Last of the Crochet Flowers (for now)

I have finished making the flowers for the Islington Mill Festival. Hopefully Rachael will take photos of the decorations when they are all in place next week. I love these daisies. I think they are so bright and cheerful and remind me of Spring.

These flowers are crocheted in a length and then rolled up. They do look somewhat like cabbages but I am sure they will look OK on the posts.

I am quite fond of these brightly coloured little flowers. They will bring a bit of Spring colour to the posts.

I decided to make something other than flowers so now I have an odd looking caterpillar, a strange pink butterfly and a very evil looking sheep that looks rather like a gremlin.

These are some of the flowers made by other members of the Kings Arms Knit Club. We should have quite a lot of flowers to attach to posts next weekend. The ladies were sewing buttons in the centre of some of the flowers and we put safety pins on the back of the flowers so that they could be picked from the posts and worn as brooches.

These 2 photos are taken of the lamp post outside of the Kings Arms Salford where we hold our Knit Club. It was a practise run at how the flowers will look on the posts next weekend. Roger has made absolutely loads of the green stems with a bobbin that makes i cords. I used to have bobbins when I was younger made from old wooden cotton reels with little tacks. I must have produced miles of this cord. I was always going to make something like a shopping bag with the cords but never got around to stitching them together.

This is another of my 'lodger' cats. This little lady, whose name I have forgotten, came in for a few cat biscuits and a sleep as her owners were at work. After she left my usual 'lodger' came in from next door for a sleep and he stayed in whilst I was at the Knit Club and was sitting on the window sill waiting for me to return. People have asked me why I don't get another cat or a smaller dog but I am happy with my daily feline visitors, plus Poppy, the little dog from next door who comes through the hedge to say Hello and of course sporadic visits from my doggy favourite ,Buster, my fur grandson.

Today I am going to try to return to the last of my niece's knitting but the housework really needs doing. It has been left whilst I have been flower making as that was to a deadline as even if I make any more flowers then I won't see anyone to give them to before the weekend. Rachael has another flower project at Just So festival so any other flowers that I make can go to that.

I was going to try machine knitting this week but not until I have finished off the chunky cardigan for my niece. She has waited long enough.

More Crochet Flowers

I am continuing making crochet flowers for the Islington Mill festival. Some patterns come from Ravelry and some come from my doodles. Hence the fact that some look far prettier than others.

The tiny sun hat was one of my designs. I started off with a circle and then diverted into a thimble and then a sun hat. I thought that it would make a change from flower brooches.

These are some more flowers. We are not meeting up tonight as it is Easter so we have decided to have our Kings Arms knit club tomorrow instead. We need to get the brooch backs or safety pins stitched onto the flowers ready for them to be pinned to lamposts on Saturday. I won't be helping with that bit as the old knees are not up to walking from post to post.

The weather is very changeable today. This morning was a bit dull then it went very sunny. I have a clothes line full of bed linen outside and now it has gone dull again. I think everything is almost dry so I will bring it in before the rain comes.

Neo the Akita from across the road managed to push the gate open from their back garden and was sitting on the front step. My neighbours had gone out so I had to ring their mobile to let them know that the dog was loose. I sat on their steps for a while and eventually Neo decided to walk back into the back garden so I closed the gate with a stone as I could not reach over the gate to fasten the bolt. The bolt on the inside of the gate mustn't have been fastened properly and when he pushed the gate, it opened. Fortunately I saw him before he wandered off. Neo and I have a bit of a love/hate relationship so I don't like to get too close to him. He is great with everyone else, even with their baby. I just think that it is a personality clash between he and I. Fortunately my neighbours were shopping locally and came back in a very short time.

I was going to sit in the garden and do some crochet but as the sun has gone in now I think that I will stay indoors and see if there is anything good on the TV to watch whilst I crochet some more flowers.

Happy Easter

I hope that you are having a good Easter Sunday. I used to try to go to church on Easter Sunday but I have to admit that I haven't been in quite a while. The church bells aren't ringing yet so it must be a later service today. From my patio doors I have the view of one of the oldest churches locally and I usually get serenaded by the church bells for services, weddings and even a tolling bell for a funeral. Sometimes in the past we have had some very discordant chimes but the set of bell ringers they have now seem to have got it right apart from the odd wrong note. When they got it note perfect my son used to say "They are playing a recording again today Mum." He insisted that they had a tannoy hidden somewhere in the belfry that they switched on some days.

No Easter Eggs at this end as I do try not to eat too much chocolate and I don't buy them for my Great Grand Daughters as they don't eat that much chocolate either. I used to discourage people from buying my son Easter Eggs when he was small as he wasn't a lover of chocolate and they used to hang around the house for weeks until eventually I ate them which didn't do my figure any good!

The flowers are some that I have crocheted for the Islington Mill festival in Salford next weekend.

This is a closer look at 3 of the flowers. I find a lot of the patterns on Ravelry but I can't tell you which ones they are as I tend to crochet one and then remember the pattern so I don't often print them out. This year it is intended to put pins or brooch backs on the flowers with a label on the posts saying 'Pick Me' Last year they were sewn onto pieces of crochet but this year they are being pinned to green i cords that represent stems. We would rather people took them and pinned them to their clothes for the festival than they get vandalised later or worse still left on the posts to get dirty from the rain and traffic dirt. I have been told that one is left on a traffic pole from last year and it is so black that it is now almost welded to the post. Roger says that he will cut it down whilst he is dressing the posts this year.

These two flowers came out rather large and remind me of waterlilies or cabbages as one of the ladies said yesterday. I ran out of wool for the end of one so I hope that no-one notices the deliberate mistake.

This little bunny is a Marshmallow bunny from a free pattern on Ravelry. I am going to try to make a couple more of these as I think he is very cute.

The bird is from another free Ravelry pattern and is supposed to be a cat toy filled with catnip. The owl is called Hoot Owl and is another free pattern. My finishing leaves a lot to be desired which is why I don't do amigurumi as a rule. They always finish up with cross eyes and lop sided features. The owl has a crooked beak and the bird has somewhat of a strange beak. The details are what let me down every time.

Today the sun is trying to shine but it is colder than yesterday. Hopefully it won't mar the Easter plans that people have. My plans today are to crochet more birds, beasties and flowers as we are having a 'sew the brooch backs on day' on Tuesday evening at the Kings Arms as the pub is closed tomorrow, our usual meeting eve, for Easter Monday and we need to get organised before the final pin on the stems day next Saturday. I don't mind crocheting flowers and things. It makes a welcome break from all the knitting that I have done lately and so I hope to make quite a few more before Tuesday evening. I have a few more ideas in my head for things other than just flowers.

Crochet Flower Corsages

As I am still sorting out the ribbons and buttons from the loft I haven't had much time for crocheting. I have just been making some little flower brooches for the raffle. I have ordered a book from Amazon about crochet and knitted flowers. I had seen the book at the last Knit Out and thought it was a good idea and then got an e voucher from filling in an online survey so I put it towards the book. It should arrive early next week. Then I can make some more brooches or corsages as I grandly called then in the title. The ones I have made so far have been adapted from free pattern that I found on the net. I think that I would rather wait to see the better ones in the book before I make any more.

Sorting through the boxes from my loft has brought back many memories as I keep coming across things that remind me of my parents. Happier times when we had the shops and everything in the world was rosy. Sad times when I remember the utter misery that I felt when I realised that I had no choice but to close the last shop.I felt that I had failed my parents by not being able to carry on financially with the shops after their hard work over the years.I had thought that I would be in the shops until I retired but some things are not meant to be. Things like divorce, having to remortgage the house, family illnesses, visits to nursing homes and subsequent deaths got in the way.

If I could have weathered the storm during the last knitting slump no doubt the credit crunch would have got me now. My bank manager refused me a loan on the grounds that I was an unsupported woman with commitments a thing he would never get away with saying now. Who knows which way my life would have turned out if I had been granted that loan to rescue the business that I had neglected during my Father's final battle with prostate cancer. We never know what life holds for us and it's probably as well. My mother always used to say that knitting would revive and be as big as it ever was. I am just sorry that she didn't live long enough to see her prediction come true. Sorry that I am not still in the family business to be part of it.It breaks my heart to try to search about in shops, that carry less than a quarter of my stock, for things that I stocked and now cannot find anywhere except online where the P&P costs more than the item.

The sun is shining and I will probably sit in the garden with my crochet for a while if it's warm enough. I have got the rest of the wool now for the crocheting that will form the mermaid tail for the calendar shoot so I will be doing a bit on that if I can remember where I am up to with the pattern as I started the first ball several weeks ago.Vicky called around today to deliver the rest of the wool for me but could not stay as she was off to the Trafford Centre.

First it's a spot of lunch and Loose Women on TV before I decide what to do next.

Crochet flowers for a bouquet

The Knitting Noras have decided to make a knitted bouquet of flowers either for Sarah's funeral or to give to her family as a keepsake. I am more at home with a crochet hook in hand than a pair of knitting needles so I have been crocheting some flowers to send as my contribution. I have not yet decided quite how I will attach leaves and stems to these flower heads as I don't have any forestry wire to thread through the stems. I am sure that one of the Noras will come up with a solution for this maybe using pipe cleaners.

I rang my GP this morning but he wasn't there and so I spoke to one of the partners. He said I have had the maximum dosage of antibiotics and as my chest X ray is clear then he sees no point in continuing with any more medication. The steroids were the only other option and they did nothing when I took a course of those. His opinion was that I have some kind of a virus and as anti biotics are ineffective against these then the only thing to do now is to weather it out. Easy for him to say. He is not the one with an aching chest and a persistent racking pant wetting cough! I use a CPAP for sleep apnoea at night and it is hard to breathe with that on when I am coughing like mad. The doc has prescribed a placatory bottle of linctus for me so I will try that. I have drunk bottles of this cough medicine and that cough medicine so one more won't make any difference unless there is a miracle included in this bottle.