Free Your Skeins

I was very honoured to be asked to contribute a pattern pick to Free Your Skeins this week!

Free Your Skeins is the wonderful idea of the ladies behind The Golden Skein Yarn Club. Every day, a different pattern is shared that uses just 1 skein of yarn, inspiring us to set this skeins of yarn free that on,y get sniffed and stroked every so often and then returned to the stash box. Tuesday's are crochet pattern days and I picked the beautiful Consider Owls fingerless mitts. You can read all about them here - https://thegoldenskein.wordpress.com/2015/02/03/freeyourskeins2015-day-34-consider-owls-by-tanja-osswald/

Christmas is Coming!

I know, I've said it! The dreaded 'C' word. Although it may be the last day of August, Christmas is not too far away - just 4 months in fact! People have already turned their minds to Christmas shopping and, as a crafty business, you always have to stay one step ahead.
I have spent most of this rather glorious summer crocheting woolly hats, scarves and mitts. At times it was rather warm work, but now I've uploaded my designs to my Folksy shop, ready to be purchased and made to order.
Below, you can see some of my designs. To see them all, hop on over to my Folksy shop.

Off the hook #1 ~ Sock Yarn Mitts

To continue my series of posts sharing my finished items from the past few months, I bring you my finished mitts!  Now, I know what you are thinking, it's summer and, despite the vast quantities of wet stuff that seems to be pouring from the sky here in England, it is still quite warm out there and not 'mitt' weather.  No, I haven't worn them yet (as tempted as I was to show them off to the World) but I am looking forward to being able to slip them on when the weather starts to get a bit chillier.

As you may recall, I received some superb birthday presents way back at the start of June and my best friend, Shinybees (she has a fabulous blog here), bought me the most delicious ball of supertwist sock yarn from Nuturing Fibres in South Africa which had been hand dyed especially for me. I couldn't resist the temptation to use the yarn straight away and started searching for suitable patterns to use.  I chose the Boleyn Mitts by Aoibhe Ni from her collection of mitts and gloves in the eBook Gloves to Love (all the mitts are fabulous in here and I have plans to make more - no cold hands for me!)  They have a stretchy, ribbed cuff and are then finished with lace detail at the top.  You then add ribbon and a button to finish it all off - gorgeous.  

I made the small size, and my ball of sock yarn was 100g.  There is still some yarn left and I now need to decide what to make with it - quite possibly some flowers for brooches and my hair!