So, you may have guessed by now, that I'm willing to give any yarn-based craft a try. Whether it's knitting, crochet, weaving or felting (which I am yet to try...), they all  have their place and where possible if they can be completed within a short period of time, whilst leaving you with something impressive looking, all the better!

At Depop - where I work - we had a line up of crafty workshops for colleagues in the evenings during May for Mental Health Month, so I stepped up and offered to teach Macrame! Had I done macrame before? No!.. but, I stock the fab kits from Hoooked (Only £9) and have a lot of their beautiful t-shirt and cotton yarns, so I got to learning.

 All you need is a wooden ring, some beads and about 18-21m of a thick rope or yarn. 

There are 3  main knots of macrame - all easy to google and thankfully one is half of the other - so really there's only 2! The loop knot, square knot and half-square knot is all you need to cover. Then it's up to you to get creative and combine them to develop a beautiful plant hanger!

Within an hour or so, you'll have something beautiful, functional and the platting and knotting will send you to a serene and lovely place of meditation. 

Enjoy!

I shall be brief-ish.

I have always had a strange fascination with eyes. For most of my teens, I had a necklace from a shop called Octopus, that was a weighted blinking dolls eye in a glittery casing on a chain. It made me happy beyond belief - and the fact it freaked a few people out was a little added extra joy. 

They're the window to the soul and the bodies biggest mystery, they are all you need to see of a person to know how they are - and yet, they almost always look the same. 

So, in the spirit of rug making, I've known for months an eye rug was on the agenda. As with my sunshine rug, I extensively googled for eye rugs, but they were either not to my liking, or far too expensive. 

I'm not yet sure whether this is to my liking - and I can't tell you how I made it, because it was improvised, but I can tell you it was made from Hoooked Spesso, a chunky sustainably made cotton yarn with which I am smitten. It's about £12 a skein and there was less than 1 of each colour used here. The rug is about the size of a 32" TV. 

What boggles me the most though, is how Eliot (my kitten) knows to cat-moflage himself in the middle. Does he just like the middle? Or does he know it makes him look adorable?!

So, brighter months approach (do I start every post with that?!) and I'm testing out ideas of summery, but crafty workshops. So this time - a rug! 

This is made from Hoooked's Spesso Chunky Cotton, which is great for those 12mm crochet hooks. Hoooked say:-

'Our Spesso cotton yarn is very suitable for decoration and interior design. Tons of textile waste are generated during the textile manufacturing process. We purchase and collect this textile waste from companies that truly care about the proper destination of these materials. After being collected, the textile waste is sorted by colours, shredded into yarn fibre and spun again into this crafty cotton yarn. No chemical dyeing process is required. A new cycle begins, maximizing the use of natural resources. In this circular economy, you are able to transform yarn into art, making crafty creations of the lowest environmental impact and the highest ecological appeal.'

Which, in brief, give a little comfort around the fact that this beautiful rugged and rustic feeling yarn is sustainably sourced, using up waste and repurposing into something that can be used to make something else!

So - the rug - it's super simple. All you need to know is a chain stitch, single and a double crochet. 

Row 1: slip knot, chain 4, complete the round by hooking into the first chain (4) 
Row 2: 2 single crochets in each stitch (8)
Row 3: 2 single crochets in each stitch (16)
Row 4: alternating between a 1 single, then 1 double crochet, hook 1 crochet in the first stitch and 2 in the second (24)
Row 5 - how big you'd like it: continue Row 4, but each circle increase the number of 1s

so 5:- 1 in 1, 1 in 2, 2 in 3, repeat
6:- 1 in 1, 1 in 2, 1 in 3, 2 in 4, repeat 

Essentially your circle is 8 1/8s - and each time your increasing the size of your 8th by 1 stitch. 

Continue until your yarns have run out!

Unfortunately you can see below, I started part way through a skien of the blue, so I'm not quite sure exactly how big 3 would make. There was definitely still at least one round left in each of the pink and yellow - and with each hoop there's about 2cm added on every side. The rug below measures just over 50cm in diameter and therefore has definitely exceeded giant placemat territory!

​1 skien of Spesso is about £12! - On the stall soon.