Threading the Up-Cycle

 It always disturbs my equilibrium when I have to throw anything out. Anything. 

A pair of Mr B's discarded canvas trousers, worn at the knees, frayed at the hem and stained where random splodges of paint had caught him unawares mid-DIY - presented a special kind of problem: no one, but no one would want these bad boys. 

I noticed that the dark navy canvas really made my embroidery floss pop, and voila: problem solved! 

All the best for now,

Bonny x

Aerial Gardening with a forest of Macramé hanging baskets ...

 It started with a YouTube video and a ball of string …

I had more hanging plants than I had pedestals to put them on, so, with overcrowding at ground floor level, the only option was to go multi-storey, and reach for the ceiling. 

Macramé hanging pot-holders 

Happiness is … Auriculas in bloom, socks that match their stripes and Ric Rac on steroids!

 Happiness comes in a terracotta pot, brimming full of auriculas. It's so satisfying to compare their performance with last year, and see how they're filling out and prospering. 

Auriculas

Things that rocked my world this week ...

 This week I've been struggling with the cold weather. I want to spend my days outside, but it's just too cold. I've got a jungle of tomato plants that are crowding my conservatory, and I'm so proud of my baby pelargoniums. Back in February I pruned back the leggy plants that had over-wintered, planted up the cuttings and - hey presto - I've got loads of baby plants. 

Happy Mother's Day 2021!

 A very big shout-out to all our mums! Happy Mother's Day!

I've just made this lace scarf in a sumptuous fingering weight cashmere/ silk yarn that a supplier sent me as a sample. It was a delight to work with: lovely sheen and all the gossamer lightness of a spider's web. I cast it off on Thursday, blocked it overnight and posted it to my mum on Friday morning. And, thankfully, it arrived just in time - phew! 

5 Things to do with a dead duvet ...

 Do you feel bad about throwing things in the bin - things that you might just conceivably find a second life for?

I hate to waste things. Any things. It's my pet peeve. And one thing that always causes me particular angst is the vast expanse of a dead duvet - a duvet that, for whatever reason, you no longer want to use for its primary purpose. I am ideologically opposed to sending so much fabric off to landfill . So here's a list of what I've found to do in order to spare my conscience the wrench of binning the cast-off.

Masks

If someone had told me a year ago that I'd be staying in to sew plague masks I'd have thought they were tripping on something very potent ... but here we are a year down the line, and it's impossible to buy masks just about anywhere.

One of my besties sent me this link for an internet how-to instruct-able. The pattern is easy. I used old clothes - recycling/ upcycling is the newest, hottest look for Spring/ Summer 2020 - and a snip of garden wire to shape the bridge of the nose. For comedy value I highlighted the messiness of my top-stitching with a contrasting thread!

Anyway the link for how-to do it is here:

How to make a face mask

All the best for now,

Bonny x

It's coming ...

I know! I know! Shoot me now for mentioning it, but we're getting rather too close for comfort given how little Christmas shopping I've done. Eeeek! Every year I swear it'll be different next year. Next year will be the year when I finally get my act together and don't end up doing my usual demented dash for the festive finish-line.

I find it hard to get geared up for Christmas until it's officially December. It's a state of mind. I remind myself of my mum who has this tendency to not really feel like she needs to leave the house until just about the time she's supposed to arrive at wherever it is she's going to.  It is a tendency of hers that used to leave me hanging around a lot after Brownies.

Anyway I'm in my customary seasonal denial, frittering away the time with my needle. And this is what I've got to show for my head-buried-in-the-sand approach to the coming festivities:

Royal School of Needlework, Hampton Court Palace, London

On Tuesday I spent a fun day at Hampton Court Palace. Now I have to confess that it takes very little enticement to get me to spend a day in such a wonderful place. However, on Tuesday, I had a very special reason for being there: I was taking part in one of the Royal School of Needlework's sampler days, which involved a tour of the Royal School's workrooms and then a workshop in their studio.

Ally Pally Knitting and Stitching Fair 2018

For all of us in the stitching community there's nothing quite like the big Ally Pally Autumn Fair. There are lots of other craft fairs, but this is the big'un, and I, for one, always feel like I'm missing something if I'm not able to go.

This year I got an early ticket for Thursday morning. I rocked up 5 minutes before the official opening time, and the place was already pretty much full to capacity already. I'm a bad girl who likes to come by car so that she can transport her swag bag (day's shopping ... wicked 😈) home with minimum muscle strain. I was able to find a space in the free car park, but only just ... .

A chum, who trolleyed in on a late ticket that afternoon (after 3 p.m. entry), told me that it was fairly civilised when she was doing the rounds, but I'd have to say it was a bit too much of a push when I was there.

Still - gripes about how many of us there were apart - it was a great morning out.

Dog Mattress

Gosh I've been away a long time. I've been crazy busy on a non-crafting project, which has slowed down progress on absolutely everything else in my life. But it's finished. Hurrah! It's over, and I feel like a huge burden has been lifted from my shoulders. It's a long story, but it's finally done and dusted, and I'm really excited about moving on to other things.

One super-quick sew that I have managed to knock out was this little mattress for the dog's bed. I measured the exact size that would fit inside his basket, added a 3 cm seam allowance all round, as I was planning on sewing in a very thick wadding, and quickly cut up some fleece that I'd bought in ages ago.

Autumn Cowl Pattern

This cowl is knit in my own home-dyed yarn. I chose 4 ply wool, which I had dyed with cochineal to produce the deep burgundy red, coral and salmon pink (as the dye bath got weaker), onion skins, avocado stones, pomegranate and turmeric for the golden yellow, walnuts shells for the muted brown, log bark chips for the purple and indigo over-dyed yellow for the green. I've been experimenting with natural dyes of late, and, in truth, these colours were chosen from the kaleidoscope of what I had to hand. I passed a happy half hour playing around with the little hanks of wool in my stash to produce what I thought would be a pleasing combo of autumn colours. I'll be honest there wasn't  lot of science that went into the selection, and things got edited further as the cowl progressed. I hadn't, for instance, reckoned on including purple, but it quickly became apparent to me that if I used only my favourite fire colours the composition would look a bit flat without something from the opposite side of the colour wheel to spice it up a bit.

The finished cowl weighs 50.51g - so you'll need just over 50 g of wool in total to knit it. It's a project that you could knit up from oddments left over from sock-knitting. If you want to buy the wool for the purpose, you will do just fine with little 20g mini-hanks of each colour, and you will have loads left over for another creation when you're done.

I've used 3.25 mm needles, which have produced a tension in stocking stitch on the colourwork of 33stitches x 40 rows for 10 cm². The finished cowl measures 20cm long and 50 cm around. It is knit in the round.

Knitting on the Bias - a short guide to everything you need to know ...

What could be nicer for late summer or early autumn than a swishy scarf, knit on the bias for extra swing? - Something just perfect for wrapping up a little in the evenings when the sun sinks, and things start to cool down just a little.

Read on for our all-you-need-to-know guide and pattern for creating a great patchwork scarf knit in triangles to devour left-over yarn from your stash.

Super Easy Curly Wurly Scarf

Are you looking for an easy, lazy knit for working on in the shade of a parasol during this glorious heat-wave? Well, I may just have the thing for you.

I recently put this pattern together for my lovely guests on the Spring Colours tour to the sunny Costa Brava. Knit with our own, double knitting weight variegated bamboo yarn, there's enough interest in the colour work of they yarn to sustain a fairly simple pattern. It made for a relaxed project for guests to work on without having to think too much about what came next, which was all the better for shooting the breeze and chilling out.

It's a really, really easy knit, worked in double knitting on 3.75 mm needles (UK size 9, US size 5). In garter stitch it knits to a tension of 20 stitches x 30 rows for a 10 cm square. To make a scarf that measures a very generous 158 cm you will need 3 balls of 50 g bamboo.

Ivy leaf wool wash

OK ... you're thinking. She's finally lost the plot. The sun has addled her brain.

But bear with me. There's been a lot written across the internet recently about how you can use ivy leaves as a wool detergent. With all this warm weather I don't have much need of my woollies, so it seemed the perfect time to get things laundered and try out this crazy idea.

I went off into the wilder reaches of the garden and gathered myself a big bowl of ivy leaves, which I washed under the tap to rid them of their cobwebs and dust. Next I tied the leaves in an old T-towel so that they wouldn't escape and mess around with the inner workings of my washing machine. I placed my trial woolly jumper in a mesh wash bag, and placed it in the machine along with the bundle of leaves and popped them on the wool-wash cycle.

Provisional cast-on - crochet methods

I was recently asked to demonstrate how I went about doing a provisional cast-on. I have 2 methods, both using a simple crochet chain, and, truth be told, they amount to pretty much the same thing. The cast-on in crochet is essentially a disposable beginning, which in both cases can be ripped back to expose a second line of live stitches so that you can do a knit-down finishing or some other join in your knitting.

Sew Sunday ...

I'm enjoying a lot of peace and quiet at the moment, perhaps rather more peace and quiet than I'm totally comfortable with. By some strange alignment of the stars Mr B and the child are both away: Mr B is the Far East with work, and Emi is in Wales on a geography trip. So it's just me and the WonderDog holding the fort.

I enjoyed it enormously for the first day or two. Whaow! I got so much done ... but now I'm finding excuses to go and visit people. I've had enough of my own company.

On Sunday we had a glorious day here in London: all blue skies and sunshine. I devoted my afternoon to sewing peacefully on the terrace.

St. Patrick's Key Fob

Like just about every other Irish person I celebrate St. Patrick's Day with genuine gusto. It helps that it's such a big everyone's-invited kind of gig. For one day the whole world gets to be Irish, and I'm all for inclusivity. Let's build bridges instead of walls, and hold parties instead of wars. And if you can dance a jig or two, down a drop of the hard stuff and tell a few tall tales in our time-honoured national tradition, more power to you, I say.

The shamrock, symbol of my homeland, is one of my favourite motifs. So, inspired by St Patrick's Day, which is looming large on the near horizon I give you my latest creation, craftily made from left-over 4 ply from my Spidery Scarf, and, as such, another idea for using up your left-over sock wool.

Spidery Scarf

Here's a little something I've been working on for a-g-e-s - literally since forever. It's knit from the top centre out, adding stitches as you go, and, in the natural order of things, the rows accumulate more and more stitches. In the end I think I got a bit intimidated by just how many stitches that totalled up to. I'm a tidy knitter, who likes to finish the row she's working on before putting the needles down to go and attend to whatever emergency needs to be dealt with, but when you're wrangling 300+ stitches on a row that can mean a lot of missed telephone calls, postal deliveries and other deadlines. So I'd only start a row if I was totally sure that I'd have time to finish it. And, for someone who knits on the hoof, in between doing all the other things that have to get done every day, that became a major disincentive to doing anything. Anyway, that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

I've knit this using own, hand-dyed 4 ply Merino on 3.25 mm needles. If you've got lots of left-over sock wool, you could think of knitting a stripy version to use up your left-overs. The purple trim on my scarf came courtesy of some left-over wool from my New Model Socks. I was worried about how far the green wool would go, and didn't want to play yarn chicken at the end, so I introduced the second colour-way to give me a little more security. Given how (very) many stitches I ended up with on each row I opted to use circular needles, knitting back and forth on the flat.

Just read on for the pattern:

Knitted Narcissus ...

It's sooooo cold this week in London. And spring sunshine seems a lifetime away. But the daffodils are looking good for a whole lot of lovely sunny yellow cheerfulness in the very near future. I've been knitting my own narcissi here in the cosy snugness of my study to steal a march on old Mother Nature. And here they are:

If you'd like to knit some for yourself, just read on for the pattern.