Mainly Dogs

We rather lost our heads on Saturday and adopted a puppy from the local SPCA. She is a 9 month old black lab cross, although with what exactly is anyone's guess. She has been called Spotty - The Husband's idea. He thinks it's hilarious, as she is totally black.

Craft-wise, I have also stared this

which hopefully will end up like this, although this involves me mastering double-knitting, so nothing is certain.

Free Stuff

Looky what the postman brought me today - free books! I finally got around to spending an Amazon gift certificate last weekend and I chose the latest in the River Cottage Handbook series. I already have their guides to Bread and Preserves, and I think the books are simply lovely as objects in themselves. Very excited to get planning the veg patch for next year with the help of this little tome. Hopefully I will have lots of success to report here in Spring!

Not strictly free but near enough....

The properly free book was this:

Free as a bird

I signed up to the Early Reviewers group on LibraryThing a while ago, hopefully chose my books each month and suddenly - I get one! I actually can't even remember picking it out but it looks like it has potential. The story follows a Castrati in 18th century Vienna, so it ticks a fair few boxes for me. Now all I have to do is get around to reading it (not easy - the books are starting to pile up on the nightstand), take notes and write a useful review for the site. Eeek! A proper review!

Stashbusters!

Welcome to my new blog! The other day I realised not a day goes by without me making something, be it bread, a cake or knitted scarf.  I figured a record of all this frenetic creativity would be nice. So here it is.
As Christmas is coming up, and as once again we have very little spare cash I'm doing a Handmade Holiday. I'm also trying to use up as much of my stash material, so am looking for knitting patterns by yarn rather than by desire. One day I will be able to buy yarn again....

Yesterday I finished and posted my sister's birthday present, a lovely soft cowl, using this pattern from New York Miniknit and a skein of Patons Decor I've had for ages. The Ithacowl is such a great pattern, once you get going its very TV-watching friendly, and the result has lots of drape even with a thicker yarn like this one. The Sister is lucky I didn't just keep it for myself...

Ithacowl!

I woke late this morning but extremely motivated, and decided to get on with my mother-in-law's festive gift. She is doing an art degree right now and draws and draws and draws. So this is what I came up with:


 

A pencil roll! I followed this great tutorial and I'm pretty happy with the result.  I'm especially pleased with this as I used an old dress shirt of The Husband's as the lining, and cut up an old flannel sheet as the interfacing.  The outer fabric is Tweet Tweet by Keiki for Moda which I originally bought to make cushion covers, realised it wasn't quite right and promptly hid in the stash box.

Before Christmas I will fill the roll with nice pencils and cover a hardback sketchbook with the Moda fabric.

And finally, I made some bread....mmm, bread.