miss marie's miscellany

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I've moved! Click here and you will be transported to my new home.

Then you can see more of this!

 

Time for a change

Oh dear, I seem to have been AWOL for quite some time, sorry that it's been rather silent and boring in these parts.  There's been a lot going on,  mostly work related and there's been nothing else for it but to knuckle down and get the job done. I think I needed a little break from blogging too, if I'm really honest; I felt a bit frazzled at Christmas and it took a little longer than I thought to get myself back on an even keel. Better now!

Anyway, I have decided to have a new start, new blog, new look, Please come and join me at  purpleshed.wordpress.com; it'll be great have your company!

 

 

 

November and making stuff

I thought these photos will be a good way to summarise my November, because there's been a LOT of crcoheting going on this month.

I've made loads of there flower brooches recently; I sold a lot at one craft fair, sold not very many at another and quite a few have gone to good homes through Etsy and with my colleagues too. I thought I should take a photo of them all before they all disappear, and share  these lovely vibrant colours with you!

 

Poppies and roses too :-)

 

There are lots more makings to show you but I'll save them for tomorrow.

Happy Saturday!

Still here, just busy

Hello, it's ages since I popped my head round the door. Time seems to be flying by so fast this year, and I'm busy at work, with not much time for blogging at the moment unfortunately. There's been quite a lot of crochet going on......

Most of these are en route to a craft fair this week, or have already found homes with some lovely customers. It's been great to start selling a few more things - I make them because i like doing so, but it's even better when someone likes and wants to buy my creations. Very heartening!

Anyway, the house is a mess, the garden is covered in leaves and I have 101 things to do! I really should get on...see you soon!

Snapshots from the week that's been

A bit of garden colour -this rose is called 'Rhapsody in Blue'

Something newly made (and now in my Etsy shop)

A lovely gift

I think I have a lodger

The calendulas still look good, both outside

and in

I made this cover for my mobile phone

and some digging in the garden produced this little lot

That's all I had time for!

In a pickle

It's been a good year for courgettes but there are only so many of them one can eat before a mountain of them start to take over the kitchen! I've been looking for some different ways to use them up and happened upon this brilliant recipe. It uses up quite a stack of courgettes and the smell is heavenly. I didn't have exactly the same spices as the recipe; I improvised and used cumin seeds, fennel seeds, black onion seeds, mustard seeds, pink peppercorns and chilli flakes.

I'm looking forward to tasting them, once they have matured a little!

Flower power

Much flowery hooking going on in these parts of late, I've been making lots of the ones I showed you in my last post. They just kept on multiplying till I had quite a stack of them. Enough for some floral decorating.........

Voila!

I used some of my stash of Scottish lambs wool in fuchsia pink and scarlet and used 2 different sizes of hook,  3.5 and 4,  just to give a small variety in the flowers; it's hardly noticeable, but I like the non-uniformity of size, much as you would get in a real garden.

i initially was going to make a long crocheted chain to join them together but it just didn't look right and the flowers were decidedly droopy........not good! So I threaded them onto some white cord and it's worked a treat; the flowers have their heads held high and they can be moved along the cord to wherever looks good and they stay put.....result.

I've put it in my Etsy and Foksy shop; please feel free to pop over there and take a look!

I really like this flower pattern, and wondered how it would look in some different colours?

I think they're all lovely, and the possibilities to use them in different projects are many..........so, yes, there will be lots more flowery items being made. Perfect for summer!

 

 

 

What's hooking?

A lovely lazy week spent pottering at home has been just the tonic for me, with the bonus of some hot and sunny weather to top it off nicely. I've done a lot of hooking, playing around with some ideas and patterns.

Some old favourites in a pink, purple and white colour scheme

These are going to end up as a blanket, finishing soon, I hope.

Something for Christmas maybe, just thinking ahead!

I have to block these as the ends of the points are not behaving, but I think they'll look great, a long garland of these in different colours would be very festive!

And last but not least, something pretty, in summery pinks and red

and raspberry and turquoise

I really love these flowers (pattern in Erika Knight's book Crochet Stitch motifs). It's an easy pattern to follow and they don't take long to make. As the weather is a bit changeable today, I'm staying put and will carry on making my pile of flowers grow a bit bigger!

Happy weekend!

Lime and violet part 2

I've been working away with those lovely yarns I bought a couple of weeks ago and finally finished my rose motif cushion cover today. Here it is, out in the sun and looking pretty gorgeous IMHO!!

I made one side in the rose motif squares, 9 squares in total, each with 5 rounds.

And the other is a granny stripe pattern of the 3 colours, with 2 rows of each colour in each stripe.

It's fastened with lime green mis-matched buttons (bought on Etsy from this seller, BigFish; well worth a look, she has oodles of fantastic button!).

It's a happy coincidence that as I was finishing this off, these lovely purple roses are blooming in the garden, serendipitous indeed.

I'm liking this harmony between my crochet and my garden, it's magical when that happens!

Lime and violet

 

I bought some more wool.......which was probably a bit naughty of me, as there is plenty in this house already but, well, the colours are lovely, and very 'me',  and they were a bargain! Resistance was futile!

I started making some of these rose motifs on Friday (pattern by Sarah London)

Over the weekend I've made some more squares and I also began making a large granny stripe square (pattern is found in this book......or you can just pop over to Lucy's blog where she has done a great tutorial for this pattern).

And this is how things look today

 

A while back, I bought these great lime green buttons on Etsy

So one of them was used to make this flower brooch (pattern found here)

I think I'm craving bright colours just now as the weather in Scotland has been awful for the last 3 weeks or so, more autumnal than spring going into summer. So I think there will be lots of vivid and zingy colours on this blog for the foreseeable future :-)