Squashy Stripey Knitted Ball

I made this cute little ball for my nephew’s 1^st birthday.  The design is based on this one from Knitted Toys by Zoe Mellor.  I saw a picture of it on Pinterest but couldn’t find a free version of the pattern online.  Of course the honourable thing to do would have been to buy the whole book, but being sly as well as crafty, I decided I could make up the pattern if I put my mind to it!  So here it is:

For each diamond:

Cast on 2 stitches

Row 1 – knit (2 stitches)

Row 2 (and every even row) – purl

Row 3 – knit 1 front and back, k1fb (4 stitches)

Row 5 – k1fb, knit 2, k1fb (6 stitches)

Row 7 – k1fb, knit 4, k1fb (8 stitches)

Row 9 – k1fb, knit 6, k1fb (10 stitches)

Row 11 – knit

Row 13 – k1fb, knit 8, k1fb (12 stitches)

Row 15 – k1fb, knit 10, k1fb (14 stitches)

Row 16 – 30 knit every odd row, purl every even row

Row 31 – knit 2 together, knit 10, k2tog (12 stitches)

Row 33 – k2tog, knit 8, k2tog (10 stitches)

Row 35 – knit

Row 37 – k2tog, knit 6, k2tog (8 stitches)

Row 39 – k2tog, knit 4, k2tog (6 stitches)

Row 41 – k2tog, knit 2, k2tog (4 stitches)

Row 43 – k2tog, k2tog (2 stitches)

Row 45 – knit 2 stitches as one, pull ball through to finish.

Make 6 diamonds, 3 plain and 3 with stripes (change colour every 4 rows).  Sew together, stuff, and you're done!  I used wool to sew the seams on the inside, but went over some of them on the outside using coloured thread, just to neaten them up a bit. 

A very quick easy knit, I did it over two afternoons while the baby was napping & then sewed it all together tonight.  I have no idea how big the original one was suppose to be, but mine is about 30cm diameter.  Oh, and I used 3mm knitting needles and any old scraps of wool from my basket, all of different weights and plys and so forth.  I never find that kind of thing matters too much.  Wool is very forgiving.

I wanted it to be jingly, and in my innocence thought I’d just pop a bell in the middle and that would be that.  But as soon as the bell was embedded in the stuffing it didn’t make a nice Noddy-ish bell sound anymore, just a kind of muffled rattle.  I tried various things, but what I ended up doing was boring some holes in one of those plastic canisters from a Kinder Surprise egg with a pair of scissors, and putting the bell inside that. If you can't get hold of a Kinder Surprise, one of those black film containers might work, or a whiffle ball, or a cat toy.

Sewing Nook in the Wardrobe

I am having a baby in April this year and am currently in the process of clearing out my spare room and converting it into a nursery.  The spare room previously housed my sewing machines and all my art stuff, but I had the perfect place in mind for their new home - a sewing nook in the wardrobe!

We have a large wardrobe with rolling doors in our study which we don't really use, so I cleaned out one side of it and enlisted my Dad to help install a little desk and some shelving inside it.   It was an idea I'd toyed with for ages but never really had a reason to put into practice, and it worked out even better than I'd hoped.

Dad even installed a little light in there for me!  It literally took him one afternoon, including buying and sawing all the boards - so impressed.  The best part is that when I'm finished working on something I can just pull the door closed and it's all tucked away out of sight.  Voila!

Still to do:

1. I want to attach a rack for all my thread spools to one of the inside walls - I'm thinking I might have a go at making something like this:

I got the idea from this blog and I love it, although I think it might be a bit ambitious for me as I've zero experience with woodwork of any kind.

2. I've bought some small storage tubs for things like buttons and safety pins which need to be mounted on the wall also.
 
3. I would love to decorate it in some way, maybe painting or sticking something against that back wall which looks pretty bare at the moment.  But I don't know whether I'll have time as the spare room/nursery is still far from finished and time is running short.

Jessie's 3-canvas painting

Jessie was commissioned to do this for a friend who wanted it on a deep red wall, to go with a bedspread design with a pattern of red cherry blossom flowers (you can see the pillowcase in the first picture).  This is what she came up with!

Colourful fruit

So pretty!

Red Riding Hood earrings

My friend Kate told me she wanted some earrings that were shaped like Little Red Riding Hood.  After fiddling around with a few different designs I came up with these ones (as seen in the banner).

The inspiration for them was drawn from various different pictures I found on google...

The teapot is so cute!  I want it!

Another recent painting

Here's another recent painting, from this photo which was taken by Dad near Auburn in SA.

I painted it (on and off) over the course of about a day and a night, which explains the  lighting differences in the photos.  I can't really say which of them is the most accurate depiction of the colours etc.  I guess it looks different in different lights.

The finished painting!

Rainbow Cake

My husband held a "Regression Party" this week, while everyone was still on holidays.  A Regression Party is a retro kids' party, with all the fairy bread and mini frankfurters of childhood, but for adults.  He came up with this concept himself and was quite proud of it.  It was pretty much an excuse for him and his friends to get together and have Nerf-gun and Supersoaker wars and eat cake.  Anyway, he wanted that cake to be suitably exciting, so we decided it should be a rainbow marble cake and in the shape of Beartato (a character from Nedroid, a comic that we love).

To make the rainbow cake I made a white chocolate cake using this recipe:

    175g white chocolate, broken into pieces
    4 eggwhites
    1 cup (250ml) milk
    1 tsp vanilla extract
    2 cups (300g) self-raising flour
    250g caster sugar
    A pinch of salt
    1 tbs baking powder
    125g unsalted butter, softened

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C, grease and line cake pan.
2. Melt the white chocolate, set aside to cool.  In a separate bowl, whisk the eggwhites, vanilla and 1/2 of the milk to combine. In another separate bowl, use an electric mixer to mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, butter and salt with the rest of the milk.  Beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Stir in eggwhite mixture, then the melted chocolate.  Mix until well combined.
3. Spread the mixture into the pan, then bake for 45-50 minutes until a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean (cover the cake loosely with foil). Leave cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Except before I got to part 3 I separated the mixture into 6 bowls and added food colouring.  Apparently you can get some kind of gel food colouring which doesn't thin the mixture, but they don't have it at my shops.  I just used regular liquid food colouring and it turned out ok. 

I poured the coloured mixtures into the tin one by one, like so:

When it was cooked it went a kind of brown-purple colour on top but with patches of different colours showing through.  Spectacular!  This is a cupcake made out of scrapings of leftover mixture:

For decorating ideas I googled "Beartato cake" and found this one which I shamelessly copied.  My cake tin was a bit too long for Beartato, so I chopped off about 10cm at the top.  I rounded the corners and used the chopped-off bits to fashion two ears, then slathered the whole lot with blue buttercream icing and put it in the fridge to set.  Buttercream icing is really gooey when you first put it on but it hardens when you put it in the fridge for an hour or so, and once it's hard you can smooth it with a warm knife to get a finish almost as perfect as fondant icing.  I actually don't like the taste/texture of it that much, though - it's just like eating a lump of  pure butter.  You can feel it hardening your arteries as it goes down.  Anyway, after that irresistible selling point, the recipe: 

    250g white chocolate, broken into pieces
    300g cream cheese
    150g unsalted butter, softened

    Melt the white chocolate, then cool. Transfer to the bowl of an electric mixer, then beat with the cream cheese and softened butter until light and fluffy.   Add food colouring as desired.

So yeah, once I'd neatened it up I added details a la Beartato with black gel icing from a tube and a few bits of fondant icing from a packet.

I don't think it looks as good as the one I copied it from, but oh well.  The inside of the cake looked great!  Next time, though, I would probably make less red and orange and more purple and blue - the purple was only a thin layer on the outside and the red was all pooled in the middle, so it seemed like there was more of it.