Birthday Cupcakes

It was my birthday on Friday.  I'll never understand why you are expected to take cakes to work for your birthday.  When you're little, other people make you cake!

Anyway, I decided to make some fancy little cupcakes and I really enjoyed making them... even if my icing bag split!

Mint Choc Chip complete with fresh mint from the garden!

Fresh Lemon

Pink Vanilla and Turkish Delight

Pink Vanilla and White Chocolate Stars

I think there may be more cupcakes on the cards in the future!

The Gloves are off...

Gloves!  Gloves go with hats!  Time once again to search my friend Ravelry for some gloves, but not just any gloves.  I wanted to use Cable Knitting in a way that was funky.  Ready for my next challenge I set about making some Cabled Writs Warmers.

At first, using the special cable needle, which I got free with Simply Knitting magazine, was really fiddly, but once I got the hang of it, my first pair of gloves were born!!

Hats off and away we go

A friend of mine from work has a sister who is a knit addict.  When she found out I was starting out myself, she did everything she could to help me.  She even introduced me to the AMAZING knitting and crochet online community Ravelry.  I registered straight away as WackyWendy and spent forever in my new world.  Here people share patterns, show projects, get advice and much MUCH more!  I was amazed at the amount of knitters out there and what beautiful, funky, cool and interesting things they have knitted. 

I decided I was ready for the next step.  It was time for a new knitted project and as it was winter, a new hat was calling!!
Again, with help from You Tube, I was able to knit my first hat! it was a slouchy mock cable hat and with You Tube again, I learnt how to knit with circular knitting needles ...

I was so pleased with how it turned out, and it would seem that friends were too!  Before I knew it, I was again knitting the same hat for friends...

 

Now with all these hats, what should I knit next?

and sew to knit...

So... or should that be 'sew', back in September 2008, in an attemt to stop reaching for food and keep my hands busy and my mind occupied, I dedcided to teach myself how to knit!
I didn't have a clue what I was doing, but I took myself off to Hobbycraft, bought myself a pair of knitting needles and some wool.  When I got home, I looked on You Tube and to my delight found lots of videos teaching the basics.  Soon I found myself knitting a plain black scarf.  I found that it was quite thereputic, and although I slipped stitches and the whole scarf was a bit wonkey, I was quite pleased with myself.

Then I got some red, green, purple and pink coloured fluffy wool and knitted 4 plain scarfs for my friends (one of which had an allergic reaction to hers!! Oops!)  I also knitted a loooooong purple, grey and white scarf in one night with chunky wool and size 12 needles.  I felt smug having made such a long scarf in such a short space of time!

After knitting 6 plain garter stitch scarfs, I was ready for my next challenge.....

Duct Tape Dreams

My other half has more Gaffer Tape that you could shake a stick at!  With all that tape laying around, I was inspired to make something that is so manly and useful, into something more feminine that could benefit me!  After a little experimenting, I created a smart and cute little clutch bag!  Et Voila!  Something useful for me!

I was really pleased with how it turned out, and began to experiment further...

The wallets are really quite fiddly to make with all the little pockets for credit cards and they take a good few hours to make.

One of my favourite gaffer creations is the large ladies bag and in a world where plastic bags are frowned upon, this is a really handy and unique bag!

My next gaffer creations are really fun to make and are great if you suffer badly with hayfever and they can be made in all sorts of bright colours.  It's amazing how many different colours of gaffer tape there are when you look!

My man does alot of travelling, and when he's flying and travelling all over the place, he gets through an amazing amount of books, so he inspired me to create a funky little travel kit complete with Luggage Label, Passport Cover and Bookmark!

Welcome

Welcome to my brand spanking new blog!

Here I will be showing you a small slice of my life starting with my dog! 

This is Dusty, a beautiful Miniature Schnauzer who is almost 3 years old.  She's perfect in every way... in my eyes!  

Here she is in the snow...

 

She loves to push her nose into the snow and get it all stuck to her fur...

 

 More from Dusty later!