Vintage crochet

When we moved into our new home, just over a month ago, the very first thing I wanted to do was to crochet something for the house. I have been collecting vintage crochet and knitting patterns from garage sales and thrift shops, along with crochet cotton so a doily seemed a good start.

This doily pattern book is dated 1945 and is full of beautiful, finely detailed doilies.

Here is the pattern I chose, the cotton (this is what I had left) and the hook (old size 10 or 1.25mm).

And here is the completed doily.

I didn’t want to play ‘yarn chicken’ on the last round so stopped one row before the end. The whole thing only took a few hours to make and was a fun project. Blocking took a while, trying to avoid any pointy bits.

Oops, I can see a pointy bit, ignore that part 😉

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So little time

Where does the time go? I have another day to myself and it’s nearly time to pick the boys up! Looks like this will be another 10 minute blog.

I shouldn’t complain as I have achieved what I set out to today. I’ve been caught by the sewing bug and today’s mission was to sew myself a simple top. The weather is warm here and I haven’t got many lightweight tops. The one I wear a lot has definitely seen better days but I like the shape of it so I have made a copy of it (of sorts).

Firstly, I would just like to apologise to anyone who knows anything about sewing. I don’t, so have probably gone about this in all of the possible wrong ways. The good thing is that I am learning as I go along. What do you think?

Basically, I drew around my existing top, straight onto the fabric I wanted to use. I marked the darts and left a seam allowance and just leapt in with the scissors. The fabric was only $1 from a thrift shop so I didn’t feel too worried about anything messing up. Once I had sewn the darts, I sewed up the seams and then added bias tape to the neckline. The tape was wider than it should be but we’ll call that a ‘design feature’. Because it was so wide I didn’t use it on the armholes and just made a folded over hem instead. It’s not perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it’s wearable as I have tried to show below.

So that was my morning.

As you know we have recently moved to British Columbia, Canada. We live in a small town called Chase. It is in a beautiful setting.

These are from the deck at the back of our house.

Some of you may have spotted the train track that we live very near to. You get used to the trains very quickly!

Here is the view from the front of the house.

Lastly, this is the Little Shuswap Lake, about 10 minutes walk away.

Like everything on your doorstep, we don’t use the lake as much as we should. Then again it has been raining here a lot. A reminder of English summers.

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Catching Up

It is hard to know where to start this post so I have given myself ten minutes to write it and that way I will actually post something! I have a new computer so bear with me, I appear to have set it to Canadian so have no apostrophes alas.

I have spent this morning looking through the photographs that have been taken since we arrived in Canada back in April and there are soooo many. So those will be shared over the next few weeks, but for now I shall share some from today!

This is my first day all to myself since we arrived. The boys are at a Summer programme day together and I have some precious time to catch up on the long list of things I want/need to do.

My main objective for today was to set up my sewing machine, a lovely birthday present in May. If all went well I wanted to make a peg bag too. The good news is everything is working and I made the peg bag as well. Hooray!

Here it is doing its stuff.

I made it with some lovely fabric that I found in a thrift shop. There were lots of pieces so my sewing skills were put to the test piecing them together. I love that the fabric is faded in places already. The hanger is for trousers and has its original label, another lucky find.

I have been busy knitting and crocheting since we arrived too but I will save that for another post.

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