Well, hello there!

Hi y'all, and welcome to my new craft blog, broadcasting from the UK, glad to see... anyone? No? Just me, then. Oh, well, never mind. How long this blog lasts will be a mystery - I think my record so far is three months, but that wasn't a creative blog. Let's hope this one lasts longer. I has PLNZ.

Well, it's not exactly a beautiful day here in Yorkshire - very windy and a bit drizzly - but the cherry and apple trees are in blossom, so the landscape is full of pink and white, which I'm sure will make me eager to work in pastel colours quite soon, but right now I am in the midst of a rather heavy cold and wading through a backlog of Stuff That Needs Doing Now, with a side order of Stuff That Should Have Been Finished Weeks Ago, so blossom-coloured flights of fancy are not on the agenda.

And what is the thing that has me so eyeball-deep in urgent craftings? Well, for a start, I got involved in one of the charity auctions that have sprung up on LJ to collect donations for the survivors of the disaster in Japan. Round one is over, but I gather that there's a round two coming up, and if you are perchance reading this and wish to donate goods or services, or bid on some of the excellent goodies there, the link is http://community.livejournal.com/help_japan/.
I offered several things (the largest of which didn't sell, but oh well), and so now I'll be busy making two of these, which are the nearest thing I have to a trademark piece.

 

I'm also going to be making a pair of microembroidery willow pattern keyrings, which I will show you as soon as I have some photos. The pattern for these is from issue 43 of Cross Stitch Card Shop, a magazine which I don't buy anymore and I'm not sure why, because although I seem to have aquired the view that cross stitch is slightly below me now and magazine charts are schmaltzy mush, I tend to do an awful lot of it to keep my hand in, and CSCS does a lot of useful, handily-sized charts that are good-looking, easy to adapt and certainly nice enough that I wouldn't put them on something as disposable as a card.*

The other current project is one that I've been working on since November, and which was supposed to be a Christmas present for the oldest of my three neices. All of my family have seen its progress, all of my friends have either seen it or heard me gripe about it - The Squid has become fairly notorious.

Here you see it hanging upside-down by its feeder tentacles from my closet door - this being the only way I can store it in my overly-cluttered little house when the wash basket is in use. It's about five feet long, and has ten tentacles, and hundreds of these white fluffy suckers. I am SO tired of making suckers. Still, only need to finish two more legs, attach the four that are loose and sew up the gap and then the godforsaken thing is DONE!
Did I mention I sew everything by hand?

* - Speaking of which, one thing I'm going to try to do in this blog is craft magazine reviews. Just not today.