Blog – Page 2 – Colourful Designs by Bex Hopkins

End of summer

4 September 20144 September 2014 by Bex

Those three words End . Of . Summer . felt pretty painful when I woke this morning. As I hung 2 huge loads of washing (the new giant slow washer of doom does have its plus side) on the line with the mist still thick in the air, I really felt tv that autumn was on its way. I plodded back indoors and made coffee ready to face my first child free day after 6 weeks of school holidays.

But you know what? By lunch time it was beautifully sunny and pretty warm! It averaged about 18C last week as we enjoyed our little holiday, but today it was about 23C, so not autumn at all. I noticed several posts on twitter today from upt’ North saying that the leaves we’re turning, including some very autumnal photos of golden leaves on the ground. It’s things like this that make me love the south coast, our summer is likely longer, our winters certainly milder. The weather makes up from being surrounded grockles (that’s tourists to us) half the year.

Group Made Wedding Shawls

3 September 2014 by Bex

It’s always lovely when a member of our Stitch & B’ch group gets married or has a baby. We usually make something as a group or the few of us who know her best, make a blanket or shawl. Early this year we found out one of the newest knitters in our group, Cat, was getting married and she knew what she wanted to knit for her wedding and what she wanted help with.

It was so good to have guidance, sometimes we make something as a surprise without much understanding of what the person might want. Cat wanted us to knit a special shawl to match the accessories for her wedding dress. The yarn was Superwash Merino/Cashmere/Nylon in 4ply/fingering weight which I dyed a warm grey.

Cat chose the lovely Elizabeth Zimmermann 100th Anniversary Camping Half Circle Shawl (which is available for free on Ravelry) for us to knit for her. This went swimmingly with each of us taking it home for a week or two to complete a section and bringing it back to the group for someone to carry on. It blocked out to a lovely size for Cat to wear on her big day.

The lace for this shawl is really pretty and deserves some close ups, the edging is really lovely. You can find all the project details here.

Cat also wanted to knit a shawl for her bridesmaid and decided to pick the Dew Drops Shawl pattern I wrote a few years ago. Those of you who have knitted it will know it’s not best suited to a new knitter who hasn’t really done lace. But she was brave!
Cat did amazing work knitting her way through hundreds of metres of lace weight yarn in stocking stitch, realising that the lace would take her until well after the wedding to finish and with lots of other things to do for the wedding she handed over the shawl to some other members of our group. They worked their magic and with 2 weeks to go before the wedding it came to my turn to work the last chart and cast off and block. I was quite excited, it’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to knit some lace and even longer since I’ve knitted a Dew Drops shawl.

The first thing I did was weigh the remaining yarn, when the scales said 50g you could have knocked me over with a feather. We needed more than another 14 rows to make this into a good sized shawl!

I started adding an extra repeat of chart 4 and 5, this pattern is totally customisable on size and my triangular shawl calculator makes it easy to know how many rows you can knit your remaining yarn. It does all the maths for you! My finger marks where the knitting was at when it was passed to me, with 50% of the yarn remaining, so it would have been quite small and a waste of the lovely coloured yarn.

A few days and 40grams of yarn later, not to mention 3 hours of casting off, I had this crumpled mess. The Dew Drops Shawl with it’s circle of lace with reverse stocking stitch looks pretty awful unblocked and I’d almost forgive someone who frogged at this point.

After blocking I’m sure you will agree it is worth the effort! I’m sorry these last two photos are so poor, the tremor in my hands was pretty bad when I took them!
You can see how much it grew with the blocking too!

Ta Da!!

Next time I can hopefully share some great summer holiday knitting photos with you.

Foraged Blackberry and Pear Pie

12 August 201412 August 2014 by Bex

A.k.a. Purple Pear Pie!

We noticed some blackberries over the fence this morning as we played in the garden with our giant bubbles (you can find the recipe, including secret ingredient, and how to make giant bubbles wands here).
I suggested to Little E that we take a wander down the foot path and see if we could find enough blackberries for a sweet treat! She asked if we could make blackberry pie, this really surprised me as she had never been one for fruit pie or crumble puddings. So as any mother keen to have her child try new things would, I took her foraging for blackberries.

8 Years ago

12 August 20147 July 2014 by Bex

8years ago I sat at my mum’s bedside hoping and praying that I could share just a few more days with her.
She took her last breath before I saw her again.
I wish I had been with her, to hold her hand, to comfort us both.
I wish she could have met the baby girl that was growing inside me, I know she would have been incredibly proud of my beautiful girl now almost 8yrs old and proud of me for that.
There have been many times between now and then when I would have done anything for a few wise words from my mum.
I hope am as a good a mum as she was and that my daughter gets longer with her mum than I did with mine.
That is all.

Cats have faces too quilt

13 May 2014 by Bex

Let me start at the beginning, I offered to make a bed quilt for my daughter… at least 2years ago.
She was about 5 years old at the time with a huge love of cats and all things red and knew what she wanted. So we did a little google image search for cat quilts and looked through some patterns and made a short list. From the short list the only one I could get a pattern for was one from Copy Cat Quilts.

I ordered the pattern, rescaled it to the size we thought we wanted. Got the red and white fabrics and set to work. After piecing about 5 of the 12×12″ blocks, with about 13different sized/shaped pieces per block, I had had enough and it went in the bag for months…
After a long time I finally pulled it back out and finished all the piecing and I had a quilt top! After I found some fabric for the border and got that sewn on I realised the quilt covered a double bed!
That’s a big quilt for a little primary school kid! But Em did want a quilt for life.

We took a trip to the fabric store to look for a backing fabric. I hunted online for a red fabric with either black or white paw prints all over, but never found one, so decided to give Em free choice at the store. She picked a red, black, grey and white swirl pattern. There was no swaying her and for a long time I really wasn’t sure about it, but it has grown on me over time.

I needed to visit a friend with a huge table to layer the quilt and get it all pinned ready for quilting, so that delayed the project further.

With all the pins in place it was time to start! I had machine quilted a block to use as a matching pillow and to sample how to quilt it. The result was too dense for a bed quilt in my opinion. I asked around for suggestions and a friend on twitter said I should hand quilt it, something I had never done. She assured me it wouldn’t take much longer the machine quilting and would be worth it.
So I took the plunge, my first hand quilting.

Over a year later, okay I’ve only worked on it for a few days at a time then put it away for weeks on end, but it feels like a long old time. I’ve completed the outline quilting around each cat, and quilted tiny paw prints in the empty space down one side of the quilt.
I’d also designed and appliquéd 4 little mice into the big empty spaces, and machine quilted 26 circles with an extra layer of batting to look like balls of yarn. Then carefully trimmed back the batting so that they could be edge tuck appliquéd onto the quilt.

So this week I decided I needed to crack on and hand quilt the remaining tiny paw prints, appliqué on the balls, add some hand quilting to the border, trim back the border and hand bind the quilt! It needed to be done!
Em hates a duvet, at 7years old she still can’t get used to sleeping under even a really light weight one. So every night she sleeps under a blanket I had for her, acrylic fleece on one side, cotton print on the other. But now she is just too big for the blanket and this quilt was supposed to replace these small blankets long ago!

I’ve tried quite a few thimbles to save my poor fingers from the repeated abuse of driving a tiny sharp needle through several layers of fabric and batting. I’m happy with a metal quilting thimble, but it makes my finger sweat like mad and soon I have a soggy wrinkly finger!
My kind friend Donna has been enjoying some hand piecing lately and made herself a simple leather thimble, so she made me one too. It’s soft leather and works well, its my new favourite.
In the photo above you can see the fairly small and irregular stitches for the paw prints. This is about as good as my hand quilting gets on a quilt this thick.
But I don’t mind that it’s far from perfect, I’m sure the stitches will hold it together. (The bright blue paw print marks are made with washable fabric marker, I started off when a pencil which drove me nuts, but this pen works well on light fabric and washes out easily.)

So this is where I’m at. (The edge isn’t bound, just the backing folded over the edge to keep everything neat and stop the batting getting messy at the edge.)

The white space on the right has already been filled with paw prints.

The other side is partially marked up and I’ve just started the paw prints, so I have quite a bit if work to do still!

I added one of the trapunto/trapplique yarn balls to the quilt today, for a chance of stitching and to see how they look.

I realised when I pulled this out, over a year after I made the balls, that I am 1 ball short. Which made me think it would be a good opportunity to hand stitch 1 as a label, with the quilt details on. So I will leave that 1 ball til last.
I like how they stand up slightly off the quilt surface.

I remember when I was sitting embroidering faces on each block in the early days of this quilt, how I thought that would be the longest part of the process and cats need faces too, so they couldn’t be left off! How wrong I was, the quilting has gone on for ages, especially the paw prints. But I think it will be perfect, I couldn’t have done the law prints like this by machine and I think they add the lovely bit of whimsy to this quilt.

More stitching to do… But for now, it is time for sleep.
Tomorrow, less blogging ~~procrastinating~~, more quilting!

Silk with Priscilla Lowry

20 August 201411 May 2014 by Bex

Our local WSD guild was lucky enough to have Priscilla Lowry to visit this weekend, all the way from New Zealand.
She came to do a few workshops and give a talk on silk history.
Sadly I had to miss the silk history talk, but other guild members said it was fascinating.
We had a morning workshop on spinning lofty silk yarns for knitting, all about trapping air between the silk fibres.
On Sunday we had a full day workshop on spinning all different silk fibres, from A1 Mulberry Silk brick right through, tussah brick, short silk fibres, muwatas (hankies and caps), degummed silk cocoons, cocoon strippings, throwsters, to tussah noil a.k.a. floor sweepings.

A friend spinning mulberry silk cut with scissors into 1-2″ long pieces then spun from the fold with plenty of twist.
The resulting single has tufts of silk ends all along it’s length, well secured by the twist. Like a beautiful eyelash yarn, spun from silk.

Close photos of yarns to follow.

To almost everyone’s surprise these lesser silk products were pretty fun to spin! The variety of yarns we could produce was phenomenal.
Accompanying all these wonderful yarns and techniques were Priscilla’s stories of how the beauty of fibres from silk cocoons was discovered, how the secrets of processing silk were hidden, how silk is produced and farmed today and the differences in the fibres and how they are all processed.

Like with all these things we can believe we know a reasonable amount about subject, then we meet an expert and realise our knowledge is a drop in the ocean.
So there was lots to be learnt and I think we all had a fantastic weekend spinning wormspit a.k.a. Silk!

Equality Stripe Cardigan and Hat

6 May 2014 by Bex

New pattern release Equality Stripe Cardigan

Equality Stripe Cardigan is knit top down from neck to cuff in one piece including button bands without seaming or picking up stitches for a button band!

Full photo tutorial for switching colours for the button band is included.

Sizes: Newborn, 3-6m, 6-12m, 12-18m, 18m-24m, 2-4yrs, 4-6yrs, 6-8yrs.
Yarn: Heavy fingering (4ply) or sport (5ply) weight yarn. Samples knitted in 6 colours of Katia Merino Baby.
£3.00

Matching Equality Stripe Hat
Sizes: Newborn, baby, toddler, child, adult and large adult.
£1.50

Or both patterns together as an ebook for £4.00

I am now part of the LYS In-Store Sales program. So participating yarn shops can sell my patterns directly to their customers in store. All the patterns that I have available for purchase through Ravelry are in the program.

These cute little unisex cardigans were inspired by a close friend of mine who was pregnant with non identical twins. She asked for ‘rainbow coloured knits’ rather than the traditional white or pastel baby colours often gifted to those who don’t know the gender of their baby before it arrives.
So I ordered some lovely soft yarn (Katia Merino Baby) in 6 rainbow colours and grey. The idea of the pattern took hold in my mind before the yarn even arrived.
After the first was off the needles it seemed only logical to make the cardigans ‘fraternal’ for these *fraternal twins. So I reversed the rainbow colour ordered and the second cardigan was soon complete.
*fraternal twins; meaning twin developed from two separately fertilized ova; dizygotic. (Developed from two eggs, each fertilized by separate sperm.)

With plenty of yarn to spare, these special babies deserved matching fraternal hats too!
So out of 6x 50g ball of yarn came 2 cardigans and 2 hats with significant yarn left over.

I released the hat pattern during the 2014 Sochi Olympics, to show support for LGBT difficulties in Russia. Donations were made to Stonewall during the Olympics in lieu of pattern fees.

Now they are both patterns available to buy trough Ravelry or you can use the links above.

Of course you don’t have to knit them in rainbow colours, 6 random colours or just 2 or 3 colours will be just as fun.

The joy of releasing a pattern hasn’t got old for me yet and in between pattern releases I forget just how great it feels. So this time, like all the times before it, I was surprised by the smile on my face and the joy of knitters seeing and liking my work.
Seeing my pattern rise up through the Ravelry hot right now list is always a little thrill. Often one I am too busy to spot, but someone points out to me.

While you all enjoy this I am working on getting my next design tech edited and test knitted.
Happy knitting!

Banana and Left Over Easter Muffins

22 April 201422 April 2014 by Bex

Everyone ends up with left over Easter egg chocolate right? Okay, maybe not everyone, but we always seem to end up with more Easter eggs than we want to eat, especially the cheaper chocolate that doesn’t always appeal so much.

Well combine that with our habit of having over ripe bananas at the end of the week and you get banana and chocolate chip muffins!

Muffins are the easiest sweet treat to make, I really don’t enjoy mixing up cake mix, so often use the mixer, but that means more washing up. The great thing about muffins is the ingredients only need barely combining, so it’s a 30second easy job with a spoon.

Equipment:

Scale
Large mixing bowl
Small bowl or jug
Large jug
Table spoon
Fork
A cupcake/yorkshire pudding tin with 12 spaces
12 muffin cases (big cases, not the small cup cake cases of our youth, muffins rise – a lot!)

Ingredients (makes 12):

280g/10 oz of plain white flour
1 tbsp of baking power
115g/4 oz caster sugar
2 medium-large bananas
100mls of milk
2 medium eggs
6 tbsp oil or 85g /3 oz of butter melted and cooled (I use sunflower or vegetable oil)
100g/ 3.5 oz (or about 1 kids size Easter egg) of chocolate broken into small pieces
pinch of salt if desired (I never bother)

If you don’t have a sweet tooth and fancy these as breakfast muffins you can cut the sugar to 3oz.

Method:

Pre heat the oven to 200C/400F/Gas Mark 6, or 180C for a fan assisted oven.
Put 12 paper muffin cases in the tray or grease a muffin tray and put the mixture straight in if you prefer.
Using a large bowl add the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt, stir together. (I place the bowl on the scales, tare the scales, and add the ingredients directly to save washing up.)
Add the chocolate chunks to the bowl and stir in.
Mash the bananas in a bowl, measure and add the milk to make a puree, some lumps add a nice texture.
Beat the eggs in the jug and measure the oil. Add the banana puree to the jug, mix together.
Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients, pour in the liquid ingredients.
Stir until just combine, do not over mix it! Small floury lumps are fine.
Immediately spoon the mixture into the muffin tin. Do not leave the mixture standing around, it must be baked straight away or they will flop!
Bake in a pre-heated oven for 15-20mins, until well risen and golden. A knife will come out slightly sticky.
Serve warm after 5mins or leave to cool.

Yumm!

Sewing a Recycled Denim Jeans Bag

18 October 2013 by Bex

Our local knitting group is hosting an Autumn swap, so it’s time to make some gifts. It’s our third swap and the last two were very popular, so we are all looking forward to opening our gift bags on the day. Each swapper has to buy a different item for six different people, 1 yarn, 1 pattern, 1 accessory, 1 hand made, 1 edible and 1 bag. So everyone in the swap gets 6 gifts all from different people, lovely!

For the bag some people choose to buy a nice shopping bag, others will knit a bag and some of us decide to sew a bag. So I spent too much time surfing through bags on pinterest, when I found this bag tutorial for using an old pair of jeans. I’ve been collecting my torn/worn/too big/too small jeans for a while to make some aprons and project bags. So it was a no brainer.

I made some minor changes to the pattern;

Where it mentions cutting off the pointy corners, I cut the corners to make a bag bottom instead. (tutorial here)
Added a regular sewn on pocket instead of a zip locket.
Instead of leaving a gap at the top of the bag for turning, I left a gap in the bottom of the liner, machined the liner to the top of bag, turned through then stitched the gap in the liner closed.
It’s worth noting that I didn’t use a pair of flared jeans, because the bag panels are made from 3″ wide pieces you should have enough fabric in a pair of regular jeans.
For the lining you need 2 pieces of fabric approx’ 13″x13″ plus extra if you want a pocket.

The finished bag is approx’ 12″ x 12″ x 2″ with a 26″ strap, a nice size for a small handbag or project bag. I hope my swap partner likes it!

Teyla Shawl

7 October 2012 by Bex

The unusual construction forms a semi circular shawl which hangs comfortably over your shoulders, with a textured stitch pattern and 5lace panels. Knitted from the nape of the neck outwards in one piece with easy resizing options included. Charted instructions.

Irokezka's Teyla Shawl — Knitted and photographed by Irokezka ©.

Requires 4ply/fingering weight yarn – 625metres for the Shawlette size or 1000m for the Shawl size. It will look lovely in any weight yarn.

Teyla Shawl is the second shawl pattern I have self published.
It’s construction was a little different from the hundreds of triangular shawls and I think the textured stitch makes a lovely change from stocking stitch for the body.
The design came from paging through Barbara Walker Treasury’s, then modifying 2 lace patterns to meet my needs for the shawl. I wanted something that only had lace on the right side rows, with the wrong side rows being just purl.
Teyla Shawl came to fruit quickly and with the help of some lovely pattern testers and a tech editor it is now available for Ravelry Download.

Spinning for Fair Isle & A Poorly Cat

28 March 2012 by Bex

I’ve been quietly concerned about my old cat for a while now. Cuddles has just turned 19years old, which is a fantastic age. We’ve been lucky with him day one, with exception of being hit by a car when he was a kitten, he’s never had much need for a vet.
Sadly for the last 2years he’s had random bouts of diarrhoea and loosing weight, then he goes off his food. Each time the vet can find nothing wrong and further tests would require an anaesthetic, but he’s always got better and gained the weight back when his appetite returns. After several episodes like this the vet assumed it was some form of irritable bowel disease.

We had learnt to live with this occasional problem and it didn’t seem to be getting worse.
But over the last 6months he’s got more doddery on his back legs, unable to jump as well, and unable to sit down properly. He’s old and didn’t seem to be in pain with it (though it’s often hard to tell with cats) so we assumed it was old age causing stiffness and maybe arthritis. But in the last 2months those diarrhoea accidents have turned into solid poop accidents. Which from a super clean cat who washes obsessively was very odd. I noticed he was a bit smelly, and put it down to the pooping and washing less. He shows many signs of dementia so we gave him plenty of leeway and again didn’t worry as he seemed happy.
In the last 2 weeks I noticed slightly wet patches in his bed and on the floor (thankfully he’s been shut out of carpeted rooms for a while), saw him do solid poos while walking about and seeming totally surprised. Then when sleeping on my lap he wet himself (or should I say he wet me!!) I knew something was really wrong and off to the vets we went.
The vet didn’t seem sure and ran some full blood tests, wondering about thyroid, kidney disease, urinary infection (and dementia while doesn’t show in blood tests!).

So the last 2days I’ve nervously waited for the results, wondering if his time had come to an end.
I stayed up very late spinning both evenings plying some BFL/silk in yellows and oranges and spinning and plying some Romney fleece I’d dyed purple.

The plan for these contrasting mini skeins is a fair isle bag from the latest spin off magazine.

More cat news to follow as the results come in.

Stripes

22 March 2012 by Bex

After 2 courses of antibiotics and a week in bed in agony. Did I mention just how bad this toothache was? We are now wondering if it is also neuralgia, this would explain why it’s been so much worse than regular toothache. Yesterday the antibiotics finally started to feel like they are working and the episodes of severe pain stopped. So I recommenced some knitting, which saved my sanity I’m sure. I think I was right on the edge of break down, not being able to knit makes life so hard!
I stayed up late working on my stripes, having slept during the day when I was released from the pain. Going to bed didn’t seem like a priority now I could knit again. I worked 4inches of one front for my cardigan before forcing myself to go to bed and listen to ‘The Hunger Games’ as I fell asleep. I am really enjoying it so far and it’s well read, I’m hoping it’ll be a good use of 3 Audible credits.

I’m really pleased with the 1 row button holes, they are the method Ysolda describes in ‘Little Red In The City’, they have a good firm edge and don’t feel like they will stretch out over time.

I’ll post more about the simple clean looking Cardigan when I’ve started the back and can post some photos of that.

I didn’t want to speak too soon, but 2 weeks ago a friend welcomed the first ever lambs into her Polworth flock. The ewe had been very sick and we were all very worried about her, even the vet. She eventually squeezed out 3 beautiful pure Polworth lambs. Unfortunately 1 lamb didn’t make it, but the 2 ewe lambs are being bottle fed and getting stronger every day. I was asked to help out with the lambs when my friend has other pressing things to deal with, so I had the pleasure of bottle feeding 2 beautifully 3day old lambs. Polworth’s have wonderfully fine fleece, the breed was originally established by crossing Merino’s with 1/4 Lincoln. This gives them the fineness of Merino with some of the length and lustre of Lincoln. The addition of the Lincoln also makes them slightly more suited to the English climate than purebred Merino sheep.
I’ll dig out a photo of some yarn I spun from English Polworth fleece last year for my next post.