Quick crochet

I'm doing well with the granny square cot bed blanket that I've been busily working on, but yesterday I decided I needed a bit of a break from cranking out squares and so I made up a little pair of booties.

These little shoes will be a present for a baby girl who is due in April. I've decided not to do my usual pink as her mum prefers other colours, but I've tried to keep them looking girly by trimming them with lilac and adding little heart buttons. The pattern is from "Crocheted gifts in a weekend" by Nola Theiss which was the first crochet book that I owned. The pattern itself isn't very well written, but once you've made it up a few time then you get the hang of it and it does make a very cute little baby bootie :-)

Early valentines

Some how I managed to find a little time to make up a valentines card for my lovely husband. I really love ladybirds (for our wedding I crocheted a whole swarm of them to decorate the reception rooms) and this is probably why I had the idea that two ladybirds on a leaf looking at each other would make very cute heart. I think that in my head it looked better but I'm still happy with the result.

I find it really hard to make valentines/anniversary cards for a man though as you don't want to overdose on the heart theme but what other images can you use? Beer and football aren't very romantic are they?

Tomorrow we're off for a short trip to see the in-laws, but because of all the baby stuff I'll be packing I won't have room to take much craft stuff. I'm going to bring some of the granny squares that I've made though and spend a few hours sewing in the loose ends.

Make do and mend

Back in the olden days people were much more likely to repair an old pair of socks or sew a patch onto their clothes, however in recent years we seem to have lost that urge to fix up our worn possessions and throw things away at the first sign of any damage. I'm just as guilty of doing this as anyone else - but I'm now starting to think about fixing things first or coming up with another use for some of the items that just end up in the bin.

My husband must have started to feel the same way recently, instead of throwing away an old pair of headphones he passed them on to me in the hopes that I could try and make some new covers for them. Surprisingly this was very easy to do, using a little left over chunky black yarn I quickly came up with some crochet covers which seem to do the job very nicely.

These covers are very simply 6 sc into a circle and a few rows of increasing by 6 sc each time. To finish off I worked 1 row without decreasing and then decreased by 6 sc to finish.

Both my husband and Tolo (see above) are impressed with the results - now if only I could make my worn out maternity jeans last me a little longer...