Bridal bouquet

It has been ages since I last updated this blog! Not for a lack of projects though, it seems the past few months have been the busiest so far, with baby's to crochet gifts for, house selling/buying, preparing to quit my job and ... preparing for our wedding. Since my family and me love to craft/DIY, we did a lot ourselves. When I say 'we', I mean they did most of the work and I mainly 'directed' :-)

My main solo wedding project was to crochet my bouquet, and I have been thinking about/planning this for about a year and properly working on it for the last few months. I found some beautiful patterns for calla lilies (http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/calla-lily-flower-2) and roses (http://www.fiori-uncinetto.com/). The leaves and sepals are derived from another pattern (http://happyberrycrochet.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/how-to-crochet-realistic-roses.html).

There are 7 calla lilies and 5 red roses and a dozen of stems of leaves. A fashionably small bouquet but surprisingly heavy and substantial. I got a lot of positive comments, people were fascinated that this could be done using crochet! :-)

Hula hoop rug weaving

At some point, I stumbled upon a Pintrest tutorial on how to weave a rug using old fabric and a hula hoop. Since I've only ever used my - rather large - hula hoop 2 or 3 times (not enough space indoors, I was constantly damaging things), I thought this may be a good way to put it to use.

I used a tutorial that seems to be down at the time of writing this (original link). However, Pintrest has lots of similar tutorials (here's a place to start).

It was very easy to do and went a lot more quickly than crocheting something this size (at least for me). I used 2 old double/king duvet sets with some spare fabric left over. After finishing the weaving, I crocheted 1 row around the edge to make it heavier and stop it from curling up. As an alternative, you may want to weave quite loosely (also when tying off!) to prevent this from happening.

And yes, that's the pouf I made a while ago there on the right. I do like upcycling and currently there's another idea brewing involving (non-hula-hoop) weaving and old jeans. Stay tuned...

Happy New Year!

Another year over, and lots of crochet has happened in its last few weeks! I've made more presents than ever before, some of which were only finished the day before, and broke my personal record of frogging. Good times :-)

I will be trying to catch up soon, writing a bit about every project and a 'how to crochet a basic hat (with modifications)', since I've now made 4 (3 complete, 2 in progress counting for 0.5 each) which are essentially very similar even though they look different.

Here's to more crafts in the New Year!