Tutorial: Make Your Own Wooly Sheep Keyring

Here's a great activity to use up scraps of yarn and make a few fantastic little gifts. It's a quick and easy project and so simple that it makes a wonderful weekend or summer holiday activity for children.

All you need is some scrap yarn (bonus points for using wool) and a small amount of polymer clay.

Start by making a small pom-pom with a diameter of about 2-3 cm (1-1¼"). If you have a super-swish pom-pom maker, then you're sorted, but if you're not lucky enough to own one then please save yourself a bit of time and frustration by making your pompoms using a fork.

I have made a little brown sheep simply because it is easier to see the brown yarn against a white background, but you can have a rainbow of sheep if you have bright enough yarn. Once you have your sheep body you need some polymer clay for her head.

 Roll three balls of clay - one should be about three times the size of the other two and they should be comparative to the size of the pom-pom as in the picture above.

Press your thumb into the larger ball of clay, elongating it slightly so that one half is slightly thicker and wider than the other. The two smaller balls of clay should be shaped into flattened, elongated teardrop shapes.

Turning the face over shows the smooth surface of the clay face, free of thumb and fingerprints.

Press the two teardrops to the edges of the narrower end of the larger clay piece and use a pencil or thin knitting needle to poke two eyes into the clay. Bake the clay according to the manufacturers instructions and allow to cool (an adult should be in charge of using the oven and handling the still-hot clay pieces).

Using a clear glue such as UHU multipurpose glue, attach the head to the pompom body by pressing it firmly into the parted strands of your pompom. Attach a keyring or ribbon for hanging as a handbag charm or home decoration using a sewing needle and thread, or glue a small round magnet to the back to attach to the refrigerator.

These are so quick and easy to make that you might wish to make a whole flock to turn into a hanging mobile and they are a wonderful way to make something cute and fun out of leftover yarn.

4KCBWDAY7 Looking Forward

4kcbwday7 Looking Forward One year from now, when the 5th Knitting & Crochet Blog Week rolls around, where do you hope your crafting will have taken you to? What new skills, projects and experiences do you hope you might have conquered or tried?

As today is the final day of this year's Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, my looking forward today is not only about my knitting and crochet but also about blog week itself.

This year's blog week seemed to go smoothly and with minimal confusion, but with so much inspiring output. I have genuinely enjoyed being able to read all of the blog posts (my favourite day this year perhaps being the infographics challenge, where knitters and crocheters showed their wit and ingenuity with amazing results). It has certainly been a challenge for me to run, especially as I was brought down with a nasty bout of Scarlet Fever on the very first day of the blog week, and so even reading some of the wonderful posts has been a challenge from my sick bed, but I am on the path to recovery now and still have plenty of reading to do.

So, looking forward means looking towards next year. Every year I hope that Knitting & Crochet Blog Week will be bigger and better than the year before, because the more participants we have, the more we grow as a community and an event. I hope that as well as the bloggers that participated en français this year that next year someone will be kind enough to translate the guide to blog week into a third and fourth language and spread the word to knitting/crochet blogging communities in other languages.

So, to wrap up this year, I would like to say thank you to everyone who took part. Also to congratulate all bloggers who managed between one and seven posts this week. Keep an eye out for the posts tagged 4KCBWEC to discover those bloggers who made a marvellous job of actually making their mascot project (relatedly, if you haven't seen it, I have made one of my patterns free to download for everyone who has participated in blog week but it is a limited time offer, so download soon!)

Keep in touch and drop by Eskimimi Makes to say hi from time to time and to keep up with latest news about the annual Knitting & Crochet Blog Week.

Happy Blogging!

New Pattern: Monkey House Socks. Free To All Knitting & Crochet Blog Week Participants. 4KCBWEC

Some seriously frantic knitting has been going on at Castle Awesome, folks, and it is with great pleasure that I present to you the Monkey House Socks, as modelled on Mr Awesome's shapely pins.

Inspired by the search for a mascot project, these socks have come to embody the Knitting & Crochet Blog Week experience for me. They are new and exciting, presented a challenge and also have the most rewarding of results. Called the Monkey House socks for the qualities of the House Of Monkey that went into the devising of the pattern, these socks are designed to make the most out of a skein of self-striping sock yarn.

I have listed these socks on Ravelry for download at the very reasonable price of $4.50. However, though it can be hard work and a bit stressful organising Knitting & Crochet Blog Week each year, I do get a sense of achievement in reading everyone's blog posts and seeing people blogging along, so I am offering the pattern for free to anyone who has taken part in the Blog Week this year.

To get your free copy, please send me a PM on Ravelry, including your blog address, and I will send you a code to download the pattern for free. Both the download code and pattern are non-transferrable. Bloggers have until 11:59pm on Wednesday 1st May to request the download code which must be redeemed before 11:59 on Sunday 5th May.

Obviously, if you enjoyed Knitting & Crochet Blog Week and wanted to treat me to a coffee or something then you are very much welcome to buy an additional copy for a friend, or to treat yourself to a second pattern from my pattern store for less than the price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Available to purchase now for just $4.50

4KCBWDAY6: A Tool To Covet

4KCBWDAY6 - A Tool To Covet Write about your favourite knitting or crochet (or spinning, etc) tool. It can either be a tool directly involved in your craft (knitting needles or crochet hook) or something that makes your craft more pleasurable – be it a special lamp, or stitch markers.

I have one item in my knitting arsenal above all others that I cherish (well, if we discount my hands, which I am going to take as given, as you don't want a post about my hands... I think) and that is my swift.

It is a relatively new item in my knitting cupboard and was extra special because it was a gift from the one that I love. But its not only for its sentimental value that I love this swift.

The sturdiness of good workmanship shines through every element of its construction, and above all of my other knitting and crochet tools I can see this one working flawlessly in 60 years time. It's good, honest workmanship at its finest, and though its not the cheapest of knitting items it is absolutely worth every penny, and would make a great gift for any knitter or crocheter who admires all elements of their craft.

Though today's post is short, please keep watching this blog as I have a new pattern to release today and though it will be a paid for pattern I will be offering it for free to everyone who has taken part in Knitting & Crochet Blog Week this year.

To find more posts on this topic, enter 4KCBWDAY6 into a search engine of your choice.

5KCBWDAY5 Something A Bit Different

4KCBWDAY5 Something A Bit Different It’s the annual challenge to blog in a way different to how you normally blog. You may choose to create a podcast, or vlog, create a wordless post or write in verse. You've already stretched your wings with an infographic, now it's time to freestyle. You can post on any topic you like, but be sure to post in a style different from your usual blog presentation. 

I thought I'd explain exactly why it is that I have so much Kaffe Fassett Regia Sock Yarn at the moment. I know a lot of people say "it's not my fault!" because the yarn was calling to them, or because they just can't help the shiny, but I have another problem.

Mr Awesome is an enabler! And I thought that as I now had a load of new yarn I should put some of it to some use. And as it will soon be coming up to two years since I met the wonderful Mr Awesome I thought he deserved a new pair of socks to go with his other two pairs.

After finding a masculine colourway I have cast on for a third pair of Giant Man socks.

As this yarn is self-striping I spent a while researching ways to play with the yarn to achieve an effect something other than simple stripes. After looking at a number of options I wanted something that was less fussy and more masculine than most of the options I had seen so have devised a new pattern that makes the most of this yarn's qualities.

I'm really enjoying both the effect and simplicity of design of these socks, and they are flying along as the stitch is so easy to execute. As the stitch I am using does require the use of a stitchmarker I have selected one of the most cheery from my collection, in the form of a dainty teacup.

Working with this yarn to bring out and emphasise its qualities (in this case the colour changes and self-striping nature) is a very House Of Monkey thing to do, and though it may be a few days late I realise that I have now found my mascot project!

To read more blog posts on this topic enter 4KCBWDAY5 into a search engine of your choice, or click here.

Adding A Custom Bookmark Icon To Your Site For Apple Devices (Even On Blogger!)

Some time ago, Apple introduced icon bookmarking to their devices, which allowed website owners to place a custom icon within their site structure so that anyone bookmarking their page using an apple device such as an iPod touch, iPhone or iPad would be able to have a little visual indicator of that site that mimicked the style of app icons and could sit alongside them on the user's phone screen.

If you don't currently have one of these icons and a user adds your site as a bookmark on their homepage they will instead see a tiny image of your front webpage, which at such a small scale can look pretty indistinct. It's very easy to add a custom icon to your site if you are on a self hosted blog or other website. Simply create a 144x144 image of whatever you want your icon to be and save it as a .png file with the file name apple-touch-icon.png and upload it to your home directory.

However, if you aren't self hosted and so cannot access your home directory, things become a little trickier. However, after a bit of playing around I think I have found a way to get around this. If you create an image as before: 144x144 pixels in size, saved as a .png file, and upload it to somewhere that will host your pictures for you (I chose Flickr, because I always use Flickr) and upload it there. Now, after uploading, find the URL of your picture. You'll need to make sure that the file extension of your picture is still .png and that the program hasn't converted it to a .jpg or similar. If you are using Flickr, click on the picture you have just uploaded and then click Actions > view all sizes and select 'original'. Right click that image and copy the image URL. Paste it back into your browser address bar to make sure it ends in .png and keep that window open.

Next, open up Blogger and go to Template > Edit HTML. Click in teh window that opens up and scroll down to the closing head tag, which looks like this: </head>.

Once you have found that tag, type the following into a line directly above it: <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="http//www.yourfileaddresshere.png"> </link>

(Blogger kicks out a stink if you don't include that closing link tag.) Next you must save your template. If you already have a web screenshot icon of your site on your phone/device's home screen you will need to delete and re-save the bookmark for your icon to show.

To save a website icon to your home screen as a bookmark, simply visit that website in your device, select the icon that looks like an arrow escaping from a box and select the 'add to home screen' option.

PS: You don't ned to worry about rounding off the corners of your icon or making it look all shiny as Apple Magic will do that work for you.

4KCBWDAY4 - Colour Review

4KCBWDAY4 Colour ReviewWhat are your favourite colours for knitted or crocheted projects. Have a think about what colours you seem to favour when yarn shopping and crafting.

Only after writing this part of your post should you then actually look to see what colours you have used in your projects. Make a quick tally of what colours you have used in your projects over the past year and compare it to the colours you have written about. Compare this, in turn, to the colours that are most dominant in your yarn stash – do they correlate?

Now think back to your house animal - do the colours you have chosen relate to your animal in anyway - if you are in the house of peacock, for example, are your projects often multicoloured and bright?

I was thinking the other day how much my sense of colour has calmed down over the last year or so. I used to love to surround myself with as much colour as possible, and always went for the brightest yarns, but now see the beauty in the delicate grey hues and subtle natural colours that we have decorated our home in, and I am always drawn to project that have been knit in these colours. My projects since the Last Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, however, tell a different story.

Though a pair of grey/brown socks make an appearance, they were knit for Mr Awesome, who has outgrown his novelty socks years (though he still acquires a number as birthday and Christmas gifts from various people, which he does wear). There are actually a far few projects more than this, but as they are all due in upcoming publications I don't have pictures yet (or rather I do, but they are under wraps), but I can tell you that they are bright and vibrant shades of an almost electric violet and bright red and olive green as well as white.

Looking at the colours that I have used and that are in my stash, they are every bit as vibrant as the preceding years, and I am still enjoying playing with colour in my knitting, crochet and my spinning. I like to try and make colour work for me - putting together pallettes that I enjoy working with and making yarns that are by nature multicoloured work to their best advantage. I spent a while working out how to make the most of some yarn that I had spun that ran through all the shades of the rainbow, but decided what better to make with rainbow hued yarn that a rainbow?

I have also spent some time this year trying to make varigated yarns work to my favour. I've not usually been a fan of variegated colour ways until I started playing with stitches and various techniques that could work with those very short colour repeats and play with the colours within.

These Confetti socks were the result of many experiments on how to alter and control the flow of colour in a skein of yarn to bring out the various hues whilst minimising the risk of accidental pooling.

So does my choice of colour reflect my house animal at all? I'd say yes, in that I am always inquisitive about colour and finding ways to best put different colours together as well as making the colours that somebody else has selected for a multicoloured yarn work toward the effect that I am looking for, and I think that is a very Monkey-ish trait!

To find other blog posts on this topic, please enter 4KCBWDAY4 into a search engine of your choice, or click here.