Blue Stripes

This week I am absolutely loving my new Blue Stripey wellies from Joules. They have Green and Blue Stripes with a jaunty little orange stripe up the back of the boot and the very delightful name of Water Fall ~ my all time favourite Watery colours.


Just right for late Autumny walks through the lovely crisp, scrunchy leaves and more than likely for stamping through puddles and trudging through snow later on in the year! This year I am determined to be prepared for the wet and wintery weather when it arrives.


Loving my Blue Stripey socks too! Just right for feet that need to stay warm and dry inside the Blue Stripey Wellies out in the cold and also for sitting cosily on the settee with a cup of tea and some hooky stripes.


Also loving my Blue Granny Stripes ~ although progress has not been as quick as I would have liked and these particular Granny Stripes are at the stage of looking very scarf like at the moment! And although a scarf would come in very handy right now, these stripes are destined to be a snuggly Blue Stripey Granny blanket just right for keeping warm and cosy on a wintery evening.


I'm off now to try and hook up a few more Blue Stripes ~ Enjoy your weekend and I'll see you all very soon :O)xx

Halloween

Every Friday afternoon I drive to the next village along the coast to take my daughter to her dancing class. Last Friday I was driving along, with both kids in the back of the car ~ chatting/squabbling as usual ~ when all I heard was screeches of delight and excited cries of LOOK! and Pleeeeease Mum can we stop? I couldn't imagine for a minute what all the fuss was about, but I promptly did as I was told and this is what we saw...........


An absolutely fabulous Halloween decoration which was outside someone's house! Isn't it super? It must of taken ages to put it all together and all the little details are really lovely. I particularly love the stripey black and purple tights that these three lovely ladies are wearing on their dingly, dangly, witchy legs.

My kids, like most kids, love everything Halloweeny! They love all the dressing up and all the gory and yucky stuff ~ the more gory the better in their eyes!

But, we don't let them go Trick or Treating (or Trickle Treating as it is known in our house) as it's something we just don't feel comfortable with. Instead, we let them do the dressing up bit and then Daddy plays Spooky Halloween Hide and Seek with them in the house with all the lights off. We also play some of the more traditional Halloween games ~ such as dooking/bobbing for apples, which is a lot of fun and we always end up getting soaking wet too!


Later on this evening we will all get settled down in front of the telly to watch a spooky Halloween film ~ this years choice is the not so scary Disney film Spooky Buddies and as always there will be a plentiful supply of Halloween treats to tuck into whilst watching.

I hope that you all enjoy your Halloween activities ~ whatever they may be ~ and I will hopefully see you all very soon :O)x

Smiley things :O)

Making me smile today is the progress that I have been making with my blue stripey blanket.


I have been whizzing back and forward along these stripey rows making lots of treble clusters of cozy blue loveliness. I love how easy this project is ~ easy, mindless crochet that can be picked up and put down without too much thinking about. And these days that's exactly the sort of crocheting that I need.

Smiley thing number two is this lovely new crochet book which just happened to pop through my door this week ~ Cute and Easy Crochet by Nicki Trench. Do you see that EASY word cropping up again? I bought this book from The Book People for just £3.99 ~ can you believe it? I had to do a double take for it to sink in. There was really no reason why I couldn't have this book ~ It just had to be mine! What an absolute bargain! This really is a super book and it is jam packed with lots of lovely projects which are just begging to be made ~ the only problem that I am going to have is deciding what to actually make first.

Also making me smile today is my pretty new year planner. I have been particularly scatterbrained over the past few weeks. Forgetting about meetings for work, missing dental appointments and my worst scatterbrained moment of all was turning up a week early for parent's night at my little boy's school!

Up until now my usual haphazzard method is to scribble things down on little pieces of paper and then end up hunting frantically for them in one of my many piles! So, in an attempt to get myself a bit more organised ~ and to save my poor children squirming with embarrassment at their mother ~ I am going to try and write down appointments as soon as I get them. This year planner is great because it has a side for me and a side for the rest of the family per page ~ there really is no excuse now is there? Wish me (and my children) luck!

I hope that you find lots to be smiley about today too! See you all soon :O)xx

Granny Stripes

At last!

I have finally managed to get around to making a start on a Granny Stripe blanket. I have been wanting to crochet one of these lovelies ever since they started doing the rounds of Blogland last year, but have just never had the time up until now. But here I am jumping on the Granny Stripe bandwagon and I have to say that I am really looking forward to the ride.

The foundation chain has to be done in multiples of three ~ so I sat yesterday and crocheted a chain whilst counting 123,123,123 in my head. In the absence of a size 5 hook I remembered to crochet my chain loosely on my trusty and very favourite size 4 in order to make crocheting the first row as easy as possible.
I am making this Granny Stripe for my little boy and want it to be around about the single bed size when finished. So, I carried on counting 123, 123, 123 in my head until I thought the chain looked the right length and then ran up stairs with hook and chain in hand and measured it against the bed. That's about as technical as I get these days!

This Boy Granny Stripe is going to be made using Stylecraft Special DK in various shades of blue, with perhaps a few other colours thrown in for good measure. But I've not quite decided whether or not I'll deviate from the Blueness or not yet!


These are the colours that I have chosen so far ~
Aster ~ Royal ~ Midnight ~ Denim ~ Cloud Blue ~ Turquoise ~ Sherbet ~ Bluebell.
I am really excited about this blanket and now that I have finished the tricksy foundation row I am raring to go and can't wait to go whizzing along the rows with ease ~ making lots of lovely Blue treble clusters.

Right! I'm off now to put the kettle on for a cuppa and then get settled for a few rows of Granny Stripes :O)xx

Side View

This is the view from our side gate immediately to the left our new house.


If you walk along the pathway and turn right up the adjoining field this is the view that you get! This hilly structure is North Berwick Law ~ which is a volcanic plug rising 615 feet above sea level.


Just after we moved to this beautiful town, we decided to make a day of it and climb all the way up to the top ~ we rounded up the kids and a couple extra ~ and headed off.


The climb starts of at a reasonable pace but it does become very steep indeed and as we got closer to the top I was practically crawling on my hands and knees and could have done with some extra oxygen too. I am soooooooooooo unfit! It really doesn't help when you have a small boy racing all the way up and the fact that you are trying to keep up with him in the fear that he might slip and fall all the way down! Boys!!


Here is the boy in question actually sitting still long enough to have his picture taken!


The effort of all that climbing is definitely rewarded when you get to the top as the panoramic views across East Lothian and the Firth of Forth are absolutely amazing ~ you can see for miles and miles in all directions. We are really lucky in this little part of the world as we are surrounded by countryside,the sea and some very beautiful beaches that stretch for miles along the East Lothian coast.


After a much needed rest at the top ~ for us oldies to catch our breath ~ we had a much more leisurely walk back down and then it was back home for a hard earned cup of tea and big slice of cake :O)xx

Wash Day Blues

And greens ~ and pinks ~ and reds ~ and yellows and others too!

A few weeks back ~ whilst I was working my way through the usual daily mountain of washing ~ I felt that I needed something to take the dreariness out of doing the laundry.

Something to make the whole chore a little bit more pleasurable ~ so what better way to cheer myself up than a lovely new colourful crocheted peg bag.


I took some of my inspiration from Ravelry, but basically my colourful new peg bag is just a stripey rectangle shaped piece of crochet made from Rico Creative Cotton.


I have to say that I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the Rico Cotton, it can sometimes be a bit splitty to work with, and it does sort of look a little like beautifully coloured string. However ~ even after saying that ~ I do kind of quite like the overall finished effect that it gives to the crochet fabric.

Anyway ~ let's get back to the peg bag.

First of all I started by crocheting a rectangle with a hand sized slot about three quarters of the way down. I then folded the finished rectangle over and threaded a wooden hanger through one of the middle stitches at the top. All that was left for me to do after that was to crochet the sides and the bottom closed. I also decided to pretty it up a little bit by adding a bobbly edging and.........Ta Dah!


There we have it!


A colourful little crochet peg bag all ready to brighten up my Wash Day Blues and because I now have a lovely new brightly coloured peg bag I may just need to go out and buy myself to some new brightly coloured pegs to go with it! :O) xx

edited to add :: I have been asked to do a tutorial for my peg bag and I will try to do this asap for those of you that would like to give it a go :O)xx

Bloggy Break

Goodness me!

That was a much longer bloggy break than even I anticipated having ~ but I'm really happy to be back in the land of Blog again. I'm hoping that I'll still have some of my lovely readers left! And although I haven't actually been blogging myself I have still been checking in regularly with everyone's blogs and have enjoyed reading about all your Summer Holiday exploits.


During the long bloggy break the BIG MOVE has finally taken place and after a very long eighteen months our little house was sold in June. We have now taken up residence in this modest three bed roomed semi detached house in my childhood hometown ~ which is by the seaside ~ and I am absolutely thrilled to be back home. Back near the beach and more importantly just a short two minute walk from my Mum's house ~ what could be better?


We have already spent a fair bit of time walking on the beach looking for treasures, paddling in the sea and taking in all the wonderful seasidey views ~ It makes me feel so lucky to be able to have my children spend some of their childhood by the seaside and experience the same pleasures that I had growing up in such a wonderful place.


As I've been so busy with the new house there hasn't been much time to spend on any hooky stuff ~ although I have been tying up some loose ends on my Rico Creative Cotton project ~ which I hope to be able to share with you sometime soon.


It really is good to be back! I'm off now to do a very quick food shop before heading off on the school run to collect a small boy. I hope that you all have a fabby weekend and I'll see you all sometime next week :O)x