ADAM AT HOME UK

An audio clip will appear  HERE   in due course... I am always amazed at just how much crochet I churn out.  I suppose it IS my main occupation now, but there are quite long stretches where things just 'progress' towards completion: Work In Progress, or WIPs as they seem to be known.  Well, of late, several projects seem to have come together in quite quick succession:- In the wake of my Ocean Waves wrap came a scarf using the same pattern and yarn, but in a slightly different way: On the tail of that was probably my favourite so far - a pineapple shawl worked in hand-dyed alpaca-and-silk yarn, to a pattern by my guru Fiber Spider on YouTube. It's 6 ft by 3 ft 6" and thus this photo really only shows half... The upper photo shows the blocking process, where one dampens the shawl and stretches it out to open up the lace-work.  As you can see, an awful  lot of pins are involved, but the end product IS worth it.  It's one of those patterns that seems ini...

For the spoken version, please click  HEREABOUTS ...  BLOG CATCH-UP I feel a slight apology is in order - not that I imagine there's anybody out there looking at this any more! I hit a couple of 'tricky' spots with the banyan, not the least of which was trying to sort the hem out. There was no way I had the space to lay things out here, so I ended up using Martin-at-Pennell's wonderful cutting table - my goodness it's useful having a friendly local haberdashers!  The garment is 90% finished I suppose... The last hurdle is to sort out the sleeve length: I have left them over-long as I want to turn them back to form a cuff... but it means  a bit of unpicking - not difficult with a hand-sewn garment, just tedious... so it gets put aside.  Now I have a small kitten (of which more later) which means the banyan has been bundled away until there's less danger of someone's claws shredding the silk damask... In the meantime, I have made myself several more items of ...

For some reason, I did not post this back in May... so here it is, 'better late than never' !! To bring you up-to-date on a few things: THE BANYAN progresses, albeit slowly.  There's an awful lot of just plain old sewing of long, straight seams.  Perfectly enjoyable, but not really 'newsworthy! The second photo shows the neck of the lining being re-inforced, prior to stitching it into the outer layer. Exciting stuff... but I have a few more straight seams to sew before I can move on to that... Then I have been developing my latest crochet pattern, called Treble Triangles, which is now slowly taking shape as a wrap... Oh... and on top on all that... I have just taken up the tenor Viola da gamba! When I left school, forty-five-odd years ago, it had been my intention to learn the gamba as my second study when I went to college to study singing.  Of course life is never quite that straightforward and I ended up at Guildhall - where second study was, automatically, piano :-(...

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 y...

This whole episode is audio only, but it will help to look through the photos below while listening. Click  HERE  to start...

Back in the mists of time... when the 'Lockdown' concept was something new and... exciting? no, perhaps not quite that ! Anyway, back then, I wrote down a list of about eighteen things I wanted to achieve. Some of these remain undone (going through the photo album and blog from my trip to New Zealand and Australia back in 2007 [adamabroad2007.blogspot.com if you are interested], tidying my dining room/craft space, etc) but sewing more clothes was on that list - and I've certainly done more than enough of THAT ... ha ha;  learning to crochet was another one and, finally, after a few false starts (mainly to do with finding a good 'teacher' from the myriad YouTube vids out there) that discipline has taken a firm hold - indeed, I can safely say I am totally hooked (pun intended). Bar the obligatory pot stands, my first proper piece was this triangular shawl: in a pattern called 'Rustic Windows' (thank you Fiber Spider on YouTu...