Operation Front Room!

I've been living in a rented house for over a year now, and I haven't really done a lot to it to make it feel more homely as I wasn't sure how long I was going to stay here.

Recently we have had insulation work done. Because we don't have cavity walls, they had to attached 90mm foam boards to the inside of the house at the front, and onto the outside of the house at the back. This means the walls of the front room and front bedroom are now an extra 9 cm thick and are now a different colour to the rest of the house.

Our landlady has organised a decorator to come in and repaint the walls, and this has spurred me on to actually make the house more like a home.

The front room currently is the spare bedroom for guests and is used as my husband's computer room, so I've decided to claim the front room as my own, to store all my sewing and craft things that are currently taking over the living room.

 At the moment, the front room is being used as a storage space. It's a very small room dominated by a massive fire place and a huge cupboard/shelving unit, and it can get very cold, so hopefully the insulation will make a difference.

One of the other reasons I want to start using the front room, apart from storing my craft and knitting things, is to use it as my office. I have always wanted to write a novel, and I have had an idea for a story for the past 4 years but unfortunately I think finding things to distract myself. The living room is too comfortable with a sofa and tv, so I thought if I had a space dedicated to just writing and being creative, it might help me to be more disciplined.

I have made a small start on the room by changing the curtains. The previous curtains were thin and a beige colour, so not very inspiring , so I change them for cream ones with blue/green poppies on them. They were £9.99 from Home Bargains and they match the carpet really well.

I have also started re-upholstering some of the chairs that came with the house, as we can't afford new chairs. I had some material left over from a door curtain I made and cut out a square to re-cover the chair.

To attach the material, I must admit, was a bit of a botch job, using things I could find around the house. So I used a mixture of drawing pins and small nails, but it works so I'm not complaining :)

So this is now my project to keep me occupied while looking for a job at the same time. I will try to update this more regularly than I have done before and hopefully there are ideas here that you can use too!

Memory Blanket

At the moment I have the builders round to put in some insulation, which means I have to be in the house to let them in. Yesterday they switched off the gas for a while, which I annoyed me a bit as I wanted to make some mince pies, so I had to find something else to occupy myself.

I've had an idea for a couple of weeks to make a blanket, but each square would represent each year Spence and I have been married. This has now evolved into a Memory Blanket,as I would get too impatient waiting for our next anniversary to knit a square. I managed to create my own pattern and knit the square in one day and I was really pleased with the result.

I do hope that this blanket will grow and be filled with happy memories and that it will be used and cherished by future generations. It will be a picture story telling the life of our little family.

I will update the blog with new squares when I make them, and you can watch the blanket grow :) and hopefully it will encourage you to create your own, whether knitted like mine or maybe even a scrapbook.

The red square is the day Spence and I got married and the Snowflake square represents our first Christmas together as Mr and Mrs.

My New Shop

I'm aware I haven't written on my blog for such a long time, that is because I have been a very busy bee :)

I have started a little business called J'adorele back in September and that has had most of my attention. I make knitted items such as hats, scarves, and blankets and hand sewn items like my t-shirt cushion covers and Christmas Stockings.

At the moment I do have a sale on. 10% off all items listed on my etsy shop and 30% off all custom orders and free delivery. I also have a facebook page and a twitter account so please check them out!

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Jadorele

Etsy: http://www.etsy.com/shop/Jadorele?ref=si_shop

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jadorele

My New Draft Excluder

Because of subsidence of the ground (I don't know when it happened, it was before I moved in) there is a massive gap between the kitchen floor and the bottom of the door and on really cold nights, you can feel the cold air coming through. So I decided to make a draft excluder to try keep the cold out.

If you want to make your own this is how I made mine.

• 4mm knitting needles (size 8)
• odd balls of wool in the colours of your choice - I used cream, white brown and red as those are the colours in the room
• stuffing - I used rags left over from tshirts I made into cushion covers. You could use old clothing and cut into pieces for stuffing.
• Wool sewing needle - if you don't have one, use a large strong sewing needle.

Measure the bottom edge of your door and make the length of your draft excluder a inch or two longer than the door measurement. My excluder is 33 inches.

Cast on 50 stitches and knit in stripes. I alternated between garter stitch and stocking stitch on each stripe, so a cream stripe is all garter stitch then the red stripe is stocking stitch and so on.

When your draft excluder is the length you want, cast off and join the edges using blanket stitch using the wool needle and fill it with the choice of your filling as you go along.

this link shows you how to do a blanket stitch http://www.cherrymenlove.com/crafts-how-tos/2009/11/how-to-sew-blanket-stitch.html

thanks for reading!

T-shirt Cushion

I have loads of old clothes that I find hard to throw away as they have sentimental value or are just too pretty to get rid of. So I decided to make some into cushion covers.

The instructions will fit a cushion pad size 18 x 18 inches.

1) First select your tshirt/item of clothing.

2) unpick or cut along the hem and side seams so it looks like an apron.

3) Cut out a 20 x 20 inch piece of the front piece and two 20 x 12 inch pieces for the back of the cushion. (However mine in the photo turned out rectangular by accident!)

4) with the two back pieces, hem one end of each.

5) when you have finished hemming the back pieces, place the t shirt front on the floor with the right (front) side facing you. Then place the back pieces on top with the wrong side facing you (you're making the cushion cover inside out). The back pieces should overlap.

 Pin together and sew either by hand or with a sewing machine. When finished, remove pins, turn it the right way out and you have a cushion!

you can do this pattern with other clothes than just t-shirts. For ideas add buttons, ribbons and patches to make your cushion unique.

Cute bear hat

At the moment I'm doing a lot of knitting as I have some friends expecting a baby soon, so I've been knitting some little hats and currently progressing through a baby blanket.

At church on Sunday night, they were showing the England v France football match, (which didn't end well for us) and for those who didn't want to watch the match, the Muppets film was being shown in another room.

As I was trying to knit in the dark with Kermit and Miss Piggy on screen, my friend Beth saw the little hat with bear ears on it and asked me if I could knit one for her and that she would pay me for it. Well I wasn't going to turn that down, and I wanted to knit an adult size bear hat for ages but never got round to it.

I didn't use a pattern off the web, instead I just adapted a pattern that I already had and attached ears to it :)

I used 5mm and 6mm straight needles.

Cast 108 sts using 5mm needles.

Do a K2, P2 rib for 6 rows.

On the 7th row P2, P2tog (P4, P2 tog)

Change to 6mm needles

Beginning with a Knit row, continue in stocking stitch until the hat measures about 23cm from beginning, ending on a Purl row.

Shape Crown

1 - K1 (K2tog, K3) k2tog, k2

2 - Purl

3- k1 (k2tog, k3)

4 - Purl

5 - k1 (k2tog, k2)

6 - purl

7 - k1, (k2tog, k1)

8 - purl

9 - k1, k2tog

thread yarn through remaining stitches and pull tightly. Sew up the hat and weave in the ends.

Ears x 2

Using 6mm needles cast on 12 sts

Work in garter st for 8 rows

9 - K2tog, k to last 2, k2tog (10 sts)

10 - k2tog, knit to last 2, k2tog (8 sts)

11 - k2tog, knit to last 2, k2tog (6 sts)

12 - k2tog, knit to last 2, k2tog (4 sts)

Rows 13 - 16 increase 1 st at the beginning and end of each row until you have 12 sts again, Work in garter st for 8 rows and cast off.

Sew up the ears and attach to hat.

Back again with bridesmaids' bouquets

Hello, it's been a while since my last post, mostly due to the fact I was busy with wedding prep and I got married! 

The days leading up to the wedding were so stressful as I still had 1 bridesmaids bouquet to finish and I was panicking that it wasn't going to get finished. Luckily though it all came together and it looked fantastic on the day :)

I used the same technique as my bouquet, a polystyrene ball with knitted roses attached to it with diamante corsage pins. I also used 2 corsages I bought from a haberdashery in the sale for 98p each, as it went with the colours and also took up some space so I didn't need to knit more roses!

The pattern was a lot simpler and bigger than the one used for my bouquet and I got it off the knittingpatterncentral.com website, which is like a database of free knitting patterns for personal use.

The pattern is this:

Row1 : k60
Row2 : k2, [yo, k2tog, k4] 9 times, yo, k2tog, k2
Row3: k60
Row4: k60
Row5: k60
Row6: k60
Row7: k60
Row8: k5, [yo, k2tog, k4] 8 times, yo, k2tog, k5
Row9: k60
Row10: k2tog 30 times
Row11: k30
Row12: k2tog 15 times
Row13: k15
Row14: k2tog 7 times, k1
Row15: k8
Row16: k2tog 4 times
Row17: k4
Cast off leaving a long length to use use for sewing
Twist into a rose shape and sew to secure..

This pattern was also used for the buttonholes and for the table place settings for each guest, with their name written on a paper leaf attached to it.