Egghenge

Easter Monday is almost over now :) Hope you all have been enjoying your break. Tummies full of chocolate and of all sorts of Easter bakes. Chill-out and feet put up in this nice sunny weather. There's been lots of Easter crafting for me this year.

This season I'm having a knitted Easter theme again. It's my favourite on cards and in decor. In preparation for Easter this year I've knitted these Au Naturale eco eggs :) Very pleased with how they turned out as this is what I wanted to achieve - a natural smooth pastel effect combined with soft coziness and a knitted texture. 

To knit these I used Twilleys Freedom Sincere organic cotton yarn (DK) and dpn needles. I knitted two of each colour and would probably have kept on knitting if Easter hadn't come so fast this year! They were so easy and fast to make as they are plain, not patterned so you don't have to worry about joining in other colours, you just knit automatically like a robot, one by one :) The pattern for the egg comes from Arne and Carlos' book: Easter Knits I mentioned many times on this blog (check for the blog tags) and I'm already well familiar with it as I've already knitted dozens of eggs :) 

Basically I just wanted some plain knitted eggs in natural earthy tones with this lovely knitted cotton texture. I am fascinated by this classic stocking stitch - its simplicity, its genius, its structure. Cotton yarns are particularly good at creating this kind of knitted texture as the fiber is smooth and the fabric weave is so clear and distinct. It loses a little bit of this effect if you knit with a wool. 

I filled the eggs with polyester well to the brim. They keep the shape and they even can stand... like penguin eggs in a nest ;)

And how about having your own Easter Stonehenge... or I should rather say... an Egghenge  - a mysterious circle of knitted eggs :) So what was first then: a stone or an egg? ;)

Or...the Easter Islands perhaps? Doesn't that photo remind you of those colossal stone statues standing proudly in a row?

I had lots of fun making these and will probably come back to knitting them sometime in the future as I've got some other yarn colours and would love to see these in other shades too. 

I haven't been taking part in Hand-made Mondays blog hops for a long time! Time to join up the 164th episode of Hand-made Monday at Handmade Harbour :) 

Background builders

This week in the evenings I've been busy making (again!) some more vintage Scandinavian Christmas cards as well as making my own stamped backgrounds using my inks and stamps. This is such fun! I'm thoroughly enjoying myself at the card making paper production. There's a new trend in the stamping world - a new type of stamps sometimes called "background builders" or "backgrounders" - these are sets of stamps coordinated in style/theme that are used to build your own scenery on a card. They allow for the personalization of a card - you choose where and how to stamp and in what order and how much. So I've had those 4 gorgeous stamps sets with the Nordic theme from The Waltzing Mouse Stamps and the knitted pattern stamps from  WPlus9 Studio Design and it was a perfect moment to put those stamps into practice. So this week I've been stamping these:

I experimented with various colours and shades. By accident, using a thick chalky ink that didn't stamp too crisp, I discovered how to achieve a shaded knitted pattern by stamping two patterns - one on top of  the other. One fills it with a faded colour, the other gives it a defining outline. I thought the coffee brown knitted pattern will look cosy and warm on my cards ;) I really look forward to making cards with these impressions. 

I was very pleased with how these images came out on card as it can be tricky to get a good even impression from the big-sized stamps. I had to use super long acrylic blocks for these borders. I also used some stamping advice from the stamping expert The Waltzing Mouse website and it did work for me this time. I'm going to cut those papers up into smaller backgrounds and perhaps use some cutting dies and punches on them. The thing I love about those background builders is that there are so many possibilities with these stamps. You can make monochromatic patterns as well as multicoloured ones. You can use the papers as backgrounds, punch various shapes out of them or simply cut them up into decorative borders or create your own gift wraps too!