Awesome Owl - By Stip and Haak

Since my surgery I have spent a fair bit of time at my local yarn shop/knitting cafe WeKnit. It was whilst I was there one day that someone commented on the little arigumi cat sat on the table. It had been made using a free pattern from a website called Stip & Haak, a Dutch website, meaning dot and hook - http://stipenhaak.nl/. 

On closer inspection (and with the clever laptop and google working together to translate) I found a range of patterns for fantastic toys. I fell in love immediately and quickly purchased 4 patterns - opps! (Owl, caterpillar, Hamster and Bear)
I knew I had to start with the owl (owl Floortje). Being a good girl trying to use up the yarn stash rather than add to it, I had a rummage.  I found some Sirdar Folksong that I had purchased in bulk on EBay some time ago (not sure why as I could neither knit or crochet at the time). I picked out a couple of balls of this:

378 Tally Tree

The ball band describes it as a chunky yarn, however we decided it was more of an Aran weight. So, I continued to rumage and found some Nepal by Drops. Some 0612 Medium Brown Mix, 0206 Light Beige Mix and 2923 Goldenrod unused from previous projects and matched these with: 0100 Off White and 1477 Pistachio from WeKnit.

A foot

The Folksong -- became the body.
Light Beige Mix -- became the head.
Goldenrod -- was perfect for the beak and feet.
Medium Brown Mix -- was great to define the eyes and used for the ears.
Pistachio -- became the wings.

It was all getting very exciting. The pattern although it was in English, was written in US Terms and so needed a little conversion before I began, as I so easily get confused. This was easy to do using the 'Find' and 'Replace' feature in Word, I asked it to find sc and replace with dc - voila! The pattern was well written and clear in its instructions.

 It was a great project as I was spurred on by the completion of each part and could see how they would form something resembaling an owl.  Even the joining together seemed relatively easy.

The final product:

I have to say I'm really pleased with how its turned out. Am going to do another (non toy related project) then I think it's time to give the caterpillar a go. I'm thinking in the colours of the hungry caterpillar (I'm a primary school teacher- what do you expect?).

From my experiences with this one, I can't recommend the Stip&Haak patterns enough, they are well written and very reasonably priced. There is even a page with smaller creatures which are free to download.
Check them out:
Here on their website - http://stipenhaak.nl/
Or here on Ravelry - http://www.ravelry.com/designers/stip--haak

Crochet Poncho - ribbed cowl neck

As promised a catch up of what I got up to in hospital ...
Where it all started?
I had seen a pattern in issue 25 of Simply Crochet that caught my eye. The beautiful poncho in the bottom left hand corner of the cover. 

You can download the poncho pattern from Ravelry for £2.75 -Ravelry link to Simply Crochet cowl-neck-poncho worth it in my opinion, great pattern, easy and a fab garment. 

Yarn, colours and work in progress

So I toddled of to my local yarn shop and Drops supplier: weknit-youcantoo.co.uk in search of yarn.
I was soon plucking yarn from the shelves and lining up colours. 

As you can see on the far right I had already picked my base colour and begun working up the cowl neck (worked from top to bottom). We (me and Sue the lovely shop owner) sat for a good 10 minutes playing around with the order of the colours (I like to pick colours that are more me). We were just getting near an order we were happy with when much to my dismay the Sue muddled them all up, grabbing balls randomly to come up with this. I loved it! A stroke of pure genius!!

I used Drops Nepal from my local yarn shop for this WeKnitYouCanToo - Nepal. The base colour was - Beige colour code 206 and I used 7 balls. I then used approximately one ball (less so far, but as you wil read later I want to add more rows to make it longer)of each of the following for the stripes (from right to left as seen in the photo above):

4434 - Purple

6220 - Medium Blue

2923 - Goldenrod

7238 - Olive Mix (dark green)

8783 - Forget-Me-Not

1477 - Pistachio  

7120 - Light Grey Green

6790 - Royal Blue 

6273 - Cerise

 As you will have seen in an earlier post I had some surgery and this was the project I took with me to the hospital to keep my brain busy. I got started and had this (below) when I went into hospital. 

In hospital I was spurred on by the idea that I wanted to aim to wear my poncho home (I was only in for the one night, but still there’s not much else you can do). 

Sure enough I had most of a poncho by the time I left. 

 I decided against the tassels in the end as being a cat owner I suspected they would make me prone to random attacks and destruction would be caused in no time. As a result, I have decided to go back and add a few more rows to give the poncho a bit more length - will post a photo update below when I have done this.