hats, hats and more hats..

As a good portion of my 'stock' is now in Daly's craftshop in Valentia I've been trying to rebuild up some stock - in a couple of months Lucy's Sea Synergy Centre will be open in the village again and I need some stock for there - as well as my Etsy shop too.

A lot of the yarn that I'd bought in Poland is chunky so it's very quick to work with - so I'm making hats at the moment...lots of them!

It's been warm enough for me to take my crochet to the beach a couple of times lately - my most favourite place to crochet.

Loads of hats and I'm not finished yet... These are all made in Katia yarns - Inca and Azteca.

 I made these wristwarmers with Polish wool (Olé brand) while we were on holiday -I wish so much that I'd bought more of it (I bought a navy/blue shade as well) but eventually I'm hoping to buy it online.

Wool Shopping in Krakow

 Sadly I am that obsessed with my yarns that one of the few things I research before we go anywhere on holiday is where I might be able to buy some new wool. 

After a bit of googling it looked like there was only a choice of two in Krakow - one was in the huge shopping complex in the city (and had a reputation for being very expensive -- I guess to rent a shop in such a big shopping centre is pretty expensive so they have to charge more?) -- I didn't bother going to the one in the shopping centre as the one that we went to was great!

It's ''Pasmanteria Klebuszek on Karmelicka Street and I loved it! It's pretty small as wool shops go and the man didn't have very much English - but his English was much much better than our two words of Polish ;)

For a small shop there was a load of different yarns, threads, cross stitch patterns, buttons etc crammed in - right up to the ceiling.

 I bought these big buttons! I will put them on hats :)

I didn't get a good photo of all the wool I bought together in one place - this is a fuzzy one that I took with my tablet - the only Polish wool that I bought was the sock yarn at the top right (three balls) and the cream on the far right hand side.

They had a GREAT selection of Katia yarns so I got a lot of them in different shades and some King Cole ones that were new to me.

I've started making hats with the Katia 'Azteca' already so will probably have photos of them for my next blog update - and I've already made two pairs of crocodile stitch wrist warmers with the browns and multicolour sock yarn.

Towards the end of the holiday I was hoping that we might manage another trip to this wool shop; but on our last day I had packed up our cases and there just wasn't any room left :(

Helter Skelter Headband

You might remember that I was one of the lucky five to have been chosen to have a go at the February Cygnet Yarnstars Challenge http://selkiecrochet.blogspot.ie/2018/01/helter-skelter.html

Sadly I didn't win - I wasn't expecting to anyway, even before I'd seen the other entrants work; but it was a fabulous opportunity to try a new wool and to put me outside of my comfort level for a bit.

 A couple of photos -- I LOVED the colours in the wool: I'm at my happiest when I'm using either self-striping or multicoloured yarns and I really liked the contrast between the blues and reds in this particular shade...they look like they shouldn't 'go' together but they do!

It's a 100% acrylic, chunky yarn and was really good quality - no squeaky or scratchy acrylic.

I decided to make a headband in double 'rib' - it was very quick to make up and used virtually all of the 100g ball of yarn.

I'll write up the pattern in case anyone else would like to try - any questions please leave me a comment below and I'll try to help!

Join with a slip stitch at the end of every round. 

• Using a 5.5mm hook chain 80.
• Join carefully with a slip stitch to form a loop (without twisting the chain)
• Work 1 double crochet into each stitch
• Ch. 3 then treble all round - you should have 80 trebles 
• Ch. 3, work 2 front-post trebles then 2 ordinary trebles all round to create a 'double rib' effect
• make 6 more rounds in the 'rib' pattern
• finish with a round of double crochet again

make edging (see photo above) by working double crochet into the row below the last row at the top and bottom of the headband. You don't have to do this but it gives a neat edge. 

For the flower embellishment I chose a chrysanthemum as I love the crazy texture! 

• Use a 4.5mm hook.
• Chain 5 and join with a slip stitch, forming a ring.
• Ch 1, work 10 double crochet (dc) into the ring (join with sl st) 
• work the front loops of the ring *ch 6, sl st into next chain from the hook, dc into the next 3 ch and sl st into last chain - making a short petal. Sl st into the next front loop and repeat from * all around the stitches in the ring.
• working in the back loops of the ring *ch 8, sl st into next chain from the hook, dc into the next 5 ch and sl st into last chain - making a longer petal. Sl st into the next back loop in the ring and repeat from * all around the remaining stitches.  Break off yarn.
•  For the second layer of petals: chain 8 and join with a sl st, forming a ring
• Ch 3, and work 19 trebles into the ring (join with a sl st)
• Using the front loops only *ch 10, sl st into next ch from the hook, dc into next 7 ch and then sl st into last chain - making a longer petal. Repeat from * as you did for the petals in the other layer
• working into the back loops as before *ch 12, sl st into next chain from the hook, dc into the next 9 ch and then sl st into the last ch - making an even longer petal!
• break off leaving a long end for sewing in. 

To complete the headband: 

•  Sew in the loose ends on the headband (at the start finish and from the edging)
• Sew the two layers of petals together to give a nicely textured flower with twisty petals
• Securely attach the flower to the headband, positioning it over the start/end of the edging so that it looks neat.

March!

Oh boy, it's the middle of March and it's almost exactly a whole month since I last update this blog ...

Things have been kind of busy lately - first with minding Donal and Rosie's shop on Valentia for 18 days, and then towards the end of February we headed off on our own holiday - to Krakow in Poland!

Peter and I alternate between us as to who gets to choose the holiday destination - and this time it was my choice. I chose Krakow as it was somewhere we could fly to directly (leaving from Shannon airport) and it looked like it had a LOT of history. It turned out to be a great choice - the old buildings are so beautiful in their faded elegance and there is history around just about every street corner.

We had 11 days there and it was just about the right length of time - by the end we thought we'd seen everything that we'd wanted to and were ready to go home (though I've just found out today that there is a stained glass museum, which I never knew was there & would have loved to have visited)

 We arrived in the middle of the 'Beast from the East' - a snow storm with freezing temperatures -- even on our holiday in Iceland a few years ago we hadn't experienced this level of cold. Minus 10 to minus 13 in the daytime!!

But we just wrapped up warmly and got out and went sightseeing. We were lucky that we were going to stay for such a relatively long period of time and we knew that the weather was set to improve after 4 or 5 days - it was so cold that I didn't take many photos in the first few days as it was too much 'work' to take off my big mittens and wrist warmers, open my bag, open my camera case and take photos; you know it must be bad when I can't be bothered to take photos!

But it did look beautiful and I feel lucky that we did get to see the snow - in the second half of our holiday it had warmed up considerably (up to +10 degrees C) so all the snow had faded away.

The same park at the beginning and at the end of our holiday!!