Easter Chick

Hello again :)

Spring is in full swing now and although the weather is still a bit cold and windy here in the UK, I decided to have a colourful Easter indoor this year. I just needed these bright energizing colours in my life, sunshine, warmth, positivity especially now when there has been so much people's misery and sadness at work and around. I also cannot simply wait when the Covid-19 will be a thing of the past. 

Roll on sunnier, happier days!

So, to put some sunshine into my life, I decided to crochet this cute Easter chick to add to my Easter decorations. 

I'm pleased how he has turned out, sizewise and colourwise. I used Yarn Art Jeans yarn (my favourite recently!) and a 2.0 mm crochet hook. The chick is about 18 cm tall. 

I used a pattern from Etsy - by Sandra Toy Designs. It was clear and easy to follow.

I love this little fella and his/her cheekiness of wearing a bunny ears hat. 

I added some little tufts of hair on its head. It always makes a chick look extra cute, I think :)

I also opted this time for some black bead eyes instead of inserting plastic safety eyes, as I tend to. I'm quite pleased with the effect. A small neat pair of eyes were needed for this chick and all the safety eyes I've got are 5 mm or more. (Weirdly, you can't find easily small safety eyes under 5mm size complete with washers. Trust me. Been there, done that.)

And just look at these green booties - one of my favourite details! :)

I added a little tail of my own... For some reason the pattern didn't predict it. I had to improvise a bit.

I love Easter, do you? Everything is new, fresh, baby flowers and baby animals. Life is waking up again. There is hope. 

So my place at Easter is always full of eggs (I've been collecting /making these over time), baskets, doilies, spring flowers, porcelain figurines of ducks and bunnies, decorated trees.

Hope you all have a lovely Easter break. 

Easter blessing to you all! 

Easter tree with Scandinavian balls and eggs

I love Easter time. All around is so fresh and cheerful, the days are getting longer, there's more daylight, it gets greener and trees go into bloom. Shame Easter days last so short. Since I have a thing about cosy knitted Scandinavian things I usually have my knitted theme as a part of my Easter decoration :) So this year for Easter I arranged this tree:

On the tree went on all my Easter knitted balls and most of the knitted eggs from the previous years, including the 4 new one from the previous blog post. All these knits come from Arne and Carlos' books.

Under the tree I put a white porcelain hare surrounded by even more fair isle knitted eggs. Well, let's make it cosy this year, shall we?! It can still get cold, you know! ;)

And this is the view of the tree from my sofa :) I'm really pleased with my knitted collection, which by the way, still keeps growing. 2 years back I didn't even think I would be able to make such things by myself :)

So how is that? :)
Thank you for your opinions x x

Time to link to the Handmade Monday blog hop no. 165 tonight at Handmade Harbour. Do join in for some blog hopping fun and go round visiting others.

Knitted Easter balls and eggs

Hi all. There's more Easter craft of mine I'd like you to see ;) I'm still fascinated with Arne and Carlos' Easter knits so for Easter this year I made the 4 new Easter knits:

In fact I knitted the "shells" for these eggs / balls last year but couldn't get motivated to finish them off so they had to wait all year to be finished off this Easter. I steamed them, stuffed with polyester and attached the strings. Ta-dah! Ready to join my knitted Easter decoration :D

They are all knitted with double pointed needles and Dalegarn yarns: Lerke, Heilo and Falk :) I just love how these colours come out in knitted patterns. Very eye-catching, I must admit. The stripey egg is my first own designed pattern :)

In the next post I'll show you my Easter tree with knitted eggs and balls :D

Have a good day and thank you for comments x 

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 :) 

1 and 1/2 rabbit

What a busy time this Easter time is for me. I've been busy tidying up, cooking, setting up the decorations, finishing my craft projects and now I've found a spare moment to come online here and write this blog post for you. I hope you all enjoy your Easter time and spending it together with your beloved.

Today I'm going to show you what I have been creating recently :) Do you perhaps remember this cheerful book with Easter projects by Arne & Carlos I blogged sometime ago? I have knitted a few Easter eggs and the Easter balls from this book already but this year time has come to try out something else. Something out of my knitting comfort zone. Something I've been wanting to knit for a long time. So this time I have knitted my first Easter rabbit  and I think I've got hooked on it :)

I know it's not perfect. It's a prototype. It may have some sort of "knitted celullitis", flabby bottom and some lumps and bumps on his body. I've made a couple of mistakes on the way as I went along but now I know how to avoid them :) Overall the bunny isn't that hard to knit, you just need to read the instructions carefully, perhaps a few times to get the idea. However the hardest thing was to knit the heel - that extra 6-row bit that is knitted and purled and then you've got to work out on your own how to pick up and knit the vertical stitches on both sides of that bit. The book is not very helpful with the explanations on how to do it (which is a shame really) and I know from the Amazon reviews that the other knitters usually struggle with this bit too. I basically used a trial-and-error method and did my own thing which ultimately helped me to shape the bunny's heel but it wasn't exactly what the instructions said. However, looking through the other books of Arne and Carlos and searching for more explanation I have discovered that their knitted dolls book (lucky if you've got one) includes a very similar piece of instructions for knitting a doll's heel and there is a small helpful picture showing which stitches should be picked. Finally I managed to work it out and I think it is the right way to knit the bunny's heel. I'm gonna practise that with the next bunnies.
The rabbit's face was another "critical" knitting moment as the face requires the very same type of knit-and- purl bit of fabric and it needs to be knitted into bunny's face, giving it a characteristic bunny type nose. 

The second moment I struggled with was how to join two legs and knit the corpus but it turned out that you just put four dpn needles together just as you always do when you knit in rounds and simply knit two legs together with the bind-off sides facing each other and then you stitch them up. The 3rd moment I struggled with was embroidering bunny's eyes. I unpicked the stitches 3 times before I managed to get them look acceptable. I followed the instructions from the book which basically said: knit the head, fill it up with stuffing then embroider the facial features. Ha! The problem here will is: how to embroider the bunny's face without the knotting the yarn on the opposite side. Next time I'm going to stitch the eyes while the head is not fully knitted and bound off. 

Generally I'm pleased with my 1st bunny. The colors of yarns are random. I never care much for the colours I use when I make my first model. They are mostly any scraps of yarn. I'm more focused on reading and understanding the pattern. 

I stuffed the rabbit with the cotton wool. It's very light and it feels nice to hold the bunny in hand. It would make a nice teddy toy for a child.

The pompom at the bunny's butt.

My bf adopted the bunny. Now he's driving around with it on his dashboard. Sorta a campervan mascot now ... and a dust wiper :)

And in the meantime a mint green cousin rabbit is dangling half way through off my needles :) Still using an acrylic yarn but the stitches are smoother and more even. The heels look nicer too.

I stuff and sew up the bunny as I go. It is knitted in pieces which are connected with each other at some point. In the end the whole bunny is dangling off your needles.

And this is what the bunnies look like in the book:

Don't they all look fab on that shelf? :)

edit: I shared my knitted bunny on the Arne & Carlos' facebook fanpage and they liked it!!! ;) 

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