making a start

July 15, 2015 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)58 Comments

The summer holidays are hurtling towards us and with them the prospect of a lot less free time so we're spending most of this last week of term-time trying to get our bedroom painted.

Paint

I made a start last week by painting over some of the dark blue so that we could pin down which colour to choose from our short list. At the moment no. 3 is favourite but it's hard to be certain as the colours change so much depending on the time of day and which lights are on…

Paintlights

Painting

We'll live with the colours for another day before committing ourselves to a paint purchase and then it will be time to dig out the paint rollers and full steam ahead. Though I must admit that I'm not looking forward to the doing bit of having a new-look room – I must be using muscles that don't get a lot of use during knitting as my arms are aching already and I've only undercoated part of one wall! Thank goodness we only do this once in a blue moon (it was last decorated 16 years ago – H finished painting the skirting boards and hung the curtains the day that Amy was born!)

Talking of blue moons there is one happening on the 31st of this month. It won't actually be blue coloured but is called so because it's the name given to the second of 2 full moons taking place in a single month – something that doesn't happen very often.

Bluemoon

Enjoy the rest of your week x

crafts & knitting

more kitties

July 9, 2015 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)93 Comments

Thanks so much for all of the sweet and kind comments about the new patterns. Since writing them up I've found myself a little feline-fixated and have been knitting cats in all kinds of yarns. With all of the work involved in pattern compiling I miss being mostly a maker, so it's nice to be spending more of my time actually knitting rather than writing about it :)

Fuzy

These kittens are made from mohair yarns (one strand of Rowan Kidsilk haze and one of Rowan kid classic). Mohair is a lovely fibre to work with if you want fluffiness, especially if you brush the knitted surface afterwards. Because the fibres are long and strong (it is often referred to as the diamond fibre and has a higher tensile strength than steel of the same diameter) they can be teased out from the knitted surface using an ordinary hairbrush to give a very fuzzy finish.

Mohair often comes in a very thin yarn, so for the purpose of knitting toys is best used in combination with a strand of another yarn in DK weight. These are the yarns I've used previously: Drops Kid-silk, Austerman Kid silk, Lana Grossa silkhair, Rowan Kidsilk Haze, Debbie Bliss Angel (all are thin mohair/silk mix yarns, so do need to be knitted with another strand of DK weight yarn for any of my patterns).

Fuzzycats

Anyway, I'm having fun making a little collection of cats that I hope to have for sale later in the year. In fact I've decided to give myself the summer off in terms of working on patterns and instead will be spending my Toby-free time knitting lots of different animals. I have a big basket of unfinished ones (mostly heads) so I've already made a start and I'll keep you posted when they are ready.

It's lovely to see photos appearing in the pattern project pages for the cats. I always enjoy seeing what people are making from the patterns, so if you give any of them a go please consider uploading a picture on the ravelry cat Knit-along for us to admire (we also have Knit-alongs for the other patterns too).

In other news from here we are back to having 3 eggs a day as Hattie has come out of her broodiness. The chickens are all doing well and are still a source of daily amusement with their struttings, scratchings and chicken-ish antics. Talking of the chickens, I better go and give them their second breakfast – they eat a lot and have probably already finished their mash from 7am!

……………………………………………………………….

PS: With all of the extra emails I've been receiving about the new patterns I've fallen a bit behind with my plans for responding to comments on the blog (clearly my best attempts were not quite up to scratch!). I won't now reply to each comment on the previous post about the patterns but I will attempt to reply to comments here from now on. Thanks in advance if you take the time to leave one x

Miaow

June 28, 2015September 5, 2025 Julie (little Cotton Rabbits)93 Comments

Working on this new pattern on and off over the last year has been an exciting and slightly novel thing for me. It’s the first time I’ve made a pattern from scratch with the intention of it being a pattern, if you see what I mean. All of the other animal patterns have come about because I wanted to knit them as finished items rather than with the original intention of sharing them in pattern form and so for most of them I had years of tweaking and lots of knittings before arriving at the final patterns.

This time I started off with a basic idea sketched out and then knitted up some trial runs (the earliest of which did not go well). But I’ve persevered and after lots of rejected test samples I arrived at one that I was pretty happy with. Then it was just down to playing around with ear placement, head length, tail tip and a few more little bits of fiddling and tweaking. Anyway, I’m satisfied enough to now release the patterns, so here is my little cat boy and girl, both clad in plaid 🙂

It was hard to decide exactly what sort of cat should be in the pattern – after all there are so many different breeds, from refined pure-bred Persians to lowly but loveable moggies. So because I couldn’t decide I’ve included in the pattern 4 extra head designs which are interchangeable, so you can make either a plain coloured cat, or a cat with a white blaze, a cat with an eye patch, a Siamese cat or a tabby. There are little bits that you can combine from these different designs to make your own unique looking cat, a bit like a selection box (sorry I couldn’t resist taking this photo – hope it’s not too creepy!)

Here are some of the heads I’ve made so far from the pattern (all instructions and details of yarns used for these are included with both patterns)…

As usual with a new pattern release I’m on tenterhooks, waiting for the first projects to appear on Ravelry. It’s so exciting to see what other people have made from the patterns so please come and add yours to the group if you give any of the patterns a try.

The new patterns are now live on both Ravelry and Etsy . I so hope that if you give any of them a go you have fun knitting from them x