4KCBWDAY6 a tool to covert ::

Day 6 of knitting and crochet blog week (I appreciate I'm now about 3 weeks late!), and it's time to think about our favourite tools.

This is super tough for me, there are so many items I simply couldn't work without.

Though I'm not particularly fussy when it comes to crochet hooks, honestly any old hook works fine for me, I am more so when it comes to knitting needles, I haven't tried them all and certainly have yet to work with some of the best, but some of my current favourites are knitpicks interchangeables (they aren't perfect, they do come unscrewed regularly and I have snapped more than one, but I do like them) my other favourites are a lovely pair of square rosewood needles I purchased on holiday one year in a really sweet knitting shop in Historic Georgetown, South Carolina.  I so rarely knit on these as they are really chunky, but there is something about square needles that seems so right!

However after a chat on the subject for crochet hooks over on twitter a couple of weeks ago, I have been convinced to try out some of the better ones.  Top recommendations were for Clover, both Amour and Soft Touch, though if anyone has any further suggestions I'd love to hear them.

Something I would love to own, but as yet is missing from my crafty collection is a swift.  I hate winding yarn from skeins and really I am not good at it, I will turn a skein in to a knotted, tangled mess,  just looking at it, throw a kitten and a toddler in to the equation and really I'm doomed to spend my life impatiently untangling yarn.

If I really had to choose my most coveted tool, I guess I'd go for my books, I have quite a collection.  I literally could not design without these, my stitch dictionaries are invaluable (Kat Goldin did a fab post on this exact subject a while back which saw me adding a few more staples to my collection!) but also Elizabeth Zimmerman's 'Knitting without Tears' and Debbie Abrahams 'Design Your Own Knits in 5 Easy Steps' have been fundamental to assisting with my designing.

 Currently my favourite stitch dictionaries are "Harmony" Guide to Crochet Stitches and Complete Book of Crochet Stitch Designs

I'm also currently awaiting delivery of 63 Crochet Cable Stitches.  

4KCBWDAY5 something a bit different ::

Day 5 of knitting and crochet blog week and something very different for me.

Very much an amateur attempt, but not too bad for a first go, plus I certainly learnt a lot, if I ever fancied having another go ::

4KCBWDAY2 A Mascot Project ::

Today's subject for the Knitting and Crochet Blog Week, is to think about the way in which we are inspired to make what we make, so I thought I'd share with you how I tend to design projects.

Unless I have something very specific in mind to make I usually just start with a theme and search out some inspiration.  As I established yesterday I was a in the House of Bee, I thought I would use that as a starting off point to hunt out some inspiration.  I tend to use Pinterest a lot along with a google image search, I'll start with a key word and then I tend to go off in tangents from there.

For this particular exercise I started with the obvious 'bee', then moved on from there, searching, 'bee knitting', 'bee crochet', 'honeycomb', 'honeycomb knitting' etc...

I set up a Pinterest board especially for my finds, but quite often I just clip straight to Polyvore, which is what I tend to use to create my mood boards (unless I'm using images from real magazines in which case I use my work room walls!)

So here you go this is the mood board I created :

When I started searching out inspiration, I had no idea what-so-ever of what I might actually create, but by the time I had finished I had a good idea of a design forming in my mind.

Honeycomb was something that really stood out for me, I love the knitted hexagons in honey colours I found, and imagined a really lovely shawl, made from crochet hexagons, in similar honey colours.  Looking at actual honeycomb and the colours in it was really interesting, and lots of ideas of how to work colour into the hexagons started to develop.

From here I tend to take to the drawing board, as I'm not a particularly skilled artist, I use Sketch Book on my iPad and trace over an image of a figure to get my outline, from there I add all my design features.  For a shawl of course there isn't much you really need to see of the garment on the person and in any part of a design, one of the most important features is of course a swatch.  

Unfortunately I didn't have anything quite as gorgeously honey coloured as the yarns featured in my mood board (found in Baby Long Legs shop), if I was doing this as a submission for a magazine, I would probably search out the perfect yarns first, so that I knew I would be able to find the perfect colours and get hold of them for the swatch, as colour is such a vital part of this project.

I swatched a couple of ideas before I settled on a final idea, wet blocked in a lovely alpaca or super soft merino/cashmere blend, this motif, joined to lots of others to make the shawl, will make a beautifully drapey piece.

Here is my final design page, if I were sending this as an actual submission to a magazine, I would add a lot more detail about my thoughts for the design, the yarn to use and of course my contact details.  I would also have settled on a final motif design and created a larger swatch, blocked and looking gorgeous to replace to 3 different swatches I have included in this page.

This was all just a practice in exploring the way I find inspiration and create a design, but I have fallen quite in love with the idea of this honeycomb shawl, if I can find the right yarn, I'm thinking I will almost certainly turn this idea into a reality.