Kizzia Mildmay

This is going to be a very short update as most of the month has been spent working on a project I can’t share yet!

The half fingered gloves arrived with their intended recipient a week after my last craft post and both they and the person who commissioned them are thrilled, so I’m very happy about that.

I finished my Ruana poncho at the very beginning of April and I’m incredibly pleased with how it has turned out. The pattern definitely works and the finish is beautiful so altogether it’s been a very successful trial run.

The other thing that happened at the very start of the month was my birthday. This is relevant because one of my gifts was a mystery box from Crochet UK. A Mystery Box, in this particular instance, comprises one of Crochet UK’s glorious yarn cakes and a pattern to use with it that matches the length and ply of the cake chosen by the person who buys it; the mystery is that the cake is hidden inside a box so you can’t see the colour scheme they’ve picked for you.

I’d been longing to try one for a while and my parents kindly obliged me with one containing 1500m of 4ply. The pattern is called Footsteps in the Sand and when finished will give me a rectangular wrap to wear. So far it looks like this:

I’m loving the colours and the pattern is very well written and easy to follow. And yes, it is worked along the longest side so I did have to do over 300 foundation half double crochets to start!

Two items I did both start and finish this month were a pair of small bags that I made to hold two charms I’d created as gifts for two very lovely fellow witches. I really enjoy using crochet in my witchcraft as knot magic is very intuitive and easily adapted for both knitting and crochet. The bags may look the same but a different spell has been woven into each one to compliment the different charms going inside.

And last, but by no means least, a friend’s birthday is coming up at the end of May so I’ve started working on a gift for them, using a pattern I’d purchased last year but not found the time to try out. That turned out to be a mistake as I did not get on well with the pattern (it was clearly understandable but missing stitch counts for several rows, containing incorrect stitch counts for others and had a number of other mistakes) and even after I’d made adjustments to counteract those problems I was not happy with how it looked. So I frogged everything I’d done (about 20 hours worth of work by that point) and swapped over to a tried and tested pattern. Pictures for this will be in my June update as it will have been gifted by then so I can’t spoil the surprise!