My Creative Space

Another week fraught with tedious personal and work stuff.  But at least I got to play with the new sewing machine at the weekend, and a love affair is definitely in progress!  I tried out lots and lots of stitches and stuff :)

Then I did some more playing in black thread (rather than the white which I had been using for the samplers), realising that, on the random fabric I had pulled out of the stash to practice on, it would look good for something specific I was vaguely thinking about.  (Can you think vaguely about something specific?  What I mean is that I was thinking I could use some of these stitches on fabric and then cut them up and make brooch/hat adornments from them, and then realising that the black and red would work well with the yarn I was using to make hats).

And the hat with the attached glasses and antlers?  From the other day?  Well, I canvassed opinions from people on here and on various Facebook groups and decided that it might be better to make it a little more mainstream.





So it now has a gum nut type scrumble on it.

And these are all going to be adornments for other hats in a similar style.



This was meant to be a brooch in the red/orange MazeyPrettyThings collection, but somehow got left out when I was sewing backing fabric on them.  So it is going to be sewn down to a slightly larger piece of the red and black, machine embroidered fabric.


This a dreadful photo, don't know what happened there!  But there is a glittering green button in the middle of this.



And another green button on this one.

These three will probably have brooch backs sewn onto them and pinned to hats and sold together, so that they can be worn together or separately.

Please go and enjoy some other people's spaces :)

My Creative Space

What with the (currently stalled) Knit Along, and this lot 'ere, I am behind in the Bead Journal Project.  But I feel an urge to bead returning and will catach up sometime soon!

I finally had some time, and some courage, to pop into Open Drawer (see last post) and hopefully they might be able to sell some of my things.  And I was asked to make some more things, which I took in at the start of the week.  These are they - my creative space for the last couple of weeks:





Patchwork scarf - a variety of yarns of completely different textures and weights, with some of (now specially named) Mazey Patchwork on the bottom.  Because I was running out of time (this was the last one I finished) most of the embroidery on that was done on the tram, the train and in the Melbourne Central food court at lunchtime.  It got a few weird looks, but who cares!





The first of two feral hats.  This one has some of the ends pulled out through the top and tied with big beads.  It is a floppy tam-o-shanter type of hat.





The other feral hat.  Again floppy.  This time the ends are like a fringe down the back seam.






This blue hat is what you do when you find half a scrumbled hat and don't have the time to finish making it properly.  You knit a tube, using a hat block and pins to judge how long it needs to be, then you carefully sew down the scrumbling to the tube.  Add an extra row of stitching underneath the scrumbling (repetition, and tying the design together) and hey presto!





Simple scarf knitted lengthways in a variegated yarn, and some crocheted bits sewn down in a viney pattern (plus I needlefelted the long ends of theyarn in a similar pattern).  Finished off with Suffolk Puffs and cute buttons.






The final, blue, scarf, knitted lengthways and the ends turned into a feral fringe.  They were lightly needlefelted crossways for the first third or so of their length, so hold them together but still keep them defined as separate yarns, and then I sewed buttons and beads all over the ends of the actual knitting and the start of the fringe.

These were fun to make, and all my own designs.  Currently working on a prototype new design which I might try to sell through my new Made It Shop.

For more yummy, inspirational Creative Spaces, pop over here.

Creative Tuesday

Ah, scrumbling, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Thy wondrous colours and textures, thy randomness (or not), thy portability (until the whole sewing it together bit), thy ability to look great in photos .. what's not to love?

A cape I made several years ago when I discovered the frabjous Prudence Mapstone and got all excited about stuff. It is far too hot and heavy to wear in a place like Melbourne, except once or twice a year, but I still love it. I haven't scrumbled in a while but I always keep coming back to it.

Creative Tuesday

This scrumbled hat dates from the days when I was trying to create and sell patterns as PDF files. It failed largely because most of the people who bought the patterns off Etsy.com seemed to be completely ignorant about the nature of PDF files and tended to berate and abuse me for notposting them a paper pattern. (Yes, I did make it crystal clear what they were to expect). I did however sell some hard copies at the now defunct Yarn Fest that used to be held at The Highway Gallery in Mt Waverley (now, apparently, also defunct).

Being scrumbled, this one did not have a 'pattern' as such, more a recipe with lots of pictures. It was great fun to make. I also consider the beautiful model to be one of my favorite creations, though she is a lot older and taller and more grown up now than five years ago!

M is for Mariposa

I called this freeform hat Mariposa, because it reminded me of a posy of flowers. I made for Baby Bear to wear to Music Camp last year. She loves it, most gratifyingly! 

Online Hat Exhibition

The lovely Prudence Mapstone has uploaded the latest online hat exhibition on her wonderful, splendiforous site Knot Just Knitting. Click on the title of this post to see all the fantastic hats. Yes, Mariposa is there, but you must look at all the others and drool over them!

This is Mariposa, by the way - from my grumpy post. On sale for $AU7 as a PDF file, hint hint! Sirius the half Pharoah Hound is not for sale at any price. The child, however ... no, she's priceless too.

It's hard to see the details properly in this photo but I thought it looked pretty on the azalea bush.

Close up of the scrumbling at either end of the scarf.

The scarf exchange scarf is finished!

The freeform hat I made for Baby Bear in June, which is now called Mariposa. The pattern will be on sale at Sheepeasy Designs from September 1st (as a PDF file for $AU7).

The scarf I am making for Celia's Scarf Exchange. The pile of colourful jumbles will become scrumbling at each end of the scarf - I am currently sewing them together and aim to have it finished by the end of the week. It really does bend round like that! A pattern will be available in a few weeks time.

Big Purple Thang

We spent the weekend down at Moe with George's mum, going over paperwork - I seem to have become the official filler-in-of-forms because I can, when required, write in large clear capitals. Rather surprisingly exhausting. Baby Bear was off on a church youth group camp down on the Peninsula somewhere, where apparently she had great fun and has come back apparently full of a desire to be baptised and confirmed. Good for her, we always thought it best to leave it up to the children to decide whether they wanted to do this sort of thing for themselves, not impose it on them as babies. My only real concern is whether she will want to be baptised in our own pool in a sparkly bikini, and if this would really count as Sacred Space!!

Wombat coped well with the weekend - it was fun for him to be the only child, and he had free run of the TV and DVD player, but he also had to do a lot of sitting around waiting for grown ups to fill in forms and photocopy things. He lasted very well, really, and was rewarded on Sunday morning by a nice long visit with his big cousins D and L. They all played companionably on computer games and watched The Simpsons. He's got another heavy cold now, though, and is off school. We gave him a Gamecube for his birthday (second hand) and he has played on it all day today.

I decided that I wouldn't do anything that involved concentration as he is clingy and constantly wants attention, so I've caught up on reading emails, done some scrumbling and played altogether too many games of Snood, in between providing drinks and the occasional snack and very frequent cuddles.

No progress pics of anything, but plenty of knitting progress to report. The socks that were excelklent car knitting on the trip to Albury have continued to be car knitting, with the result that I am about ready to do the heel on the second sock. I am using a very jolly Regia in the predominant colours of red, white and blue, with flashes of green and black - George calls them the Tyrolean socks.

The Big Purple Thang of the title is one the three designs I am working on for the next Sheepeasy Patterns. It's a drapey vest knitted in a myriad of, mostly, purples (with bits of pink and green and orange and a little glitter here and there). It is designed so that you can pin it on either side, or allow it to drape - at least I hope that's how it will work out! I am nearly three-quarters of the way through it, though admittedly I haven't worked in any ends as I go so that will take extra time at the end! I have been tossing up edging ideas - it is mostly stocking stitch, with generous ribbing on the fronts - and am still thinking about that.

The other two designs that will be appearing sometime soon are a scrumbled hat - completed ages ago but still waiting writing up - and the scarf I am doing for Celia's Scarf Exchange. I am well on the way with the scarf. I have knitted the body of it - a relatively narrow and plain scarf in a K2 P2 rib, in a Bendigo Woollen Mills 5 ply Rustic in a dark teal (more green than anything else, really) - and have been working on scrumbles to embellish it with over the last couple of days. It will be ready in time for the deadline and I hope the recipient appreciates it!! As it is an original design I thought I may as well write up the pattern for it to sell on the site.

I have numerous other ideas for original designs that will follow in due course - there will probably be a scrumbled bag and shoulder shawls coming out next, plus I am toying with some scarf ideas.

The scrumbled hat would have been done by now if I had pulled my finger out, but for some reason writing the patterns seems to be so much harder than thinking them up in the first place!

Scrumbling

Thanks, Lee, for the lovely compliment! (In the comments).

Scrumbling is my true obsession. Legal, too! It's also known as freeform crochet (or freeform knitting and crochet, or just freeforming). There are some disputes as to who originated it and its connections (or otherwise) to modular knitting/crochet. I came across it when browsing the Net about three years ago and found Prudence Mapstone's site. It wasn't quite as exciting then as it is now, but even then it was a moment of perfect synchronicity for me. I had been looking around for a new knitting challenge, having got bored with Kaffe Fasset (sorry, Kaffe!) - I'd signed up for a knitting class that sounded interesting, with lots of embellishing, but that was cancelled - and I found this site. I immediately ordered her book and set to work. There was a fair bit of crochet in it. I could crochet, but tended not to, so that was a bit of a learning curve!

Not long after I had started scrumbling, we all went up to Sydney for two weeks while George did some urgent work, instead of having a summer holiday. I did my best with the kids on my own, but Wombat was at his autistic worst and it was hard. We spent a lot of time sitting in our air conditioned apartment, and I scrumbled while he watched cable TV. It saved my sanity and gave me an enduring love for what is, essentially, a form of patchwork.

How do you do it? Well, any way you like! One of the things I love about it is that there are no rules and you cannot make mistakes. Some scrumblers are more rule-bound than that, and their work is lovely. If I want to follow rules, however, I use a pre set pattern. When I scrumble I like to go with the flow.

When I make a scrumble I do this - I make a centre piece, in either knitting or crochet, about an inch or so across - a square, a triangle, a rectangle, a circle or something misshapen. Then I work around it, adding bits here and there, either knitting or crocheting straight onto it, or doing separate pieces and sewing them on afterwards. When the overall piece is approximately the size of the palm of my hand, I stop and make another one. What I do with them depends on what I think I might make out of them - for the cape I made lots of scrumbles and sewed them together at the end, and then added some bits and pieces here and there to fill in gaps. I deliberately left some gaps because I liked to effect they gave. I sewed some beads on in various places, just for fun.

I made a hat for Baby Bear recently, in which I did separate pieces and attached them as I went, using a hat block for shaping. I am writing up a pattern for that which will be on sale by the end of the month (hopefully!) at Sheepeasy Designs.

Anyone interested in scrumbling will find lots and lots on the Net - Prudence's site gives some interesting links and a Google search will come up with lots of things too. Big warning, though - you either love it or hate it, no-one seems to be lukewarm about it!!

And for anyone who thinks it is a great way to use up your oddments of yarn - well, it is, but I guarantee that you will end up buying twice as much again, because you keep seeing things that would be perfect for it. I can rarely resist buying a multitude of single balls of new and novelty yarns, because they will be great for some freeform project or other.

A close up of some of my scrumbling. This is the cape that is too warm to wear most of the year.

I look too wierd in this picture, but it's the only picture I have of my scrumbling actually being worn.