Amenably Crafty: Desperately seeking that elusive pot of gold

Saturday, 18 November 2017

Desperately seeking that elusive pot of gold

Gosh things have got tough! It seems that our lives are contuously blighted by debt, debt and more debt on top of a huge STINKING pile of debt. Neil has been shopping for the last few weeks with just £13 in his pocket. This week however, It's been different - Neil's car went back to the garage in what is very quickly becoming it's bi-weekly and very expensive problem. So we've been reduced to buying just cat food, bread and margarine this week. Ohhh woopiedoo!
However, It's not all doom and gloom, I met up with a friend on Thursday. I've watched his meteoric rise from poverty to huge wealth, just as my personal wealth declines. I am so thrilled to have met him, It's given me the impetus to get going, he gave me the proverbial kick up the backside.
I've come home with a plan to improve my situation. This includes pushing my crafting sales, promoting Bodyshop, increasing my blogging and attending regular carbooting events. I want to raise the funds to enable me to embark on extra training, which in turn will lead to employment.
I'm determined to do it, I need to be more organised if I am to succeed, and I'm determined to succeed because we're so far down - the only way is up! Signing off for now but I will say to you - watch this space.

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My First peruse into the world of Free form Crochet (Scrumbling)

Well! I can hardly be called an exemplary Blogger can I? It's been nigh on 8 months since I last wrote on here - I will endeavour to do better. I didn't take many photos of my latest project, but I'm very proud of it none the less, I'm currently in to making phone socks, mainly because they're relatively quick and easy to make (well, for the average crafter, not me, because I keep getting side tracked!) I'm absolutely determined to get myself a shelf in the crafter's shop on Burton Road at the top of town. It only costs £25 a month, but when you have no job and no money, that's a lot of money to find. However, I keep working on it and thought to make the phone socks as a quick fill for the shelf whilst I'm working on larger and more time consuming projects. Seemed like a good idea anyway. I've made a variety of socks and am relatively pleased with the result but, as always, they're none of them actually 100% complete and ready for sale yet. I really must work on my attention span! Anyway, I was particularly proud of my latest phone sock because I've started tying in different skills that I've been teaching myself - and this particular phone sock was done entirely by SCRUMBLING, or Free form Crochet. I really enjoy this kind of crochet, not least because I have a massive problem with following patterns, I tend to start off reasonably okish and get sidetracked along the way and the next thing I know, I'm completely fobbing it! So free form suits because there are no rules to follow, absolutely perfect for me - but I don't have much imagination, so it's still a pretty hard process for me. Unfortunately there are no photos to show - other than the end result because I didn't think to write a blog about it, however, I shall try to do better next time. I started off with a small piece of green wool from my oddments bag and started practising with the Bullion Stitch, I love it - but haven't really ever got the hang of it, now this is where scrumbling really comes into it's own, because you're not following a pattern, so you can just do as many or as few stitches as you like. My practice piece was 13 bullion stitches long and curved off to the left slightly - that was as far as my attention span took me, so then I got bored and started to add several stitches into one stitch, kept this up for a while to develop a nice little wave. I then moved onto scarlet wool and double (UK triple) stitch except I was doing the chainless double foundation stitch, did enough of those to have a nice curve that allowed me to make a full circle and tail which, rather fantastically seemed to flow nicely from the green Bullion curve - at that point I decided I had to do something with it, and ended up drawing around my phone to get a rectangular base to put my scrumbled pieces on. From that moment forward - I was making a phone case. Grabbing a lilac, I did yet more Bullion stitches, was back on track with my practice by then, (but only briefly, 13 stitches seems to be my limit) did a bit of a chain and made some shell like curves and moved onto dark purple. Tried a bit of lattice stitch and a rectangle of (US) treble (UK) double. Another frilly effort around the base and corner of the phone sock, with a smidgen of scarlet on the top side. Then I had a go at making little puffs, I just stitched in a round from a base of two chains, and kept going round until it was big enough for me (about three rounds) then I started pulling it in by missing a couple of stitches - and the next thing I knew, I had three beautiful puffs! I played around with my scrumbled pieces and chose the best fit for them, and crochet them together in what I considered the best pattern. However, it still looked pretty bland, I wanted more, so I sewed on some beads to bling up the center of the puffs, and crochet in embroidery thread (which is incredibly hard to do I found!) over the top of the green frilly bit and then did a slip stitch chain to highlight the swirl of the lilac bullion stitch. I'm pretty pleased with the result, especially for a first attempt. I do enjoy scrumbling and am in the middle of another set now - I haven't decided on what I'm going to make from it, but I figured, if I just did my own thing and then kept them all in a bag, at some point, they might come in useful. In the meantime, I have a rather interesting phone case to complete and sell. I intend to line it with some kind of matching/complimentary lining, if I said it was mainly because there are so many loose ends for me and my gnat's attention span to concentrate on, would that be a bad thing to say? If it is - then I'm going to line it with a complimentary material because I think it's a necessary addition :p