Why is that all baby shoes are cute?

I don't tend to coo over babies the way lots of women do. I'm just not that terribly interested in them. Cats are far more entertaining.

However, what I am interested in is that my lovely friend and former workmate is pregnant with a healthy baby after many complications and several miscarriages and I am very very happy about that. So happy, in fact, that I knitted him or her some booties from leftover sock yarn.



Sorry for the bad photos, I snapped them quickly as I was leaving the house, before giving them away.

I don't know what it is about baby booties and shoes (especially those tiny little Nike trainers) but they are all incredibly cute. I can't resist them.

The reason I haven't done any drawing for a while

My dad will be 74 next Friday and here's his birthday present. Even though they're very simple, they took quite a while to make! But I think they turned out well and I hope he likes them.

The yarn was a Kaffe Fassett design for Regia and was lovely to work with. Best thing was that I bought three balls and only used one and a half, so I still have enough left to make some for Richard :)

Felting is fun

I picked up my needles recently and knitted this little bag, and finally got around to felting it and sewing the flower together.

The yarn is Twilley's Freedom Wool, Crystal Palace Little Flowers, and something else I can't remember, also by Twilley's, and it was a very quick and very easy knit. The pattern is here.

I'm so pleased with it! Isn't it pretty! The only problem is that it's quite small and I tend to carry a huge bag around with me everywhere, but I like it too much not to use it so I'll just have to cut down on all the stuff I carry! Oh and the flower is removeable so I can pin it on my jacket :)

Here's what it looked like before I felted it.

Thing a day - broken AGAIN?

It's been more down than up over the past few days, and it's not letting me post a photo tonight so I'm posting it here instead to remind myself to try the TAD site again tomorrow.

I was going to post another doodle from my new Wacom tablet but I didn't get to finish what I started (and it's awful anyway), so instead here's the progress of my second husband-sized sock. The boring ribbing is done, the heel's done, the stitches are picked up and I've started on the gusset. It's easy and pretty mindless from this point on. He'll have toasty feet by tomorrow or Wednesday.

Oh and my dad wants some now too... perhaps I should open a sock factory. I wonder if someone would pay me what I get paid now to sit and knit socks all day... it'd certainly be an improvement over my current job!

Things and stuff.

What have I been up to since my last post?

Well... I've been crocheting again, and I have a new crochet book. It's Tiny Yarn Animals, by Tamie Snow who is the brains behind Roxycraft which is a website anyone who's into crochet will no doubt recognise. I hoard amigurumi books but seldom actually follow the patterns because I find most of them too big, and I really prefer tiny little toys. Tamie's book, as the name suggests, is full of patterns for tiny little animals and they are all cute enough that I actually want to make them. I made this hippo for today's Thing-a-day. He's from a pattern in the book but of course I abandoned the pattern and did my own thing after a while. My husband named him Gregory - why I have no idea, but I think it suits him. I also learned how to do an invisible decrease from PlanetJune today - it's absolutely shocking to think that I've been crocheting for this long, and I own so many crochet books that no doubt give instructions for this, and I never knew it existed till now. And it makes a huge difference.

What else? Well yesterday was Valentine's Day, but my husband is a very vocal hater of the greeting card industry. So instead of buying him a card I drew him a picture. I should explain that he's a big Resident Evil fan, and also happens to work for a very well-known videogames company who make a certain zombie-filled game. And he is definitely better than zombies (although I do like zombies too).

He did get me a card though - the first year I've one that said "wife"!



Instead of going out and paying over the odds for a meal in a packed restaurant, we spend the day in the V&A, which is one of my favourite places. And I did an EDM challenge when I was there, which was #38 - draw in a museum. Unfortunately it didn't turn out as I wanted. It was very busy and people kept walking in front of me and blocking my view, and eventually I got annoyed, scribbled a few very rough details, and left in a sulk. This is a bust of Charles II and I'm posting a photo of the original beside it - can you tell the difference?

My second life drawing class was on Friday and it was as enjoyable as the first one. We moved on to using different 3D shapes to represent different body parts - cylinders, spheres, cones etc. My drawings are still not looking all that much like actual people! It was very very difficult to get half decent photos of my drawings, due to the lack of light in this apartment. I ended up having to put them on the floor and rig up a tripod (my husband's awesome Manfrotto that I wish was mine) so it was kind of kneeling over the paper, then using the brightest lamp we have as sidelighting and using a remote release to get a long exposure although I think I ended up using flash after all. And the photos are still absolutely terrible even after some photoshopping! There must be an easier way!


One thing I am happy about is that having upgraded to Photoshop CS4, I can finally shoot in Raw, which is making me want to go out and photograph everything.

Finally, the socks are done! Not only that but I've actually worn them out and they haven't fallen apart, and are so comfy that ordinary socks now feel rubbish. I've started another pair for my husband in some lovely blue yarn.

Finished!

I finished my sock! I can't believe it's done. It was so easy in the end. And it fits absolutely perfectly. I brought it to work to finish it off at lunchtime and I felt like a celebrity, everyone had to come and look at it and marvel at the magic self-striping yarn and give it a bit of a squidge. Now I just have to make another one... I've cast on already but I remember all the tiresome ribbing from the first one, that was the least fun bit. Here's some stuff I got in Walthamstow on Saturday. There's a fabric stall in the market that I've got a few bits and pieces from before, but they seldom have anything out of the ordinary. But this time they did!

Corduroy with button print! I got the end of the bolt, which wasn't much, and some of it is going to a swap partner but I'm keeping enough to make myself a little purse or something. And this... this?

It's velour, with a very unusual print! I couldn't help but buy a metre of it even though I have no clue what to do with it. Any ideas?

And I picked up some books - there's a new cheapy book shop which has 70% off everything, so I picked up a couple of books in there, and another one for a pound in a charity shop. Because you can never have too many books, right?

All in all I think it was a pretty good haul, and the whole lot, fabric and books, only cost me about £12!

People are boxes. And a growing sock.

On Friday evening I had the first of ten beginner's life drawing classes.

It was a cosy little group of about eleven of us, which included the teacher's partner. Apparently she's been coming to the classes for years to help out with the setting up and tidying away, and making tea in the break, but never actually done any drawing. And she thought it was about time she tried it out.

Some people had lots of drawing experience, and others (like me) had almost none. But we all started from the very beginning, which meant drawing great big white wooden boxes stacked on top of each other at weird angles, and then trying to see the human body as a series of cubes - one for the head, one for the torso and one for the pelvis, and we had to draw the model in various poses represented by these cubes. It was a lot harder than it sounds. Homework is to draw several printouts of old masters' drawings using this cube business.

There was an outstanding variety of tea and coffee to to guzzle, and very very impressive biscuits including some gorgeous coconut things with jammy middles. I think you can judge the quality of a class by the biscuits provided. Loop in Islington is another place that gets a thumbs up in this department.

Here's some of the boxes stacked up - the first exercise we did. It was about thirty seconds per sketch.

And these are some of the "people boxes". I actually had to do a couple of "proper" sketches of the model to work out which way her pelvis was pointing as it wasn't always immediately obvious.

And just to totally change the subject, in my second ever blog post back in December of last year, I posted about sock knitting. My very first knitted sock, in fact, and how I had just started and had always been scared of sock knitting. Well since that blog post, I never ever picked up that sock again. Till today, that is. And now I'm almost finished! All the hard bits are done, and I'm wondering why I ever thought they were difficult. I only wish I'd finished them before we had this awful cold weather so I could have got the benefit from them!

More birds

Now I don't claim to be getting the hang of it or anything like that, but I am definitely enjoying this watercolour lark. We live beside a river and about a mile from here there is a tame grey heron who always hangs around outside one particular house begging for food. He's awesome. So I thought of him and painted a heron. I messed up the legs.



And tonight I painted a kingfisher which is one of my dad's favourites. I had problems with the washes pooling and drying into icky lines but I think that's because I wasn't using watercolour paper, I just painted on a bogstandard sketch pad. I went and bought a load of watercolour paper but even though it was pretty inexpensive as far as watercolour paper goes, I'm strangely reluctant to paint on it and ruin it...



The sock I started the other day is coming along ok. I've done the short row bit for the heel, but now I think it gets a bit more complicated. I'll post a photo when I've done the next step. This is the bit that scares me. It's like when you buy expensive fabric and make that first cut. Except if you mess up your knitting you can frog it and start again, but with fabric if you mess up there is no going back. Scary stuff, crafting.

Oh, and I'm going back to work tomorrow after three weeks off. I can't wait to see everyone but it's going to be a bit weird not watching Top Gear repeats on Dave all day while knitting scarves.

Scared of socks!

I've been dying to learn to knit socks for ages and ages, but something about them frightens me. I can do Fair Isle and lace and have no problems using dpns, but the very mention of short row shaping makes me run and hide behind the sofa. And I even signed up for a sock knitting class at Loop, but it was cancelled due to insufficient numbers. I was gutted.

Well I'm determined to get over myself. My husband has one pair of slipper socks and they are looking the worse for wear, and I have several balls of sock yarn that I bought two years ago in a brave moment but that have sat in my stash ever since. I found Silver's Sock Class which has lots of very detailed instructions and is bursting with photos for the mentally challenged, like me, dug out some 2.5mm dpns, and cast on. I have no idea what the yarn is, the ball band is long gone, but it might be something like Prism?? Here's what I've done so far.


The photo is a bit poor... I'm using my compact because my SLR is in the bedroom but as soon as I open the living room door a wall of cold hits me, so I'm hibernating in here. Here's a photo of the ball:


I forgot how tedious k2 p2 rib is. And it's slow going. But at least I can watch TV at the same time.

In other news, I think I'm addicted to Klutz books. Is that possible? I started off with the shrink plastic jewellery one which was fantastic. Then I found the hemp bracelets one in a charity shop for 50p, still with all the hemp (but missing the beads), and ordered the bead loom one from Amazon which was fantastic. (Well, the weaving bit is great, the sewing in the ends when you're done is less fabulous.) The supplies that come with the books are really great quality and you can find them pretty cheaply from Amazon sellers or Playtrade on play.com. So since I'm on a drawing and painting kick I had to have the drawing and painting Klutz offerings, which are clearly aimed at kids but since I have the drawing ability of a two year old that suits me fine. Plus "Drawing for the Artistically Undiscovered" has Quentin Blake as a co-author, so even if I never draw anything I can look at the pictures. I'm a huge fan of his. I was obsessed with Roald Dahl books as a kid and still think they're the best kids books ever. Here are my two new books: (Sorry the photo is so terrible.)



But the most exciting thing to pop through my letterbox today was something I've been waiting for since 1995!


Chrono Trigger! It was one of the brilliant SNES RPGs that never made it to Europe, and it's just been re-released on the DS. But since the DS is region free I don't have to wait till the UK release next year - I just ordered it from Video Games Plus in Canada. But I'm determined to finish the Final Fantasy IV remake before I even take this out of its wrapper :-)