Kizzia Mildmay

I have been wanting to get into digital art for quite a while but having made some very unsatifactory things with either my finger on a tablet or a cursor on a screen I’d shelved the attempts until I could get my hands on a tablet and pen. Three guesses who now has such a tablet, first two don’t count. 

All of which is to say that as well as having completed four crochet projects since my last update, I have also been making friends with layers and zoom and transparencies and having the best time with the mirror function. So there is drawn art as well as fibre art to share. 

Crochet first though.

The shawl I mentioned last time, which is a gift, is now complete but has not made its way to the person who it’s a gift for, so no more photos of that yet.

However a second shawl has also now been made, this time in the virus pattern, which was a birthday gift for a friend. Since this one has already reached its new home so you can see the finished product:

The yarn was a 1250m cake of 4ply 50% cotton , 50% acrylic from Crochet-UK. I love this shop because as well as having a vast number of beautiful cakes in myriads of colours to choose from, you can also design your own colour mix as I have with this one. The freedom this gives in terms of creating clothes that match with your wardrobe or items that fit perfectly into the colour scheme of your house is unmatched. The way the yarn threads are joined so the connection is almost invisible also makes these cakes stand out from the rest; you can barely feel it as you work never mind see it, unless you’ve chosen two extremely contrasting colours to be merged. They’re a real pleasure to work with*.

As well as shawls, there have also been gloves.

The first pair was a birthday gift for a friend of my Mum’s and was based on a pattern from Emma Mitchell (which you can find here). However, because I am me and know my own crochet skills best, I made a few changes to the pattern as I worked.

They were incredibly quick to work up – being double crochet (US terminology) all the way up, just a gap for the thumb and a picot edging at the top – and I finished the pair in a couple of hours one Sunday (whilst watching a Midsomer Murders repeat because I really know how to live).

The second pair were half-fingered gloves with a proper thumb covering and so took longer: 

This is not only because there’s more work in creating the fingers and thumb and the stitches are slightly more intricate but because having searched for a pattern I liked and come up empty handed, I designed them myself. So there were a few false starts and quite a lot of muttering before I got the finger sizes and the joins to work and be comfortable. And, now that I’m happy with the pattern, I can work up the pair I’ve been commissioned to make. I’ll share them next month once they’ve reached their new owner. 

And so to the digital art. 

If you follow me on twitter you may already be aware just how much I love drawing with layers. It’s A LOT. A HUGE AMOUNT. I’m sure that eventually the glamour of being able to try something on a seperate layer and just junk it in a tenth of a second if it doesn’t work (rather than spend ages undoing it) will fade and I’ll think them passe but I suspect that will be a long time coming. As it is, not only have I spent a few quite evenings playing about with the mirror function to create some soothing and rainbowtastic mandalas, I’ve also been able to create a new header for the blog and all my social media and draw a new icon which actually looks a bit like me, rather then relying on piccrew approximations.

I’ve had an absolute blast – I hadn’t quite realised just how much I’d missed drawing – and I’ve been able to make things I’d been envisaging for ages but hadn’t had the technology to make reality. It’s been a very good month in that respect!

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*I am not affiliated with Crochet-UK in anyway, they are not paying me to say this. I just love their product and want as many people as possible to buy from them so they stay in business!