ADAM AT HOME UK

As usual,  the spoken bit's HERE This time last year, at the beginning of the first lockdown, I made a list of all the things I wanted to achieve.  Amongst a wide variety of stuff was learning to crochet.  Now there are many thousands of good people out there in You Tube Land showing off their crochet skills, some of them are even quite good teachers.  I was fairly ruthless in my elimination - some folk have annoying mannerisms of speech, some I simply could not understand properly (there are some American accents I find almost impenetrable I'm afraid - I am British, after all!).   But in the end I had a nice selection of channels who gave out good information and explained things to my satisfaction.  Among several, there were Bonny Bay, Hooked by Robin, Olga Poltrova, Fiber Spider and Mikey from The Crochet Crowd.  In the process of all this learning, I found myself downloading patterns where I could and learning to read them (thank you Mikey in particular). Where

If you'd like to listen rather than read, then please do so HERE Sewing the silk outer layer of this project has been (well, still is!) an interesting journey... The fabric is incredibly slippery and I have to tack the relevant pieces together about 1.5" to 2" away from the edge before I can consider doing any proper tacking/sewing. The photo shows the outer tacking as well as a linen tape (part of an old sheet... tinted with tea, naturally!) tacked into place to enable the actual stitching.  Lovely silk thread from  De Vere Yarns , a real pleasure to use. I'm pleased to note (lower half of the photo) that I seem to stitch at eight stitches to the inch: in real terms, this means sixteen as it is a back stitch. Quite respectable! Whether this use of tape is historically accurate I'm not sure, but it makes for a stronger, straighter seam (in my view) and has the added bonus that the top edge can be sewn down to cover the raw, easily-frayed edge. Frankly, I was expec