Flake

Sorry I haven't been blogging much; I have been a flake of late. I have been knitting, but it is for Christmas presents. And, it snowed.

Recently I was invited by Stitch Craft Create to do a blog hop focused on Christmas, covering all sorts of different crafts. They have a slew of Handmade Christmas crafts that you can get from their website. They even have .pdf books, patterns and courses to take! 

I chose crochet as my craft; I don't really crochet much, but every now and then I do a little. They had a book that was Crochet Your Christmas Baubles: 25 Christmas Decorations to Make. It's a marvelous book, and has baubles divided into several categories: Sant's Grotto, Frozen Winter Wonderland, Fairy Tale, Scandinavian Christmas, and White Christmas. There are five patterns in each category. I thought about making a Rudolph the Reindeer...

... or a Cute Snowman...

.... but ended up making a snowflake from the White Christmas category. This was my inspiration:

I got some 3/2 pearl cotton and a B/2.25mm hook from Halcyon Yarn in Bath. They were out of the unbleached white yarn that I wanted, but they had a pretty, icy-looking light blue, "King Blue", that would be perfect. 

I started the snowflake and realized right away that my snowflake didn't resemble the picture in the book, and then it hit me. Of course it doesn't resemble the picture; the book is printed in the UK! They are using British crochet terms! So when they say to "dc 12 times in the ring", I would single crochet, not double crochet. This page has a list of US to UK conversions for crochet. Once I figured that out, it was smooth sailing.

This is my flake in progress, with my "right hand" crochet hook holder. As there are only 8 rounds in the snowflake, I was done fairly quickly!

It's so pretty! That's the picture straight off the crochet hook. After a little starch and a press with the iron, this was the result (Nicky provided the background):

In the book, you make a bunch of these and then string them together to make a bunting or garland, which I might do, after Christmas. It actually makes a good winter decoration, done with light blue, silver and white snowflakes. I also thought of this:

It makes a perfect coaster!

Go check out StitchCraft Create, and check out the blog hop -- crafty people everywhere take part in this!