I Spy......Crocheted Potraits

'Arthur Cheesman' Jo Hamilton. Image from designboom.com

I recently discovered Jo Hamilton's AMAZING crocheted portraits through a feature on designboom. I just never would have imagined that you could produce something so breath-taking using crochet.

I love them. I love her whole website.

I blow her kisses across the void.

Crochet Monster Blanket

Monster blanket

Last week it was the second birthday of my Fairy-Godson. Inspired by this tutorial I decided to make a crochet monster fleece blanket. I have loads of kindle-reject fleece lying around (it sheds and gets trapped in the edges of the kindle) and so thought this would be an excellent project to use some up.

I'm quite please with how it turned out. It's super cuddly. Unfortunately the fleece was quite thin and I think the crochet edging may be easily pulled out by child hands. But we shall see.

The tutorial was really easy to follow and took me about six hours. I will definitely make some more. Luckily as lots of my friends have been having babies recently I have lots of children to gift them to. I think I will try adapting the pattern slightly and make a robot too. 

House of Pinheiro Swap

As previously mentioned I took part in House of Pinheiro's Pincushion swap this month.

The lovely Katie from Booty-Full Things sent me the following:

I feel super-lucky to have been paired up with Katie. She sent me a beautiful hand-made crocheted strawberry pincushion, an embroidered card, a sewing set AND pins! I was actually ridiculously pleased with the pins. I've been in semi-desperate need for pins for ages (the only ones I had are lace pins, which get easily lost in things that are not lace).

Thank you Katie!

Her blog is full of equally wondrous crocheted goodies - I recommend going to read it. She's also currently hosting a jar swap. I'm taking part, you should too.

Also world, if you're into swaps - don't forget to enter my bird swap over at Tre La Creativity.

Crocheted jar covers

Having whipped out my crochet hook (I only have the one) to make my amigurumi teddy bear I then proceeded to go on a crochet FRENZY. The next few posts will be documenting the chaos.

I have a whole bundle of glass jars sitting in a cupboard in my kitchen. They're the remains of yoghurts and Gu chocolate deserts. At times I can be a massive horder. I've been trying to think of a way of using them. It occurred to me that it might be cute to crochet covers for them (CROCHET FRENZY).

I was pretty confident that someone else would have had this idea so I googled for it and discovered hundreds of people had and that they had also usefully written tutorials. Tangled Happy had a great collection of jam jar cover tutorials from many different websites. These were great. I also really liked Attic24's tutorial on making crochet tin covers.

As mentioned previously I am quite rubbish at following crochet instructions, so although these websites gave me a starting point, I soon abandoned them and just made it up as I went along. This may be obvious by looking at my covers.

It was fun though and gave me something to do whilst watching Game of Thrones. Now I just have to think of what to do with glass jars covered in crochet.... tea lights maybe?

Book Review: Creepy Cute Crochet by Christen Haden

This, as the title suggests, is a very cute book. It provides patterns for making a variety of amigurumi creatures. Amigurami is Japanese art where you make small stuffed animals or creatures using knitting or crochet. This book is all crochet.

The creatures within the book are all very imaginative and fun. You can make a vampire, a ninja, a zombie, a Spartan and many others. The photographs in the book of the creatures are all adorable and inspiring.

Haden provides clear lists of material needed to make each creature. My only criticism of this book is that it can be difficult to follow the instructions. This is not a book for those who are new to crochet. Also, you really should invest in some crochet markers (like pins to mark your place in the crochet) because I kept losing how many stitches I'd done.

Skeleton bride and groom from Creepy Cute Crochet

I made the above skeletal bride and groom from the book as a wedding gift for a friend. Well, I made the bride and my mother helped me keep to time restraints by making the groom. The stitching on the groom was not pulled quite so tight which is why he is far larger than the bride. This was no veiled comment on the groom himself. It was a little difficult to get started but once started easy to complete.

This is a fun book and I recommend it. It is available on Amazon and probably other bookshops.