Family slippers

Here they are.

Pleasing pile of alpaca

Half of them at least.

Imagine this picture with 7 pairs. *sigh

And you have to trust me that the other half were delivered because I handed them over, and then remembered to photograph them.

In a bad case of Absolutely not Learning My Lesson About Furry Yarn, I tried to make myself a pair in this.

Moda Vera Flurry. Feels nice around my toes, nasty on the hook.

 Once again, couldn't read the stitches and failed to count them accurately so I have no hope in hades of  replicating the one sad little slipperish shaped object that is slumped in a heap at the bottom of my crochet bag.

Sulky flurry rodent.

Turns out i can(dle)

Look what I made.

waxed faffage

Making christening candles is far out of my handmaking comfort zone, and frankly not anything I am the least bit interested in repeating (I don't think. However...)

It seems to me a bit odd and frankly a little grim to burn a picture of your loved one. But convention is as convention does, and I was darned if I was going to pay some other sucker to make the silly thing.

Basically, I went through a range of contortions and tricks to get the photo onto tissue paper, position it on the candle, wrap it in waxed paper, and apply heat. Easier said than done, much ink and wax everywhere.

How this actually works is that the surface of the wax melts, soaks into the tissue and then hardens again. There is no ink transfer as such, and the waxed paper is only there hold the tissue evenly and smoothly against the candle.

I wish one of the many many DIY tutorials I read had explained this, because I spent  a great deal of time searching for waxed paper, and eventually gave in and bought greaseproof on the the offchance.

I know the two are different, and can't often be substituted, but in this case they can. Just so you know...

I'm not entriely convinced it won't go up in a ball of flame if it burns down to the tissue (assuming the ribbon and sticky diamantes don't do the job), but I doubt I'll ever find out (see above: squeamishness as incinerating face of small child).

Simple little blanket

Well, not as simple as it could have been. The rick rack was frankly a bit of a faff, and is discouragingly wonky.

Simple little flannel blanket. Hah!

Discouragingly wonky

 But Boygoblin likes it, (more to do with the diggers than the handiwork, truth be told) and it keeps his splint safe, so, job done.

The racing boot. And a definite vehicle theme.

Too cute to survive

Because really, who can resist a teeny tiny pincushion that has a tendency to roll away, and is extremely attractive to toddlers?

Boygoblin called this "Mummy's yellow car".
Deeply unfair, because it is eerily similar to "'Goblin's yellow car."

Thats a strip of printed jersey rolled, handsewn and popped in the tray.

Babycrack. Right. there.

Too cute to live, and Boygoblin has car back now.

You know those slippers...

Well, there is progress being made, but these, these, have taken up more time that all of them put together.

Little doll slippers. Made of scraps of merino. And yes, that is knitters elastic you see worked into the top stitches... 

... and treble crochet detail in thee instep. don't tell the cousins...

He looked cold, ok? With his little bare plastic feet and shortie onesie...

So yes. there was a cardie too.

Note co-ordinating edging and toddler-easy popper fastening.

There now, doesn't that look nice?

 And honestly, Andy does sort of stick his arms out - his pose above has almost nothing to do with the construction of the garment. Almost. Nothing.

Oh, and worth noting that Andy came with socks and shoes, but they were lost within days. This had nothing to do with the construction of the socks, and everything to do with the apparently funnel-shaped feet on our favourite doll. Did i learn from this? Why no, I didn't even notice it. so, all round a good investment of time... (as in, its only a matter of...)

soul eaten.

The soul eater is finished. 

Did I mention finished?

 I made the final push this morning, as boy goblin and i were snuggled up on the couch with his snots.

Pretty, but tough going.

(The pattern is a good-un - its entirely my doing that its been such a long haul - see "soul eater" above.)

And this evening it was wrapped around the dear wife on the sofa. 

Not this sofa, but this one was in better light.

I think we have a winner.

Domestic creativity

Radio silence, because this is what has taken up much of my creative, as well as physical and mental energy.

Many, many packing boxes. Note they are all unpacked.

On the upside, the boxes revealed this:

I'm in here

Which contains this:

See?

and this:

And here?

This came through while we were on the move, so I'd not had a chance to properly dwell on it before.

Nothing like seeing your name in print to tide you over some creative doldrums.

And the best thing is, there's another in the pipeline. 

Happy belated birthday

BoyGoblin turned two not long after The Big Move, and so it was time for another birthday badge. You can see last year's here (and there's a pdf tutorial too).

This year it was all about steam trains.

This works the same as the last one, with a magnet sewn into the frontspiece, and into a large plain felt circle worn inside the clothing. 

A big hard-to-swallow felt circle for the back, with the magnet double-sewn in.

You can see that I had to use oblong magnets this year - round ones work better.

The ribbon really lifts it

The ribbon was a real find - from a bargain store, of all places!

Pun-tastic!

Making time

My Boygoblin is obsessed with clocks at the moment, and I fear that  the decorative clocks in his room that seemed such a cute idea at the time is simply confusing him.

How do I know this? Because he comes out with breathless statements like "The big hand is on the castle and its half past the dragon and now its time to play trains!"

So we raided the craft box and made our own. 

Move over, PlaySchool

I did all the sharp stuff, but he coloured the clock face, threaded the hands onto the pipe cleaner and through the plate, and stuck most of the numbers on.

I cut and coloured the hands. BoyGoblin did the rest.

I'm considering upping the stakes and getting a clock motor for it for his playroom. Only considering mind.

No motor, just a matchstick (safer than a split pin).

WIP or UFO

This is a project that is inhabiting that limbo land between WIP and UFO. Which is it?

This is when I started having doubts. 

Even Dearwife is finding it hard to stop laughing be encouraging, and she is usually extremely supportive of even my most misguided creative endeavours.

Its the beginnings of an elephant, and it was to be my first softie.

It looks less like a poo now i've attached the ears.

But, you know, I'm not sure about the pattern. Im still reserving judgement, because its hard to tell until its finished, but I'm not chuffed that the animal will be top heavy. Rather than weight it with beans, which means it cant be washed, I foolishly stuffed it with toy pellets, which are now working their way out between the loops and shedding all over the floor. Poor thing looks like it has some awful disease.

My softie's shedding choke hazards. I see here he is mysteriously covered in cat fur, so someone in the house must love him.

The yarn is just awful to work with - its flocked, so it gives a lovely soft fabric, but the stitches are impossible to see, which makes the work impossible to read. That means there was a lot of rework going on, and I found it nigh-on impossible to reuse the yarn that had been frogged.

So, I  ran out of the yarn which I bought in the UK, and is not available here, so he's going to have to have pale purple legs. And possibly eyelids. (and oh jeez, don't even talk to me about safety eyes. Safe for whom, exactly?)

Disaster all round, but I'm not quite ready to give up on him.

I am going to have to do something about his pellet problem, though, and I fear it might be terminal.

Patient feet

Cosy alpaca toes for the littlest, who also astonished me with his forebearance, allowing mummy to slip his feet in and out of partly completed slippers throughout the hot afternoon. (I think he was actually more tolerant than his mumma.)

Not sure how long these will stay white when goblintoes inhabit them...

 I bought a pattern for the applique alphabet, forgetting that as I'm left-handed, I've had to reverse them all - either working backwards up the pattern, or reverse engineering each letter. 

f is for faff

I've already given up, and all the cousins will be getting stars appliqued on their toes. 

Unseasonal slippers

I must be looking forward to the cooler weather, as I've spent the last week or so as Ive broken up work on the soul eater with hooking up a series of slippers.

I've now got a long list of requests, so here's hoping the mood stays with me, otherwise this could get very tedious indeed.

First up a test pair for me, from the simple cable slipper pattern.  

Cosy alpaca. Perfect for February in Australia.

These are in the most gorgeous, easy to use, and affordable alpaca yarn, sourced from, of all places, Spotlight. On clearance is was only $2 a ball (about 47m) so these sample slippers cost less than $4. 

I used them to test puff paint as a non-slip sole. The result is too ugly for words:

Words fail.

For a start, it never occurred to me that this colour choice would look less like a design decision and more like the innards of a small marsupial.

But, it works, and the stretch paint works best. Obviously. I didn't know it existed until too late.

Next, a jersey pair, better for the climate here. Not sure how comfy they are though. I can't decide.

Jersey slippers are slightly more seasonal. Slightly. 

Then cosy posy toes for DearWife. The pattern is really elegant, with the flowers added as you go. DearWife was extremely patient in surrendering her feet to fittings, allowing me to modify the heel a little as i went. 

The yarn was suprisingly lovely to work with - a cotton weave that is light and firm, but seems to retain its shape.

Pretty toes

Next up, five nephews, one niece, one son, and five assorted in-laws. Simple.

Soul eater

With amazing timing and incredible self-knowledge, I began a large Wool eater blanket at the height of my first Brisbane summer. Apparently the hottest, most humid summer in quite some time.

Daunting pile of blanket

The horrendous, and perfectly obvious thing about blankets in the round is that the closer you get to completion, the longer each round takes. Its like a maths problem from school - something about a frog? Anyway, I'm almost finished, which is to say, there's a way to go.

My state of mind is not helped by the fact that I started one of these a couple of years ago, in amazing candy brights, but the yarn was so horrific to work with I frogged the lot, and, wait for it, threw away the yarn. Yes, it was That Bad. 

Jolly colours. Jolly awful yarn.