Blogging block

Hello everyone, sorry for being so remiss in posting lately. I haven't even got a very good excuse, I've just been a bit uninspired and because of that I haven't been doing much crafting recently. However, I'm going to have to knuckle down and get some Christmas crafting started as otherwise I won't have any presents to give to friends and family this year!

There has been a bit of crochet happening at Tea Towers over the last month though and both items I'm pretty pleased with.

First off are a pair of simple crochet slippers that I've been meaning to make for myself for quite some time. My original pair were a present from my Mother-in-law and I've loved wearing them so much that they are now in tatters with a number of holes in the soles of them. To replace them I used the closest colour match of yarn that I had in my stash and followed the very clear pattern by Lisa Gutierrez. These will probably get worn out in a couple of years too, but as I can now make a pair up in a couple of evenings they hopefully won't get too holey before I whip up a replacement.

Next up is a simple crochet crown which I made up for a friend's daughter who is at the age where her favourite things are princesses, pink and loves to 'dress up'. This crown was inspired by some of the lovely sewn crowns that I've seen on a few blogs and also in one of my sewing books somewhere... I would have preferred to make this up with fabric instead of going to the trouble of crocheting a crown shape and then making that up into the crown you see on the right, but as I didn't have enough suitable fabric for the front of the crown I pulled a hook and a ball of yarn out of my stash and did it that way.

The crochet part of the crown was perhaps the easiest part of the construction, sewing on the hundreds of sequins and then making a basic pipe cleaner framework to hold the crown straight and allow it to be bent into shape was fiddly. After I finished with that I had to add some pink felt to the back to hide all the mess as well as adding some lengths of ribbons so that the crown could be tied on. I've heard from the Mum that the crown was very well received so all well worth the effort :-)

Because I've been a bit slow in getting my posts up recently I have come up with the idea to do a regular Friday book/magazine review which will mean I've got regular content appearing here and will hopefully ease the guilt I feel at not posting my crafty progress more regularly. This plan should work fine until I run out of craft books... but looking at my craft shelf I should have enough material for a good long while yet :-) Keep an eye out for my first Friday review tomorrow and let me know what you think!