Tag: craft

In these days of video calling in place of any other social contact, I've seen a lot of excellent video backgrounds. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned but I went the traditional route, and set up my computer close to a wall (so you can't see the mess in the room) and added a nice pinboard behind me. I looked a bit flat against the wall though, so I did what anyone else would do ... and built a handmade wooden shelf with neopixels in it!

I don't post as much handicraft on this blog as I used to (it's mostly on my instagram account with fewer words now), but I wanted to share my new handmade owl. He solves a genuine problem: how to make eye contact with your webcam.

For the last ... really long time ... I've been working on a place to put the cookery books in the "new" kitchen. Since the kitchen was finished early in 2011, that's been quite a long-running project! It's finally finished though and I thought I'd share a bit about how I made it (not least because I get nagged about the lack of non-geeky posts on this site - you know who you are!)

I have a small netbook that I use for events, which I've had for a few years and keep upgrading with various bits and pieces. This year, all the little rubber feet had dropped off so if you put it on a surface, it kind of slid around, which was …

Some very good friends of ours recently had their first child, a son named Reuben, and this is the blanket I made for him:

It's a very traditional granny square crochet blanket, I love these because I can take a ball of wool and a hook with me to anywhere …

If you're reading my main blog feed, this post may take you by surprise - however at one time I enjoyed crafting and blogged about it often. Recently I've been finding more time for this, helped by the inspiring news of pregnant friends, so hopefully this is the first in a resurgence of craft-related articles. There are category-specific feeds if you'd rather only read the tech and/or php content.

So, I crocheted a blanket for my friend's baby (welcome, Benjamin!)

This week I finally got around to making the big cushions for our bed. We do have some but they were cheap and are now old - and I reallocated Kevin's onto my office chair about a year ago. Since we do often read or use the laptops in bed, cushions …

About a year ago I discovered the BurdaStyle site - where they have open source patterns. And then over the summer I saw an event organised in NYC where they were making these Charlie Bags - foldable fabric bags for putting shopping in. The pattern is free, and came as a PDF …

After around 15 months of ongoing work, I've finally finished my cobweb wrap which I initially started (original blog post here, complete with links to yarn sources) to make a good travel project. Well it was certainly that - small and lightweight, I took it on three transatlantic trips all told …

For a few month I've been working on a handmade blanket for a baby expected by a couple of my friends - and I've finally been to visit and deliver it so here's some details of the project. (OK so baby Ethan is about a month old and I only just …

Often at PHP Conferences, the organisers are good enough to give PHPWomen a table, and we have a banner we use on these occasions.

Its kind of an annoying thing to lug around with me - its about a metre high and usually travels in a cardboard tube. I've been all …

I'm a software developer, so I like to make things. The fact that some of these things involve yarn, fabric, or wood rather than code doesn't make any difference to how I feel about building things. For the most part my programmer friends think I'm strange for making woollen things …

Some time ago I started a project, using laceweight mohair, which I blogged about. Its take 6 months to finish the first skein, which was wound into a ball by friends, and now I'm ready for the next one. I've been chasing around trying to find a wool winder I …

Yesterday I took the opportunity to pop along to the Maker Faire in Newcastle - its so exciting to see events like these in the UK! The marquee there was pretty small but what it had was great fun. I saw several things there that had me really drooling - one was …

It was a long time coming but I finally finished the blanket I was making for my granny - and in time for Christmas as well (well, almost. The border didn't get finished until Christmas Day but I didn't see my folks til Boxing Day anyway!). She was suitably surprised and …

We're hosting Christmas for family this year (actually its Kevin's family, but that's a technicality), and between preparations for that and having a new camera in the house, I have some nice photos. After all that we've done on this house, suddenly it feels like its coming together into a …

Last year in January I bought (actually my dad paid for them, thanks dad!) a whole box of Christmas decorations from IKEA, for about 2 GBP. In the box were some snowflake decorations, and yesterday I made a little hanging snowflake decoration to go over the stairs in the hall …

If you've been following the previous entries in this series, you'll have seen how to start to crochet, and if you've followed the instructions you should be able to add another couple of rounds onto your project and end up with something that looks like this:

There are a number …

Recently I was shopping for an embriodery hoop and I saw that you can buy ones which are ready-made picture frames, you literally put the fabric in, embrioder, then trim off the outside and tidy up the back. I decided that this would make a great basis for an earring …

Here's the last in the crochet tutorial series, showing how to fit a second round of granny square onto the existing "granny's daughter" that we made previously. I'll have to take some photos of stuff I've done with this pattern to give you some ideas of what can actually be …

I am a habitual chunky-yarn knitter. I will go all the way down to double knit weight, but beyond that I find life is too short to bother :) The upshot of this is that my projects get very big very quickly. I have a few trips coming up where I …

New crochet lesson, and today it really gets interesting! I decided to film the whole row to show you but flickr only allows 90 seconds playback so its in 2 halves :)

Any questions, please feel free to comment here or contact me for help! It does go by quite quickly …

There's been a wool shop on Tong Road in Leeds for years, and its always been pretty good. Last year I heard it was closing, the lady who ran it was retiring. To cut a very long story short, it hasn't closed!!

I've been in to inspect and its had …

I can't remember another post which was in both the "tech" and "craft" categories - so no complaints from either camp please! Last week I became the new owner of an acer aspire one netbook/ultra mobile PC. Its little, blue, and very cute! If you want to skip the tech …

There's a birthday in my household this week so I have been making a surprise cake, which I do every year. Apart from the year where all our stuff was in storage and I only had fairy cake tins, where I made surprise fairy cakes instead! This year I went …

Happy Easter! I’m away for a long weekend but this post was pre-recorded. I handmade my mum’s easter gift and wrote about it, but can’t publish until she’ll have got it!

Its a duckling from this pattern – knitted with fluffy wool on four needles. I used …