Tag Archives: Craft

Scrap Busting Knitted Jumper

This jumper has been about 18 months in the making! I’m a slow knitter, what can I say?! I started it in the Summer of 2021 when I was doing a lot of knitting, and still living with my sister. I then moved to Oxford and did join a knitting group locally but I still make very slow progress.

This was the last thing I was going to make to use up most of the yarn I already had before I was allowed to buy any more yarn (though, ahem, that didn’t end up quite working). I made a jumper, a cardigan and some baby cardigans too to use up what I already had.

I’d ended up with quite a lot of odd balls of wool which were all in a blue/green/grey colour palette – and lots of navy blue, so I thought the striped jumper pattern from Learn to Knit Love to Knit would be a good way to some of it up – it doesn’t actually use as much wool as the pattern said, but I guess you can’t generally get less than 50g in a ball so that’s the amount you need of each colour. The green jumper, which was the same pattern as my black sparkley jumper, is also from the same book.

The jumper is knitted flat, in pieces, with the same stripe pattern on the front and back – so you get matching stripes on the side seams!

I’m not totally in love with the neckline if I’m honest – it’s ended up not really round, with corners. It’s also a little wider than I would like ideally – but maybe it will settle down with some washing?

I did actually block all the pieces before I sewed them together as they were rolling up something chronic – and I wanted to make sure the stripes were as straight as possible on the front and back so I could line them up as much as possible. But there were so many ends to weave in, wah!

Here’s a close up of the colours – I do really like that it’s quite bright. I was looking for some more bright knitwear as it had been an area that had been quite dull – though I also bought a couple of jumpers from Uniqlo a couple of months ago – I have hardly bought any clothes recently (apart from a couple of t-shirts last Summer) but I realised I don’t HAVE to make everything – and especially with knitting because I’m so slow to get things finished, it would take literal years to get some stuff I want to wear.

I am currently working on a mustard yellow jumper too – which is knitted top down, in one piece – so I’m excited to not have to sew it together at the end! Though I did have to frog it because I did it wrong, so I thought it was going to be my fastest knit ever – but not so much. Also it will probably have to wait until next Autumn/Winter to get worn, by the time I finish it. I seem to be always out of season with my knitting and my sewing actually – anyone else, or is it just me?

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Make It: 15 Homemade Christmas Present Ideas

Make It: Meme Cushion

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(*This post contains swearing*)

I love a good internet meme. And this bayeux tapestry one is one of my favourites. I was chatting to my Aunt on the phone a few months ago and I think she might have told me about it – we were talking about other ‘don’t give a fuck’ memes too.

When she mentioned this meme, I googled it and found someone else had embroidered it on a cushion and thought this was a fantastic idea. I filed it away and planned to make it for my Aunt’s birthday, which is at the end of September. We’ve both had a pretty crappy few months so it seemed even more appropriate by the time I handed it over – a little late, oops!

I used the picture at the top as my inspiration and drew a version on paper – an A3 sheet (2 A4 sheets stuck together). I started with the writing – it was quite fun to make sure it didn’t look even or straight! I would not have had the skill to do it neatly! I traced everything onto greaseproof paper, then traced it onto the calico – it’s quite good how you can draw on calico! And because you’re sewing over it, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t all come off.

I like the 2 different kinds of ‘e’ and the random dots at the ends of some words. Also the ‘v’-shaped u’s. I did make one mistake though – can you spot it? (The a in barren doesn’t have the cross part, it’s just an upside-down ‘v’.) I sewed all the letters with really thick embroidery thread from my local sewing shop, using backstitch so the lines were unbroken.

I added a simplified version of the house thing in the photo. This is mostly to fill the space above the men! Again I used backstitch.

The men are maybe my finest hour of embroidery – again it’s a good job this wasn’t meant to look amazing! I decided to put just 3 of the men and not all 4 – I thought 4 might be pushing it! I did the outlines in brown embroidery thread – the kind you get with crossstitch kits. I used 2 strands at a time.

I bought 4 different colours of thread – gold, red, green and black. I used the grey mixed with the brown for the cape of the dude on the right. I pretty much copied the colours from the picture as best I could. I slightly with I hadn’t done the 2 bright colours on the same guy on the left. But he does have an excellent moustache, so there’s that.

I just used long stitches to fill in the lines as quickly as possible basically – I don’t know what the stitch is called, though.

I asked the advice of my friends when I’ve done all the above about whether to add some soil-type lines and they all agreed yes. And they were definitely right – it looked a bit bare before I added them. This is what it looked like before I sewed the front to the back.

I had left the piece of fabric quite big so I had room to change the proportions according to the cushion inner thing. But in the end I made an inner cushion and used toy filling to stuff the cushion. I think I stuffed it a bit full, though, because you can’t really see all of the embroidery unless you squish it a bit.

Here is is all finished!

And here is is on my sofa – it took so long to make it look good, it was ridiculous! I’m not great at styling I think – any tips?

My aunt took this photo of it on her chair and made it look sooooo much better! She’s definitely better at styling!

Do you have a favourite meme? If so, please post it in the comments to give me a giggle 🙂 Would you be tempted to embroider it on a cushion? It could be a good Christmas present for someone!

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Make It: An idea to make meal planning less arduous!

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The Boyfriend and I plan all our meals every 2 weeks, then do a big internet shop twice a month. We used to just buy a bunch of food and then every morning we would have the ‘what are we going to have for dinner’ conversation and it was very boring and meant we had the same few things over and over again. And also that some food went off before we used it. So then we decided to plan the meals so we could buy exactly what we needed and would only have to think about it for an hour every 2 weeks. Recently, though, even this has been feeling like too much of a chore.

So I stole an idea from my sister (thanks Phoebe!). I made a meal planner that we can stick on the wall and will also act as the shopping list!

(see the little friend we’ve added in the corner!?)

I wrote out each of the meals we make regularly – this used to be a scrappy piece of paper which we’d gradually added new meals to and crossed out ones we’d tried that weren’t good. I bought some coloured record cards so I could colour-code the type of meal – I used yellow for poultry, green for vegetarian, blue for fish and red for meat (meaning sausages, beef and pork).

There are a lot of meat ones! – we do have quite a few meals with sausages, so I think that’s why.

Not so many vegetarian ones – we are trying to add to our veggie repertoire as we feel we do eat too much meat. Plus meat is expensive! If anyone has any good veggie recipes, do let me know 🙂

Lots of chicken – I say poultry but really I mean chicken!

And here are the fish ones – I was surprised there was as many fish ones as fish is reeeeaaaaly expensive, but this does include tins of tuna.

I bought a cheap cork board from Tiger and used some white record cards I already had to make the days of the week for the 2 weeks. And I pinned an envelope with the flap cut off to the top to store the cards we’re not using.

My real stroke of genius, though (if I say so myself) was to write the ingredients needed for each meal on the back of the cards, so we can plan the meals for the 2 weeks……..