Patience and Pom-poms

When I tell people that I like knitting and crocheting, they often respond by saying how they admire my patience and that their lack of it prevents them from doing needlework themselves. That always makes me feel slightly ashamed because I really don't have a lot of patience. It's one of the things I do have to work on as there's nothing worse than being impatient with small children. But it's really driving me nuts when I have to wait for my three year old son to put on his shoes, come inside, brush his teeth... especially when  I'm already pressed for time. Only that showing my impatience is making it worse and might even culminate in a tantrum. 

But doing crafts requires a different kind of patience I think. You're not waiting for someone else to do something, you're doing a task over and over again until you finished something. I obviously do have some patience for this, but regrettably not that much either. That's the reason why I'm always starting new projects without finishing the current ones. It's very exciting to start something new and it can be exhilarating to finish a project, but the middle part is often boring. Or meditative, depending what mood you're in. 

Anyways, sometimes you just really want to finish something, be it because you're impatient or just running out of time. And here is where the pom-poms come in. Being that time of the year again, I'm crocheting a few wooly hats for several small members of the family. And I just love a nice pom-pom. They aren't exactly hard to make but they do require a few tools and some fiddling around. As I don't have a pom-pom-maker ( until recently I didn't even know they existed), what I usually do is cut two rings out of carton and wind lengths of yarn around them. Not too hard or complicated but here is a way of doing it much quicker and nearly as neat. All you need is wool and scissors.

Hold the end of the wool in your hand and start wrapping it around your fingers. For a small pom-pom wrap it around two or three fingers. I wanted mine to be big so I used four fingers.

Keep wrapping the yarn around until the desired thickness. Cut the yarn.

Remove the bunch of yarn from your fingers and tie a length of yarn tightly around the middle. 

Cut open the loops of yarn on both sides.

Your pom-pom will be a bit scraggly looking, so trim the ends all around until you get a  nice round shape.

And your pom-pom is finished and ready for sewing onto a wooly hat.

Here is one I've made for Enda's hat:

Gloves

As an admirer of fashions in the past I'm always looking at ways to incorporate details from bygone eras into my everyday wear without looking dressed up. A great way to do this is to use accessories and if you ever had a look at one of my online shops you might have noticed that I have a mild obsession with gloves.

In the last few years I've crocheted several pairs, usually fingerless. When I'm happy with how they look they end up in my shop. There are still a few decent ones that I could wear myself, but I rarely do. Up to the middle of the 20th century no lady would have ventured out without hat and gloves and while I love the idea of being pernickety with your clothes I can't be bothered too much about them these days. After all it's no use donning gloves when you're wearing old jeans and a t-shirt, you want just a little bit of coordination.

There is something to be said for the casualness of modern clothing and I am glad that I can go out of the house without spending hours getting dressed. But at the same time I do deplore the absence of elegance in most of our clothes. Now and then I enjoy being fussy about what I wear. 

Recently I had an opportunity to wear gloves at my cousin's wedding. I wore a fifties' style dress with the little white crochet gloves in the first picture. Of course I don't have a photo...

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Crochet Necklaces

Sometimes it's funny which craft projects turn into an object that's loved and cherished - and which ones don't. It happens quite a lot that something I've been really excited about ends up half finished or  stays hidden away in some drawer. And then there are others that were done nearly half heartedly and turn out to be used a lot.
I made this crochet necklace a while ago, mainly to try out crocheting with beads. The beads aren't the best quality, they're plastic and were salvaged from an old hair clip. They're also very lightweight which is the main reason I didn't really like the necklace: I was going for a 20s look and I really needed more weight for the necklace to hang right. Yet recently I decided to start wearing some of the things I had lying around in my room and the colour of the necklace happened to go well with the jumper I was wearing. It looked better to double it up though and suddenly the light weight didn't matter anymore and I was really happy with how it looked.

 I decided to make another beaded necklace this time with pearl beads and pink yarn.

It might be a present for someone or I might try to sell it in our Etsy shop, I don't know yet.