Send in pictures of your finished items and tell us where you got the pattern if you found it online, along with your thoughts on how easy/hard it was to make.
The new star blanket
This one was made for Jorja, Jayda's new little sister. I love the bright colours and wanted to keep it for myself - naughty grandma!
As with Jayda's blanket, I used Stylecraft DK which has now gone up to £1.40 per 100g ball but is still good value, machine washable acrylic. It comes in a wide range of colours and is really soft and snuggly.
The round shawl
The pinwheel centre is knitted flat and then the old shale edging is knitted on in the round on circular needles. The scalloped edging is knitted on along the edge, each 16 stitch pattern repeat uses up 8 stitches of the shawl edge.
Close up of the old shale border and scalloped edging.
The new Shetland shawl with changes to the edging
This is version 2 of the one below but with a different edging. In this one I have knitted the diamond border in the round straight after the old shale with a round of eyelets before and after. Only the narrow Van Dyke edging is knitted on sideways with the open herringbone pattern showing where it begins. I like this because 1 - the mitred corners extend into the diamond border, which I prefer and 2 - the sideways border is knit over only a few stitches so seems to go faster. This is an important consideration when every 8 row pattern repeat uses up only 4 stitches of the side of the shawl.
My Shetland shawl baby blanket. Not a traditonal Shetland shawl - it is knitted in 3 ply instead of the finer 2 ply or 1ply fingering. Also, it is in machine washable acrylic and nylon blend. The actual yarn is Wendy Peter Pan baby 3ply and is now only available in snow white or cream. This shawl is in cream but was photographed on a sunny day and looks much paler than it is.
Close up of the mitred corners.
In the original pattern, the centre garter stitch square is knitted flat and then each side is knitted onto it one at a time and the edging is knit on, 5 stitches along the side are used up for every 10 rows of edging.
I altered the pattern so that after knitting the garterr stitch square I picked up all the way round on a circular needle and knit all 4 sides together with mitred corners to give the same look as the original. I did knit the outside border on in the same way as the original, but since then I have had an idea on how to make it better. Look out for the new version coming soon!
Star Blanket. This one was made for my new grand-daughter Jayda. I used Stylecraft acrylic dk. They have a wonderful range of colours, it is very reasonably priced at about £1 per 100g, and it is machine washable and wonderfully soft and cuddly. The colours are slightly different than the picture, which is a bit dark. You can't tell from the photo but it is BIG at 5 feet across from point to point.
It was easy once I got going, but the instructions for the first 3 rounds were very confusing. You can email me for more information, or go to the original pattern .
This is Danny and Julie's wedding cake. I made the sparkly decoration by twisting 0.4mm silver plated wire with Swarovski crystals in light blue and clear and small silver heart beads. I could not find a tiara base big enough for a cake so improvised with metal boning designed for corsets/bodices. That was coated in white plastic so I ended up wrapping it with silver ribbon. Then it was just a matter of gently slipping each "crown" onto the cake from above.
The cute little couple were made by Julie's friend and Julie is going to cover them in varnish to see if that will preserve them (they are made of fondant icing, so we are not sure if this will work or not - if you know a better way, please get in touch).
This is the "Wild Woman Pin" from the "Making Wire Jewellery" booklet on sale here.