Flower Bed group

 As some of you may have noticed a lot of people who blog about crochet have been making flowers recently like Lucy at Attic 42 and and Suz at Suz's place. In fact so many people have been having fun with them that a new group has been started for anyone who wants to make a blanket of some sort out of flowers. It's called the Flower Bed and if well worth following to see just how different the same (or similar) designs can be when done in different yarns and sizes.

I have done a blog post over there about trying out some versions myself. The one above is what I'm planning to make more of to make into a blanket. It isn't quite the Japanese design many people are using but you can find the pattern for this design on the Flower Bed as it is a variant designed by Suz. I have five colours of chenille yarn, three in variants of pink/rust as well as the yellow and green.

While trying out options I also did a version in 2 strands of double knit which I really like, well perhaps not the colours I picked so much but the design is nice. This was done with a 6mm hook and is really quite thick and snuggly.

 From that sample and Tom's comment it looked like a coaster for a teapot a second plan was hatched.
This is where I have got to so far.

It is a different design again and was sort of winged last night while roleplaying so once I have made sure it works properly I will write it up. It comes out about 10" across and I plan to make several as a set of spring coloured placemats !

Considering I normally lean towards smaller rather than larger I am surprised to find I am enjoying making something so big and chunky.

A year of a Tree

 I have just found this idea via another blog. You can find the full idea here at A Year of a Tree.

Basically you pick a tree and observe it regularly through out the year seeing what it is like and how it changes over time. I have had a word with Noddles and we have agreed we will do it and pick a tree in the park we walk through every day to go to school.

The photo above is part of the park taken last year in the snow. We will go over sometime this week and chose a tree, it's half-term so one of the few weeks in the year we aren't going through it daily!

This is another part of the park

and these two are a couple of big mature trees just outside the park we sometimes walk past if we go round instead of through the park.

So plenty to choose from and that's without considering the trees lining Binley Rd or the Conker trees in the other park or all the trees on the old railway embankment between the school and another public green space on the other side of the road !

Once we have chosen our tree I will post here and join the Year of a Tree group properly.

More Termari

I have made a couple more Temari recently.

The first is in various shades of yellows and oranges. It is basically done by wrapping thread round the mari (the base ball) in a specific pattern using pins to keep them tight together at the circumference of the ball and then adding a band of copper coloured thread round the middle which takes the place of the pins to hold the threads in place.

The Second was done as a stitch along on the Talktermari Yahoo group which is a wonderful group to learn how to make these balls.  The way the stitch along was done I didn't know what we were making when we started and it was quite an exercise in following purely written instructions. The result was a turtle ! I repeated the pattern but smaller on the other side. I am undecided if I should add anything more in the way of decoration to the termari or not.