Back To The Rotation

I started My Crafting Rotation back in August last year and it was working really well for me. I chose seven outstanding knitting, crochet and cross stitch projects and worked on each one for a minimum of an hour each week. Some of the projects got finished so I added in new ones, others were more long standing projects but I could see each of them getting some regular attention. In November, I put the rotation on hold whilst I got ready for Christmas, and if truth be told, I lost my crafting mojo from around that time right up to a couple of weeks ago. Now that I'm back in crafting mode I've decided to get back to the rotation.

English paper piecing is a new craft to me. I've never done any sewing before, or very little, either by machine or hand, but I just fancied giving this a go. I chose fabric from the Lewis & Irene Botanic Garden range. I've cut out some hexagons and glue basted them and I'm now at the point where I've just started sewing them together. I'm enjoying it so far but it's still early days.

The scrappy blanket I'm knitting from commercial sock yarn was put on the back burner last year as I'd run out of yarn to add to it. I've actually got plenty of commercial sock yarn but I'm only adding one square of each yarn. A lovely reader of the blog got in touch and sent me a huge parcel of yarn for this blanket so I've started knitting it in. There was so much yarn in the parcel that I won't be running out again any time soon.

I'm really enjoying my cross stitch again. This is the Twelve Days of Christmas which was a stitch along on Plum Street Samplers blog back in 2015. I really like the limited colour palette of this design, I prefer a good amount of straight stitching without having to keep changing colours.

I have lots of yarn waiting to be added to my scrappy blanket which is being knit from hand dyed yarn. As well as the mini skeins I received in last year's yarny advent calendars, I still have some to add from the advent calendars which I had the year before. This blanket seems to have grown quite a bit.

There's now 500 stitches on my Twinkle Twinkle baby blanket and it doesn't look anywhere near big enough to be finished yet. I wonder how many stitches I'll get up to before I have to cast off. This project is quite slow going now that there are so many stitches to knit in each round, it's a good job there's no babies on the horizon at the moment so I'm under no pressure to get this finished for a certain date.

This granny stripe blanket has been on the go now for a long long time, in fact, a couple of years ago I nearly abandoned it and gave what I'd already crocheted to the charity shop. I'm glad I had second thoughts as I'm enjoying working on it and it's grown quite a bit since.

I started this cross stitch about forty years ago. Yes, you read that right. It was started in my early teens and then it got put away for about forty years. This is definitely my longest work in progress. I was in two minds about whether to finish it or not and to be honest, it's not the most enjoyable thing to work on. It's got so many half stitches and it's quite fiddly, but I'm managing an hour a week and it's certainly a lot nearer completion now than it was when I first picked it up again.

I'm glad I'm back into my crafting again. When I lost my mojo before Christmas I knew I shouldn't force it, I've just enjoyed doing other things until I felt the need to pick up a craft project again and now I'm enjoying reacquainting myself with all my projects. It's fun.