Happy Birthday to Me!

Hello friends!
My Birthday is late in the year, right before Christmas, which can be a bit of a downer at times, because everyone is too busy with Christmassy things to do anything for your Birthday, so for my most recent Birthday, instead of letting the poor timing of my birth get me down I made myself a really fabulous Birthday present, crochet, of course!

I crocheted myself a bag! I was heading out the night of my Birthday for a non-Birthday related event (which was awesome, by the way) and I REALLY wanted to use this bag, so I did have to finished it record time, and I was seriously still stitching the lining in as I was running out the door, but I did indeed finish it!

I used Scheepjeswol Cotton 8 which, despite the name is a 4 ply/Fingering weight 100% cotton yarn. I really enjoyed working with this yarn, it has a nice hand feel as you're working, it comes in LOADS of amazing colours, has a nice matte finish, and isn't splitty! So there's lots to love about it.

I didn't have a pattern for this bag, instead I reverse engineered it from a picture I had seen on Pinterest. I later discovered that the very talented and delightful Lucy from Attic 24 has a really great tutorial for the motifs used in this bag. I used the "join-as-you-go" method, which saved a lot of time because it meant I didn't have to sew any of the motifs together. I vaguely guessed the size for the lining and used some black satin that had been languishing in my fabric stash for a few years, which I sewed with my machine, then I hand stitched it into the bag. The plastic handles had also been languishing in my crafty stash for many years, waiting for this project I guess!  In total, the bag took 26 motifs to complete.

Have you ever made yourself a birthday present? What was it? :-)

Crochet Jacket Extraordinaire!

Hello friends!
Well, here it is! Remember when I posted a few little pics of some mysterious crochet recently? A little while ago a lovely friend of mine sent me an email with a photograph a crochet jacket that she'd stumbled upon on the internet. She really wanted it... so I obliged...and made this! There was no pattern for the jacket available, so I improvised the design, construction and a pattern of sorts from the photograph my friend had sent me.
I had a lot of fun working with my friend choosing the colours :-)
Some of the yarn is 100% pure wool yarn and 100% Alpaca yarn from the Bendigo Woollen Mills, some is 100% wool that I hand dyed, some is a random alpaca that had been languishing in my yarn stash for a little while and some is a Cleckheaton 100% wool :-) I think the colours look pretty amazing together :-)
Just in case you are curious the yarns are as follows:
-Dark green is Bendigo Woollen Mills Luxury 8ply/DK in Pine colour way.
-Bright green is Bendigo Classic 8ply/DK which was originally in Magnolia colour way that I dyed a neon/Granny Smith Apple colour using a Wiltons food dye in Kelly Green (using vinegar and heat to set the colour)
-Coral is a Bendigo Woollen Mills Classic 8ply/DK that was originally Magnolia colour way that I dyed Coral using a Landscape Dye in Coral colour way (these dyes are available from KraftKolour)
-Deep Red is Bendigo Woollen Mills Classic 8ply/DK in Cranberry colour way.
-Deep Purple is Bendigo Woollen Mills Persian 8ply/DK in Eggplant colour way.
-Rust wool is Cleckheaton Country Colours Naturals in #1832 colour way.
-Bright Blue is The Rare Yarns Company Rare Essentials alpaca/merino in Lapis colour way.

I worked on it for 4 days, crocheting, measuring, stitching and weaving in ALL THOSE YARN ENDS!! Oh, then yarns ends! In the end the jacket weighed just over 1 kilogram!
As I said, I didn't have a pattern to work from, so a lot of "designing" and planning was involved, but it worked very well :-)
After making this one, I'm pretty tempted to make myself one as well :-)

If you already follow me on Facebook at Shara Lambeth Designs or on Instagram at shara_made 
 you may have already seen some little sneak peeks of this jacket. If you would like to see more images of the things I make, or what I get up to on my travels, you can follow me on Facebook and Instagram too :-)
P.S. It was a little tricky to find the origins of the original images of the jacket that my friend emailed me that inspired this jacket, however after a bit of searching we discovered that it was from a blog post that now no longer exists, which is a shame as the jacket in that blog post, that was such an inspiration, is quite spectacular and I would have loved to have included a link here :-)

Wordless Wednesday 20th March 2013

Pastel Skulls

Hello friends!
I hope you're having a great week :-)
I have been busy, busy, busy making and designing and writing!
Some of the things I have been working on are more beady necklaces and earrings. Here is one of my favourites, "Pastel Skull".
If you already follow me on Facebook then you will have seen these skull beads popping up last year as well. They're really a lot of fun to make as they all have their own "personality"... hehehe

This particular necklace has already found a new home and seems to one of the more popular one. I think it's one of my favourites too :-)
I'm quite taken with anything lilac!
You can find a few of my other necklaces HERE

xo Shara

I Love Crochet

Hello friends!
I hope you've all been having a lovely weekend :-)
I have! I attended my lovely friends' wedding and it was gorgeous :-) Yay for love!
I crocheted the love heart pictured above using this sweet pattern that I came across while browsing on Pinterest :-) I have made a few since in various colours :-) And I attached one to a card for my Valentine :-) Ooooh!

xo Shara

Hand Dyeing Yarn

Hello friends,

Recently I have been experimenting with hand dyeing yarn. It's lots of fun, you should try it too! :-)

I have been using food dye, yep that's right, just regular old food dye.

I had tried yarn dyeing with food dye several years ago, with varying results, from kind of nice to hideous. Then I found this tutorial on Youtube and it was a much better method than I had previously been using.

I had been seeing lots of gradient dyed yarn around and wondered how folks were doing it... then suddenly it came to me! So this is what I came up with. (I'll add my tutorial of how I did the gradient dyeing soon :-)

So, it's a self striping yarn, in graduating rainbow colours :-) I have no idea what I'm going to knit or crochet with it yet, but I'm sure I'll be able to find something :-)

The yarn is a wool/angora/bamboo/nylon mix that I had hanging around in my stash. I was surprised how well the yarn picked up the dye, because of the bamboo & nylon content. The yarn is mainly wool & angora though, and through all of my dyeing experiments I know that animal fibres pick up the food dyes really well & plant fibres and synthetic fibres do not pick up the food dyes at all (well maybe a teensy bit, but nothing worth the effort :-)

Below is an image of what the yarn looked like before I wound it into a ball with my nostepinne. I know, I know, it looks all scary and knotty... but it wasn't (phew!) However, after hand winding approx 1km of yarn after my dyeing experiments I ordered an umbrella swift and yarn winder online (yippee!)

Also, I just wanted to add that a few people have been concerned that the food dyes are not colour fast and will just wash out, or bleed unpleasantly, but the vinegar and heat help to fix the dyes. I have also tested the food dyed yarns for colour fastness and they have all held up really well, even after washing in the machine and/or soaking :-)

Just in case you were wondering, for the colours in this particular yarn I used Queens food dye that I got in the baking section of the supermarket, except for the violet colour, which is a gel food colour from Spotlight, but it's also available at specialty cake decorating shops :-) Also, here's a tip, you can't use the "natural" food dyes from Queens... the colours are made using plant extracts, and while they are excellent to use when you're actually dyeing food, they don't work for dyeing yarn :-)

Colour Fun!

Hello friends!

As you know I have been preparing for the POP UP STUDIO SALE next week, and I have been SO busy making :-)

I love lots of colour. I love working with lots of different colours. I love putting different colours together. I love finding new (sometimes unexpected) colour combinations.

Another thing I REALLY love is things that are handmade (& proud to be handmade!)

Something you may no know is that I can't eat apples :-( It makes me very sad that eating apples makes me very sick :-( So, I have to explore my love of apples vicariously through this brooch :-)

P.S. If you like the Rainbow Connection Necklace then you might like to check out my blog tutorial HERE

Hexagon Blanket

I initially started this blanket for myself because I had lots of little bits of leftover Noro Sock yarn from other projects. At first I thought I would just use all my scraps… but I have really fallen in love with the way it’s turning out so I have bought a few skeins specifically for the blanket. I’m not sure what size it’s going to end up being… it might keep growing with time (and when I can get my hands on more Noro Sock yarn). Ultimately it would be REALLY great if I could make it big enough for a double bed spread, but maybe that’s too ambitious? :-) I guess we’ll see :-)

You can see this project on Ravelry as well HERE

Work In Progress 15.06.2010

I managed to do a bit more of my scarf/shawl last night (although I am a bit slow, as I have injured my hand). I think I'm about 25% of the way through to the finished product, so I can't really complain about that progress :-)

Maybe I'll have it finished sooner than I think?!

See my previous post for more information about this project :-)