Yes, my name is Iggle Piggle...

I crocheted these 'In the Night Garden' toys for H & P for Christmas. I'm not very good at embroidering faces on toys, luckily Iggle Piggle and Makka Pakka are meant to have slightly daft expressions! Makka Pakka is my favourite, he is a quirky stone-age type character who lives in a cave and collects rocks. 

The Pattern was from Ravelry, by Magdalena Svartlok, easy to follow and fun to make.

Tutorial - Christmas Crackers

 

Handmade crackers are fun to make, and you can fill them with personalised gifts and use them as place settings. I'm making the crackers this year, and my husband is in charge of writing the bad jokes to put inside.

You will need, per cracker:
1 loo roll tube
1 cracker snap (I got mine on ebay for about £1.60 for 12)
1 A4 sheet of festive paper
A slightly larger piece of tissue paper
Luggage tag
Ribbon, wool or string
Decorations, eg stickers or cardmaking toppers.

Joke or General Knowledge Question

Chocolates and gift - mine mostly came from charity shops. I'm using vintage wooden push up toys, jewellery, Guatamalan worry dolls, and miniature bottles of whiskey.

 

1.  Put a cracker snap, chocolate, joke and gift inside the loo roll.

2. Roll the piece of tissue around the loo roll, and glue or tape in place. Then do the same with the A4 coloured paper, making sure that the tisse sticks out the ends.

3.Twist each end of the cracker and tie with ribbon, wool or string.

4. Write the name of the recipient on the luggage tag, glue to the cracker and decorate with stickers, toppers, buttons or whatever you like.

Tutorial - Easy Christmas Cards

 

These jolly holiday cards are easy to make using festive papers, luggage tags and ribbon.

You will need:
Card blanks and envelopes
Festive paper in at least two colours or designs (you can use wrapping paper, scrapbooking papers, vintage wallpaper or even fabric).
Luggage tags
3mm ribbon
Glue
Small Christmas Rubber Stamp (eg pudding, robin, snowflake, Christmas Tree) and Ink Pad

1. Stamp the luggage tag with the Christmas rubber stamp, and leave to dry for a few minutes.

2. Tie a 6" piece of ribbon to the top of the tag and tie in a bow. Cut ends to the right length.

3. Cut 2 rectangle pieces from the Christmas paper. Use two contrasting patterns. The size will depend on the size of your cards, but one rectangle should be about half an inch smaller in length and width than the larger rectangle. Use a guillotine if you've got one, but I prefer my cards to look a bit wonky and handmade, there are no straight lines in nature.

 

4. Glue the larger rectangle to the card, then the smaller rectangle, followed by the luggage tag.

5. You can play around with other designs. Instead of stamping the tag, use cardmaking toppers, stickers, festive buttons or beads. Use glittery card instead of printed paper.

Happy Making!

Tutorial - How to make a Christmas House

 

Decorate a cute house to display your Christmas ornaments and trinkets.

You will need:

A Chipboard display house

PVA glue

White Paint & Paintbrush

Christmas Papers (I got mine from Tesco but you can also find them in Cardmaking craft shops and places like Paperchase or Hobbycraft). You can use scrapbook backing paper, vintage wallpaper, wrapping paper, or wallpaper for dolls houses. 

1. Start by priming your chipboard house, this is an undercoat of dilute PVA to stop the paint getting absorbed into the chipboard. Make a mixture of 3 parts PVA glue and one part water, and paint onto all surfaces of the house. Leave to dry overnight. You can skip this part but you may end up with chipboard showing through the paint.

2. Paint the house with white paint, it may need a couple of coats. Leave to dry.

3. Wallpaper your house! Measure the internal compartments and cut the papers to size. Glue in place.

4. Then have fun filling the compartments with Christmassy objects. You can use vintage cake decorations, acorns, pine cones, sweets, anything you like!

Tutorial - Christmas Wreath

 

Raid your haberdashery stash to decorate a festive wreath using ribbon, pom-pom trim and buttons.

You will need:
Vine wreath
Plain ribbon, about 2 metres
Pom-pom trim, 1 metre
Christmas ribbon
Jingle bells
Assorted buttons
Needle & thread 

 

1. Begin by choosing a colour scheme. I used red pom-pom trim (to look like holly berries), cream ribbon, rusty jingle bells, wooden star buttons and red polka dot buttons. You could also use vintage wooden cotton reels, brocade ribbon, organza, beads, or even zips.

2. Wrap some plain ribbon around the vine wreath. Don't wrap it too tightly, it should look kind of rustic and effortless. Bear in mind that the buttons will be sewn to the ribbon at the end. Pin or tack the two ends of ribbon together at the back.

 3. Loosly wrap some pom-pom trim around the wreath, and pin or tack the two ends together at the back.

4. Tie the jingle bells on to the top of the wreath using some festive ribbon. Make a bow.

5. Tack the buttons to the plain ribbon all the way around the wreath. Just one stitch in and out should hold them in place. Alternatively, glue the buttons to the ribbon.

And that's it! Your wreath should last years if you hang it indoors, but as the ribbons are just tacked on, it's easy to add or remove them, and you can re-use the wreath again with a different colour scheme another year.

Advent Calendar Crochet Pattern

There are lots of knitting patterns around for advent calendars, but hardly any crochet ones, and those that I found look like they were from the seventies! Nothing wrong with retro patterns, but I decided to try making my own. Here's what I came up with:

 

There are pockets for each day, for sweets or small toys. I'm going to make it again using cotton next time, but for now, I'm pretty happy with it :)

The pattern is available at etsy and ravelry. 

Making Christmas Gifts

Stuck at home because I can barely walk, so I may as well have fun making things for Christmas! I like to give 'consumable' presents because I think everyone has so much stuff already. I like receiving things to eat / drink / use in the bath. In grey January when Christmas is over, you can look in the cupboard and find a lovely jar of chutney or some chocolates you had forgotten about, and it cheers you up, I think. 

Sloe Gin:

Chocolate lollies with cranberries, almonds, golden raisins and white chocolate drops. From an Ina Garten recipe:

 
  

Peanut Brittle, from a simple Nigella recipe, except I doubled the quantity of sugar in the 2nd batch. This was amazing and my husband tried to eat it all:

Paper gift bags with luggage tag labels:

Only 4 more sleeps!

Christmas Crafting...

Inspired by this gorgeous post at TeaWagonTales, I decorated some baubles. After trawling ebay for vintage glass baubles which cost a fortune, I managed to find a set of 12 in a charity shop for 50p. 

I used narrowboat style flower decals. A really easy and fun project! Got a bit addicted to making them. Our house is too small for a real tree, so I just used twigs in a jar.



Crocheted baubles from a pattern by Lucy at Attic 24. I love her patterns!






Crocheted Santa and his helpers, from this Gnome pattern.



Stocking pattern from my etsy shop. We put the decorations up early because it's H's first christmas and we're a bit over excited. Must calm down...

Other things...

Experimenting with Vegan Cupcake recipes, because our hens have stopped laying for winter.

These are Coconut Heaven Cupcakes, from Vegan with a Vengeance.

Golden Vanilla Cupcakes, from somewhere on the internet. The coconut ones were amazing, the vanilla ones not so great, although the 3 children I made them for managed to wolf down a couple each...

Frome Flea Market & Christmas Artisan Market, so lovely, but you can't actually get to any stalls because it's so crowded. The Flea market was much quieter. If I was rich I'd buy everything. 

What's happing here? We stumbled upon a rabbit show, it took us a while to work out what was going on. Really bizarre! I dont really like 'pets'. I only like things like chickens and goats. I am absolutely terrified of dogs.

 

I'm looking forward to a couple of quiet weeks of present-making, baking, avoiding christmas shopping, snuggling on the sofa, and crocheting.

Happy Christmas Crafting!

20% Off All Patterns at Etsy

To celebrate my best ever month for crochet pattern sales, I'm offering a 20% discount on all patterns in my etsy shop.

Just enter the code CHRISTMAS2011 at checkout, on the right hand side of the page where it says 'Apply Coupon Code'. Offer ends Saturday 10th December, at 8pm.

There are patterns to make lovely christmas presents, and many projects work up quickly, including socks, mittens and baby cardigans.

Happy making!

Free Crochet Pattern - Santa Hat

I found a Santa outfit in a charity shop, but it didn't come with a hat, so of course I had to make one. Here's the pattern.... Really its just an excuse to post pictures of H in his hilarious outfit. 

How to make a really simple Santa hat for a baby or child.

You will need:

100g Double Knitting Yarn in Red

20g Double Knitting Yarn in White

A white pom pom or a jingley bell

5mm Crochet Hook

This pattern uses British Crochet Terminology, so tr = dc in US terminology.

Starting at the point of the hat, and with red yarn Ch3, and work 5tr in 3rd st from hook. 

Do not join. You are working around in a circle and not joining, so when you get the the end of the first row, you just work the next stitch into the top of the first stitch you made.

Work this sequence of stitches: *work 1tr in each of the next 6 sts, inc in next st*. Continue until there are 12 rows in total.

Work this sequence of stitches: *work 1tr in each of the next 12 sts, inc in next st*. Continue until your hat has a slightly larger circumference than your littley's head.

Work 1 tr in each st around for 3 rows. Dc in next st. Change to white yarn. 
Dc in each st around for 8 rows. Fasten off.

Sew on pom pom or jingley bell. You also could make this hat in green for an elf's hat.

Hurrah! Finished Socks.

I seem to have about a hundred crochet projects waiting to be started, mostly for other people, so I'm glad I finished my cosy autumn socks last night. Now I can start on something else...

They are made from 1 ball of King Cole Zig Zag yarn, (bought from ebay for less than a fiver) and I went up a hook size because my feet are bigger from being pregnant. I also added a few more rows to the main foot part. A really nice project to carry around because they're so small, I worked on them a lot during our 3 and a half hour car journey to see my grandmother, it was the first time she had seen her new great-grandson. The pattern is on Ravelry and Etsy.

Hurrah!

It's time to start thinking about making things for Christmas; the raspberry gin is getting nicely pink in the back of the cupboard, I've made my little H his first stocking, and today I baked the Christmas cake. I've used this Delia recipe for the past 5 years and it always comes out great, the only change I made was, after soaking the dried fruit in sloe gin (instead of brandy) overnight, the mixture still seemed quite dry so I so added half a cup of strong black tea and let it soak for a few more hours. This will be my first christmas at home with my husband and baby, (we got married in July), I usually go to my parents in Worcester, so I'm getting really into the idea of making it really special. After 4 and a half hours in the oven this is what came out:

Really moist and yummy looking. I will wrap it in foil, feed it every now and again, then decorate it with fruit and nuts.