Attic24

Winter Wreath Progress

Aren't the colours in this photograph beautiful? When I was searching for pictures of Hellebore flowers a few weeks ago, this image popped up on my screen and I was immediately smitten by those gorgeous, dusky pinks and purples. I knew when I was first planning my Winter wreath that I wanted to make hellebore flowers, as apart from snowdrops they are the only flowers I could think of that reliably bloom in winter. Plus I knew that the pinks and purples would provide just the right amount of warmth in amongst the very cool blues and greens of the crochet foliage I've been making. 

It took me quite a few attempts to get the flower shape right, working the petals so that they overlap each other slightly, with just enough curl to stop the flower from looking too flat. Hellebores have a lot of stamens in the centre and it took me even more attempts to get this part of the flower right. At first I tried using artificial stamens (the sort that you can buy for sugar craft) but they looked too stark and false. I then messed up a couple of flowers trying to stitch (and then un-stitch) some yarny stamens in place. It all went a bit wrong and made me cross, and the flowers were duly slung in the bin and abandoned for a while. Eventually, I made more flowers and managed (just about) to get the hang of the stamens. I stitched loops of pale green and yellow merino yarn around the flower centre and then trimmed them down with sharp scissors. 

The yarn went a bit fluffy, but I don't think it matters too much in the overall scheme of things. I'll be writing up the pattern for my hellebore flowers to share on my blog during the next week or so.

The other part of my winter wreath which I wanted to share with you is the little pine cones I hooked up in January. In typical fashion, I crocheted them in a whirl of wintry excitement one snowy afternoon and didn't bother to make one scrap of pattern notes at the time (tut tut, should have written it in my Book of Days!). However, I did take a few quick photos which has helped me to remember, plus I've just had a reeeeeally close up look at one and counted all the little bobbles so I can roughly tell you how to make one.

Snowy Little Pinecone

You will need some scaps of DK yarn in pale brown and white and a 3.5mm hook.

I'm writing in UK crochet terms.

To begin :: using brown yarn,  chain 15.

:: Row 1 :: starting in 2nd chain from hook, work 1 dc in each chain across. Turn. (14 sts)

:: Row 2 :: Chain 3 (counts as 1 tr), then work 3 tr's into first dc. Work 4 tr's into each dc to end. Fasten off, leaving a 20cm tail end for stitching up. (56 sts)

:: Row 3 :: With right side facing, pull a loop of white yarn through top of chain-3 at start of previous row. Chain 2, slip stitch into top of chain-3 (chain loop made).

*In next tr (slip stitch, chain 2, slip stitch)* 

Repeat between ** making little chain-2 loops in the top of each treble stitch of row 2. Fasten off.

Your rows of crochet should pretty much be curling themselves into a pine-cone-esk spiral without much assistance. Thread a darning needle with the tail end of brown yarn. Start from the tip/top centre of the pine cone and curl your crochet around, securing with small stitches. Keep working around/down, shaping the little pine cone and securing with stitches as you go.

They turn out quite cute - a little bit round and fat perhaps, but I do quite like them like that. I made four for my winter wreath, two snowy ones and two plain brown ones.

The very last things to be made for my winter wreath this week were some snowflakes. I went to my local shop to purchase some white crochet thread and a 1.5mm steel hook and entered into the old fashioned world of thread crochet. Oh. My. Goodness. This kind of fine, fiddlesome, micro-crochet work is both naggingly irritating and strangely addictive all at once. It made my toes curl with concentration.

I managed to hook up a small flurry of teeny tiny snowflakes (no patterns for these folks, they kind of made themselves), they turned out oh so cute!

I mean, just LOOK at this itty-bitty little thing, it only measures 18mm across! I honestly can't believe I made something so small, they are so different from anything else I've ever crocheted. I made nine altogether and am planning on adding some little pearl beads to the centre, and possibly a bit of extra stitch-work when I attach these little things to my wreath. We'll see how it goes.

And that, my friends, is that....all the components for my winter wreath are now finished. There are 81 pieces of crochet altogether, not including the wreath base and the extra buttons and bling that will be added here and there. I spent this morning photographing it all laid out (just as I did for my Autumn Wreath) and it's now all pinned in place ready for The Big Stitch-Up. You can expect a grand, wintry Ta-dah moment any time soon, just in the nick of time before Spring arrives. I can't wait to see it all finally come together.

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ps Winter Wreath inspiration post is here, and Winter Wreath beginning post is here x

 

 

Colourful Competition Update

Yes, yes I know, here I go again with yet another post about yarn and colour, I am on a bit of a mad colour/yarn-fixated thingy, well nothing new there to be honest. I am resisting the urge to apologise though, as colour and yarn make me absurdly happy and I'm not sorry for inundating my blog with happy-making stuff. And hey, I did promise to keep you updated following my post last week about the Lets Knit / Stylecraft colour choosing competition.

The three squishy balls in the image above are the three new shades of Stylecraft Special DK due to launch in early April. They are named Parma Violet, Storm Blue and Sage. I tried to photograph them as accurately as I could to share with you, they are really lovely colours in real life. They are soft and quite restrained, with a slight vintage vibe and compliment the existing colour range very well.

I added the three new shades into my studio shelves so you could see how they fit.

The Sage is a beautiful soft grey/green which sits equally well with the green and blue shades. It also looks delightful when placed amongst the soft pinks and purples.

Storm Blue also has a fair bit of grey in it, just like a stormy sea. I really like it and can tell you it works beautifully with many of the other colours in the Special range.

Parma Violet is an unusual colour, and truthfully I'm not mad keen on it as it's a bit pale and wishy washy for my own personal taste. Like sage and storm, this pale violet shade also has quite a lot of grey tone in it. It's a very changeable colour mind you, and looks very different depending on the light and which colours you place it with. Definitely a colour you would ideally need to see in real life before making up your mind about.

I borrowed this photo from the Stylecraft Facebook page, it shows a small selection of the wonderful colour entries that've already been sent for the competition. I think judging is going to be quite tough, I might need to eat lots of cake on Judging Day to help my colour-processing brain cells do a good job ;)

Full details about the competition can be found on my previous blog post HERE - closing date for entries is 31st March 2015.

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Keeping Track

I took the above photo of my Attic view on Saturday (the last day of February), it was a nice bright day but very cold and wintry still. And now February is behind us for another year and I am very happy to have turned over my calendar pages to welcome in March. Oh, hello lovely third-month-of-the-year that might possibly at some point contain a weeny whiff of Spring! Not a lot of Springyness here yet mind you - second day of March and we had an inch of snow today, just look at my back yard....

....wintry or what? Secretly though I'm loving it, partly because I am still working on my Winter Wreath and quite like that it is still winter, and partly cos I had an argument with J this morning about whether the first day of Spring is on 1st March (his theory) or on 20th March (the Vernal Equinox and my theory). Snow just proves that it's still Winter as far as I'm concerned and that we shouldn't expect Spring until the third week of this month or thereabouts. I know I'm right.

I've got a bright and cheery jug of tulips on my table this week, bending and flopping their sweet heads in the warmth of the room.

I've been gazing at them a lot during the past few days, admiring the many colours contained in those silky petals and thinking for the gazillionth time how utterly uplifting and inspiring fresh flowers are. Aren't they just?

Such a tonic for these rather drab, cold days at the start of the year.

Anyhooooooooooo - I'm not supposed to be jabbering about the weather or the flowers on my table as this post is entitled "keeping track" and I need to discuss. Very belatedly, I would like to thank the 189 people who took the time to comment on this post back in December. Thank you sooo much for chatting to me about how you organise your days and recommending your methods and tools, it was fascinating reading and inspired me to look at a couple of the books and websites that you recommended.

You may remember that I had managed to gather three notebooks (all gifted to me by friends) so at the beginning of the year I chose one of them and designated it my 2015 Book of Days. This particular notebook is pretty substantial with lovely quality lined pages and a fabric cover. It's A5 size (15cm x 21cm) and about 2cm thick so loads of pages - I love the dimensions of it but my only niggle is that it's heavy and the weight of it puts me off carrying it everywhere with me, which means I'm not using it as completely as I should be. But it's only a small niggle. If I were to start over with notebook buying I would totally go for one of these beauties (oh the turquoise one has my name all over it!), as recommended by my lovely friend Christine who recently started Bullet Journalling.

Many of you recommended I look at the Bullet Journal website, so off I toddled into the www to check it out. Fascinating! Actually, it really does look like a superb system for keeping track of a busy life, combining notes and lists in a simple and practical way. The website (www.bulletjournal.com) explains it all beautifully and has formed the basis for my own Lucy-Book-of-Days.

Last week I also came across something else that I thought I would share in case you might find it useful - it's similar to the Bullet Journal system but called The Circle. The idea is that you make your to-do lists, giving each item a circle to begin with. Then as you work through your list, you change the status of the circle according to progress (the above image should explain it, but there is more info here). It's a bit too fussy for me (I'm going with a simple tick) but I thought it was pretty clever.

So would you like to know what's in my Book of Days?

This is my opening page - I typed it out after Heather (that's Pink Milk Blog Heather) shared it on her Facebook page. Quite simply, I love these words. I've not managed to really keep up with all of them yet (eating far too much and not moving nearly enough etc) but they are inspirational and a reminder that simple resolutions are often the best.

On my next double page I printed out the above calendar on an A4 sheet of paper and glued it in. I find that my brain likes "vertical month" calendars the best, much better than "block month" calendars which don't give me nearly the same sense of clarity about where I am in the year. You can find both versions as free A4 printables on Calendapedia.com.

I have always loved calendars and diaries since being a child, I find it very reassuring to know exactly where I am within the 365 days of a year. It makes me feel excited to see all those days laid out one after the other, to look at all those numbers and feel grounded by the familiar rhythm of the days, weeks, months and seasons.

I tried to find printable monthly calendar pages in the internet but when I couldn't find any single page vertical ones (there were plenty of pretty block ones) I made my own in Word. I made it A5 size and at the beginning of each month I just print out a page and stick it in my Book of Days.....

....this keeps me on track for the month ahead, see? I can write in my appointments and mark out the school weeks and holidays and see exactly where I'm at. On the facing page, I make a simple list of Monthly Things To Do. Mostly this list is work related, but also there are reminders of things I'd like to try and do in the house (oh yeah, de-clutter time is here!) as well as personal things I'd like to find time for. It's not a strict list as such, more a compilation of things that I need to think about, things that I'm trying not to forget.

As well as a diary and list-making thing, I'm also using my Book of Days as a general notebook and scrapbook. I'm trying to get out of the bad habit of scribbling stuff on random bits of scrap paper and then promptly losing them. So phone calls, meetings, travel arrangements etc all get written in the book. Likewise crochet patterns and notes get written in the book (no more jotting down on scraps of paper which get lost in an instant!). I'm also trying to keep note of ideas and inspirations as they pop into my head - quick sketches or notes to lead me back to places on the www, as well as snippets cut out of brochures and magazines. I love the old fashioned cut-and-paste methods very much (I loved making scrapbooks as a child), give me a glue stick and a pair of scissors and I'm pretty happy.

I'm trying to make myself sit down on a Monday morning and formulate a weekly to-do list but I confess I haven't really managed to do this very effectively yet. Somehow my brain thinks that because I've written it down then it has been achieved, so much of my weekly lists throughout February remained un-ticked. I am very, very easily distracted I know, it doesn't take an awful lot to throw my to-do-list completely out the window for a whole week. But I am trying to improve.

Have you looked at the page up above there entitled "March HOME"? Do you see the Zones? Uh-huh, I am forcing myself to take on a supreme tidying-up mission this month. Based on the FlyLady's routine, I have declared March to be the month when I try hard to bring about a bit of order to my considerably chaotic home front. Nothing too drastic, but I am going to start by doing the "fifteen minutes a day" de-cluttering thing and see how it goes. I have done this before and it does work, providing you can pull some sort of motivation out of the bag. I really do feel motivated to get things ship-shape here, and I would love to arrive at the Easter holidays in April with the house looking less like a jumble sale in progress.

Pondering the business of Home Loving sent me pootling down the domestic aisle in the local cheap-n-cheerful homestore on Saturday. I was actually looking for a scrubbing brush and bucket but ended up buying an apron and a pair of Easy to Wear Household Gloves with a Luxury Comfort Lining. Oh those gloves!! They make me laugh out loud and truly I cannot wait to wear them and get stuck into a bit of dirty work somewhere, the bathroom probably. Sometime towards the end of this week probably.

It helps an awful lot writing all this stuff down you know, thank you for listening. I always feel so much better when I get all these thoughts and intentions out of my head, onto this page and into your head. I really want to feel some peace and pleasure with being just a tad more organised and spending just a tad more time making my home lovely. And somehow by writing it down, I feel much more motivated to make it happen.

February went by quickly didn't it? And I have a sneaky suspicion March will go the same way.....best make the very most of these days, lets not waste them! Tell me your plans, what's on your monthly to-do list for March?

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Edit to add :: one of my lovely blog readers made up a gorgeous set of A5 vertical month calendars which will be perfect for anyone planning/creating their own Book of Days. You can find the link to them via Nadya's blog HERE x