Wooly spiders

Despite good intentions I haven’t made anything recently or even played with anything. Th elast few days seems to have been filled with drainage and electrical emergencies. After phoning the Thames Water emergency line and reporting tha at the very least we and the next two houses in the road had nowhere for our effluent to flow to it was more than 24 hours before the combi-unit arrived down the road to sort the problem. It’s not the fault of the combi team, it’s just that they cover an area roughly from Gatwick to Reading. Go on get your maps out and SEE how big an area that is!!

On Sunday it was the turn  of the electrics. I was in the kitchen listening to the Archers omnibus with the washing machine doing its thing when suddenly, no more Archers. I got up to push the plug solidly home because sometimes it works its way out of the socket when someone moves the ironing board, when I realised that the washing machine was dead as well. A quick dive under the stairs revealed that that of the circuit breakers had popped so I grabbed my leccy bill and phoned the emergency line to check if there was a power cut.  A young man called David made me stick myhead under the stairs again and tell him the exact posoition of all our leccy bits, up, down etc. His expert diagnosis was that it was just us and to call back in half an hour if we still had no power. Ten minuted later when I phoned again, because he decided not to dspatch an engineer, I couldn’t get through for a few minutes. When I did, guess what? There was an underground fault with over 300 houses without leccy. In other words just what I had told David. No power. I can’t have been the only person listening to the Archers, can I?

Back to crafty things. I thought I ‘d share something I made earlier. You may recognise the brown piece on the left. It is my first piece of weaving on my rigid heddle loom. It was the one that got away. I made the mistake of using some of my own handpun yarn for the warp.  This was before I found out that warps should be tighter spun to give them strength. Ping, pind, several warp threads gave way and so I removed the whole sorry mess from the loom. And so I discoverd a new way of starting a piece of freeform crochet.

WOOLY SPIDER START to FREEFORM CROCHET

1.Cut at least 12, maybe 20 pieces of yarn, each at least one metre long (they should all be the same length).

2. Holding them all together, tie and a knot roughly in the middle with all the threads together. You now have a bunch of thread with a large knot in the middle.

3. Stick your crochet hook into the knot so that it goes under two or three threads. Holding only one of the threads start doing chain stitches. carry on till you have used almost all the thread then pull the thread through th elast chain to finish it off.

4. Now go back to the knot  and using the next thread crochet dc (double crochet or in the US sc, single crochet) into the previous row.

Does that make sense? You can see it best in the purple version. The rows begin to dradiate out from the big fat knot. You can crochet into the front or back loop of teh previous row, depending on whether you want a ridge or not. And of course, remember the first rule of FREEFORM CROCHET – there are no rules. So just do your own thing! How you carry on from there is up to you. You could pick up some of the “outside stitches” of your wooly spider/butterfly/flower with dpns (double pointed needles) and add some freeform knitting to your piece.

Have fun.