Daisies

Daisies
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Friday 13 September 2013

Spring has sprung!

I just cannot believe that it is September already!  The last time I blogged, was in June.  Slowly, but surely, the weather has changed from biting cold to some slightly warmer days.  We have had this terrible cold wind coming from nowhere at times freezing your limbs off.

The kitchen garden has been 'tilled' so to say and we have used a completely different method this time to see if our crops could not be more lush and fruitful.  We have stuck to the individual built up beds, but have laid a bottom layer of  hay as compost, then a good layer of normal compost and soil, then sewn the seed covering them with another layer of hay.  I must say the beds are looking fantastic.  The cabbages and caulies are big and lush and the carrots must be about two feet tall already (ok, the carrots are smaller, but you get the drift)!  Something is definately working.  We are also using heritage seeds for the first time and have sewn quite a few new things, to us in any case.  Can't wait for the jelly melons and the arctic icicle radishes to mature. Will take photo's and post soon.

I have also been knitting and have a few photo's ready to share with you.  Hoping to bash my stash, I have knitted a jersey for my granddaughter as well as gathering all the bits of pieces I have crochet and knitted (squares, etc) and crochet them together to form a little blanket.  Very skew, but colourful, I was not going to have sleepless nights over the squareness of that one! Seems the camera (or operator) made a mess of that picture! I'll have it next time.



This is my granddaughter's jersey knitted from bits and pieces and at times using different patterns.  Soft and warm.

 Blanket no 1:  using knitted squares approx 18x18cm and trying to use a different pattern on each of them.  I must say, I knitted some amazing patterns. The names of the stitch patterns are also very quaint:  caterpillar stitch horizontal and vertical, bamboo stitch, sand stitch, double andalusian stitch, hurdle stitch, granite relief stitch, ant egg stitch, wheat germ stitch and my favourite, eye of the partridge stitch!!

This is blanket no 2:  Taken from an old Golden Hands book, these are just crochet squares in 3 colours.  There are 36 squares altogether and it would make a very nice and cozy knee blanket.

 Photo to show the edge of the first blanket where I have used a bicolour cable edging to finish the blanket off.  Looks quite snazzy!!

This bag started life intended to be a cushion cover, but I thought, what the heck, lets make it a bag!  So a bag it has become.  I must still do the inside lining and decide on the fastening.  Must also still strengthen the handles with some webbing.  It is knitted from pure cotton currently on our yarn shelves and has a nice sturdy and heavy feel to it.  

The knitting patterns I have found in an amazing book called the Mon Tricot knitting dictionary featuring 1030 stitches and patterns.  And (as it says on the front page) Knitting and Crochet ~ patchwork, jacquard, afghan, fork, loom, arans, furs, woven crochet, technics.  This was printed around the 70's, but is still very much usable.  Patterns are always the same, just the yarns and wools are different in this day and age.

That's all for now!

Marl
xox