Done

 

Well, I put the time in and the little flower bag is done. I'm going to tat round 6 of the Spring doily, without noting how long it takes me, before I start on the next little beaded bag. 

Time

 

I have an order for two trinket bags. Someone asked how long one of these bags takes to make. At the time I was working in odd snatches of time, so it was hard to tell. But on this one I made a concerted effort to work it out. The bottom took almost an hour, to thread and crochet. Each pattern repeat takes half an hour to thread and an hour to crochet. There are four pattern repeats. So that gets me to 7 hours. There's also time to finish off the top, thread in ends, set up and put away beads.... It's more time than I realised frankly. 

Shirt Time Again

 

Some of Jack's shirts are beginning to wear out at the back, so I'm making replacements. This is the second, I'll probably make three. As usual, they have certain bespoke elements - pockets deep enough to hold notebook on one side and phone on the other; added length so they tuck in easily; and sewn up front so that he doesn't need to bother to do up buttons.  The green fabric seems a bit less robust than the grey, so I've done the pockets in grey and just used the contrasting fabric for the pocket flaps. I hope they'll last as long as the shirts, but in truth it's the weight of things Jack puts in the pockets that wears them out. 

Round 5

 

I've finished tatting round 5 of the Renulek Spring doily. Now it's on hold until round 6 comes out next week. Which is fine, I like the weekly structure. 

Finish This First

 

I've been itching to start work on round 5  of the Spring doily, but I needed to finish this knitting first. Do you remember the animal ears?  Someone wants to do a photo shoot of a baby wearing ears and matching leggings. Right. I found a pattern by Drops Design on Ravelry and adapted it. The construction is quite complex - it's knitted in the round, with short rows to build up the back, increases, decreases... So it didn't really lend itself to alteration. My swatch was a third bigger than stipulated, so I used that as a basis to work out stitch counts. And winged it here and there. I hope the photographer will be happy! 

Scale

 

You can see from this photo that the beaded bags are tiny. I put coins in mine, but they could hold jewelry or trinkets. Someone suggested recently that I put small glass bottles inside. I'll give it a go if I can find the right bottles. 

Zigzag

 

Another little trinket bag. It was fun to make. I rather laboriously drew out a pattern, adapting and expanding a beaded crochet rope pattern:

I had to pay attention when stringing the beads, but because it was repetitious, it wasn't all that difficult. The pattern took so long to draw I thought I'd make double use of it and made another one in shades of blue and red. I gave it away before taking a photo of it. It's difficult to tell the size of the bag from this photo. Tomorrow I'll show another photo that gives a better idea of scale.