I wanted to knit a scarf for my Dad as a Christmas gift and looked through my stash. I found this lovely 100% merino yarn from the Sip n Stitch Club at The Unique Sheep. The colours were perfect for my Dad, so I started to knit away – and the yarn pooled, all the grey was on one side of the scarf. So I looked for another pattern with a different stitch count – it was still pooling. Okay, perhaps I should better crochet the scarf – no luck, still all grey on one side.

What’s a girl to do when the yarn doesn’t behave? I’ve changed my plans and made a hat – and what a surprise, the yarn knit up into perfect, spiralling stripes. The pattern is Man Hat by Haven Leavitt, I just used 128 stitches as my yarn was fingering weight. And what’s best, not only did I like the hat I made, my Dad likes it too – that’s him at Christmas, he immediately put it on.

But there was still soo much of this nice yarn left, so I offered to knit a pair of gloves for him as well. He wanted them fingerless, as he’s a hobby photographer and it’s way easier to handle a camera when your fingertips are not covered by gloves. I didn’t use a pattern here, just made them up as I went. 1/1 ribbing for the cuff, plain stockinette for the rest of the gloves, two purl rounds before I bound off the fingers.

I received the book Creepy Cute Crochet as a surprise from a friend for Christmas, and of course I had to use it right away. Philipp and I decided that the Ninja should be my first project, so I grabbed some leftover, black acrylic yarn, a few pieces of felt, two small black buttons and a bit of silver crochet thread… About two hours later – might have been three – this cute little guy was finished.

He immediately inspected my other craft books and then vanished into the boy’s room. I haven’t seen him since – whether that’s due to his ninja skills or the chaos in the boys room, I don’t know.

Now I already have plans to make a few more creepy cute creatures from the book and plan how to customize them to look like characters from TV shows. The book is great, I’m sure I’ll use it a lot.

Everyone with a creative hobby or business will from time to time need some additional inspiration. I found a great Flickr group, that gives you a new colour palette every week as inspiration for new creations. There is no obligation to participate, but perhaps it will inspire you to work with colours you didn’t think about before.

Here are a few stitch markers I created inspired by the colour palettes, you can have a look at the Flickr group to see more beautiful creations by other artists:

Week one

Week five

Week six

The stitch markers can be found in my shop, along with a lot of other new designs.

After not touching my sewing machine in what feels like ages, I finally decided to make a High Waist Skirt for myself, pattern (in German) can be found here. It should be fairly easy to translate though, even with my almost non-existant sewing skills I managed the make a skirt that fit on first try. I know, the pictures are not the best, but I was alone at home and had to photograph myself in the mirror. The picture above shows the finished skirt, I added a wide lace ribbon at the waist to make it look less plain. The fabric is a bit heavy though, it doesn’t drape that well – so I’ll most likely only wear it with a petticoat.

That’s what it looks like with my petticoat, I like it a lot better that way. Next time I’ll use a lighter fabric, then it should look good even without the petticoat. But considering the fact that this was just a test for the pattern before I use it with my expensive, pinstripe fabric, I rather like the result. I just used some inexpensive fabric I had at hand and am pleased that I ended up with a wearable item. I might make the next one a bit wider at the bottom still, to have it fit better over the petticoat if I want to wear it that way, but that’s the only thing I need to change. Otherwise it fit perfectly on first try.

Now keep your fingers crossed that I won’t mess up the pinstripe version, I hate it when stripes don’t match at the seams… and it is supposed to be part of a future cosplay that I need in May, so it would be bad if I messed it up. Don’t have enough fabric to make more than one skirt and the matching jacket.

I can’t believe that I didn’t blog at all since August last year, it’s about time that I resurrect the blog. For now I just changed the layout, but I’ll get back to posting – I promise