Crafts, leisure and happiness

A new giveaway on my store blog  here . Giving away a skein of lovely banana silk yarn in a color of your choice. Here are some pictures. Detail on my store blog! Happy crafting!

I'm hosting a giveaway on my Amber Threads blog. I'm giving away two gorgeous skeins of Duke Silk Yarn. Here are the details. And here's a pic of the yarn I'm giving away. 10 days to go!

I almost did not realize today was a Wednesday. I thought today was a Tuesday for some reason. Where did my Tuesday go or was it Monday that I missed? Hmm, anyway. Here are my WIPs for this week. I'm hoping to be done with the  Kaftan  tomorrow, sleeves to be added. I'm sort of getting bored of knitting kid stuff now. Or it might be because I'm knitting this Kaftan  with acrylic yarn. Nooooo I'm turning into a yarn snob! I thought that day will never come. I have this tweedy yarn from Tahki and decided to make a scarf out of it. I picked the Daisy Stitch from this book. This picture is just of a swatch. I'm still trying out different spacings between the daisies. Here's the picture of the Long Jacket . Not much progress as you can see. I'm not liking this acrylic yarn that my mom had bought for me a long time ago. I have so much of it, I HAVE to make something large.  And yeah finally the promised modeled scarf. Pretty right? Yeah the scarf too! I f...

It's WIPW 6  but it's only Wednesday 2 for me. I missed last week's WIPW because I had to stop knitting and typing the last few days to give my hands a little rest. Nothing serious just repetitive stress. So here is my work in progress this week. This is a long overdue bolero for my friend's daughter, it's the "Little Flirt" by Sublime. It's a really quick knit for quick knitters. But a slow knitter that I am, and the 10 day break that I took, I've only come so far since I cast on 2 weeks ago. That's the back and the left front done and the right front is on the needle. The edges are rolled up so the shaping for the sleeves and neck are not visible. Still have a border to add all around, then done. Hoping to finish tonight if DH and DS are kept busy. My scarf is coming along fine too. I took some not so great pictures of it again and decided not to upload them. I will upload pictures of the final blocked version. In any case it's just lo...

Here are pictures of some more of my finished objects. The other offset wraplan I was making is finally done. It's the 3-6 month size, and with fewer buttons, better ribbing, better button / hole plackets, a better finish and definitely better yarn than the acrylic one that I used for the first wraplan (Stripy) . A dishcloth with a lace pattern made using lion brand cotton ease (worsted weight cotton). This is the Travelling Vines Dishcloth. Not sure I can use it as a dishcloth, maybe a pot holder or something. I had a hard time with this seemingly simple pattern. I must've ripped the first few pattern rows at least 3 times before I got it right. The pattern is beautiful for a scarf or shawl don't you think?

Sigh! Look at all this beautiful yarn! http://www.purlsoho.com/purl/products/yarndetail/410

Cool huh? Took me forever to finish it though. Men's sweaters can be quite monotonous to knit. The sweater I knitted Originally uploaded by vin E Yarn: Paton's Merino Wool Pattern: Inspired (made quite a few modifications) by the pattern on the Berroco patterns site. Here's the link. Doesn't look quite so much like the one on the Berroco site. The sleeves of my sweater are shorter and the whole sweater should have had a closer fit. Nevertheless doesn't look too bad on the whole.

Kimono sweater Originally uploaded by vin E This little sweater was inspired by a pattern I found on the berroco site. Here's the pattern. Made a few modifications to fit Bubba, looks like its going to be too big for him right now. He seems to like it though. When I tried it on him, the first thing he did was spit up on it.

Here's what Kusuma is upto these days. Churning out beautiful things like a factory. This birdie is just so adorable I had to tell the world! She just sent me the link with the pattern to add to this blog. So here it is if you want to make a birdie. crocheted-bird Originally uploaded by kusumaghoshdastidar

I absolutely love visiting a craft supplies store out here in the USA. For one thing it kindles my creativity and another, its fun just going over the hordes of stuff that people do and need supplies for. I'm sure most people from India would feel the same way. I remember when I was in school and needed supplies for a project all I had to do was run to the neighborhood "fancy" store, yeah that's what they were called, atleast in Bangalore, and ask for the specific item I was looking for. If I needed craft paper (or more aptly color paper) there was only 1 kind, at the most 2 and one kind of glue and one kind of card board - K.G card board (if that's the way it is spelt and hmm, I wonder why it was called that). Every aunty I knew in my neighborhood had an interest in art and craft. My mom knew how to emboss on metal, to sew and knit and my neighbors and family friends could knit, crochet, paint on canvas, on cloth, on ceramics, embroider, whole saris sometimes, m...

I've always been interested in craft work, probably because my mom would enroll me in different courses during summers. I never had the time or the resources earlier to pursue this interest until I moved to the US and found I had a lot of weekends and evenings on my hands. So I started to knit. This post is for anyone who has always wanted to knit and did not know how to go about starting it. This is what I did and I hope it helps Pick your project. Pick an easy or intermediate project Pick one where the size of the finished project need not be accurate for it to be usable. For instance a sweater or cardigan may not be a good idea, but a blanket or scarf or bib might be. Pick your project from one of the many available projects online. I picked my project from http://www.michaels.com/ . This was a baby blanket and it involved knitting the same pattern over and over again. Click here for instructions . Pick something that does not involve more than one color. Joining new colored yar...