bottle cap crochet-flowers

I improvised those flower-brooches for my girls 

during a girls-weekend in a cottage on the countryside

I used icelandic lace (loðband,einband) and bottle caps for the center 

and léttlopi for the flower pedals

one more thing: I´m starting to miss "the word of the week" photo-challenge so I'm starting with that one again next week...  next weeks word "outlines" is chosen by my sister Guðrún

Have a wonderful weekend ya´ll!

Christmas is coming...

I´ve been busy creating different things lately.

The first thing I want to tell you about is our new advent-candle-holder. I really love driftwood and I found this beautiful piece in the north of Iceland about 2 years ago. I took it with me because I loved it, without knowing what I was going to do with it. Right now, I´m so glad I did! 

Using my pretty piece of driftwood, old candle-holders with a needle at the bottom - the ones you would normally use for candle-wreaths (like those) & tiny wooden stars I bought at Laugarvegur (púkó og smart) I made this really simple and natural-looking advent-candle-holder. :-)   

Ooooohhhh how I love it...

Kría

The second thing I want to tell you about is my second Kria-shawl - what a wonderful project... you can work on it everywhere and in almost every situation (except maby while driving or sleeping)... 

you can take a look at my first one in this post and on Raverly. 

yarn: my own, handdyed einband (icelandic wool), dyed with different kind of plants

made for: my lovely friend Rodrigo for his birthday

Button: from my "button-stash"

And now to my nr. 3: my candle-decorating. 

How I did it: 

1. I found some lovely pictures on pinterest (you can find them over there in my "jól" board), printed them out (normal paper, landscape layout, with black ink only) 

2. Cut the picture out in the right size, depending on your candle

3. Finally, I mod-podged my candle about 3 times, glued the picture on the candle and mod-podged it from the outside. 

It has been burning for a few days now, the paper has still not gone up in flames and we really love the way it looks... 

I´m thinking about making some special designs, using Illustrator as Christmas-gifts...

Crochet snowflakes and christmas in my heart

These little crochet decorations simply make me happy - I´m so glad I learned how to crochet this year! :-)

Snowflake from the book "Þóra"

Crochet hearts, the one in the front is from the book "Þóra" and the one in the back is a free tutorial, found here

I really loved making Lucy´s (attic24) snowflakes - they are so easy to make, quick and really really pretty! I just couldn´t stop making them and had to try out other materials than cotton... bulky lopi, léttlopi and einband (jurtalitað), which I dyed myself with dandelions and Rumex longifolius (njóli)

Since the light was so poor last week (it´s dark most of the time at the moment) I wasn´t able to take any pictures (word of the week). This shot is in a way a little something to compensate for that. Last weeks task was to choose a little spot (a room, a corner of your garden, balcony... ) and look for something interesting to take pictures of.
I went right outside my front door and tried to find something interesting there - not an easy task - but since I love moss, this little spot, covered with green moss is really interesting in my eyes...

Elves at home...

A few years ago I found an interesting slipper pattern on Ravelry (felted) - I really wanted to knit them for myself but at that time, I was overchallenged by this pattern beeing written in english and filled with short rows, so I ended up just dreaming about those slippers... until now! On a relaxing cottage-trip at the countryside with my boys the other day, I finally had the time&the right skills to make them!

This pattern, "Elf Shoes" really is a piece of cake if you know how to knit short rows (I recommend using youtube if you don´t), it´s interesting, fun, goes really fast and I learned a lot about sock-knitting while working on this project. 

Details:

Yarn: léttlopi (aran) for the shoes and my plant-dyed einband (laceweight) for the freehand embroidery 

Needles: 6 mm

Modifications: I made my slippers longer than it says in the pattern, since I´ve felted léttlopi several times and know how intensely it feltes.

I really, really love those shoes and I´m sure the elves do too!

Freehand-embroidery with plant dyed einband (onionpeel, lichen, lupina and calluna vulgaris)

 I used some iron-on-patches to make them last longer...

ohhh how I love those colours of nature... 

I also wanted to show off my new button - a very dear friend of the family gave it to me, knowing that I have a thing for buttons :-)  

It´s probably one of the most beautiful buttons I´ve ever seen...

Kría

I think crochet-projects like shawls, collars and squares make the most perfect on-the-go-projects. It´s just one hook, one strand of yarn and you can easily choose a pattern that´s just a constant repetition... you can therefore easally work without counting and making mistakes all the time AND it fits into most handbags. 

Because of this, I started making my first crochet shawl during a campingtrip this summer. It´s the wonderful pattern "Kría" from the beautiful book "Þóra heklbók" by Tinna Þórudóttir Þorvaldsdóttir.
Making this shawl is totally addicting - once you´ve started, you can´t stop and now that I´ve finished one, I can´t wait to make another one in different colours!! Crazy! What I really like about this shawl is, that I was able to use my leftover-natural-dyed-yarn... it´s so hard to find use for leftover einband (lace)... and the strange thing is, that no matter how many colours you use for this project, it will always look nice (that´s not the case for knitted lace shawls).
I added a scalloped edging (5dc each) and I´m so glad I did - it makes it even more pretty!

My new shawl reminds me this wonderful summer I had with my boys, all the fun campingtrips, nature and sun... thanks to all those memories and the warmth of the colours it will keep me and my soul warm on cold, dark winterdays.

Details: 
Yarn: icelandic einband (lace), dyed by myself with many different plants
Hook: 3,5
Repeats: 62 since I like bigger shawls 
Modifications: I added a edging
Resumé: love this pattern, love this book!

amazing and surprising how the combination of many different colours really works for this shawl

love the size...

so warm and cozy!

love those colours... 

scalloped edging

A giant

Two day´s ago, inspired by pictures of hand carved crochet hooks on the internet, I got this great idea: why not make my own oversize crochet hook? I was so very excited about this idea, that I went straight out on my balcony at 10 o´clock in the evening (it´s still quite bright in the night at that time in Iceland at the moment) with: a branch of a pine tree (smells like christmas :-), my cute little saw, my wonderful carving knife and some sandpaper and started working on my giant.

My mission was a success - after a while, I actually had a well working, oversize crochet hook and I still can´t believe I did it. Of course I had to test it out immediately... I used 6 strands of plötulopi & 2 strands of einband and made a classic granny. At first I had to figure out how to use this huge thing but after that it was a piece of cake and so much fun! 

Now I can´t wait to try out some other, more complicated granny´s and see how they turn out! 

My giant hook is about 20cm long and has a diameter of 2,5-3 cm

  just to show you the difference:

 

It still smells like christmas... 

 

Huge granny (27x27 cm) and a normal granny (12x12cm)

So squishy, soft and cosy... 

More Granny´s...

Here you have a update on my 2 weeks Granny-project...

Those cuties are my favorite at the moment - I´d love to make them out of different kind of materials (not just yarn...)! They are so much fun to make! You can find the pattern on the Royal sisters blog, they have a really good pattern/tutorial with pictures 

This one is from the Royal sisters blog too - I learned a lot by doing it...

I found the next 4 Granny´s on my favorite "Granny-site"... 

this one was quite fast and easy - you can find it here

... and the next 2 really need to be blocked, but they are really pretty... here

 Have a wonderful week!

Granny nr. 2 and 2b

You can read all about my challenge: "A Granny a day for 2 weeks" here. 

Granny´s nr. 2 and 2b are ready but not blocked... 

Pattern: crochet square tutorial, found here

yarn: kambgarn and léttlopi

Pattern: square - a chart found here

yarn: einband

Yarn bombing in Reykjavík

Since I´m extremely busy working on a certain knitting project I haven´t got much time for any other knitting or crochet-related things. But when I was invited to take part in a yarn bombing-thing in Reykjavík I was really tempted - especially when I looked into the big box of yarn (sponsored by Istex for the yarn bombing) filled with different kind of icelandic wool in every colour of the rainbow! You can read all about it in icelandic here.

After thinking a lot about what I could knit or crochet, that didn´t take to much time and was in some way interesting and challenging, I decided to make a 2 weeks program: I´m going use this as an opportunity to learn how to make different kind of crochet squares and make a square a day for at least 2 weeks.

There are two rules:
1. Never make the same square more than once
2. Every square has to be one, that I´ve never made before

It only takes about 5-30 min to learn how to make a new square and I really can spare those few minutes of my time for this fun project.

I´m really excited about this challenge - I'm going to learn how to make at least 14 different kind of crochet squares and it will only take about 10 minutes a day! :-)The fun thing is, the squares don´t have to look perfect, so even if I make a mistake it doesn´t matter at all  - and I also get to use colours I would normally never choose for granny squares (at the moment: dalia hot pink, bright yellow, turquoise... )


If you want to participate in my challenge and make a granny a day for 2 weeks, please leave a link to your blog, photosite or ravelry-page...

Details on square 1:

Yarn: léttlopi, einband and kambgarn

hook: 4,5

Pattern: French Nannie Granny Flower Square, found here on Ravelry (tutorial and pattern with pictures)

The very cute front: 

I´ve always wanted to know how to make a flower in a square - and now I do! 

The back:

My roots

It has been a dream of mine for some time now, to dye with rhubarb-roots (rabbarbararót). It´s not easy to get this dyematerial, so that beeing able to make a strong dye from those roots has only been a dream of mine... until last friday! The thing is, that day my cousin G. called and told me he knows somebody who is getting rid of rhubarb in their garden and if I wanted to and could go there right away, I could get some rhubarb-roots. 

I drove like a mad person to Garðarbær and was expecting to get 1-2 roots... but never in my dreams did I imagine that I would drive back home with 2 big garbage bags, filled with roots! Wow... what an amount of roots... and how much beautiful colors could I possibly get out of this dyematerial!! 

Now I just have a really tiny problem: how to dry this amount of roots without filling up every empty space in our really small 3-room flat? We´ll see... wo der Wille ist, ist auch ein Weg... 

Thanky you so much cousin G. - you made me really happy and I can´t wait to make a strong rhubarb-roots-dye! 

 A huge root... gigantic!

shades, texture, sweet smell...

  cutting the roots so that they´ll dry faster and better

beautiful from the inside... 

 

so much dye-material - love it! 

Another thing I wanted to share with you are 2 dyeing-experiments I did the other day:

I dyed some kambgarn (wool) with the roots of Rumex acetosella (hundasúra). I had read on the internet, that it should give you pink or grey color.  I used Alum and then dyed with the roots, and got a pretty brown colour out of it. Even if I washed it out with a small amount of salmiak spiritus, it only got a slightly different brown shade. It´s quite similar to the brown colour you get from coffee - and coffee is so much easier to get than those small and tiny roots, so I would prefer coffee to get this brown shade. 

kambgarn dyed with the roots of Rumex acetosella

The other thing I did, was dyeing einband and kambgarn (wool) with horse-tail. I had read that it should give you a pink or a grey shade - but the only color I got was a pretty, even yellow.  Well, yellow was not the color I was expecting and aiming for - so hoping for a miracle, I tryed dyeing it again with Rumex acetosella (the leaves and flowers), since I had heard it should give you a green tone. And once again, I just got a deeper yellow... really anoyed I threw the wool into water mixed up with salmiak spiritus - and the color I got from that was just wonderful: a golden mustard but really the most pretty one I´ve ever gotten! 

I DO love this golden mustard