year too!).....

And some stripy bits and mini cross-style squares (lawns and giant flowers!).....

And had a great time making pops of pretty pink for the border....

Here it is in all it's glory spread out on my parent's living room floor (See how it matches the colour of the carpet)!

 

It was so much fun to make this all the while imagining my mum being able to snuggle up in its warmth. I'm pleased to say that she really loves it!

 

Ahhh it's fun to share pictures of crochet after all this time away! I'll be back with another blanket very soon - yep that's right I told you I've been busy!

x

A haiku a day...

I've been writing these little haikus every day for over 6 months now, which is quite hard to believe as I'm usually rubbish at sticking to things like this. I doubt that anybody else really enjoys reading them, but the weekly ritual of typing them and putting them on here has certainly helped me to keep on writing them. I love how they capture random little snippets of things, like the changing seasons, weird little observations I've had during my days, pretty flowers, frustrated moments, dreams, runs in the rain, snow, autumn etc. It's funny sometimes the way that inspiration strikes me and I think - ooh! that's definitely the subject of my haiku today! Maybe at the end of a year's worth I will print them all out in a little book and it will be one of the most concise and yet strangely evocative diaries I've ever kept. Anyway, here's this week's worth, served up this time with a healthy sprinkling of snow....

Friday
On this cold night we
shut out the world and sip wine,
convivially.

Saturday
Creaky snow footsteps
through a freshly coated world,
a blank page tonight.

Sunday
Confused birds singing
at street light reflections on
snow: a fake dawn glow.

Monday
Drip drop, melting snow,
the great thaw's started, perhaps
Aslan's on the move?

Tuesday
Treacherous pathway,
Snow sparkles a warning that
I'm running on ice.

Wednesday
A nun, a ginger
beard, school children, you and me,
huddled on the tube.

Thursday
I'll miss the way that
Distant trains sound strange at night,
like boiling kettles.

ps. If anybody is reading, I invite you to leave a haiku of your own in the comments :)

x

happy little moments... a Parisian haberdashery

I had a rather happy moment indeed when I emerged from a randomly chosen metro stop in Paris upon my arrival last week to start a-wandering to my hotel and immediately stumbled across the most marvellous haberdashery. Tucked into a narrow old building near a big building site, it was a little cavern of colour and delights full of rows of shelves which housed jars of fabric flowers...

A whole room full of buttons and beans, all sorted into colour and shape and lined up like sweets in an old-fashioned shop...

And an entire wall of beautiful ribbons of all colours, sizes, intricacies and delicteness...

In the back of the shop, a lady was spinning wool on an old fashioned machine, and there were various nooks and crannies full of bundles of fabric, loops of luxurious wools and yarns and pretty little craft kits. I could've spent hours browsing, admiring and picking out treats, but I was rather conscious of the gigantic backpack I was carrying and its potential to knock over all the pretty fragile things and alas, I had many miles to wander to my hotel, so I left empty-handed. But not without a smile on my face :)

I looked up the name of the shop online when I got back - it's called La droguerie and it's right by the metro stop Les Halles - well worth a visit if you're in Paris and looking to stock up on buttons/ribbons/beads/smiles... In fact, there are similar shops in lots of French cities (with different names I believe - the one in Lyon where I used to live is called La marchande des couleurs and I still have pretty things that I made with some of the treats I got there)

*sigh* even the sign is pretty as can be!
image via Craftzine

Later, in another quartier entirely (right near the Louvre) I sat in a pretty café, admiring this metro station entrance. It hardly looked real. It was as if some mischevious fairy had paid a visit to the lovely haberdashery, strung some beads and christmas baubles together in the shape of a miniature door, and then sprinkled them with fairy dust so that they grew to human size. Clearly, it's *actually* a magical entrance to some other place - probably a French fairy land or some extravagent pixie palace - and not a metro stop at all....

pretty pretty!

Here's to happy moments in haberdasheries all over the world!
x

Reverse haiku

As my weekly 'haiku a day' posts suggest, I've become rather a fan of these little poems. I recently found a wonderful internet rabbit hole which ended with the discovery of a Japanese poet, Matsuo Bashō (who you can learn more about here - ah wikipedia, source of all lazy knowledge!). More specifically, I found this website, The Haiku Poems of Matsuo Bashō, where many of his poems are listed. As I scrolled down, reading them all, I was struck by the amazing imagery in them, and their ability to create vivid images in my mind's eye. I started to wonder about the image or moment which inspired the poem. It's strange really that seventeen syllables can be so evocative (although the element of translation involved in the poems I was reading means that some of them have slightly more syllables but nevertheless, they are so concise, and almost made slightly more dreamlike by the awkward translation in which something inevitably slips away or gets added).

Anyway, some of the poems really stuck with my and I was inspired to recreate one of them - not in real life, as that would be rather tricky and would involve a lot of props - but rather, via the wonderful messy process of collage in which anything is possible. I love cutting up pictures in old magazines and newspapers anyway, and decorating my notebooks with them (a good way of jazzing up a boring notebook when you don't feel like spending a fortune on a snazzy one). This one now lives at the back of my notebook where I draft out all my haikus, so its very inspiring. I'd love to see a scene like this in real life....

Along the roadside,
Blossoming wild roses,
In my horse's mouth.

A delightful lunch indeed for this horse :)
Maybe I'll collage up some more of Matsuo Bashō's lovely poems one day soon...
x

Happy little moments... by the lake

One of my new favourite autumn rituals is walking along the nature trail to the lake in the nearby park at the end of the afternoon to visit the ducks and geese and swans. If we time it right we get there just in time to see the sun sinking behind the autumny trees, casting its glow on the clouds so they light up like impossible tufts of fluorescent candyfloss. As the air gets colder and crisper in the last glow of the sun's rays, all kinds of quacks and shrieks and squabbles break out amongst these feathery lake dwellers. We've been learning all their names and so far have identified pochards, mallards, goldeneyes, tufted ducks, swans (an easy one!), canada geese, greylag geese, coots and moorhens.

There are really quite a lot of them out there on the lake, and when somebody starts throwing in food it doesnt take them long to descend on mass to peck at each other's necks and flap to the front of the queue to win the best bits!

A feathery commontion...

Peaceful moments and colourful scenes at sunset...

I like the way that Greylag geese having matching beaks and feet...

When the swans get in a flap it is a beautful sight to behold... but you wouldn't want to get in the way of those powerful wings...

On our first visit to the pond we weren't sure what kind of duck this fellow is....

He has very dark (almost black) feathers and bright yellow eyes with a distinct white marking by his beak. Research suggests he's either a tufted duck or a goldeneye (we think we've seen both kinds but I'm not entirely sure which particular one this is). I like to think of them as Goldeneye ducky spies (the James Bond of ducks) because they slink into sight amidst all the other birds and then swiftly dive down beneath the surface. One minute they are there, the next they are gone! Are they looking for food or spying on the other ducks? What is their mission? It's Top Secret for sure. A little while later their little heads emerge before all of a sudden they disappear again.
International duck of mystery...

Here's a few of them looking mysterious together...


And one last picture for you - a Canada goose...

I love the patterns that raindrops make falling on the lake.

x

Autumn leaves: a garland DIY

I love autumn leaves, they're so colourful and bright. One last burst of life before slowly but surely, they detach themselves ones by one and float to the ground. I have a special theory of my own about why the leaves change colour. It involves a team of well organised fairy folk, many tiny pots of paint in all shades of red, gold, yellow and brown and a many a well-coordinated sleepness night of leaf painting mischief. Whatever really goes on in the treetops, I like to collect pretty leaves all autumn long. Many of my big heavy books are hazardous once taken off the bookshelf, as opening them causes a flurry of carefully pressed leaves to fall out. I put them in year after year and forget about them. Inevitably they fade and become so fragile and delicate that they are in fact useless. This year, I wanted to put some of them to a more decorative use instead of hiding them away to be forgotten about. So here's what I did.

1. I collected leaves of different colours and shapes.

2. Once home, I wiped them clean and then coated each side with a nice thick layer of pva glue before leaving them to dry overnight.

3. I cut a length of ribbon and then carefully stapled each leaf to the ribbon, spacing them out carefully so each one could be seen and admired. (this was quite a delicate process and caused a couple of the smaller, more fragile leaves to tear. Itn hindsight, i might have been better to glue them, but I wanted instant results and this worked nicely enough).

4. I bluetacked my new leafy garland to the wall.

5. I stepped back to admire it :)

Here it is, in all its leafy autumnal glory hanging on my wall....

And some close-ups...

Hopefully the layer of glue will preserve the leaves so I can enjoy the garland for a few weeks whilst the rest of the trees change colour....

Why not make a leafy garland of your own? x

oh to be a butterfly!

It seems that the butterflies in my mum's garden like nothing more on a sunny afternoon than to flutter along to a certain purple plant and spend the day sun-bathing and lazily flapping their wings as they teeter on wobbly petal platforms which sway in the breeze. They spend hours sampling the pollen and hanging out with the giant bumble bees who also like to congregate there. When it was really sunny this last weekend, there was barely a flower un-occupied with a wingéd visitor. I snapped this red admiral showing off her glorious wings...

Up close you can see that the butterflies have really furry backs. Like a luxurious rug for the fairies and pixies that hop on their backs and get taken for rides amongst the flowers and trees giggling to themselves and clinging desparately on as they whizz around the extremely unpredicatable (and rather loopy) flightpaths that the butterflies so love to follow.

Here she is again seen from another angle...

Look how long and graceful her tiny thin legs and long twiddly antennae are :)

Nearby a small tortoiseshell came in to land/show off her beautiful wings. The markings were so colourful and intricate, ranging from tiger stripes (she's fierce!) to opulent blue splodges around a deep golden amber back...

And here's one of their bumble bee friends, feasting away. Making honey is a hungry business...

He's sat on a different flower - but it's still a purple one. They really seem drawn to all shades of lavendar and lilac and violet and plum. I think these insects must all be royalty of some kind. I wonder if there's a butterfly palace somewhere underground where they all head off to when the sun goes down. Each of them gets a throne and a little crown studded with teeny tiny diamonds and they sit around looking haughty and important, discussing world affairs and how much things have changed since the good old days when they were all wee young caterpillars without a care in the world. They don't need robes, what with their wings being so exquisite, but they probably all wear fancy princess shoes around the palace. Clip clop clip clop go their little royal feet as they parade for one another in the grand palace hall where once a week they host a glamorous butterfly ball, inviting moths and the bumblebees and sometimes the centipedes (but never the mean angry wasps). Every morning when they wake up in the beds made out of their old silken cocoons their ladies-in-waiting (ladybirds of course!) wake them up and fuss over them for a good hour, paying them compliments and catching them up on the local garden news. They bring them acorn cups of fresh dew and rainwater to splash over their faces and they comb their furry backs until they glisten and gleam. Then all the butterflies fly off to spend another day on the purple flowers back in the garden....

You never know, it might happen.

Anyway, yes, I think it would be rather grand to be a butterfly.
x

happy little moments... ferny green seahorses

I had a happy little moment last weekend when I was walking on the moor near my parent's house in dartmoor. I was looking at all the ferns that are growing wild there and I noticed that as the leaves unfurl, they look like tiny little seahorses dangling down....

I wonder if they all carry on growing on the plant and eventually open out into big fern leaves or if some of take their chance to escape when a big gust of wind comes along. Maybe they break free and float on the breeze down the hill to the stream that runs through the valley. Perhaps there's a whole big flock of ferny green seahorses swimming in that stream having magical adventures with other tiny green ferny seahorses and whatever other creatures grow mysteriously on the hillside...