Extreme Knitting

Thought you might like to see this video of extreme knitting by Rachel John - 1000 strands of yarn knitted on super big knitting needles. Amazing! The strands alone look like an art installation. Wish I had that stash:)))

Enjoy!

Cupcakes

Yesterday, a lovely friend came to visit - bearing gifts! A huge cupcake to be precise, lovingly made with her son who decided it just HAD to have blue icing:) Doesn't it just make you want to put the kettle on to have a nice cup of tea and a large chunk of cake? Yes, me too!

And fresh strawberries and raspberries around the cake too - yum! Just this piece alone was very filling and I didn't need much in the way of food for the rest of the day, lol! I didn't realise you could get cupcake moulds this big - such a great idea.  Apparently it's two moulds together so just like a cake only with shaping for the top.  And then all the fun of decorating - if you don't eat all the icing mixture first:)

Looking online at some cupcake photos I found tiers of cupcakes used as wedding cakes - fantastic!! That is brilliant:) For myself, I don't like heavy fruit cakes and I can't really say, "excuse me, can I just have the icing?" So lots of little cupcakes makes a novel and very aesthetically pleasing cake, don't you think?

These are so gorgeous. The precision and delicacy of some of these decorations - lovely! I love the tall one - a christmas cake! Don't think they would last very long, do you? It could be a really clever exercise to keep children busy on the run up to christmas though - decorating and adding cakes to the tree - if they didn't keep disappearing into little tummies:))

Anyone for cake?!

Filigree vessel

Two posts in one day! But now I've got my work in progress photographed, I was just bursting to show you what I've been up to this month. The problem of working on larger creative projects is that they take so long and don't look very exciting photographically speaking till near the end.

I've been playing with modular freeform crochet, building sections of crocheted loops into a 3D form. The original intention was to use white to focus solely on the form structure as I went, but for a lover of colour, I'm really liking the subtlety the white is giving me - especially with a light source behind creating all those interesting shadows.

Now the form is complete, the intention was to start incorporating wire and beads, weaving through the structure in an organic way, crossing and twisting over each other using different colours and thicknesses of metal wire and threading beads as I went. But now I like the simplicity of the white, would a riot of new colours and surface materials kill its delicacy? As it is, the form is not quite sturdy enough to sit on its own and maintain its pod-like shape and the wire's main purpose - other than being decorative:) - was to strengthen the form unobtrusively, so to speak.

I had considered using starch but it can leave a residue. Although the yarn used isn't all that special at this stage, it could be a feature I may not want to lose on another vessel. So, I think a series of small test samples are going to be needed exploring all these possibilities before I decide on a final course of action.

But it's all very exciting!! If I used starch, would that give a good ground to paint on? If I crocheted with wire instead, how would that look? Strength would no longer be an issue but what about the tactile element? Would there be enough fibre content to keep me happy? How could I incorporate more? I think I may have a series of vessels before I'm finished:))

I'll keep you posted!

Colour personality test

Thanks to Kate @ The Garden Bell for telling us about this colour personality test. I'm a bit of sucker for these things:)) so I had to go and check it out straight away! It goes into a lot of detail so I've just edited the main bits of my results here. If you want to try this out, you can find it the link here.

Result of your test :

Your Profile : You are 48 % extrovert and 52 % introvert.

Independently of any order of importance :

• You are creative, you always have new ideas, and your inspiration comes from the inside.

• You are also strong-willed and active, your actions are determined by your own will, by the goals you settled for yourself, and by your need to act and to move forward.
  
• Finally you are able to listen to others, you show a good emotional intelligence, you know how to bring your support to others.

The qualities that characterize your personality at this time :

24 % Your creativity.
You are creative, you know how to see beauty, you are intuitive and your inspiration comes from the inside.

21 % Your energy.
You are strong-willed and active, your actions are determined by your own will, by the goals you settled to yourself, and by your need to act and move ahead.

20 % Your imagination.
You are a creative person, with always new ideas, and you know how to apply them.

17 % Your dynamism.
You are dynamic and active, you are determined in your actions, you know how to communicate your ideals and your energy, and thus, you know how to boost people.

16 % Your thinking.
You are attuned to others and you show a good emotional intelligence, which allow you to give support to people.

Finally, you are a manager and a structured person, you know how to take into account the needs of each person while leading them to the fixed goals, you are a manager and a leader, and you know how to organize groups of people and how to give them your energy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

So there you go! Glad to see that creativity is at the top of the list:)) Actually it's very interesting how accurate this is as a personality test - hmm. I'm working more on my own creative work and less teaching at the moment which this reflects too. But good to know it at least thinks I have managerial and leadership qualities - who knew?! :)))

Back soon with some pics of the aforementioned 'creativity' !

Ready, steady, knit!!

My poor blog has been neglected this last week or two! I've been outside making the most of the lovely sun and working with a friend who is learning knitting techniques. There has been lots of knitting, chatter and cake devouring but alas not much of that is bloggable! So for your delectation, I have a lovely video for all you knitters and makers to enjoy...:)))

Back soon with some garden pics - my, how the plants have shot up!! - and even, fingers crossed, some knitting:)

elaine xx

Cake

Over the weekend, I got around to doing some baking. I haven't baked in, oh, such a long time, and I thought  chocolate cake would be nice. But starting with an easy recipe - just in case! When I was young I used to 'help' my mum bake cakes and look through her Be-Ro cook book at all the pictures of the biscuits, cakes and buns inside.

So with my own Be-Ro cookbook to hand, I chose this picture:

Yum, yum, yum! Doesn't it look nice? Swirly chocolate topping and filling - perfect! First though, I had to top up the cupboards with some extra baking things. I thought I'd need lots of melted chocolate but this recipe only uses cocoa and chocolate butter icing. So off I went, weighing and mixing.....

.... till I got a nice smooth cake mixture. Then whap, straight in the oven, wait, wait, wait, then out and cooling while I whipped up the butter icing. Mmmm, was that tasty;-) I did leave enough to cover the cake, honest! The only problem I had was I was too impatient to decorate and tried to spread the icing when it was too runny! Ah, well, no swirly topping for me but at least I managed to cover it better when it had thickened properly:-)

Then we both had a nice slice of well deserved cake - that's the space from 2 slices, not me being greedy - just sayin';-)) Anyway, after the compulsory eating of all the leftover chocolate icing from the bowl, I wasn't needing a lot more sweet stuff! Well, it's a crime to just throw it away, isn't it? I must say though I remember having a much sweeter tooth when I was young - I was struggling:)

Needless to say the cake didn't last long and is all gone now. Maybe just in time to browse through the pages and pick another recipe?

Afterthought heel

So, how do you like the new blog look? Been tinkering with Bloggers beta designer templates all day - lost a good few hours somewhere:-) I think it may need some more tweeking but I like the change. One thing I do like though is how this template highlights the page tabs at the top of the page - they were getting kind of lost before. But now they are more prominant, I'll have to revamp them too!

It's been a bitty week, trying to get some gardening done when the sun decides to come out, trying to spin but not with as much success as I'd like:-) and trying to make a dent in some of these outstanding WIP's that have kind of been hibernating - although not intentionally. Yes, there is an intentional pile:-)

Since I couldn't seem to find my spinning mojo, I looked out these lovely unfinished socks - Little Minx. Last time we saw these, I had decided to use an afterthought heel to keep the colour continuity with the Almond Zauberball bands and all I needed to do was finish the second sock to the top. A good few tv watching hours later and the sock length was done. Then I undid the scrap yarn holding the heel stitches and picked up my live sts onto two circular needles following Knitting up a Storm's tutorial. This method is so easy and very quick to do. It's just like decreasing a sock toe with a simple st st graft at the end. And they seem to make a well fitting heel too!

With the first sock I didn't colour match as exactly as I would have liked - you can see a little darker shading going on there - damn! It looked right at the time too so with the second sock I was more careful and it looks a lot better. These are knitted up bigger than my sock blockers so I'll need to get some modelled shots to do them justice and show off the pattern and the stripes - which is more pronounced that it looked when on the needles but it's all cool:-)

The weather is meant to be rainy and dull over the weekend, so that will mean no gardening time. Well, it gives me a chance to get the last of the DIY done and possibly look out some more hibernating knitting projects as well - unless I succumb to the african flower crochet bug that is going around here, here and here:-)) There is even a Flickr group where you can get the pattern and see other lovely variations. I may just have a little play with colours this weekend and see.... famous last words! But I'll just be glad to get some creative mojo going again so I can post a bit more often!!

See you all soon!

Pretty Fibres

After a bit of a rummage through my roving stash this weekend, I came across this lovely hand painted roving by 'All the pretty fibres'. I think I showed you it last year when I bought it but I didn't want to spin it straight away till I had got a little more practice in spinning. So, okay, I haven't spent that much time spinning, only on  Jelly Jelly and black coffee but I think as those were both plied yarns, I may try to spin a consistantly even single. That 'consistantly even' bit is going to be the challenge:-)

When I learned to spin, yonks ago, it was on a traditional wheel using rolags and all the spinning techniques seemed really easy. Now, on my modern louet with roving, it seems that all my previous skill has gone out the window - sigh:-) I still have some samples of those earlier yarns so I looked them out and although they weren't as super duper as I'd remembered, they still seemed more competently spun  - with even tension throughout. Different wheel and tension? Different technique of using roving? Whatever, this is the wheel I have and the roving I've stashed so A+B has to equal a decent C!!

So I've spent some of the weekend, splitting some roving into even slivers. Well, as even as I can get them. Another area that could do with more patience! Now, I'm going to make sure the thickness throughout each sliver is as even as possible as I think this is where I slipped up a little last time and got a few thicker areas. And when I hit a thicker area, I changed my  technique to thin it out as I went and it went a bit pearshaped regarding evenness - hey-ho! If I spun a bit more often I really would learn from my mistakes quicker;-))

I'm also interested in seeing how this particular roving will spin up. There is a lot of length to each section of colour so if I average 3 x length of colour on the roving as the length of the spun yarn, that's a lot of each colour. It's definitely going to be stripey! I know I could choose to spin the roving a different way to change this effect but I want to see how this one plays out first. If I like the effect enough, I may get some undyed roving to play with and expand my dyeing into fibres as well.....