Crafting update

It seems like I haven't blogged here for AGES! I'm having trouble uploading pics cos my bf's using all the bandwidth, and I almost forgot that I could make a post without pictures, which is what this is going to be.

I have been busy though. I used some of the cotton I was given, and a pattern, and crocheted (is that even a word?) a table cover doily thingy. The pattern says it's a table cover/chair back, but since the only person I know who has chair backs is my gran, and I haven't seen a picture with one that dates after the seventies, it's definitely not going to become one of those. It's really cool, the cotton is variegated shades of orange, and it's a sort of spiral shape. I had to adapt it cos I was running out of cotton, but I think it's pretty cool. That needs pinned out and blocked or something anyway before I put pics of it up.

I've also been knitting jellyfish from Magknits. I changed the specified yarn to the cotton aran I bought a while ago, instead of mohair, cos all the mohair I had was either too hairy to see the lace, of self striping, and I didn't want vertical stripes. I think I will make a shrug with the self striping mohair, but it'll be horizontal stripes. I just need to find a patten for it. Jellyfish is coming along really well now, knitting up very fast, and is lots of fun, but I had lots of problems at the beginning with the lace pattern. The only way I could get round it was by casting on one less stitch - either the stitch count for the middle size is wrong, or I'm just completely inept. I'm not sure, cos it looked like it was working sometimes with the 60 stitches. But now it seems to work with 59. So I'm going with that. I'm actually 3/4 of the way through knitting it, and I'm enjoying it. I think it'll look quite nice when it's done, with the cotton instead of the mohair. The cotton seems to have a nice drape to it. I want to knit another one after this, but with beads. But since I'm on a totally strict budget just now, that'll have to wait till I can afford suitable beads. I know, they'd only be a few pounds, but right now I can't even afford that. I'm on an enforced stash-busting exercise right now, going through all the stuff I have already. It hasn't stopped me looking though old posts on craftzine.com and being totally inspired to do a whole load of other things though!