I. Love. To. Crochet.

I love to Crochet.

Plain and simple. It's a fact.

But my crochet tends not to be very plain.

In fact in tends to be pretty colourful.

Very Lucy-ish, of Attic24 bloggy fame.

I chose this style of rainbowy hooky goodness before discovering her blog.... but seeing her lovely high colour crochet exploits has done nothing to tone down my hooky-ing!

This is a cushion cover I've recently been working on.... 

See what I mean about colourful?!

These balls of gorgeous full on colour happened into my home last week.

Again, inspired my Lucy and her current mandala obsession and her recent acquisition of some of this very same make of yarn.

It is Stylecraft Classique Cotton DK bought from Wool Warehouse.

I started off with these colours but have since also got pastel blue and pink, cream, and white.

And this is what I bought it for.... to make these super cute coasters.

Aren't they lovely? 

I saw a picture of  these or something very similar on FB. 

So I googled crochet coasters, and found This Pattern.

I love that this pattern was based on a circle motif from 1893- but it doesn't look at all out of place crocheted in bright modern colours!

I didn't overly like the way the last round crocheted up, so had a play with the first one I made til I was happy.

Now there's no stopping me and I have a steadily growing pile of them on my table!

I will also blame this yarny purchase on Lucy too....

This is Stylecraft Special Chunky also from Wool Warehouse, but bought in a colour pack.

It was This Post on Attic24 that made me need this wool, and I do plan on trying that cushion sometime..... but for now I'm making this simple round cushion with it....

Very simple, nothing fancy. Just a colourful soft squishy cushion.

So that's what I've been up to these last few days.

Happy crocheting to you if that's what you do! :o)

Wool Winder

I find shop bought "balls" of wool very hard to crochet with. 

They don't roll, and due to their shape I find the wool doesn't naturally unravel- I have to pull at it to loosen up enough for the next few stitches.

This isn't great for fast or smooth crochet; nor is it good for my hands or arms.

A lovely round ball that would be free to roll is so much nicer to work from.So as I've already blogged- I bought a Wool Winder. And here it is in use.

Unfortunately, and rather stupidly, I didn't actually research it that well before buying.

I thought it was going to be able to wind me lovely round balls.

It turns out that it doesn't.

As you can see from the photo below, there is quite a large  middle to them, where they wind onto the spindle.

 

Winding is quite fun to do, but can be quite a staticky (is that really a word?!) business- especially if winding acrylic yarn and the winder is clipped onto a plastic table!

But it does have a rather annoying fault. 

The metal yarn guide positions the wool in the right place for winding. This however does not clip into  place as suggested in the instructions, and very annoyingly it moves. This makes smooth winding virtually impossible.

However a bit of blue tack stuck underneath has pretty much sorted this problem though!

This is what the balls look like once wound- after removing from the winder the hole in the middle does tend to disappear a bit, and the resulting ball is quite solid.

 

Having used these balls now to crochet with, I definitely think they are better than the shop bought pill shaped balls.

I'm glad I bought it- I'll be using it to rewind all my new balls of wool from now on.

And it has quite a cute retro look to it- don't you think?!