Souvenirs Recycling Style (With Crochet Of Course!)

As already indicated in these pages, I am susceptible to packaging. Shops that sell things in old-fashioned, paper bags or even better, shops which give away those nice, unbleached calico bags, get my custom almost regardless of what they sell. Parcels that come through the post in drifts of tissue paper beneath the outer wrapping, and with ribbon and pretty cards to boot, fill me with happiness before I've even seen what's inside. I buy wine, olive oil, flour, soap and all manner of other things guided by the outer appearance and feel of the container or wrapping (especially if it can be reused or redeployed in some way). I am afraid I am a packaging-designer's dream target!

Conversely I can be put off, if the packaging is unattractive in some way. I am currently battling my instinct to stop buying my favourite bread-making flour from Waitrose, (Canadian Extra Strong Breadmaking Flour, if you're interested) for example, because they have replaced the nice thick, brown, paper packaging, printed in a reassuringly old-fashioned, dark, red and black design, with thinner, flimsier, (nastier) paper, in nasty (to my mind) pastel shades of peach and washed-out raspberry. The original packaging was both practically robust and had an engaging, timeless feel to it, both literally and visually. The new version simply doesn't cut it - it splits easily, spilling flour all over my larder shelves and doesn't "feel" nice in handling. These things matter. I am shopping astray as a result. Fickle? Yes. Frivolous? Yes. Going to stop being so silly and carry on buying the original product, regardless of the packaging? I am afraid not!

My soft spot for packaging gets a whole new lease of life when I'm on holiday and I often come back with unusual, or particularly pleasing, examples in my suitcase. Match-wood cheese boxes with pretty printed labels from France; unusually-shaped olive oil bottles from Italy; honey tins and jars from Greece; quirky, individual wine-bottles from hotel mini bars or baby jam jars, surreptitiously squirrelled from hotel breakfast tables, saved from their inevitable, sad destiny of a commercial recycling bin to ride again as containers for little gifts of homemade jelly or jam back home; dinky, little Maltese salt-jars; hinged, wooden chocolate boxes and Lebkuchen tins, equipped with musical box mechanisms that play "Stille Nacht", from Germany; they all now people my home in various new guises housing tea, stationery, cotton reels, buttons, preserves etc, or like the baby jam jars become containers for little homemade gifts.

My big weakness is, believe it or not, yoghurt containers! I have two roughly glazed terracotta bowls, that take it in turn to house tomatoes waiting to ripen, on my kitchen work surface, which were originally sold, containing fresh ewe's milk yoghurt, from a sheep dairy, in western Crete. I only brought back two smallish half-litre size ones but the yoghurt also came in big, one litre bowls too. I felt that this might be going too far as it was quite big and heavy but I have regretted leaving it behind ever since.

My watercolour-painting water jar is a Spanish yoghurt pot, embossed with a kite and clouds in the glass.

(The same Spanish holiday also supplied a fetching, brightly enamelled, dried milk tin, now the repository of candle-ends.)

I have a set of no less than six, lavender-coloured, terracotta dessert pots that originally housed, set, French yoghurt which I now use to serve lemon syllabub or chocolate mousse in. I saw the same make of yoghurt when in Provence a few weeks ago and I can't tell you how tempted I was to add to my collection!

 You get the picture!

I have been known to embarrass my family in restaurants in France by asking If I can take home beautiful, printed, paper place mats that I have turned into book-covers.

And I have not been allowed to forget, asking a waiter in Munich, in my very sketchy German,  if I could purchase the glasses, in which a round of Glühwein had been served. (These were very delicate to bring back on a plane, but with care, everything is possible!) Every time, we're packing to come home and I sidle along with a mysterious bundle to be slipped into someone's suitcase, my family raise their eyes and ask why their dirty washing has been redeployed. (To prevent my treasures getting broken in transit of course!)

This last holiday I was quite restrained. I did not make everyone eat a particular yogurt every day for a week to provide a complete set of dessert dishes back home, nor did I cause embarrassment by asking if I could purchase the tableware from any restaurants. I did however bring home a Provençal wine bottle. Nothing fancy. A plain, uncoloured, glass bottle that housed my favourite Provençal vin gris. Not quite plain though - it has the word Provence embossed along one side of the base.

It appealed. So, the wine having been drunk, home it came, wrapped in an old T-shirt. (Not my T-shirt of course, in case the bottle broke in transit and shards of broken glass caused any damage! Tee hee! I know, I know, I am very unscrupulous!)

Anyway it didn't break and all was intact. But what to do with it? For a week or so it sat on the side looking a little forlorn.  And then I thought I would redeploy it as a water carafe. You may have one of those nice fridges that have an in-built, chilled water dispenser, but I don't and when it's hot, I do like chilled water. I don't buy bottled water, except for the fizzy variety which H drinks in vast quantity; I prefer tap water, especially here in Oxfordshire where the Thames Valley water is very "hard" - full of calcium and other minerals anyway, but I always forget to chill it and in any case, there isn't always room for a big water jug in my fridge. A wine bottle that could slip into a small space in the fridge door made a perfect solution, but not without a smidgeon of hooky adornment.

Thinking of all the colours of Provence and the essence of the place, in the beautiful rosé that the bottle had originally contained, the idea of a colourful hooky wine bottle / water carafe jacket was born.Very simple but somehow very pleasing! The only snag is that the jacket has covered up the embossed letters of "Provence". I wondered about creating a window in the crochet to reveal them but in the end decided it would look fussy, so they are present, but hidden.

I embellished the plain, blue jacket with a handful of hooky tulips which I made using AterG's lovely pattern. You can buy the pattern on Etsy here.

I know tulips are not exactly typical Provençal flowers, but nevertheless, I think, they give the ensemble a lovely sunny, summery feel especially in these slightly, sun-bleached, pale colours.

There's not a huge amount of space for decoration - as you can see I had a few tulips left over. That's OK though - they will adorn another project. Possibly another bottle cover!

If you fancy giving the idea a whirl, it is very straightforward. I have put the pattern up as a separate page here.

Once kitted out in its pretty hooky jacket, fill your bottle with water and stick it in the fridge. The jacket, as well as being pretty, prevents the bottle getting slippery from condensation so has a nice practical aspect to it as well as a purely decorative one.

Anyone else stuff their suitcases with similar items? It's a fun and cheap form of souvenir-hunting and often I've found that these kinds of souvenirs are more laden with memories than things I've bought specially. I recommend it! (Just don't forget to wrap breakables in someone else's T shirt!)

E x

PS Hello and welcome to new followers here - it's lovely to see you! 

Weather For A Crochet Sun-hat

When summer comes properly in the UK it surely is the business. Perhaps this is why we get so grumbly when it doesn't. These last two weeks have seen the kind of sunshine-filled hours of which the best summer idylls are made and even if the weather turns again and shifts from hot blue skies to cooler, damper grey ones, being able to have had this run of consistently hot summer days will have made all the difference. Eating meals in the garden; being able actually to wear, every day, the lightweight summer dresses I've sewn, that in recent years seem to have spent their summers mostly in the wardrobe; walking along the midsummer footpaths, that border what are now hayfields, in the early morning and the evening, among  tall summer grasses, poppies and blue scabious; hanging washing out on the line, where it dries almost before one has finished pegging the last item out and smells of the sun when it's brought inside - all of these small things have given the last days a kind of delicious benediction all their own.

It has been weather not just to wear summer dresses and floaty shirts but also serious sun-hat weather. And just in time for these hot July weeks I have made myself one. Crochet is peculiarly suited to making hats because of the easy way it works up in the round and the idea of making a crochet sun-hat has been in my head for a while. It started in Liberty's when I was in London a few months ago. Taking a meandering detour through Liberty's ground floor, - as all rightly-arranged visits to London do! - I came across this:

A fabulous broad-brimmed hooky sun-hat! I wasn't convinced about the colours - not the most inspiring choice, I felt - the black, yellow, white and salmon pink together - but the design was perfect and when I tried it on, (as I just had to), it looked wonderful. The price however was not so wonderful - an eye-watering £210! Sadly, trying it on for a few moments was all that was possible. Or was it?! Close examination revealed it had been made in US double / UK treble crochet in a way that looked relatively simple to replicate.

Perhaps I could create a version of this Audrey Hepburn-style accessory myself, without breaking the bank?

I scoured around for a suitable pattern but couldn't find quite what would replicate the shape of what I'd seen in Liberty's, with the beautiful wide brim and I felt hesitant about plunging in with a pattern that wasn't quite right. In the meantime I played around with possible colour palettes and chose one or two additions to my Cascade Ultra Pima collection. I wanted a stripy hat but in subtle wearable colours, nothing too brash or startling. The colours of summer grass and newly-cut for hay, the bleached blues of early morning summer skies, the pale greeny-yellow of meadowsweet growing by the stream and the silvery-green of olive leaves under a Mediterranean sun, green water-mint, pale duck egg and soft sea-foam.

Then the July edition of Simply Crochet arrived and on the cover was the pattern I'd been searching for - a perfect wide-brimmed sun-hat, worked in my favourite US single / UK double crochet.

I tweaked the pattern a little, using a 4mm hook throughout and making the crown slightly deeper than the pattern specified -  I hate sun-hats you have to hang on to the whole time to prevent them blowing away in a sudden gust of wind and I wanted this to fit snugly enough to put on and forget about. This wasn't to be a fancy hat to wear to a garden party, or a wedding, but a more functional item, to wear when out and about in the heat of a scorching day. A hat that would keep the sun off and leave my hands free to pick cherries or take photographs or eat an ice cream. In addition to making the crown slightly deeper, I  also added a row or two to the brim because I felt like it (less is not always more!) and I didn't bother with the picot edging of the original pattern as I preferred a clean, plain edge.

I worked two rows of each colour and repeated the colour sequence three or four times over the course of the hat, making good use in the process, of my new yarn bowl which was a birthday present from my parents. This is a fabulous bit of kit for any hookaholic - so simple but so effective - no more runaway balls of yarn. Mine is a ceramic one from Muddy Heart Pottery on Etsy but you can get them in wood as well.

To finish I used a piece of brim wire, over which I crocheted the last two rows so that the brim stretches out nicely and isn't all floppy.

It's worked just as I hoped and I love it!

The subtle colours are a bit different from my usual brighter ones but make the hat so wearable and the soft light they cast on my face underneath is kind in tone. (I'm clearly getting to an age when I notice these things!)

It didn't take long to hook up, once I'd got started so if you like the idea of making one for yourself you have a fair chance of completing it while we still have the weather for it! The pattern recommends Stylecraft Classique cotton but any DK weight cotton yarn would work. For a good fit I recommend keeping to the 4mm hook throughout and repeatedly checking so that you get a snug fit on the crown. The brim wire you can get from MacCulloch and Wallis in London (they do mail order, so you don't have to trek to Soho!) - it's very cheap and really makes a difference to how the hat sits. Buy enough to go round the circumference of the finished hat twice so that you can insert it in both of the final rows.

You could obviously make the hat in just one colour or follow the pattern's suggestion of making a plain crown and using stripes on the brim. You can go bright or subtle or anywhere in between. You can keep it unadorned or you could easily pretty it up for more flamboyant use with a bouquet of hooky flowers. The possibilities are myriad and sunny!

I've worn it a lot here this last week, out and about in the English countryside with my American blogging friend, Liz of Carolina Knits who has been staying with me after a Charles Dickens seminar week in Oxford. So it's been given a whirl among the white-flowered borders of Highclere Castle of Downton Abbey fame, in the garden of Jane Austen's house in Chawton (which, for those of you keen on dyeing, has an interesting section of dye plants that would have been familiar to Jane and her family), along the wild-flower-edged, grassy tracks and footpaths, near where I live and on the open, sunny downs of White Horse Hill near Uffington.

And I am happy to report that it does exactly what it's supposed to do i.e. it stays securely on my head (until H wants to take photographs that is!) without being too hot or tight  and it keeps, what has been a beautifully scorching sun off my face and the back of my neck.

It's been the perfect accompaniment to a hugely happy week that has seen the translation of a virtual blogging connection into a new and tangible reality.

It's also a perfect hat to take on holiday - the crown flops flat when not in wear and so the hat packs easily in  a suitcase, which is handy because that is exactly what I am going to do with it!

A bientôt!

E x

Summerberry Yarn Bag

I have been trying to finish off one or two projects that have been lurking in the long grass, so to speak, and one of them is this bag which I almost completed last summer but which failed to reach the finish-line and sat, bristling with stitch-markers, for nine months or so, awaiting a pair of handles and a lining. It was driven, not by the need for a bag (I have plenty!) nor by the colours (they were defined by availability) but by the yarn itself.

Does this ever happen to you? Working with a particular yarn is just so delicious, you want to go on and on, hooking into the sunset with it? It's a surprise yarn for me, a departure from my normal go-to cotton or wool blends. It's a 100% microfibre DK weight yarn and the fabric it makes, has wonderful stitch definition and drape. It is King Cole Smooth and it is exactly what it says it is, on the tin, or rather the label - smoooooth!

I bought a random sample ball when I made my African Flower bag last year and needed as many acrylic brights as I could lay my hands on and found, brooding among the light and bright Stylecraft Special DK, a gorgeous velvety, deep purple ball of it. It worked rather well with the bright Stylecraft Special pinks and oranges of the African flowers. And it was so addictive to hook with that when the African flowers were finished, I wanted to make something entirely out of this magic stuff, that even Rumpelstiltskin would be proud to have spun. My local yarn store only carried the purple, for some reason, but a little trawling around revealed there were other colours to be had.

Not all the colours you might look for and heavily weighted in some areas of the spectrum but quite a number nonetheless. Mossy and grassy greens, the colour of fruit leaves; a lone, pale apple or mint green that is sadly now discontinued (as are some of the others colours I bought last year); muted, soft, sky blues and a bright turquoise that didn't quite seem to fit predictably into the rest of the range's palette; cranberry, redcurrant-jelly and cherry reds; creamily muted, blueberry and blackberry mauves as well as the gorgeous, deep blackcurrant purple I'd first come across; a clutch of strawberry and raspberry pinks to gladden Mrs T's pink-loving soul. No yellow or orange; no dark green, no tawny ambers or browns, nor any neutral grey, although they seem to have added some of these colours to the range now, I think, as well as some pale pastels, that weren't there last year. Many of the colours are very close in shade to one another, rather than distinctively separate. I bought one ball of each of as many colours as my budget would allow, in addition to my original purple, from here. It's not as cheap as Stylecraft Special DK but it's less than half the price of many more expensive yarns and it comes in good, fat 100g balls.

I'd been toying with making a hooky stash bag for a while and here was the opportunity to make one in delicious double stripes of single crochet (US terms, so I am talking about double crochet in UK ones), going with the colour-weighting dictated by what was available, grouping related colours together and seeing what would happen. The result was rather pleasing. Unexpectedly pleasing actually. Even though there are colours here that perhaps I wouldn't have picked on their own from an unrestricted palette, if I had had one.

I used the pattern for "Red's Goodie Basket" from Julie Armstrong Holetz's book  "Uncommon Crochet" as a starting point but I went "off piste" a bit - making it stripy, larger and with longer handles. The original pattern actually works this bag up in fine, red, leather cord and the handles are shallow ones, integrated to the top of the sides. I wanted longer straps to be able to sling the bag over a shoulder or the back of a chair so I simply made these at the end and stitched them in place with my sewing machine, after lining the bag (and the handles themselves) with a scarlet cotton print dotted with bright flowers. There wasn't quite enough of the fabric to make the lining without a bit of judicious piecing together but what's a bit of patchwork between friends?!

I've hidden the machine stitching, that secures the handles firmly in place, with hooky geranium flowers:

They are the same flowers I used on my Blue Sky Bunting here. I would never normally have put these two reds together but to create a geranium look-alike they work OK, I think. The two shades of red, one dull and the other bright, give the flowers a sort of three-dimensional shading rather than a simple colour contrast, which is what I would usually have chosen.

I think single crochet is my favourite of all crochet stitches. I love the simplicity and density of the resulting fabric, the rhythmic easy stitches and the fact that by altering your hook size and the thickness of yarn you can make it stiff enough to stand up on its own, as in the blue and pink hooky bowls I made at the end of last year here or these, more recent, experimental neutral ones, in pebbly colours, that I made in the Spring, using, in both cases, a double strand of DK weight cotton on a 4mm hook.

Or you can make a fabric that is beautifully drapey and floppy as with this bag with one strand of DK weight microfibre yarn on the same 4mm hook.

As I say, the colours are weighted very much towards one end of the spectrum - the red end - even the greens have the red-tones of the greens of early Spring and Summer. Put together, the colours reminded me of bowls of summer fruit - unhulled strawberries, blackcurrants on leafy stalks, raspberries nestling on a bed of their own leaves, blackberry flowers cheek by jowl with the fruit, still on bramble stems - so the bag became a Summerberry Bag and as its function is to contain yarn, it became a Summerberry Yarn Bag.

Being microfibre, the bag is practical - easily washable - and the only disappointment about it is my crochet mascot's. Duck hoped he could commandeer this as a balloon basket, powered by a bunch of helium balloons tied on to the handles but unfortunately it's a bit too heavy, so his dreams of crossing the garden, the Channel, or even the Atlantic, in a stripy, hooky Montgolfier have been dashed!  He's consoled himself with taking up residence in it anyway and it's good and roomy - enough space for him and plenty of yarn.

Duck's ballooning ambitions aside, it's satisfactory all round! 

Happy Weekend everyone! 

Hope it's a good one - I, (for once), am not working all Saturday and am taking the opportunity for a teensy-weensy yarn expedition with a blogging friend. 

Never mind a balloon basket / stash bag, we may need a trailer for the transportation of our haul, at the end of the day! Tee hee!

E x

Granny Square Book Cover & Pencil Scribblings

I am just coming to the end of the notebook I carry around with my crochet and sewing projects and will shortly need to start a new one. This notebook has become disproportionately valuable to me and I would hate to lose it - it contains all my pencilled notes on the things I've made over the last few years - variations on patterns I've followed, but have adapted or tweaked (because I seem to be incapable of just following a pattern, exactly as it is given); lists of fabrics, yarn names and colours; scribbled references to blogs or books; hook sizes used to make particular things - almost the most useful info in the entire book, especially if I've put a project aside for a while and then returned to it and cannot remember what on earth size hook I originally used; templates and pattern pieces, cut from newspaper or the backs of Earl Grey tea packets, drift occasionally to the floor from its pages, as well as oddments of yarn, receipts and snippets of fabric; there are written notes, and little drawings, sketches and diagrams that all chart my hooky and sewing progress and the book's cover is now endearingly dog-eared. It's become a kind of friend who marks my creative life alongside me. Looking back through it, I can instantly recapture the mood associated with particular projects and times, even though it is by no means a diary and it only charts one very particular aspect of my life. I shall be sad to come to the final page but hopefully, in time, Volume 2 will be as precious to me as Volume 1.

I say "pencilled notes" because I only write, or draw, in pencil, in this book. Pencil feels creatively provisional to me - it is reassuringly easy to erase and rewrite - but in a way it's strange to have information that I really want to preserve, mapped in such an ephemeral medium. When I was at university, my tutor was very sniffy about writing in pencil and claimed it reflected a "lack of willingness to commit to a given thesis and a lack of confidence in what one was expressing". I didn't agree then (and I don't agree now) that that is always a bad thing.

There's a softness about pencil notes that makes the transition from thought in the mind, to arrival on paper, easy and because writing in ink always feels more definite, it can restrict experimental expression, whether written or drawn. Pencil invites the experimental -  it says, "Don't be afraid to try something, even if you decide it doesn't work and want to redo it or rework it." It says, "Why not push the limits, because you can always change your mind?" Ink is more demanding and less open to possibility and playing with options. It says, "Are you sure about this? Because if not, think again!" It says, "Stick to what is tried and tested rather than potentially make the mistake of playing around with what you don't know will work." Perhaps my tutor was right to be pejorative about a pencilled essay discussing Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" but for notes exploring creative options and marking creative progress, the open possibilities of graphite, I find much more congenial and comfortable than the unequivocal definition of ink.

Anyway I digress. Notebook Volume 2 is waiting in the wings and actually has quite a pretty pink cover of its own already, but I'd seen Sue Pinner's pattern for a notebook cover in "Granny Squares" and it seemed like a nice small-scale project that would have the benefit of making the notebook distinctively difficult to lose or, (God forbid!), leave behind somewhere, and the nature of its construction would supply the book with two convenient pockets for all the things that currently have a tendency to drop out of the old one.

So here it is. Complete with the first pickings from my slightly-dilatory-but-getting-there, sweet peas whose colours happen to harmonise rather nicely with the granny square centres.

I experimented with the colours of the tiny grannies a bit and wondered about making them all different but in the end I restricted the number of centre colours to six and made all the outer rounds in this chartreuse green. The squares are worked on a 3.75mm hook and I've used Cascade Ultra Pima cotton yarn from my stash. I usually use a 4mm hook with the Cascade Ultra Pima but this time I went down a size to make sure the squares came out nice and dense.

I know it's bright, but I love the way this kind of lime green acts unexpectedly, almost as a neutral colour, setting off all the others, while still blowing its own bright trumpet. I used the same green to crochet all the squares together once I had them arranged as I wanted them. I just can't get on with joining-as-you-go, somehow - quite apart from getting the components lined up as I want them, which I can't always decide on happily in advance, my joining-as-you-go efforts always look lumpy rather than smooth and even. I know many of you hooky people swear by it as a method and it saves a lot of time, so I wonder if I am simply doing it wrong. Perhaps I must try again.

The button is a printed wooden one

- couldn't resist them when I saw them here.

The cover is held in place by two panels of straightforward (but deliciously stripy!) single crochet, crocheted onto the border of the outer cover, to make two "sleeves" at either end. Perfect for holding templates, small pattern pieces, yarn labels or other vital scraps as well as their primary function of holding the cover on the book.

And the loop for the button neatly holds a nice fat twiggy pencil in place, ready for use. I like these pencils. They are made from Indian Neem twigs. Not very practical to sharpen as they are too fat to fit any normal pencil-sharpener and when blunt, require the judicious application of a very sharp craft knife, but they remain useable for a surprisingly long time and their quirky, slightly irregular shape, sits in harmony with the invitation to irregular possibility, that writing or drawing in pencil offers.

In his rather grim poem, "Dolor", Theodore Roethke writes "I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, neat in their boxes" and you may agree with Roethke, but I can't see it that way. As a school-girl of around eight or nine, one of my favourite rainy break-time activities was to wend my way along the long corridor that led to "Stationery" and visit dear, kind Mrs Pepper in her treasure-store. The little room was piled high with new exercise books, pink blotting paper, pairs of compasses (with inch-long stiletto points, that would now be deemed far too dangerous to allow in the classroom, but which we blithely wielded without the slightest anxiety, or indeed, injury) and boxes of beautiful, shiny new pencils, each tipped with a soft, new rubber, on one end. On production of a completed exercise book, or a note initialled by the teacher, you could collect new supplies, gratis, but you could also purchase items for yourself, for next to nothing.

"Stationery" smelt of paper and wood-shavings, coffee and filing boxes. It was a little hidden world in which no mistakes ever marred the white, squared pages of the red mathematics books (unlike mine, back in my desk, which was a sorry mess of painfully reworked sums, rubbings out and red ink crosses); creamy sheets of graph-paper waited expectantly for the perfect points of new "H" or even "2H" pencils to draw flamboyant, rainbow arcs against their checkered skies; ordinary "HB" pencils "neat in their boxes", held, not "inexorable sadness", but the promise of stories and poems waiting to be written and drawings that, you never knew, might give Picasso a run for his money; all was possible somehow and when the bell rudely ended my exploration of Mrs Pepper's wares, I never failed to return to the afternoon's lessons that awaited, without feeling re-energised and somehow encouraged to renew my efforts at intractable maths problems or whatever was on the timetable. I still love stationery shops and can happily wile away the odd half hour in them although they don't have the same evocative smell as the secret, paper-and-pencil-filled nooks of Mrs Pepper's hideaway, all those years ago.

Happy Hooking and Scribbling!

E x

Apron Love and Hooky Tulips

I don't know whether anyone else has been captivated by the front cover of June's "Country Living" but I am afraid I took one look and fell in love with the idea of sitting in a flowery, sunny garden in one of those lovely red aprons. I don't buy magazines very much any more but this issue was a must-have.

There's something about seeing images of aprons being modelled that I find both beguiling and soothing. I think it's because the subliminal message I absorb is that:
a) these are not cat-walk numbers but real garments that actually have an everyday place in my own lifestyle (I am usually to be found in an apron). Dwelling on the possibility of acquiring a new one is not therefore simply feeding impossible or ridiculous sartorial dreams but sensibly practical;
b) modelled in a bower of flowers, with the only mess around being artistic and somehow therefore desirable, I feel my own, considerably less artistic, mess is soothed away or at least put into soft focus by extension;
c) although my mantra of "a girl can never have too many bags or too many shoes" is always ready to be rolled out, occasional guilt creeps in at the idea of spending significant money on same, whereas an apron by definition can't be expensive and one does indeed need plenty in the drawer, if doing a lot of cooking, gardening, cleaning and other hands-on stuff, which I do.

I say, "an apron by definition can't be expensive", but this illusion was rudely shattered by discovering that the said red apron on the front cover of Country Living costs the princely sum of £48; (from Selfridges, if you're interested and have had a windfall recently). How disappointing. The article, in which the red apron also figures, inside the magazine,

featured, to be fair, a number of other, less expensive, aprons including some denim ones from Muji and John Lewis.

A denim apron... hmm... now there's a thought. Denim being robust and considerably improved by regular washing, I could see might have mileage as an apron. But dark blue denim on its own, while possessed of a certain minimalist chic, (especially paired with those spotty cotton kerchiefs, floaty voile scarves and vintage buckets of flowers in the photographs), still wasn't quite cutting it, as set against the sheer ebullience of that bright and soul-lifting, red linen number, I wanted so badly. I could forgo the pristine Hunter wellingtons (I don't think mine were ever that clean, even when they were brand new) and the enchanting, wide-brimmed sunhat and the model's beautiful, long, straight hair and the vintage gardening books; I could accept that the oases in my days are not always like the sunny idyll of the magazine photo-shoot, depicted among baskets of freshly cut flowers; but a bit like King John ("who was not a good man"), longing for a "big, red india-rubber ball" in A A Milne's poem, "King John's Christmas", I, (not a good man either, clearly!), did long for a bright, red linen-fabric apron!

But there was nothing doing. I simply could not bring myself to spend nearly £50 on an apron. It hovered however, tantalisingly in my head and peeped round the corners of my mind when it thought I wasn't looking. And in the way that sometimes happens, necessity generated happy invention. Delving into my fabric boxes there was (of course) no suitable red linen to run one up myself, but there were the off-cuts from making my denim skirts last year. "You really ought to throw these out!" I told myself, "you can't use denim off-cuts for much. Or could I? Yes, indeedy!" The red apron peeped one last time at me and gave way to a denim one, pieced together from nothing. But not just a plain denim apron, a denim apron blooming with hooky tulips, from a pattern I'd discovered here on Etsy by Greta Tulner of AterG Crochet. It's not free but the download only cost £2.41 so it was hardly bank-breaking and for such a gorgeous and versatile pattern, I thought, well worth it.

I've recently come really to love projects that combine fabric and crochet. Initially I thought the two media might not work terribly well together, but every time I've experimented, it's worked absolutely dreamily. And I am on the look-out now for more of such. (I've found a couple too, of which more in due course!)

Anyway back to my tulips and their background. The denim off-cuts were pretty motley in shape and size and so the apron really did have to be pieced together; "hodged" as my mother would say, meaning "made to work when really there isn't enough of whatever it is to make it work"! Because so many seams were needed to make up the apron shape, I was a bit concerned about them fraying badly in the wash, so I sewed the pieces together with French seams, with all the raw edges tucked away and my little old sewing machine, which I've been thinking about needing to replace, coped manfully with all the layers of thick fabric she had to sew through. She's earned herself a reprieve, I think, after that!

The crochet tulips are a joy to make - lots of happy colour changes and once I'd got the hang of the pattern, nice and easy to hook up in quantity.

I found I couldn't get on with making them, as per the pattern instructions, on a 2.5 mm hook and with a correspondingly fine yarn - just too fiddly for impatient Mrs T to manage. But having switched to a DK weight cotton yarn and a 4mm hook, we were away! The bigger size actually suited my apron-embellishment purpose better, too. I simplified the pattern a little and omitted the surface crochet details as I felt that the bright, beautifully gaudy blooms were just right as they were, without further additions but the pattern adds some extra outlining here and there.

To apply them to the apron, I pinned them in place and then tacked each one down, sewing by hand just slightly inside where they were going to be sewn properly, before using the sewing machine and a longer stitch than usual, to sew around the perimeter of each flower. It's worked perfectly, far better than I'd hoped or expected and the flowers look as though they've just grown out of the denim.

The patchworky construction seams are largely disguised and I have an apron that can give the beautiful red one, that I originally longed for, a run for its money any day, without spending a single penny. Actually that's not quite true, I did have to buy one or two additional colours of thread to match the perimeters of the flowers for sewing them in place so that the stitches would be invisible. Making do with an almost-but-not-quite-matching thread would have spoiled the ship for a ha'pp'orth of tar. Even the ribbon to make the neck loop and ties was in my sewing box, purchased ages ago for something and never in the end used.

Thrifty makes like this are just so satisfying. Something pleasing and useful for next to nothing and the huge delight in making it, to boot. Anyone feeling down at the moment? I detect quite a number of us are feeling a bit low here in the UK - I suspect the brief appearance of the sun quickly replaced by grey, cold and damp days that would fit better in early Spring than midsummer may have something to do with it. "Country Living" may have a headline saying "Here Comes Summer!" but that would appear to be a triumph of hope over experience at the moment. Anyway, if you feel you could do with a lift, I recommend a project like this for an instant feel-good and soul-lifting boost! Much more effective than retail therapy, I find!

If you want to give it a go, it's easy-peasy. Draw and cut out a simple apron shape using an existing one as a template. Don't forget to add on a bit extra all round when you draw it, to allow for the extra fabric you'll need for turning under the raw edges. Draw and cut out an additional rectangle or a square for a pocket or two, if you fancy. Omit, if you don't.

Raid your fabric stash or that bag of clothes you are sending to the charity shop and see what you can cannibalise. The overall shape can be pieced from few or many bits. Cut up old jeans or a denim skirt for a denim apron like mine; take your scissors to mens' shirts where the collars and cuffs have gone - these are a good starting point for lighter weight, fairly plain fabric; outgrown children's clothes may also provide enough fabric when deconstructed and pieced together.; look speculatively and creatively at any plainish off-cuts from a previous sewing project - cotton curtain fabric and curtain-lining fabric are particularly good for aprons. Just remember that each piece needs a seam allowance built in where it joins another piece and don't work with funny shapes - stick to linear ones, even if it means you need to use more pieces or you'll get in a muddle assembling it all.

And if your cupboards yield no treasures to cut up, and you have to buy something, a plain piece of calico, or similar plain cotton fabric, from which to cut the basic apron shape, will cost you almost nothing, certainly no more than a fraction of that eye-watering £48, although you won't have the peculiar pleasure, that is all its own, of making something out of nothing.

Sew the bits together so that you have a single apron-shaped piece of fabric. You can use ordinary seams or French ones. (Google for instructions on sewing French seams if, like me, you're not sure of how to do them) Press all the seams nice and flat. Turn under the raw edges all the way round and sew in place by machine (or by hand if you prefer).

If you are adding a pocket, turn under the raw edge of the top and stitch down. Turn under and pin the sides and bottom of the pocket piece but don't sew the pocket on to the apron yet until you've added your flowers. You may find it useful, however, to mark where the pocket will go on the apron, with pins, or tailors' tacks, so that you can see how the overall design will work when positioning your flowers.

Hook up a bed of flowers - tulips, roses, forget-me-nots or any other bloom that takes your fancy in a washable yarn, from whatever pattern and colours you like. I used Cascade Ultra Pima Cotton for my AterG tulips because that's what I had. I love that yarn so much - it's a dream to work with and the colours are just gorgeous.

Pin your flowers onto the apron and tack securely in place by hand, using running stitches.

Machine sew around the perimeter of each flower with a long machine stitch or, if you like hand-sewing, you could stitch them by hand, using small, neat oversewing stitches. Make sure your thread matches the yarn, whichever method you choose.

Now that all the flowers are sewn on, you can stitch your pocket(s) in place, machine sewing close to the turned-under edges of the sides and bottom.

Neaten off any loose threads by pulling them through and knotting at the back of the apron.

Sew on tape or ribbon to make the ties and the neck loop and go and sit in the garden with a cup of tea and a muffin.

Tea and muffin (or equivalent) essential! Hunter wellies, hat and long hair optional! Baskets and vintage gardening books, if you have some, desirable!

Of course, in such an apron, any mess will no longer really be mess, or not mess with a capital M; it will be artistic and intentional laissez faire "styling"! Must say that to myself every time I go into the living room and discover H has taken it over again with computer parts, school text books, DVD boxes separated from their discs, chocolate wrappers and sundry other nameless detritus. This has been trying my patience somewhat over recent weeks and I am not sure that calling it "laissez faire styling" instead of "this disgusting mess" will prevent Krakatoa blowing, when I next enter the room but we'll see!

As he so kindly took the photos of the apron on me, however, I shall turn a blind eye, for now!

Thank you, H, you are, despite any "laissez faire styling"in the living room, an angel!