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Learn to Crochet – beginners kit

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Here are my top tips for a beginners kit for anyone who wants to learn to crochet. Lots of people would love to take up a new craft. The health benefits of crafting are real!!

The kit of products I am recommending here would make a lovely starter set. At entry level crochet is very simple and with a few basic stitches you can make a lot of beautiful things.

Disclaimer – the products I am recommending here are ones that I use and love myself. I am a registered affiliate of Amazon and if you click on the links to these products it is possible that I will receive a small payment at no additional cost to you. Any payment I do receive would go towards the running cost of this blog and help me towards my dream of running this as a business one day!

Firstly let’s look at hooks. The hooks I find most comfortable have a cushioned grip. The hooks I have selected here come in a range of 14 sizes. I love working in different yarn weights and do use all the sizes, especially the very large and very small ones!

Next, when you have finished your crochet work you have to finish off the ends. This used to mean trying to thread thick yarn through the eye of a darning needle. Frustrating! Then forcing the needle through the work, splitting the yarn and often piercing your own finger in the process! However, my crochet life was transformed when I discovered the Knit Pro Wool Needles. These are AMAZING wonderful time and patience savers. They produce a better result as well because the rounded ends do not split the yarn.

The appearance of any finished piece of crochet is always improved when it is blocked. This means placing the finished work on a foam board and pinning it out to the shape you would like it to hold. Spray the work with a fine mist of water and leave it to dry. Magic happens and the work takes the desired shape – stops curling at the edges and generally looks much tidier! I used to use kids foam play floor tiles for this and ordinary dressmaking pins. If you are just starting you could use those as a cheaper alternative – they served me well. If you are looking to treat someone or yourself, the ones I recommend are these Knit Pro ones. The grid lines are really helpful. The extra thickness means the pins don’t go all the way through into the table like mine used to!

Finally – when it comes to blocking, I find you can never have too many pins. The blocking boards come with pins but I recommend buying a few more. The set I found has two sizes which is helpful when working in different weights of yarn.

That is really all you need to get started apart from yarn of course! I buy all my yarn from Wool Warehouse here in the UK. I have also posted ideas on how you can recycle yarn which you can read here.

If you are the kind of person who likes to learn from a book, there are several good ones to choose from. I have included a few that I enjoy reading through below. There are ideas here for beginners and more advanced crafters. It really isn’t necessary to buy a book now though with lots of excellent tutorials on YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram.

Hope you find this set of products as useful and helpful as I do. Happy crocheting!

Annie 🙂

Crochet Blog – update #9

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Welcome to my Crochet blog – update #9. It has been such a long time since I posted an update. I have been working on a number of projects but life and the day job took over. It is difficult to find time to get the patterns together and tested. I am trying to ring fence time to work on my crochet projects, for the sake of my mental health if nothing else!

I have been trying to organise this blog better, updating menus and links. Building my Pinterest profile has been a focus and reviewing all the beautiful work that my fellow crochet designers are producing. I have set up a Tailwind tribe to collect and promote inspiring crochet block and crochet blanket patterns.

Join my new Tailwind tribe here!

Project updates

Hearts and Spots blanket

Now onto the projects I have been busy with. Firstly I am close to finishing a couple of long standing projects. My Hearts and Spots blanket which started life as a Christmas present from my husband. The present was one ball of every colour of Drops Paris cotton yarn. The only thing I have left to do is to finish stitching in the ends. There are a lot of ends!! The design is made up of squares that I designed and have already shared as free patterns. I have added the links to these patterns below the picture.

Hears and spots blanket

Open heart square

Sample square

Cosy Knitted blanket

I branched out into knitting for a short time and will be putting the pattern for this lovely cosy blanket up on my blog as soon as I can get it written. Not to make excuses for the delay but I am actually waiting for my husband to draft the chart 🙂

Cosy knitted blanket

Hearts and Stripes blanket

My latest project is a 4th of July inspired Hearts and Stripes blanket. I designed a solid block based on my heart motif and put it with a simple striped square to produce this blanket. The free patterns for the two squares you need to make this project are already posted. I will post the full pattern for the blanket next – just finishing the pattern test! Here is a picture of the finished project. I hope you like it. Below the picture are the links to the patterns for the two squares.

Hearts and stripes blanket

Full Heart crochet block

Striped square

Finally I have been working on yarn recycling. We (Mum and I) put together quite a stash of salvaged yarn and it has been nagging at me from bags in my stash room….. YES… I am so lucky – I have a whole room for my stash. Admittedly the room is only about four foot square so I suppose it is more of a cupboard than a room … but it is stash dedicated space 🙂 Anyway these bags of recycled yarn have been on my mind so you can expect to see an update on that project in the coming days. I think that is it for now – Happy crocheting!

Annie 🙂

Crochet blog – update #8

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Hello and SORRY – it has been a few weeks since my last post.    I was calling these ‘weekly’ updates but that just hasn’t been happening.    My day job has been REALLY busy for a few weeks but should be calming down now, so hopefully I will get to spend my weekends here again.

I have still been busy with my crochet projects on the train each day.    I have also been able to work on with my Hearts and Spots blanket in the evenings.  Although I don’t want to get my laptop out after a day in the office – I don’t mind a bit of crochet to wind down before bed.

Here are the latest views of the blanket.   I still have to tie in all the ends but it is all stitched together.  The border would be finished if I hadn’t run out of yarn!   The yarn order is in for just two more balls of Drops Paris to complete the project.   The patterns for the squares are on my blog, heart square pattern here and basic square pattern here.   I am not fully happy with the way they fit together so I will be tweaking them over the coming weeks.   I plan to put a smaller version of the blanket together as a kit so watch this space on that.

This project is waaay too big for the train now so I have been working on other things in the mornings and evenings.   I started work designing more blocks and produced a pentagon….  not terribly useful as they don’t tesselate or fit together easily.   I might turn out a pattern for a ball (think football/soccer) at some point using these and a hexagon or two 🙂  I will put the hexagon pattern up on here in case anyone finds it helpful for a five sided project!   I suppose you could just keep going round and make a pentagon shaped blanket.

My other project on the train has been a little bag.   I am quite pleased with this so far.   It looks a bit basic as it still needs handles, decoration.  I think I might include a lining.   Again I am thinking about putting this pattern together as a kit on Etsy but I will share the pattern for free on the blog as soon as I can get it written up.

I have been using a lighter weight yarn for these two projects, Drops Muskat.   Another winner from Drops as far as I am concerned.  This yarn again is incredible value and consistent quality.  I have yet to find a knot!  The yarn is 100% mercerized cotton with a lovely sheen and tight twist which means that it doesn’t split much if at all when being worked.   Easier if you want to be looking up from the work a bit!  I have been using a 4mm hook for this yarn which seems to work well.  The finished work has great stitch definition so would really show off complicated stitches.

Finally, a team project has started in my house.    It started with me worrying about the cost of yarn.   I began wondering whether it would be possible to get hold of some yarn very cheaply by buying old knitwear and dismantling garments to recover the yarn.   This is where my Mum came in and if I am honest has completely taken over!   A trawl of local charity/thrift shops turned up a number of candidate garments.    We got to work (carefully) with scissors, unpicking and balling and the results have been amazing.    I will put up a separate post on the process and results as I could fill pages with what we found and learned.   For this post, in summary, we have recovered a huge quantity of yarn so far for a tiny outlay.   My Mum is now unstoppable in her search for woollies to dismantle and I have started my first project using this recovered yarn!    I am trying to top up what we find with yarn from my stash but as it stands far more is going into my stash than is coming out!!

Here are some of the pics of the project using the recycled yarn.   The inspiration for the project was the first yarn we recovered – a soft brown boucle yarn flecked with yellow and orange.    I came up with a pattern for a block using a cluster stitch (another new one for me).    I will share the patterns in a separate post.

My husband loves drawing and designing and was once an engineer before moving on to other things so he likes a bit of geometry and maths.    I enlisted his help for this project as I was short on time.   He came up with this layout below which I really like – I think I will be asking him for designs more often!   Here is his sketch.

I have had a very exciting time with the blog this month.   One of my posts on pricing of handmade work seemed to catch attention out there and drove far more page views than I have had previously.   My income from ads ‘soared’ to £1.83 in one month 🙂 clearly still a long way to go to being financially secure!

That’s all from me for this post – I have promised a number of follow on posts and patterns so I had better get working!   Please get in touch either by leaving a comment or joining my mailing list.   I love hearing from you all.

Happy crocheting!

Annie 🙂

 

Crochet blog – update #7

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Hello and welcome to my 7th update.    I am still aiming to do these weekly but my week was crazy busy last week and I didn’t make enough progress to tell you about!

Over the last two weeks I managed to complete the squares for my hearts and spots blanket.  Here are the last four rows.    These are not laid out in the order I plan to put them together here but you get the idea.

The original colour layout looked like this.    I will be joining the blocks in this order more or less.

The heart squares are less stable than the spot and solid squares so rather than make it random I am rotating the three designs which means that a heart square will always be surrounded by solid/spot squares.  Here are the finished blocks in their colour piles!

I have been working on joining methods.    For my sunshine flower blanket I wanted to make the joins as invisible as possible.    This hearts and spots blanket will make a feature of the joins.    I am using the mid colour from each of the sets to join the blocks in each row.    For the joins between rows I haven’t decided what to use yet.    I might carry on with the mid colour of the previous row or might use the bold colours.

Away from this blanket I have been trying to get organised.    I recently published a couple of posts on daily and weekly planning with free printable planner downloads.  I have also been working on a stash catalogue which I will share in a separate post but this is what it looks like.   Here is the file as a free download.   The file is A5 size so you might need to resize it if you would like a different format.    If you have any problems with this please let me know and I will resize the file for you!   stash catalogue (190 downloads)

I have quite a large stash of yarn (!) and much as I try to make use of it before buying more yarn, it doesn’t seem to reduce any!   I hope that having it catalogued and available to browse through will improve my ability to create ideas to use it all.   One thing I have found is that as I go through the backs of cupboards and packing boxes to look at all my yarn, I am falling in love with it all over again.    I have found some yarns I didn’t know I had!    I read an article on yarn stashing and I know I am not the worst for this.   I do not have any yarn deliberately hidden from my family.    I loved one story I read, of a knitter who had removed a bath panel to create a new hiding place for an extreme stash 🙂

That’s all from me this week.   I will go back to joining squares and cataloguing my stash.    I hope to be able to edge the hearts and spots blanket next weekend and to share the final pattern.   Happy crocheting!

Annie 🙂

Crochet blog – update #6

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Hello and welcome to my sixth update!   This week I made more progress on my blanket project.   I realised I have been calling it different names as is has progressed.   It started life as my Shades of the Rainbow blanket but more recently I have been calling it Hearts and Spots!   Whatever name it ends up with I have to confess, I am ready to move on… I have never been great at finishing things but this blog acts as a conscience so I will get it done!

This photo shows four more completed rows of squares.   Only four more to go and I can start the making up.   I have already made the majority of the blocks for those last four rows but still need to fasten off the ends.

I started to look into pricing of this project, researching on Etsy and google for similar items and found a huge range of pricing.   Some of it was incredibly low and looks to cover the cost of materials at best.   This got me thinking!   I built myself a little spreadsheet to calculate the cost of producing the blanket.   I know what the yarn cost including shipping and I used the UK minimum wage to value my time. The blanket isn’t finished yet but when it is I will know what I should be charging. The spreadsheet has a section to record the number of hours worked.   I think I will use one for every project from now on.   I created it as a PDF and set up a FREE DOWNLOAD HERE.   Pricing basics (648 downloads)   I wrote a longer post on pricing which you can read here – pricing basics.

As a break from my big project this week I designed this new block in the picture above.   I have made it up in a few colours with some of my left over scraps. I am very pleased with the way it turned out.   Here is a link to the FREE PATTERN. There are no complicated stitches so it should be suitable for beginners.   I have listed the instructions in both UK and US notation.   I haven’t decided on my next big project but I would quite like to make a blanket with this block.   I worked it in Drops Paris yarn on a 5mm hook and the finished blocks are about 14cms square.

The problem with these little side projects is that they hold up work on the main project.   I do tend to get a bit distracted by new things.   Confession time, I have three other side projects on the go.   I am working on a cushion design, a summer top and a shoulder bag design.   The good news is that I will be able to share those patterns with you soon I hope.

For now it is back to finishing of little Hearts and Spots squares.   I hope you have a good week. Happy crocheting!

Annie 🙂

Crochet blog – update #5

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Hello and welcome to my fifth weekly update!

This week has been all about getting my heart and spot squares finished.    I have completed all the blocks for four of the colours.   Sewing in the ends has been a long long job!   I laid out the finished blocks  in the order I want them to sit in the finished piece and I am preparing to start joining them up.   I plan to join them using the mid shade in each colour way but I might change my mind on that after testing a few styles.   Here is the layout I am working on.


The picture shows almost all the squares in a row and there are are another eight rows to complete!  I was given a single ball of every colour of Paris Drops cotton yarn for Christmas and this is the project I came up with for that yarn.   The pattern would be great for using up oddments though and the design would look very different with random colours instead of these single colour stripes.   I am planning to make it again mixing all the colours up as an experiment 🙂

Yarn Review –  Drops Paris – this is a strong cotton yarn that works up using a 5mm hook/needles.    The yarn comes in a wide range of colours – 47 available at the time of writing.  Some of the colours say that they are made from recycled denim and those tend to be more harsh in texture.   In general the yarn is relatively soft for cotton.   Drops Paris is made up of many thin strands and does have a tendency to split.  This means you have to watch carefully as you work but if you do find it splitting it is easy to pull back out and correct.    One really big plus for me is that I have hardly found any breaks/knots in the yarn.   It is very reasonably priced – I am picking up odd additional balls as required for around £1 per 50g ball.

Stash buster project – Even though this blanket project is a stash buster itself, using small bits of yarn, I am still finding that I have oddments left over.   As a break from sewing in the ends on all these blocks I came up with a use for those oddments.    This is a hair accessory I made.

I have put up a separate post  – hair accessory instructions in case you want to have a go at this.    It is soooo quick and I am really pleased with the results.    I am using fairly thick cotton per the review above, but if made using lighter, softer acrylic yarn the strands form lovely spirals which you can mix and match with the straighter ribbons.

In other (non-crochet) news, I have been working on two knitted blanket patterns which I will be sharing next week.   One of them is a chunky, soft and cosy blanket made with some lovely 100% merino wool (shown below) that I picked up at a craft show.   The other is a much lighter baby blanket with stripes and hearts.   I am looking to back the baby blanket with fleece and put some crochet edging round it but at this stage the blocks are waiting to be sewn together.

I think that is all I have this week – back to sewing in ends and sewing up blocks for me!   Happy crocheting!

Annie 🙂