A sprinkling of inspiration

Hello! Hope you're all having a nice weekend. I thought I would break my post-Knitting & Crochet blog week blogging hiatus by sharing a couple of things which have been inspiring me recently.

I'm a big fan of recycling and upcycling. I also like kitties and good design... so I had to try hard not to "squeee" when I saw this!

Image via Atomic Attic

Atomic Attic creates these wonderful pet beds made from recycled iMacs - so they're nice & colourful and the light shines through them too. Doesn't that cat look really rather content in it?

Birds + lego + art = awesomeness. If you don't believe me, for proof, see below:

Image via Laughing Squid

- thanks to the North East Craft Mafia for highlighting those! There's a whole series of British birds built by Lego enthusiast DeTomaso Pantera, including a woodpecker, blue tit, kingfisher, goldfinch and even a puffin.

Handmade Portraits: Biscuit Scout

Handmade Portraits: Biscuit Scout from Etsy on Vimeo.

I love this lady's story :) Find out more about her here.

My Design Process

I recently designed and created a custom scarf for a friend of my sister's and as I had documented the work throughout, I thought I would provide a little insight on my design process for it.


First of all, I needed to work out a pattern, based on what she had requested. This involved lots of looking at pattern libraries for inspriation as well as scribbling and sketching on squared paper. This is generally how I plan out any design before I hand or machine knit one stitch.


Once the pattern was worked out and agreed on, as this scarf was going to be made on my Knitmaster (a vintage mechanical - that's hand-operated to you and I - knitting machine), I needed to create a punch card with the pattern 'punched out.' This means I can easily make my own original designs for fair isle or individual motifs.


Next, I whizzed up a swatch to test out my pattern design on my machine using Merino lambswool yarn and felted the test swatch to see how it looks in the chosen colours.


Once this had been approved, I got started on the final scarf. After felting and trimming of floats/tufts on the reverse, blocking and sewing on my little WildCat Designs label, it was ready to go!

A Kindle of Cats

I do love the English language for the amusement that the collective nouns for animals provides. An army of ants, a congress of baboons, a charm of hummingbirds, a mischief of mice, a parcel of hogs and an ascension of larks. How delightful!

What prompted me to ponder these was a review I recently came across of an exhibition of work at Haunch of Venison (London) by the lighting designer Stuart Haygarth entitled "Found" in Grafik magazine.

Image via Grafik

I like the way the ornaments wouldn't be significant on their own, but because they have been collected, ordered and arranged in a particular way, they become an object of interest. Also makes for a very unusual and interesting lamp!

Image via artnet