The 20 minute T-shirt makeover

Just as it says in the title.

The left over crochet flowers from the batch I made the other day.

One plain green T-shirt.

20 minutes and a sharp needle later.

One re-vamped T-shirt.

Another rainy day

With the skies leaking all over the shop again, I thought I might take the morning to sort out the files on the computer, but I am not having great success. I have now backed up everything, I have deleted, de-frag-ed and scanned registry files but the damn thing still will not work properly. It needs to be formatted but without the disks I can't reload the operating system, and I can't decipher enough Dutch to set up the partitions. I am so frustrated by it now, that I just want to commit acts of violence on it.

The frustrating part about it is, when it works it works fine, I have two photo-editing programmes and it will flip between the two, it will upload files, it will even play some music at the same time, but then it freezes and all your work is lost, transferring files are lost, photos are lost and there is no warning when it will happen. Sometimes it works for as long as 45 minutes, then at other times you have to reboot it 3 or 4 times in the space of 10 minutes just to get to the desktop screen.

I feel that I have just wasted a couple of hours on nothing.

At least I spent the 30 minutes while it was trying to upload some photos drawing up plans for my next attempt at a maxi dress.  ( I hope Thea does not notice that I ripped a page from her magazine for inspiration -  Glamour is her bible at the moment.)

I have an idea of how to fix a dress that I butchered last year, but before cutting it up I am experimenting with the theory on some pink voile that used to be curtain material for Thea when she was into pink, and hope to continue with this once I get home from work this afternoon.

Thank Crunchie it's Friday

The weekend starts here - well actually the weekend starts a few kilometres up the road with a birthday BBQ in the sun this afternoon.

In the meantime - a bit of greenhouse potting on again- I found more tomato seedlings and I just can't let them go to waste.
I keep finding these random little strays from last year, peeping out from the edges of the weed suppressant and so I keep pulling them up and replanting them.

  I grew cherry and plum in the greenhouse last year so they could be either - but most likely cherry as we lost a few fruit here and there collecting them in.

I have started using my new cutting table, I have a dress on the go, and also a couple more bags done, they just need the embroidery finished.

As you can see the table has four handy little cubby holes underneath it - which I have obviously already filled up.

I also managed to finally get my patterns sorted out this morning, having been stuffing them willy nilly into the pockets of the room screen and running the risk of damaging them, I got them organised into a folder neatly - not sure how long that will last though.

Unfinished bag embroidery - first layer of beads done yesterday, now just the crocket flowers and large sequins to go.

Welded to the office chair and crochet flower patterns

With April finishing on a very wet note, all things green and planty are shooting up in the garden and I just know that very shortly I will be attached to my hoe and wading up and down the lines of seeds trying valiantly to do battle with the weeds.

Until then I am welded to my office chair and finally getting around to re-opening my etsy shop and doing a bit of updating and tidying up of my listings.

I have realised that I need a model to get the latest refashions and bags photographed and for that will have to wait until my daughter is free and not buried under a mound of homework.

In the meantime along with uploading photos and editing descriptions etc etc, I have been messing about with a ball of cotton and a crochet hook.

I love to crochet and learnt as a child, but in the intervening adult years I found various other pursuits more to my taste, namely bikes, cars and boys - but this is not a story of my misspent youth - in recent times I have picked up my crochet hook more and more frequently, and whilst my amibitions are still very modest I have found that I don't need to go back right to the beginning and relearn single and double stitches every time I want to make something.

Over the last 24 hours I have crocheted a veritable garden of flowers ready to be sewn to an upcycled garment or to be part of another bag design - only problem is now that I have started I can't seem to stop.........



I am starting the flowers with a chain (ch) of 4 then joining together with a slipped stitch (slst).

Into the loop double chain (dc) 20 times, then single chain (sc) into every stitch.

From there it all goes a bit mad and a bit random, some flowers I have continued as follows:

Round 3 - ch 1, sc into next stitch, ch1, sc, contune all the way around
Round 4 - ch3, sc into next stitch, ch 3, sc, continue all the way around
Round 5 - chain 3, dc 3 times into the chained loop of the previous round, sc, ch3, 3dc into loop, sc, and continue into every loop all the way around to create a ruffled flower.

Another varaion: 

Round 1 - chain 4, join together, crochet 20 dc into the loop 

Round 2 - chain 1, sc around, join to first sc

Round 3 - chain 1, sc in same stitch, *skip 1 stitch, 7 dc in the next stitch, skip 1 stitch, sc in next stitch* repeat 4 more times to create five petals

Yet another variation:
Round 1 -  ch 3 ( counts as 1 dc), work into the ring 1 dc, *6 ch, 3 dc*, repeat from * to * 5 times, 6 ch, 1 dc, join with a slip stitch in the 3 rd ch of the ch-3 worked in the beginning of the round

Round 2: * chain 1, work (1 sc, 7 dc, 1 sc ) all into the chain arch, chain 1, skip 1 dc, slip stitch in next dc*, repeat from * to * throughout the round

I am using the same 50g ball of 100% pure cotton in a variagated dye so the flowers change colour by themselves as you go along.