Secrets and colour

Last week was all about pattern writing, this time for the book.
I finally have a book skeleton, its very scary to see it printed out and in a display book, but its also very exciting and beginning to feel real.
I did take a photo of some wool on top of the display book so I could show you, but I must of deleted it off the camera as I can't find it.

I have almost finished Book Blanket no 8 (only 2 more to go :-) and I discovered I had made far too many of these
They are far too pretty to go to the discard pile, so I thought I'd make a new blanket for me to self publish and did a little bit of swatching.
I can't really spend much time developing it further at the moment as I have too many other things to do, but I'm quite happy with the swatch (even though the photo is a bit rubbish)

      

As I've almost finished no 8, I need some yarn for no 9, so I acquired some Knit by Numbers DK from the John Arbon Textiles shop round the corner.

There are a few colours missing, one of them is the pink, which is being spun shortly, so I'm a bit reluctant to start the blanket without it.

As I've started writing the book, I need to start working on swatches for illustration, I've already finished 2 of the colour wheels, so needed to make the last one, so started playing with the yarn in my colour wheel basket.
And subsequently found another pile of tiny motifs to play with, which ended up with another idea for a blanket I don't have time to make.

        

This one will incorporate a skein of Easyknits and Skein Queen, which are both saturated colour, but I think will look amazing with the natural colours.
The motifs are going to be tiny, the squares in the photo below are only 2 inches wide, so I will have to make millions for a blanket, so its going to be a very long process.

So I have 2 forbidden blankets, that I shouldn't be working on as I don't have the time, and it was a huge struggle to put them to one side.

But luckily I am easily distracted, and was especially distracted when the yarn arrived for my secret Love Crochet project.

   

I can't tell you much about the project yet, I've finished half the crochet bit and am going to start writing the patterns to day.
But I can tell you about the yarn and give you the colour numbers so you can start collecting.
The yarn is Lang Baby Cotton,  its a perfect time to buy as its reduced from £4.25 to £3.80
You can find it HERE
The colours are as follows 14 (yellow), 16 (lime), 116 (apple), 74 (jade), 79 (duck egg), 78 (turquoise), 46 (violet), 7 (lilac), 19 (pale barbie), 55 (pink), 128 (soft red), 27 (orange)
The colours don't actually have names, they are only listed as numbers on the site, the names are mine and hopefully will make it easier for you to choose.
Hopefully I'll be able to tell you more about the project next week.

And yesterday I actually took some time off work and we went for a afternoon stroll to Lynmouth for an ice cream.
I have never seen the tide so low, the photo below will give you an idea of how far you needed to walk to get to the sea.
If you click on the photo its should bring up an enlargement, its a panoramic photo which makes the river look wonky, its straight in real life.
If you look carefully at the base of the hill you can just make out the buildings at Lynmouth.

Colour theory and excuses

Last week I did a little bit of moaning about the fact I can't share what I'm crocheting at the moment.
I have 3 secret projects on the go at the moment.

The first and biggest project is my book, I have finally started writing patterns and realised I have a mountain of work to do.
Luckily the blankets are under control, I've finished 7 blankets and am well over half way through number 8, numbers 9 and 10 are in the design stage.
Number 9 is going to be relatively simple, but I'm planning a mega complex explosion of colour for number 10 :-)
The second project is the Zodiac which is really 2 in 1 as I'm having to sew in Phil's ends and construct the knitted blanket as well as the crochet one.
I think we are up to September, I'd like to get it finished ASAP, but I need to be realistic and do all the other things I need to do too.
And the last project is something I am working on for Love Crochet, hopefully all will be revealed in the very near future.

All these projects mean that I don't really have much to say or share with you, I've been very quiet on Instagram and my other social networking sites.
Yesterday I decided I needed to do something positive about it rather than moaning that I was too busy.

So here is yesterday's work.
It is the beginnings of a colour wheel/rainbow tutorial.
I made my own life incredibly difficult when I closed NDS, all my designs are made out of NDS yarns and so I need to recommend replacements to you so you can make my designs.
I didn't realise how difficult finding yarns to recommend would be, firstly I need to find natural yarns that I enjoy using and then I need to choose the yarns that have the biggest colour ranges in them..sigh..
DK isn't too difficult as there are lots of DK yarns I like, but 4 ply is proving a bit of a nightmare.

So to make it as easy as possible for you I decided I needed to do some swatches to explain what I'm trying to say.

 

I started off with 2 big piles of yarn, because stupidly I thought I could do all the colour wheel swatches for both in a day!

The 2 yarns are my NDS colours, which are my default colours and the other yarn is Drops Alpaca

        

After I had crocheted a couple of base circles I realised I didn't have time to do both yarns, so the Drops Alpaca got put back in the basket for another day.

My plan was to do 3 wheels for each yarn, one for the primary colours, one for the secondary colours and one whole wheel.

I started with the whole wheel (primary, secondary and tertiary colours)  as it was easier to work backwards.

The base colour is silver, as I don't really like white, its far too easy to get dirty.

I try not to wear white as it seems to instantly attract food, whether I've eaten or not.

Anyway this is the whole NDS colour wheel, these are most of the colours I use for all my designs.

There are a few other colours, but if you collect these you should be able to make most of my blankets easily.

 I photographed the wheel on a white background as in theory this would give the truest colours, however I also photographed it on the natural wooden background of my coffee table because I like the way the colours look against the wood.

Neither of the above photo's look completely right, so I will need to take lots more photo's before I am happy with them.

The same goes for the photo's below, which are the secondary colours in the colour wheel.

Then I ran out of time and so the primary colour wheel is missing.

Once I've finished the 3 NDS wheels I will re-photograph them and write an explanation that hopefully will make a lot more sense than the waffle I have written in the blog post :-)

Bank holiday and secrets

You might notice I am a bit quiet on the social networking front.
I've started to tackle my "To Do" list and realised that about 90% of it is secret projects I can't share.
I'm crocheting away in the back ground and it looks like I am doing nothing.
I'm really hoping I can start to reveal my Love Crochet project very soon, its very exciting and I had a eureka moment yesterday where the whole thing transformed into something I was happy and excited about.
Up until then I wasn't sure and considered starting it all over again.

Anyway I can share my bank holiday photo's.
My baby and his partner James came for a short weekend visit and we went on a family picnic to Landacre or Lanacre as it's know by the locals.
We had an amazing day, here are a few photo's :-)

Phil and I started off with the "walk of shame" down the hill to pick up our car's from Lynmouth.
There had been an auction at the Rising Sun to raise funds for the pre-schoolers at our local school.
Phil had driven there straight from work and I had driven the family down, I wasn't too bad, but Phil had had a really messy night and was suffering the morning after :-)
I love this photo, it really sums up the "walk of shame"

 

Then we drove across the moor to Lanacre and lay int he sun beside the river, basking in the sun.

 

Oh and yesterday I added some more yarn to Ebay, which you can find HERE

   

 

John Arbon's Open Mill Weekend

Daisy and I had a brilliant time over the weekend.
We went to help John and Juliet with their open mill weekend.

I thought I was going to sit and crochet and chat to customers, however it was so busy that I ended up on the floor selling with a huge queue of customers waiting patiently to pay.
I'd even been to see Juliet to get some yarn for a new version of Lorna Doone so that I could crochet with their yarn, sadly the new Lorna didn't really happen.
However I have almost finished crocheting her now and there will be a blog post when she is finished :-)

It was lovely to be in the wool show atmosphere without any of the pressures of setting up, breaking down and worrying about costs.
I'm already looking forward to helping again next year :-)