A colourful week!

My word of the week this week is colours, as I have been enjoying all of the colours of spring.

At the weekend we popped over to one of my favourite spots, our local bluebell woods. I love going at this time of year to see the gorgeous carpet of blue up the slopes of the hillside in the woods. Monkey enjoyed exploring and so did LM though there was some big muddy puddles we had to keep her away from!PhotoGrid_1460552808015

Afterwards we headed to my mother in laws for her birthday celebrations, and Monkey and I had made her a rather colourful cake! We had a lovely time with family.PhotoGrid_1460552905975

We also did some gardening over the weekend and it is so lovely to see so much colour appearing in the garden and out and about!PhotoGrid_1460553012830

I’m also a little in love with my new bright yellow coat from Trespass… Review coming soon! It is not a colour I would usually go for but I am loving it so far!PhotoGrid_1460573962618

Finally you may have seen my recent post about bubble painting with Monkey… Well we have been at it again this week as he loved it so much. He was enjoying mixing the colours this time by blowing two at once! Such fun.PhotoGrid_1460574008936

How has your week been?

The Reading Residence

My Crochet Cushion finally completed!

I haven’t blogged about anything crochet related for a while now. Mainly because I have been working on a big-ish project, a lovely rainbow cushion! I got the pattern from my mother-in-law ages ago but it took me a while to get round to it, as I was busy with my Granny Square Blanket and then I did some cute Christmas Crochet Creatures. Come January though it was time to get cracking.

Rather than buy the colours listed in the patterns I decided to use up what wool I could from my bag as I have lots of part used balls leftover. I am a bit OCD about colours and like them to be in spectrum order – I don’t know why particularly but we have some colourful mugs and they HAVE to be on the mug rack in spectrum order. Weird I know!

So these are the colours I got cracking with.

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It started off well enough as it was quite small, I made a big mistake somewhere on the first side of the cushion but thought I had rectified it enough (turns out I hadn’t but i will come back to that later!). In the pattern the reverse of the cushion doesn’t have frilly edges like the front, but hubby and I had a chat and decided we’d quite like the cushion to be the same on both sides.

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As I mentioned, it starts off quite easily but as it gets bigger, and the rounds get longer, it starts to take a lot longer to finish a row, and, well get s a bit repetitive and dull. I have now well and truly decided that I am better off with smaller projects. I just don’t have the patience to work on big things. Much as i love the way they look, I get so bored and then can’t be bothered to crochet in the evenings and it takes months for me to finish it as a result. It’s a hobby I have really been enjoying but I really don’t enjoy the big projects quite as much. Which is a shame, as I think the blankets and cushions look so lovely when they are finished.

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Anyway, it has taken me a while but I got to a point where both sides of the cushion were progressing nicely… then I compared them and realised that the side which I made a mistake on earlier was actually quite a bit smaller than the second side. boooo. It’s not the end of the world, it’s only about a round smaller, but that was a little demoralising and led to the cushion being put to one side again for a couple of weeks…. honestly I can be such an ostrich, I totally bury my head in the sand and ignore problems sometimes! Which isn’t the best idea!

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I eventually picked it up again, determined to actually get it finished and knew I just needed an extra row of trebles on the smaller side. I would have dine it in the same dark purple as the final rows… except for the fact that I ran out, I literally only just had enough to actually complete the final row of frills as it was (And that was doing a stitch less in some of the petals on that row) oops! So I had to use lilac for the joining row.

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But you know what, I am proud that I have finally finished it and it doesn’t look toooo bad!

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So that’s my creative challenge for this week (which has taken me months!) what’s yours?

Creative Challenge