We've had some gorgeous blankets donated for this project-they've been a joy to receive!  I'm so impressed by the skills and talents of people and by the generosity.

Joyce, from the SIBOL ravelry group, donated a blanket early on-and this week, I received another stunning blanket from her.  She's used a heart pattern throughout that gives such a lovely textured effect.

This is absolutely beautiful Joyce, thank you so much xxx



My friend Lisa has two little ones and she has very kindly donated a blanket that was made for her when her little ones were babies.  It's a gorgeous circular blanket that will definitely bring comfort to a grieving family.

She also has been hard at work with her mum making some squares and blankets for us as well!

There are some pink squares as well that I can't use for this project but I'll keep them aside with some of the other squares I've received that I can't use here for another blanket.

We met up on Wednesday night for another crochet along-this time to put together the squares for one of the child size blankets.  I brought down 80 squares in yellow and white with lots of spare yarn and we had a great time!  I showed some ladies how to use single crochet to attach the squares together into long strips of ten-I'll put these together a little later.

We had a lovely time again and met a couple more new faces!  We also talked about staying as a crochet group after the Cwtch Of Comfort project is finished, with the plan of regularly making donation pieces for charities close to our hearts.

WOW!

What a lovely day for post!
I've just had a whole bundle of parcels arrive at my door and I must tell you, the contents are GORGEOUS!

First, we have a wonderful set of 6 knitted squares, donated by Una
She has very kindly made these for the project

Thank you Una!  They are perfect :-)


Next, we have 3 lovely squares that have been crocheted by Jessiebonbon from the Sibol ravelry group.

Beautiful, thank you so much!




Then I opened a parcel from MarilynJG (also from SIBOL Ravelry) which contained 9 gorgeous squares

Wonderful Marilyn, you have been busy!  Thank you :-)


And last, but most certainly not least there was this stunning blanket from Joyce28

This is a beautiful blanket Joyce and absolutely perfect, it's so kind of you to make it.  She has also included a couple of extra squares for me to add to the pile :-)  Thank you!




I'd like to give a massive THANKYOU to the lovely ladies of the SIBOL Ravelry group-the wonderful ladies there have all been working very hard to make squares for this endeavour.  You are all so kind!

Here's what it's all about-

'Cwtch of Comfort' requests blankets to donate towards bereavement boxes for the '2Wish Upon A Star' charity that supports families suffering the loss of a child.  I have been inspired by the amazing SIBOL project to ask people to send me squares as many find the thought of making a whole blanket a tad overwhelming!  So with your help, I'm hoping to have a whole big pile of squares to work with by the end of this month.  Could you help?

Here's what I need you to do:

Make a square!
It can be either knitted or crocheted
It must be approx 6" (knitted can be a little bit smaller)
Pale pastel gender neutral colours or White only please
Acrylic yarn

Email me at amberspider@googlemail.com and I'll send you my address :-)
The deadline for squares is the end of May 2015-I'd really like to have lots and lots of squares to put together and any help would be so appreciated.  Even a share on your blog would be a massive help!

Thank you so much! xxx

Time for a much needed catch up!

Things have been a rollercoaster for us here in Wales.  I had such a lovely holiday with my family but when I returned to work, things went haywire.  Suffice to say I actually ended up walking out-I couldn't cope with the abuse from my boss nor the frequent disregard for employee rights.  I immediately applied for other jobs but had an accident and broke my left wrist in two places so I can't work at the moment.  Even more distressingly, I can't crochet!  Myf is having problems still with her father so there has been a lot going on...

Now for some positives!  Myf has started secondary school and, quite literally, has taken to it like a duck to water!  She's settled in brilliantly and I'm so proud of her-she's helping me a lot around the house as well-where did my baby girl go?!
I've lost over half a stone in weight-still a very long way to go as I'm very overweight at 5.2" and 14 stone but it's a great start :-)  I've swapped milk for soy milk (surprisingly nice in cereal) and tried to make better food choices plus I think not having the stress of that workplace is making a difference as well.
I couldn't make my Mum something for her birthday so I went with an idea I had a while back and had some note cards printed using some of the scenic photos I took on our stay in London.  She absolutely loves them-she uses notecards all the time so it was lovely to send her ones made specially.
I'm learning a lot from having a broken wrist-sounds strange but it makes me mindful of what I'm doing-having to take my time, finding ways to adapt, listening to my body and knowing my limits.
I'm blesssed with amazing friends and wonderful family and the past month has shown me truly how important that it :-D
I've also finally got these three blankets for SIBOL packed up to send...

These were sent to me a couple of months ago-they'd been donated but were unfortunately far too small so I was asked to make them bigger-I wanted to do something a little different for each one and tried to keep the theme of the colours originally used.  The first one took ages-I thought trying to make triangles to fit around would be something new so I had to learn how to make big half granny squares.  Not particularly challenging but a bit time consuming!  It also didn't give a flat edge but I like the effect, it looks quite striking!
The other two I used a couple of varieties of small squares (anyone spot the lovely DebiY's squircles?) to add size with a small border.  Hope they find good homes!

How are you?  Hope you are all well! xx

Reasons to be Cheerful (and other stuff)

Ok, this will be a massive post with a large variety of photos so hang on to your hats!

It's been an incredibly emotional week-Myf has finished her very last day at Primary School so they had a Leavers Prom

And a final School Assembly with Awards (linking the kids to famous names-mostly sports stars and singers but a few awesome ones) with Myf receiving 'Charles Darwin

She's having a lot of problems with her father at the moment but has been very strong in standing up for herself and telling him how she feels-it's going to be unpleasant for a while but hopefully it will settle down soon.

I finished my commision blanket in record time-the lady has asked me to post it to her when I get back from London.  I've sent her a photo and she loves it (phew!)

I've had a birthday as well-Myf spoiled me thoroughly and Rascal also wanted to get me something special-he brought me a dead bat :-(  Certainly never had one of those before!

I'm helping out the wonderful SIBOL with some blankets they've received that are a bit too small to use-

I'm taking a couple with me to work on-I'm playing with half squares for one of them that will make it about 40" wide, a little larger than standard but I'm hoping Sue won't mind!

My Dad had his 64th birthday a couple of days ago and he doesn't like presents being bought for him so instead I have made him this-

One of my earliest memories is when I was 6, helping my Dad build a barbeque in the back garden when a female stag beetle grabbed on to my toe-Dad managed to gently get her off and then spent ages teaching me about these gorgeous insects :-)  My Dad is also a huge Beatles fan so this seemed appropriate for when he's 64!

I couldn't find a pattern anywhere so I looked up a google image and went from there-the antlers should have been much larger as I wanted to make a male stag beetle but she's wonderful I think and I hope he likes it!

We'll be away for 10 days so I hope you all have sunshine and happy days :-)  Much love!

Yarndale and Attic24!

A few weeks ago my beautiful biggest sister called me to tell me about Attic24 and her Yarndale project.  Fact is, I've been reading her blog for a while now-stumbled across it when learning about joining granny squares and it 's one of my favourite places to go for inspiration and  a colour boost.
I really wish Yarndale was closer because it sounds awesome-Attic24 has been asking crochet crafters to make granny triangles to use as bunting for the big day and in the years to come.  So I went and had a look-one of the things I love about this blog is that Lucy makes such beautiful, easy to follow, photo tutorials.  She's written up a gorgeous photo tutorial for these triangles and has said any yarn, any colours, just have fun!

I have quite a few bits of wool that I don't really use as I stick with acrylic yarns for blanket making so this was a great opportunity to use up some of those bits.  I've made nine triangles and last night I attempted to 'block' (for the first time!) with steam.  I think I need more blocking practise but aside from being a little curly at the edges, I think they've turned out well!

While being blocked...

Afterwards...

So I'll be bundling this up to send to her-anyone else want to join in?  She's extended the deadline until August so there's time!  And they're super easy to make :-)

In other news, I finally managed to post the two SIBOL blanket donations after I realised they were a little smaller than requested on her blog-they both only measured about 32" and they needed to be 36-37" so I needed to spend more time adding more to the border.

I managed to get them up to 35" before sending-Mrs Twins kindly emailed me yesterday morning to let me know they'd arrived safely with some lovely comments *blushes*  Cant' wait to see where they end up!

'Sweet Memories' Blanket

Finally!

I've been working on this for a few months now-with work and some of the other projects, this has been sitting on the back burner and it's so nice to have it done :-)

Remember the 'Sweet Dreams' blanket?  And the smaller version I made for Myf?  Well, I wanted to make another one for SIBOL to send along with the 'Autumn Glory' blanket.  One of the squares on the original Sweet Dreams blanket came out looking a bit like a wrapped sweet-the square design is based on the amazing Debi Y and can be found here.  By changing the colours frequently, it came out looking like a sweet and I thought it would look good to make a blanket with alternating 'wrapped sweets' and loose sweets.

The 'wrapped sweets' squares are a bit fiddly which is why it took so long to complete. I finished the squares up yesterday and laid them out and then discovered a slight problem....

See the second row?  The square in the centre?  That's 'supposed' to be seaside rock.  I swear, it wasn't until I had this laid out that I saw it looks more like something else...

As you can probably guess, I removed it from the layout and made another wrapped sweet square to replace it.  I crocheted it together yesterday and finished off the border today and I think it looks lovely!  No inappropriate motifs to be found anywhere...

From the top left hand corner, the loose sweets are as follows:
Gobstoppers, Peardrops, Strawberry Bootlace, Toffee Blocks (with hammer), Barley Sugar, Lollipops, Licorice Allsorts, Everton Mints, Peppermint Creams, Parma Violets, Gingerbread Man, Licorice Sticks.

What do you think?

Autumn Glory Blanket amd Arm Rest Covers

I GOT A JOB!


I'm starting on Wednesday, working as a supervisor in a little retail shop on the new college campus in Nantgarw.  Minimum wage but it's full time and no weekends.  I'm really looking forward to it but I'm a little anxious about having to be up in the mornings-I have to be there to open at 7.45am which means I have to be out of the house before 7am , drop Myf with my neighbour who'll give her breakfast and get her to school and get the bus.  So I need to be up around 6am and I am terrible in the morning.  I have invested in two new alarm clocks, one which should be loud enough and I'm getting myself up earlier in the mornings to prepare for it.  The real trick will be actually getting to bed early-but I need to stay focused on how important this job is to Myf and I.  I HAVE to be up in the morning.  No other options.

Anyway, aside from that exciting news, I've finished up another blanket that will eventually be sent to SIBOL.  I have another one in mind and I want to send them together so this one will be staying here for a bit longer.

I was inspired by the colours of Autumn-my favourite season and I love the different shades of green, yellow and brown.  I completely forgot I had any dark green until I was doing the border but having just one layer of dark green around the outer edge really sets it off well.  I think so anyway :-)  I love this little lapghan, it'll be a wrench to say goodbye but I know Mrs Twins will find a loving home for it!

In the first photo, you can see the new arm rest covers-they certainly tidy up my poor old sofas (I have two of these) as the cat insists on sharpening her claws on them...

I think they look nice but they have a tendency to curl up at the edges which is irritating but better than looking so shabby!  Some cushion covers will set them off nicely as soon as I have the time.  That blanket looks nice with them too...

SIBOL Squares!

Good evening all!  It's blustery and chilly as well as a little damp here in Wales but at least we don't seem to have any more snow.  It's a bit strange, being grateful that it hasn't snowed when it's nearly April but with the peculiar weather of late, it's hardly surprising!
Last March, I joined the vast number of people worldwide who make granny squares for the SIBOL project.that are transformed into gorgeous blankets and donated to elderly care homes across England.  The wonderful lady who runs this project, 'Mrs Twins', spends a huge amount of time putting these squares together and visiting the care homes to distribute these creations.  She also comes up with fantastic ideas for 'challenges'  for her 'SIBOLETTES' to try as well as making some incredible blankets for fund raising (she did a series of Olympic blankets for last years Games which were stunning!)

I've been snowed under with blanket projects (a few requests for baby blankets from friends who are expecting in the near future) so my original plans for a SIBOL donation are temporarily put on hold and instead I had a go at some of the challenges running at the moment as well as a few for her squares stash :-)

As you can see, Artemis (the cat) looks pretty pleased with them too!  They're winging their way over to her now-hopefully they'll arrive by Monday :-)

In other news, I've finished making the arm rest covers-I like them but I think they'll look better when I get around to making matching cushion covers...

Crafty plans for 2013

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I'm feeling very optimistic about this year-there's so many projects I want to do and gifts I want to make so I figure I need to make a list!  So here it is-my 2013 to-do list :-)

The sofas we have have been scratched up a lot by the cat and the cushion covers are falling apart so they need some work-

Arm rest covers (4)
Cushion covers (4)

I'm going to be seeding some herbs in the spring but the pots tend to look messy

Crochet plant pot covers

Myf has a lot of pencils and pens that I keep 'tidying' into jars

Jam jar covers!

Christmas 2012 was completely handcrafted giftwise and I'm hoping to do the same again for Christmas 2013!  Hopefully, I can start a little earlier this year :-)

HANDCRAFTED CHRISTMAS!


I have some ideas for Pagan crochet projects-which I want to start exploring this year

Tarot bags
Elemental candle holders
Goddess/God dolls


I'm working on a donation for the amazing SIBOL project and I'm looking for more crochet causes to donate to-I love making blankets and I'm going to donate at least one to SIBOL this year and at least one to another charity.  Any suggestions for UK based charities that accept blankets?  I'd like to be able to donate to the US and other places but frankly with the cost of postage, I can't manage it!

It's not a very big list but I may add more as I think of them!  So excited already :-)

SIBOL Squares!

There's a lovely lady called Sue who spends her spare time making beautiful blankets to donate to elderly care homes-people all over send her granny squares for these blankets or take part in her special 'Challenges'.  She's making a huge 'Olympic themed' blanket which will be auctioned to raise money for people suffering with Alzheimer's.  I've wanted for a while to send some squares and finally have some to offer!

I hope she likes them :-)

You should really have a lot at her blog: http://sunshineinternationalblanketsoflove.blogspot.co.uk/
and if you can crochet or knit, send her some squares!  Each one will be hugely appreciated and will go towards spreading some love where it is desperately needed.