Extreme Crochet Pt I

It has been rather a tough few days on the fingers, but the results are finally bearing fruit. These little critters have just gone on sale and though I say so myself this isn't too bad a picture for a notoriously rubbish photographer. You can see enough detail, and they look quite jolly, sitting out there in the garden on a crisp October day.

10p for a cup of soup, anyone?

Although it would appear that the rabbit is a tad camera shy, or maybe he senses the shortcomings of the portrait artist.

"I can't be expected to work in these conditions"

Anyway, there will be more posting on the extremities of crochet and the perils of opening an Etsy shop. I have things to say on these matters. Oh yes.

Washing Machine Maintenance

Domestic Tip #1 - always attend to the maintenance of your washing machine. Failure to do so may result in an infestation of bears in the drum….

This is Waldorf. At one point, he was driving a lego tractor around the coffee table, so his ultimate containment in the washing machine was something of a relief.

The Wanton Burden

Keats is everywhere at the moment and it's becoming rather tedious. Autumn, which really is a splendid season, is invariably accompanied by mass Keats quoting to the point where you just want to stuff your ears with dead leaves and squirrels so you don't have to LISTEN to the wretched stuff anymore. It's a nice sonnet and all that, but it raises the foppery quota to unacceptable levels.

So just for a change, we'll go with Shakespeare's Autumn - "Bearing the wanton burden of the prime." It has a fruitier ring to it. And it's not Keats.

To celebrate the wanton burden, here are a couple of autumnal pictures taken on some of our recent walks. First, we have Ham House, a super Jacobean building near the Thames which I rather like even though Mr Horse was underwhelmed.

Ham n' Pineapple, please

It's where Charles II was famously presented with a pineapple. I quite like Charles II but pineapples give me the fear, so fair play to the Merry Monarch for giving it a whirl.

And here is lovely, lovely Winchester cathedral which has featured on this blog before but you can never have too much of it, I say. It was a lovely, crisp day, the water meadows were on top form and the pub wasn't too full. Bingo!

Squids In

It was supposed to be a shrew, an "Animals of Farthing Wood" type shrew. There was no pattern, but how difficult could it be, after all this practice?

Well, in much the same way that no one expects the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects a shrew to turn out to be a squid. But that's what happened. What fell off the hook was not a small, fluffy woodland creature, but an underwater menace by the name of Squirtle.

I am not a shrew.

So onto shrew mark II. So confident that nothing aquatic would occur this time, I even risked using some posh wool (a merino/alpaca blend). The result was almost a shrew, but really, when you examine it closely, it's an anteater. And he's wearing a stripey jumper. But that's fine. It's close enough.

I am not a squid.

With his talent for innovative naming conventions, the small horse christened it "Anty". It took him all of 2 seconds to come up with that one. You can't buy genius like that, folks.

People who know about these things always recommend that you use the cheapest available acrylic wool to make ami. It cannot be denied that this is a wise strategy for both budgetary and aesthetic reasons. However, that Rowan Felted Tweed WAS awfully nice on the fingers, and the end product is much softer and far more "au naturelle" than anything you'd get from acrylic. It was £1.50 for three different coloured oddments in the bargain bucket of my local craft shop. And it will not last long.

(all Donations to the "Rowan Felted Tweed Fund for Blogging Horses" gratefully accepted).

And a walk...

around Wensleydale, since you ask. Rather beautiful too, the high point being the diversion to the ruins of Jervaulx Abbey.

part of the ruins of Jervaulx

The "of history" part of this particular horse is the 16th Century bombshell known as the Henrician Reformation. This, of course, covers the dissolution of monasteries such as Jervaulx and Fountains, which we also visited.

view over the grounds - the sheep on the left is a spy from Lancashire

Fountains was beautiful, if a bit busy for my tastes, but Jervaulx was nothing if not tranquil. You pay if you want to, the leaflets and guides are left in a wooden porch with an honesty box, and then it's just you, some sheep and a fabulous ruin....

Jervaulx Wall

... and a tumbling riot of wildflowers, including white achillea (Yarrow), which I rarely see growing wild in Hampshire.

No doubt the monks would have used achillea for medicinal purposes as it was a common ingredient in dayes of yore, and judging by the amount of the stuff growing on the roadsides near the abbey it would have been a fortuitous place to incur a paper cut. Or scroll cut or whatever the medieval equivalent might be.

The walk continued on from the Abbey, with another diversion in the direction of the tea shop (nice Tunisian Orange cake slices, by the way), and away up into the Wensleydale countryside.

Pretty much this very walk, in fact. Or one which resembled it very closely. And one which I would recommend most heartily.

Lions and Fish

What a useless blogger, wandering off for over a month. But it's been a busy month and since it included both "random crochet threads and a walk or two" it at least lived up to the byline of this blog. And frankly, that's the main thing, eh?

Anyway, on to the random crochet threads. This is "Growly".

He doesn't look very growly at all. More like a slightly depressed pincushion. With bouffant hair. 2 out of 3 of those surveyed said he was a lion, although it took one of those two some moments before she made a positive identification. The third respondent thought he was a hedgehog. I felt ashamed.

Meanwhile, washed up on the shingle, we have "Mr Fishburger".

We did have "Captain Fishbones" as well, a splendid purple creature, but I think one of the cats has dragged him behind the sofa. If these are the sort of jolly japes they get up to when I'm out, I think I might have to ration their biscuits.

It's a Prawn!

Apparantly. Or so I've been told by some undiscerning savages. It looks like a completed nautiloid to me.

I've got permission from Beth to post up the adapted pattern for her nautiloid. She was pleased that the pattern would be available to crocheters as well as knitters, so many thanks.

The directions below are based on Beth's original knitted pattern (which is here) . To a large extent, I winged it, so the crochet instructions are much more of an inexact science. However, the nautiloid is very forgiving - the odd mistake here or there, like forgetting to increase, increasing on the wrong row, or increasing two stitches instead of one, as I did several times - will be difficult to detect, so don't worry too much about trying to achieve 100% accuracy.

I opted for a variegated yarn rather than going for stripes and am glad I did - the first few rows are quite fiddly owing to the fact that you have to work SC with so few stitches on the hook. Trying to introduce alternate colours would have made my head explode. It's not impossible, though. You could try adding your contrast colour after you'd increased up to about 5/6 stitches - it gets much easier then. Then again, a lot depends on your hook size and the deftness of your fingers.

SHELL

Magic ring 3 sts, (or ch 2 and work 3 sc into the second chain).
Row 1 - SC around
Row 2: sc-inc, sc to end - 4 sts.
Row 3: sc around
Row 4: sc around
These four rows are tough on the fingers, but it will get easier.
Rows 5-8: Work as for Rows 1-4 - 5sts.

COILING THE SHELL

Add a little stuffing at this point and roll the shell towards the hook. Once you get the shape you like, you basically need to SC into one of the shell stitches to keep the coil in place. It really is up to you where you choose to pick up the stitch, but try to keep to the centre of the shell as far as you can, and don't pick up too low down or you don't get much of a coil.

Now, you started this process with 5 sts in your round. Now you have 6. What you should do is SC the coil stitch with the stitch on your hook (sc-dec) to return to 5 sts again, but if you forget and end up with 6 sts, it's not the end of the world. As I said, the nautiloid is very forgiving and so long as you keep more or less to the number of stitches, it will look ok.

So, that was row 9.

Round 10: sc around

Round 11: sc around

Round 12: sc inc - sc around. 6 sts.

Round 13: coil shell, sc around.

And again;
Round 14: sc around

Round 15: sc around

Round 16: sc inc, sc around. 7 sts

Round 17: coil shell, sc around.

Just continue working in these blocks of 4 rows until you get the shell size you want. I went to about 28 sts, but you could make a mini nautiloid or a monster nautiloid if you felt like it.

HEAD

I kept increasing by 6 sts each row until I had a half ball shape which more or less fitted into the neck of the shell. So,

Magic ring 6 sts

Row 1 - 1 sc inc into each stitch - 12 sts

Row 2 - 1 sc inc, sc - repeat to end of row - 18 sts

Row 3 - 1 sc inc, 2 sc - repeat to end of row - 24 sts

And so on until the circumference is about right. Then sc around for as many rows as it takes to get the head the right length. I think I did about 2/3 extra sc rows, but it's up to you. Don't close the head, just leave the end open and once you start to attach it to the shell, get the stuffing in.

A word of warning - if you make the head too big, it will look ever so slightly phallic when you sew it on!

To attach the head to the shell, make sure the head fits inside the shell so that the shell gives a sort of collar effect. Either add safety eyes before attaching and stuffing, or sew the eyes on afterwards as in my example.

The tentacles are dead easy - just make a set of chains as long as you like. I made 8 chains of about 19 sts each and sewed them on.

And voila!

As I was taking the photographs, I stepped backwards and stood on a snail, coiled shell an' all. I didn't feel too bad about this as he had just been chomping through my campanula.