Repurpose fabric, egg boxes, broken jewellery and more to create fantastical headwear and other accessories such as unicorns, dragons, fairies, lions, festival fashions or anything else your imagination can think of! Part of the Upcycling and Junk Art workshop series. Suitable for all ages and skill levels
I really like these ones 🙂 And I thought this tutorial I found on Youtube could be helpful for others 🙂
This is my first attempt at crochet – I think it is double with single around the edge. It is a start – I have a long way to go and I find crochet really hard 🙁
It also took like a whole month to make this :/
I found this tutorial on Youtube – there will be a few more of these as well 🙂
As I frantically knitted purses and creepers and dolls and baby cubes over Christmas and hubby worked on his tea cosy, we had a realisation – we have been working with the same stitches that we learnt 3 odd years ago within the first few months of taking up “yarn crafts” as part of our wool wedding anniversary.
I can knit purl, garter, rib and moss and he can crotchet little tubes and that is it!
All the projects we have done are just variants on these!
It’s time to expand – I tried think of a project that would help us with this. The obvious one is to just knit squares and turn them into a blanket but I currently have two blankets on the go and to be honest it just will not be neat enough and more importantly – the different types of stitches come out different sizes so the squares would not fit together nicely and it would need a backing for the more holey structures and so on.
But then I thought about what else we have been meaning to do this year – cheese making and soap making have been on the list for over a decade!
Soap making!
Yes soap making – if we make little soaps then we need flannels or as some people call them face or wash cloths. We can knit squares, maybe add edging and use and give them away with the soaps.
Perfect 🙂
I have great big chunky needles I knit on and have taught countless numbers to knit with their fingers – something I called French Knitting whilst growing up, though other call peg dolly knitting that and I call peg dolly knitting, knitting Nancy as that was the name my Nan’s called it. My mother saw me with the HUGE needles and informed me I would be better off using my arms, I looked at her in disbelief but she assured me it was something they used to do when she was young.
So we scheduled a – we’ll try that next time you visit. In the mean time friends have been posting this amazing tutorial to my Facebook wall.
You can guess what has just added itself to my to-do list can’t you 🙂
For Christmas I was given purple ribbon wool which opened up into a kind of edged netting. The scarf took three balls of the stuff! Using a crotchet hook I made a chain or dutch lace. When I was coming to the end of one ball I simply over lapped it with the beginning of the next.
Tying off the end I then went back to the beginning and hooking through the loops my chain stitch had provided and did a second lot of chain stitch making it a bigger puffier ruffle!
I made this one very long as a kind of bower type thing or you can fold it in half to make an elegant ruffly scarf. Now my only issue is stopping my 8 yr old from running off with it!
At the Cheltenham Science Festival I meet a lady from Surrey University who was using knitting to explain chemistry. She had balls of wool, needles and patterns so that people could take part in knitting the unit cells of minerals (the little clusters of atoms that get repeated within a crystal structure).
The mineral is Perovskite which is found in abundance in the mantle 🙂 She is crowd sourcing knitters and crochet nuts to help make a huge model. The pattern is very simple. It is called The Perovskite Project – go and check it out!
Also there were huge beakers which looked cool with the balls of wool sticking out 🙂
So yes I am adding this to my knitting projects 🙂
This wonderful knitted poem was on display at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival – it is hung in the stair well of the Waterstones in town. It was knitted by the local knitting groups as part of an initiative set up by Centre Arts. The poem is Jonh Hegley’s The Price of Art in Luton from his collection Dog.
There is also a knitted homeless guy and his dog sitting on the blanket who are full of character.
