Poncho and Super Fast Zpagetti Container

Hello there!

A couple of weeks ago I showed a red lump which should be my poncho at some point... Well, it is not a WIP-project anymore!

I more or less followed this pattern. None of my stitch count matches up with the pattern because I used a different yarn. So in the end I only used the pattern for the general idea and the size.

The poncho is very soft and I love wearing it. It tends to leave little red fluff thingies everywhere though but I don't mind much. What I like best about the poncho is the cowl-neck. Keeps me warm and feels so nice.

The overall yarn cost was rather high but worth it. I have some left overs and so I am thinking about making matching wrist warmers or a hat. We'll see.

The last weeks have been incredible busy, so there wasn't much time or energy for hooky-plays. I did however whip up a Zpagetti basket last night because I needed a tin for my hooks. And yes... I have a lot of them. Why? I tend to loose the 3.5,4.0 and 4.5 hooks and it's cheaper to buy a whole set than individual needles. Opps.

The basket is so easy and it takes like no time to make.

Super Fast Zpagetti Container

Pattern

Start with a magic circle.

Rd 1: 8 sc in the circle. Close with a sl stich.
Rd 2: Chain one, 2 sc in every stich. Close with a sl stich.
Rd 3: Chain one, [1 sc in the next stich, 2 sc in the next] x  8 times. Close with a sl stich.
Rd 4: Sc in the back loop of every stich around.
Rd 5: Chain one. Sc in ever stich around. Do not close but continue working in spiral.
Rd 6-8: Sc in every stich (in spiral!). 
Finish with a sl stich.


Anyway, I need to go to work!

Take care everyone!

~ Anne ~

C2C Blanket, Baby slippers und Booties, Münster and Canada... :-)

Hello!

I have spent quite some time traveling during the last 1 1/2 weeks and thus I didn't blog as soon as I intended to.

Crochet

Last week I was on a work trip in Bayreuth (Bavaria). Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures. :-( Not that I saw much of the city anyway. I spent most of my limited time on the university campus and in the hotel. However, I did spent a lot of time on the train and got to crochet a bit. Some of the following baby / toddler shoes were made on the trip, the others at home. I fell in love with these two patterns from Tara Murray: Bodie Baby Booties and Toddler Slippers. The patterns are really well written and I will surely buy more soon! Some of the booties / slippers will go to friends but I am also thinking about opening a Dawanda shop. Dawanda is like the German Etsy and it's an awesome website. So many talented people sell their their stuff there! I could shop there for hours...

The booties  all lack a ribbon. I think I will make will make black ones since the booties are really colourful themselves. What do you think?

Some of the shoes are made with sock yarn. It feels quite nice! I reckon I will make more shoes soon... It's such a rewarding project. My sister ordered slippers too, well, grown up ones that is. I already bought the Molly Slippers from Tara Murray, so I think I will give these ones a try.

My other major WIP is my corner to corner blanket. It's almost finished! All the rows are done but I need to weave in the ends. And there are so many of them. Sigh! I am however already deeply in love with the blanket. As I told you in this blog post, I used the Attic 24 Color Pack from Stylecraft Special DK. I think I might order some more of this yarn soon. Hmmm. Need to work on my yarn addiction.

The blanket has 147 rows. Every color except two has been used for 12 rows. :-) And there is some yarn left. Took me about 4 weeks to complete but I also did a lot of other projects during this time.

While I was at my parents place I came across the second blanket I ever made: It is a simple granny square which I made while I lived in Australia and sent to my mum as a birthday gift. I think the cat claimed it as his though...

I searched for these lovely yarn needles for ages:

The have a nylon loop on the top and thus there is no annyoing fiddling the yarn through the tiny hole. I highly recommend them and they are pretty cheap too (3,50 €). I got them from a local yarn shop in my parents' hometown but I think they can be ordered online too.

Travel

It was our four year anniversary yesterday and we spent the evening / night in Münster. The weather was quite nasty but we had a good time anyway. Hotels aren't really affordable in Münster so we stayed in the Nordstern Hostel instead. It is a lovely hostel in one of the old town houses. The rooms and bathrooms are clean and the price is alright. What more could one ask for? Well, perhaps a better heating system but we managed with some extra blankets. There is a great old pub downstairs which sells brilliant roast chicken. I would go back any time!

We intened to have breakfeast at Milchmädchen which is a tiny, tiny coffee bar with lovely waffles on Wednesdays and Saturdays but... they were on holidays! Unlucky us! We had our brekkie in a lovely French bakery instead and enjoyed it a lot!

Yumm! I could just tuck back in again! Reminds me of our holiday in Paris two years ago when the boyfriend and I basically ate our way though Paris. Who cares about the Eiffel Tower? It's all about the food!

We also had tea in Time for Tea which is a cafe that only serves tea. As you know I love tea and liked the concept. The tea was beautifully displayed, however it didn't rock my socks. Also, it was very expensive (13 € for two) and the waitresses were talking to themselves very loudly about personal stuff I didn't want to know about.

I don't think I will go back... Instead I will have lots of teas from this selection. In Weyhe, my parents town, there is a brilliant tea shop called Tee Kontor. I adore their tea! YumYumYum!

Canada

We booked tickets to Canada!! The boyfriend will attend a conference there in July and I will travel with him to explore Vancouver. After the conference we will spend two weeks on Vancouver Island. I am soooo excited! Should anyone have some advice on where to go, where to eat, where to buy yarn... send them in!

Planes, ferries and walking shoes

Success today! I usually hate shopping for anything that isn't food or food related (and even for those things I have a specific list and targeted attack plan), but I desperately needed new shoes.  I tend to find a style of shoe that I like, buy three pairs in different colours and then proceed to wear them out completely.  Sadly, my last pair of Diana Ferrari Texas that I bought about 5 years ago finally bit the dust, and the hunt was on.  Fortunately, it only took 10 minutes in Myer and we were out! And there was even a $20 discount!

I've had some good success with crochet toys recently too.  Just when I felt like we were getting up to date with orders, our popularity has exploded again and 8 new orders came in over the last week.  I just had enough time to try out the Eddie Lives The Dream pattern from the wonderful Heidi Bears and although I didn't have time to do the zebra (and didn't really want to anyway), the plane itself came out really well :) Zoom zoom zoomity zoom!

This evening we went on a stroll about the riverbank near our apartment.  The Parramatta River runs through the middle of Sydney, from the Harbour to Parramatta, which is now close to the geographical centre of the city. Where we live at Meadowbank is where the river starts to get shallower, and sometimes the ferries have difficulty getting past the Meadowbank Ferry Wharf!

I love how the tree roots have grown around and through the loose rocks! 

The Sydney sandstone has such lovely colour variations.  I also find it interesting how the rocks that are within the tidal area are worn in straight lines parallel to the river.  Maybe a geologist can explain it to me!

The colours from the sunset looking west down the river towards Parramatta:

And a blurry picture of us!

Crochet Fun! New blanket, poncho and toddler shoes WIP! Also Burg Hohensyburg...

Hello there!

I wanted to post for some time but a cold and then a bladder infection knocked me out (still fighting with the latter... YUCK). Wish me luck that no other sickness will come after this one! :P

Crochet... 

For christmas I got the Stylecraft Special DK color set. It is the set of colors Lucy from Attic24 used for her granny stripes blanket. Like Michelle I am part of the Creative Crochet Crew on Facebook and for month people have been gushing about the Special DK yarn and so after month of looking at it longingly I asked for a set for Christmas... Well, let's say: I understand the gushing now. Of course it is acrylic yarn and not as lovely as merino or something like that buuutt it is brilliant to work with. It just glides over the fingers. My favorite color by far is pomegranate (I need to keep myself from drooling over it), but there are 16 other nice colors in the pack too.

I got my parcel early January and spent some days planing and wondering what I might make with it. So many ideas! So many possiblities! Oh, oh, the choices...

In the end, I decided to go for the corner to corner blanket pattern from Red Heart Yarns. In the CCC group everyone was talking about it and as you can see in previous posts, Michelle is quite a fan too. The tutorial is a bit though to understand at first but with the help of this youtube video I mastered the art of the Corner to Corner!

It's not finished yet but I am already on the "making it shrink" part. So far I made three rows of each color two times ( = 102 rows in total) with a 4,5 mm hook and will go back the same way. As you might guess my blanket will be square . I spent some time thinking about a retangular one but in the end I wanted to spend the yarn evenly. I hope there will be enough yarn but so far it looks good. I put some yarn balls on a scale and each of them still has 50 gramms at least. Therefore my chance to finish the blanket with the one color pack looks good! Cross your fingers!

NOTE: The finished blanket can be found in this post!

Earlier the week a good friend's little girl turned one. She (= her mum) asked for crochet shoes for her birthday and thus I am busy making some pairs. Unfortunatly I didn't managed to finish them in time for her birthday (I spent most of last week sick in bed) but I hope both mum and birthday girl will like them anyway.

Some weeks ago I came across a lovely pattern for baby boat shoes from the blog Whistle and Ivy and saved it right away. Lucky me that I got to use it so soon!

My shoes doesn't look like a shoe yet but it's getting there... What do you think of the colors?

I am also working on a poncho for myself. I got a voucher for yarn from my work mates for my birthday last year and I spent it on some really lovely yarn. It's called lana grossa garzato baby alpaka. So soft and fluffy! Doesn't look like a poncho yet but getting there:

Walking...

Over the last weeks winter came to Germany. Well, Germany except Dortmund that is. While most of the country had snow, we had rain. Eeekk. I would have loved to see some snow but it seems it’s not in the picture for us this year. We did however have a lovely winter day today, that is sun and almost cold temperatures (8 ° C) and so the boyfriend and I decided to take a walk.

We drove to Burg (Castle) Hohensyburg. The castle itself lies in ruins but the view from up there is quite stunning. Take a look! Definitely worth walking about there! When the walking path aren’t that muddy and slippery anymore, we plan to walk around the forest there. Perhaps even up to the castle starting down at the river. It’s the river Ruhr by the way. The Ruhr flows past my work place as well. So pretty! I will take some pictures in spring to show you.

 

The first signs of spring! Can you believe it?! It’s so early in the year!

Cooking and drinking...

At least the bladder infections gives me a reason to drink a lot of tea. Something I should do anyway… We got this pretty tea pot for Christmas. It’s brilliant! It has a very large tea strainer which leaves the tea floating around and the flavour comes out amazingly well. We got another three brands of loose tea from Tee Geschwender yesterday since we ran out. Yum. I prefer to buy tea in little local tea shops and not from chains shops but I haven’t found a nice little shop here.

The post man also delivered this chalk board this week. We intend to plan out meals out more, so we don’t have to go shopping as often. This board shall help us and it looks pretty in the living room. We have an open kitchen, so everything I buy should somehow look nice in the living room as well. I am always open for new recipes, so if you have ideas for some meals that are quick ( = for work days) and healthy at the same time, I would love a hint! I am thinking about baking breakfast muffins and freeze them. Has any of you done that yet?

 

That's pen is liquid ink by the way. An thing from my teaching days...

Take care,

Anne