Nayu's Craft Time #50 New Shiny Things and Snowflakes Part 2!

My snowflakes come from here!

Ah, my first 2 part post! Nayu's Craft Time #50 New Shiny Things and Snowflakes Part 1 of 2! was posted yesterday; I introduced you to my new hooks and my very first snowflake. Today I'm going to explain the rest of the snowflake experiment. I wanted to show you have different sized hooks used on the same yarn produce different results, and a part of me wanted to see whether the 1.5mm hook or the 2.5mm hook is best with this particular yarn. 

1.5mm hook snowflake vs 2mm hook snowflake

My second snowflake, seen on the right, was made with the 2mm snowflake. I've decided that there isn't really much difference between them (other than a few more yarn issues). I like the pattern, although I'm tempted to change the single chain in the last row to 2 single chains, to make that space at the top of each hole more distinct. What I did next was make the snowflake using my trusty 4mm hook, which I love not only because it's purple but because it's such a versatile size. 

Ho hum. Upon starting to crochet I instantly knew this yarn was wrong for this size hook. It isn't as neat and tidy. It doesn't feel steady while using it. It annoyed me, but for the sake of experimentation I carried on. I have to say now I've used a smaller hook I may wait until I have my 3mm and redo the few motifs I've made for a shawl, since I think it will be a bit neater (if a bit smaller...) 

Current shawl starting motifs

To make myself feel better I used a thicker yarn and made a 4th snowflake (still using the Frost pattern). 

It makes a huge difference! I loved every moment of creating this orange snowflake. I wanted to make more, but my experimenting time was up. I'm glad I can make snowflakes on both a smaller and larger scale - I'm sure in the future I will join some together as a shawl/blanket, and others I'll make with the teeny tiny hook so they can be snowflake charms on blanket. 

I'm so excited about my lovely snowflake patterns! I was going to promise to make all 100 - I may still do that, but I didn't quite understand the first snowflake so I don't know if I will make them all. I'm hoping as I go through the ones I can follow I'll eventually be able to do the ones I found trickier. Practise makes nearly perfect in crochet. I'm looking forward to showing all of my experiments and attempts with you!

Here are all the Frost snowflakes!

Back to shiny things!

I've saved this point til last to justify why this part 2 features new shiny things. What is really nifty about the new hooks is the special metal cover for the 1.5mm hook, I guess to stop it being squished by a crochet book or whatever else it gets squished by. Yes it amused me taking the cap on and off a few times. It's the little things! (Vague pun intended). 

I hope you've enjoyed this 2 part post - expect more to come over the next few months!  

Snowflakes make me as happy as Elsa is here!

Nayu's Craft Time #50 New Shiny Things and Snowflakes Part 1 of 2!

This says it all!

This is my first every 2 part post - whoohoo! Thought it would be easier for you to digest than a super long post. That and it gets you coming back for another visit to see what happens next! Mwhahahaa.... 

My shiny things!

Ahem! Tuesday heralded the arrival of the smaller hooks which I've already talked about (or not - yes there are times I make posts up in my head and then don't post them).  As you can see they still have funky handles, and the close-up below reveals just how thin the 2mm (green) & 1.5mm (yellow) hook are compared to the not new 4mm (purple) hook. 

My pretty hooks!

Now I've been crocheting with a 4mm from the time I started. I haven't really needed a smaller hook since none of my projects so far were required to be a certain size. However, with my future projects most definitely needing some delicate work and the suggested  yarn for all the snowflakes I hope to make, smaller hooks were needed. 

The source of my snowflakes!

Once they arrived today I thought what better than to test them out using what I think might be 4ply cotton yarn and launch into snowflake #2 called Frost. It perhaps wasn't the wisest decision to try a teeny tiny hook out on an unknown pattern, but I went for it. 

1st ever snowflake!!!

It took a a few tries of the first row to get used to the smaller 1.5mm hook. It was a bit tricky as the stitches are teeny tiny and occasionally the yarn twisted (cue me glaring & mentally thinking 'grrr' to the hook - as a good craftswoman I rarely blame my tools-yarn isn't a tool!) 

My version and the book's.

I was happy with my first attempt, and quickly moved on to making the same snowflake with the same yarn and different hooks. You'll have to wait for part 2 link will take you there to see how why I'm as happy as young Elsa from Disney's Frozen is when she makes snow regarding my snowflakes!

Nayu's Craft Time #49 Out of juice

Super short post today, as I'm fairly tired since I slept badly Friday night and accidentally used up my typing energy catching up on book reviews for Nayu's Crochet Dreams - for full details click on the link. I did manage some crochet yesterday and have it planned for today too. I'm taking it easy! I recommend it from time to time, it's nicer when you aren't forced to do so by being overtired.

Nayu's Craft Time #48 Craft is sociable

Nowhere I've been, sadly.

While craft is often done by someone on their own, it doesn't mean they have to do it in the middle of the woods with no one but bunnies, squirrels, and other cute creatures for company. (We can ignore all the creepy crawlies and less friendly creatures). 

Which is why yesterday I spent several hours with a friend, chatting away while we crafted together. I worked on more rainbow fingerless gloves like these. 

My friend worked on a small pansy tapestry. 

Pansies look like this

We didn't sit in silence, we chatted the entire time we worked with yarn and thread, for an entire 3 hours without stopping. I stayed a bit longer after lunch, then went home. 

Take 1 girl away, set it in a home, nix the pig-tails and uniform, swap the knitting for crochet & sewing to get me and my friend having fun ^o^

It was a super fun day for both of us! The great news is that we intend to do this on a semi-regular basis, hopefully every 2 weeks, although it's dependent on how well I feel at the time (today was rescheduled from last Friday). 

Today I've been working on squares for a new baby blanket - I can get 6 from 1 ball of yarn, which since I have 10 balls is plenty big enough. I'm not joining them together until the end, when I'll use join as you go method once I outline the squares in white or cream yarn. Carrying on with ball #2 tonight!

6 made, another 54 to go!

Nayu's Project Progress #3 Autumn Leaves commissioned blanket

Making progress!

It's time to give you an update on the progress of my first commissioned blanket! The request was from a family member to turn my Autumn Leaves Dream blanket into one big enough for a 4 foot bed. Progress was halted for nearly a month due to major hold up in acquiring more yarn. However, I am now merrily making it bigger. It's coming along rather nicely.

Today I'm actually visiting the family member in question, which means I can check my estimated measurements against the actual bed size - there's only a single and a double bed in my household. I'm hoping by the next time I visit this family member I can present them with a fully made blanket! Watch this space for more updates.

Nayu's Craft Time #45 Fairytales in future projects

Picture source

Fairytales are timeless and known all over the world. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast - there are countless variations of classic tales in both literature and film, some with castles, some without. I remember reading a story about Snow White and Rose Red when I was little - I've no idea where the book is now. I've been in love with Disney's version of fairytales for a long time...although it took other versions for me to truly enjoy Snow White and the Seven Dwarves - thank you must be said to Once Upon A Time series which had me finally fall in love with Snow as well as Abie Longstaff and Lauren Beard who helped me like the original tale. 

At the moment I have extremely vague ideas about how I'll incorporate fairytales into my crochet projects. I'm sure various flowers and bows will be part of the item, maybe familiar colours too (yellow for Sleeping Beauty's ballgown along with some red roses for the beast's rose). All I really know is that it's a theme I want to explore at some point. 

I'd love to hear what your favourite tales are and if there's anything else you'd like to feature in my future projects.

Nayu's Craft Time #44 Snowflakes!

Yes, I really am talking snowflakes at the height of summer. If you like using your imagination, then I'm sure you'll like the Disney fairy version of snowflakes being made by Tinkerbell's sister Peri's friends, the Winter fairies. 

A Winter fairy making snow

Or it could be made by Princess Elsa from Disney's Frozen 

Regardless of their actual origin, I adore snowflakes. I love the distinct trudging sound when I walk in fresh snow, which barely happens as we've had snow-free winters the last few years. 

I love how magical the world looks with snow covering everything in a white blanket. I love seeing my cat & other animals' footprints. 

I love knowing that every single snowflake is unique - that's really amazing, and is one of countless reminders how great this world God created for us is. Knowing I like snowflakes, I was super excited to find the perfect crochet book which has 100 of them! 

I'm hoping to get this before the end of Autumn, as snowflakes can be used all year around since there is always somewhere on earth which has snow, and my snowflakes can be multicoloured, unlike the ones which fall from the sky! 

Nayu's Craft Time #43 Expect the unexpected

This is kind of craft related...

So my week hasn't gone to plan at all. Had major pain issues Sunday night, so had my super strong pain treatment of ketamine a few days earlier than planned. It meant I was shattered on Monday, unable to do much except watch anime and listen to audio books. Yesterday I was super hyper, worked on the above puzzle and made a lot of progress sewing wise. 

I've done some more since this picture was taken

Today I was super tired so only did a bit of crochet. I promise that barring any more unexpected medical hiccups you'll have a full project catch up post tomorrow, with lots of pretty pictures to see what I've been doing! 2 weeks since leaving work and haven't had time to establish a 'normal' routine since my body had other plans. I'm hoping that will change from tomorrow!

Nayu's Craft Time #42 Crochet is a good medicine

Where have you been?

Sorry for being silent the last few days - it wasn't intentional. I slept badly Tuesday night, ended up with a minor headache on Wednesday night, which turned into a low grade migraine on Thursday. I tried to nap the migraine away but that didn't work. I thankfully wasn't feeling too sick, but I do get rather sensitive to noise so I couldn't listen to audiobooks (watching anime was a no-go). I read a lot, but I did do crochet too! More on that in a moment - need to finish explaining my absence. While I was headache free Friday I had the usual post migraine fatigue, regardless that it wasn't a major migraine. Saturday I did a bit of blog work but felt too peaky so stopped before I got to finish this post. 

I have been doing a lot of crochet because it's quiet and not too complicated. I worked on a summer blanket which I'm close to finishing.

I've since added a cream border, and currently making a lot of flowers to put around the edge. This will take a while so I'm making 5 flowers a day

I got to the stage where I wanted something a bit challenging, so I learnt how to make a granny (square) hexagon.

Ta-da!

To start with I didn't want to use the above pattern because it started with a flower in the middle. I've made the flower before, but I wasn't confident enough to attempt the pattern without the flower (which is what I wanted to do). However, all the patterns I stumbled across online used decreasing stitches, which I haven't come across before now, and didn't really want to start learning just yet. Or the patterns weren't like this one.

So I thought if I learnt how to make the hexagon with the flower in the centre, I could figure out how to do it without the flower. And I did!

 

It wasn't too tricky to figure out, since the flower had 6 loops before carrying on with the pattern, so  I translated that as meaning 6 clusters in the middle, et voila!

Since I want to make some baby blankets using hexagons, I thought I'd go for smaller ones, with just 2 rows. It is cute but could take a bit of time, so I'll opt for 3 rows or even the larger size which I originally used.

Today I'm working on a mixture of projects which I'll hopefully be chatting about tomorrow. I'm trialing doing blog work in 3 x 40min slots, rather than 2 hours straight, which for now seems to be working.  See you soon!

Nayu's Craft Time #41 The Tale of the Travelling Yarn

This is no ordinary yarn...

Today this ball of yarn (before it got used) went on a little journey. First stop was a doctor's waiting room. Because I prefer to re-roll yarn into a ball, I sat and did just that while waiting for my routine appointment. I nearly rolled it all up, but, as often is the case when I get to the end of a ball (while winding) it got a little muddled up. It sort of looked like a string game called Cat's Cradle which I played when I was young.

A fun game for 2

I got called in before I could untangle it, so I popped it back in my bag and there it sat for over an hour. Appointment was fine :) The next time I got my yarn out was when I popped in to see my old work colleagues. It's a bit weird to think that I finished work a week ago. It both feels much longer and much shorter than that. I fully enjoyed catching up with my colleagues, who are my friends.

Out came the yarn when I had to wait for my manager to finish seeing someone. I managed to detangle it – whoohoo! I did 3 sides of the first row (which creates the square), then popped the yarn back in my bag since my manager was then free.

The yarn popped back out once I'd got home, and I crocheted one and a half squares for fingerless gloves which will be for me ^o^ Now I've had my post lunch rest I'll be back to working on a summery blanket, as soon as I've blogged, written a little, and done some reading.

I hope you like the tale of my travelling yarn. Small crochet projects are super portable. I do need to keep a pair of scissors permanently in my bag, as I didn't have any to cut the yarn if I got far enough ahead that I made 1 glove (I didn't), but want to be sure that won't be an issue in the future.

I actually have this cute bunny ear scissors with paperclips, although they don't stand look quite like the tip of this carrot!

There will be no travelling yarn tomorrow or Thursday, as they are planned days at home, but yarn will be travelling on Friday to visit a friend, so I may have another short tale for you then!

Nayu's Craft Time #40 Circles, stars, and recreating the wheel

Why is this post a day late?

Apologies for the day's delay in writing this post, I was feeling fairly flakey yesterday so decided to stay off my laptop and rest with crochet and reading. As promised in the previous post this post is about circles. 

Now that I have more time to experiment with crochet, thanks to finally being a full time crochet artist + writer, the other evening I sat down and learnt how to crochet a circle. Here are my results! 

Aside from mats & coasters, truth be told I was hoping to be inspired by circles in the same way I get inspired from looking at other shapes and motifs. Unfortunately that wasn't the case. I looked at the circle and instead of thinking 'I could do x y z' all I thought was 'I can do mats, coasters, and nothing else'. Mats and coasters aren't bad, not at all, especially since I plan to add cute borders. I'd just hoped to have a bit more inspiration, you know? 

After the lack of circle inspiration I decided to try a five-sided star. Here's what it looked like. 

After seeing this I thought of doing a star blanket/throw, so tried a few combinations which I didn't take photos of because I wasn't happy with them, but I do have a photo with a few stars

Unfortunately there was too much space between the stars, and because they are 5 sided I simply couldn't get an arrangement I was happy with. I spent quite some time searching online for pentagons & other 5 sided motifs, and there aren't very many examples as it seems that even sided objects are far easier to crochet with than odd numbers. Yes I could do fancy bits between the spaces, but I'm not that advanced a crocheter yet. 

I spent all day working on the stars, and although at the end I came up with a cute banner (picture to follow by 12am GMT today), I learnt that re-inventing the wheel really is pointless, and there are so many other motifs I can successfully create blankets with I'll stick with the easier shapes ^o^ 

Nayu's Craft Time #39 Dishcloth Mission

 

As promised in yesterday's post today I'm chatting about my dishcloths.

Tuesday night I'd started making a dishcloth from a ball of Lily's sugar and cream 100% cotton yarn. I wanted to make 2 from the same ball as I know it can be done. So after winding it into a ball (I always do this with yarn as the original ball sometimes tangles or isn't like a sphere) I then unwound it and started a new dishcloth at the other end.

I haven't got a picture showing this process. Once I got to the point of having a little yarn left, I began figuring out what type of border I could do that would make the yarn last for both dishcloths. I undid the last row & tried a new border definitely over 5 times. I was determined to make it work! It's nice having enough time to be able to experiment - here's what I came up with! 

It's roughly 7 inches/18 cm, and this time I've added a handy loop so you can hang them up - they aren't just practical, they look pretty too! All dishcloths made from now will have a loop. These will be on sale soon, along with other colour combinations. 

Tomorrow's post will be all about circles...

Nayu's Craft Time #38 Full time crochet artist!

My crochet basket is bursting with colour!

I'm now a full time crochet artist! Whoohoo! Well if you want to get technical I'm a part time crochet artist & part time writer, but I'm happy with thinking I'm full time for both of them. I finished my job on Tuesday, and as I said in a previous post I had Wednesday for just relaxing. I didn't even sort my work related bits 'n' bobs out. 

I did have a few errands to run in the morning (milk is an essential item in my fridge), but they were all done by lunch which left me to time read some review books (for my other blog, Nayu's Reading Corner), and then I crocheted!

Did some more of a summer blanket, this is all from 1 ball of yarn. 

All dishcloths made from now will have a handy loop!

I also carried on with my dishcloth mission which will be explained in tomorrow's blog post. 

Yes, you read correctly. Tomorrow's blog post! Part of the deal I've made with myself since leaving work is that as far as possible you will get daily posts from me, not just 3 times a week! Does that sound good? It's something I wanted to do on starting this blog but with my day job I didn't have the time to do it. The only reason my other blog has daily posts is that I pre-schedule the reviews on free moments. I couldn't really pre-schedule posts here as I relied on actually doing crochet, something which didn't always get done on a work day if I ran out of energy. 

I've got 50 minutes left of being online so it's time to end this post *sad face* but I'll be back tomorrow! I hope to put non pre-scheduled posts up by 12pm each day, so long as no unexpected life things happen.

Wheee! I'm free to spend hours each day doing crochet!