Star Garland (2) - finished!

This week I've worked on various projects. Mostly crochet. Finally I've managed to finish off my crocheted star garland :) Here's what it looks like now when all done and dusted :) This project comes from the book: Ros Badger Hook, yarn and crochet and it's been my favourite since the very beginning. It's even made into the cover star (yes, literally too, pun intended)

Below you can see the stars both on their right and wrong side.

I'm really pleased with how the whole thing has turned out. It's my first completed (more significant that just the simple crocheted flowers) project from a crafty book. I've learnt a lot about crochet with this one and now I can finally see the similarities and differences between the basic crochet stitches. At last I can make them out of my head, without help from any books. Everything in crochet starts to make sense to me. Like a jigsaw puzzle. That's a big step ahead. I feel like I'm getting more confident and adventurous with my crochet now that I can read better written instructions. I feel so encouraged to go further now with my still-basic crochet skills.

The garland is made of 15 stars - the brown and cream coloured ones have been knitted with an organic cotton Freedom Sincere yarn and the red ones have been made with Lerke of Dalegarn cotton.

Because it has been cold and rainy today I couldn't take my garland outside to take a photo of. Instead I had to do with some photos at home :-/ This is what it looks like when the garland is stretched over the mantlepiece:

This is just a temporary presentation to show you the span of the garland. I'm still looking forward to some nice weather to take it outside and will add the photos to this post later. Standing back and looking at it, I'm pleased with the colour combination. It doesn't look particularly Christmassy so I believe it could be used throughout the whole year, what do you think? However, I'll surely come back to this project as I'd like to crochet some stars in more Christmassy colours. Perhaps I'll crochet just single stars on their own to hang on the tree too.

Before the garland was finished it had to be blocked. This is something I hadn't done before. The books suggested to pin it down and steam it with an iron. I did exactly what it said but also sprayed the stars with some spray starch for the crisp finish. Not bad overall. The stars do keep their shape! Yay!

What to do with the rest of the cotton yarn? Obriously knit an Easter egg! I'm slowly building up my Easter egg collection this year. I have a vision in my head of making my Easter decoration in plain pastels and au naturel this year :)

Anybody on their Easter projects already?

Joining up the Hand-made Monday blog hop no 157 tonight. Very curious what others have been up to!
Thank you for your visits and feedback. x x

Star Garland (1)

I think I'm already in a full crochet swing :) Here is an update on my crocheted stars:

I'm planning to crochet a garland made of 15 stars but I may decide on a longer one if it comes out too short to my liking.  If it goes on the mantlepiece, 15 stars should do but if it goes on my Christmas tree, it needs to be much longer. I'll see about that :) So far I've crocheted 13 complete stars.

I crochet them using only 3 colours, cream and brown are organic cotton yarn called Sincere and since there's no red colour in the Sincere colour palette, I went for the red Lerke from Dale of Norway, half merino, half cotton mixture.

The yarn naturally curls up when it's knit or crocheted so when I've finished them, I'll have to do some steaming / ironing and blocking. It will be a new thing for me as Ive never blocked any knit or crocheted items before. I must read some theory about it.
My dear crocheting friends, if you happen to have any suggestions as for blocking, I'm all ears listening out there for you. 

Some shopping goodies: this is my recent buy from Lidl - a continental German supermarket. It made me really happy. They were selling these cotton yarns at about £3.49 per pack while it's usually a price for only one 50g yarn ball! It was a great bargain and I couldn't resist those Easter'y colours.  I hope the yarn will be pleasure to knit.

Also the knitting needles and crochet hooks were on offer for only £1.49 a piece! I took a piece of circular needles (something to try out in the future), 2 sets of cable needles (also something on my to-do-in-the-very-near-future list) and some nice girly crochet hooks of a very small size. Lovely! 

Thank you Lidle! :D

Somewhere between the stacks of my craft books I found this:

a crochet diary for 2014, freebie from one of the mags - not sure what I'm going to put in it yet - perhaps some urls to crochet tutorials or something :)

And finally, the books I've been in love recently:

I have mentioned buying Mollie Makes Crochet book before but some later after that I got myself another lovely book Hook, yarn and crochet by Ros Badger and Crochet step by step by Sally Harding from DK publishing house. I love all crafty books from DK! - they are always good books full of content and good advice as opposed to many with just waffling and pretty pictures. Oh! and I love this dotty cover - supa cute and just matches the whole girly-crochety-hand-made theme. All these 3 books give me a good crochet theory as well as some easy crochet projects. The star garland comes from Ros Badger's book.

A full weekend ahead. Yipeee! What are your (crafty) plans? Hope you all have a nice chillout.

Stamped Christmas Cards (1)

Christmas card making is something I always look forward to and I always can't wait to dig out my festive craft toys so I like to start early :)) I've recently had a stamping session using one of the fabulous festive stamps from Noolibird - Christmas Garland. One stamp but many variations of colours and backgrounds. I tried different inks and different shades of red but found out that not all of them worked well enough for me. I'm still looking for a perfect ink with such a shade of red that would look good on Nordic-style cards and would produce a crisp image. Some new ink pads to arrive from ebay soon!

Here is my 1st batch of cards. I obviously started with the red-white cards and used some brown craft paper as backing (I love using it!). Eco-style combined with a Nordic theme :))

Then I created a couple in blue...

and in green:

Some group photos:

More stamped cards to follow soon.

Time to join the Hand-made Monday. Get clicking guys and head over to the Handmade Harbour to have a look at some crafty stuff.