Crocheting Through Life

Here's a pattern for some dinky Christmas lights, made in the round with cotton yarn :) If you want the backstory, do continue to read this next bit, but if not feel free to skip on directly to the pattern further down; I shan't hold it against you! Be sure to check back in a few months for instructions on joining them all together! Backstory (aka, I talk a lot, even when I'm typing...) One of the things I've done this year which is totally new for me is subscribed to a yarn club (actually, I subscribed to two!). If you're unfamiliar with a yarn club, it's literally a subscription box which shows up on your doorstep once a month (or bi-monthly, or quarterly) filled with yummy yarn (and sometimes other goodies too). As I said, I subscribed to two: a little monthly one and a bigger quarterly one. The little one is a cotton paper chain club from Three Violet Buttons, and will, over the year, build up to make a long paper (cotton) chain to decorate th...

Hello and a very happy new year to everyone! 😄 Today marks the official start of (I hope) regular posts about what's going on here at StarfishHQ, including new items for sale, side projects I have going on, new services etc. I say official because I intended to start these posts now, but then I ended up making a post at the end of last month about a custom colourway/baby booties because of unexpected new blog enthusiasm. It doesn't matter really, but today is officially the first official blog post, so.. I dunno, imagine me waving some pom poms while you read or something! New year Last year I made an overly sappy social media post about how I had had a good 2016 from a business perspective, and was looking forward to a great 2017. If you feel so inclined you can read it here . Now that 2017 is done I can reveal how it was. It was meh. My Etsy shop stats are a slight improvement over 2016, but otherwise it was meh. I made a business decision in May which resulted in ...

Hand dyed yarn. It's one of my favourites. There's so many base options, but mostly, there so many colour options! I love the idea of having a skein of yarn made bespoke for you, although of course, the creativity of indy dyers is unlimited and they manage to come up with so many beautiful colourways by themselves that there really is something for everyone. But it's the bespoke ones that are my topic today, specifically this rainbow. I approached Felt Fusion to ask if she could dye me a rainbow based on a picture provided by a customer. The picture was of a knitted cardigan, made with an unidentifiable yarn. As it turned out, there is a bit of difference between the original picture and the finished colourway, but the changes were approved by the customer and the end result is brilliant in my opinion. The customer wanted 300g so that whatever remained, after I made her a pair of Koyun booties, could be knitted into another cardigan by a family member. I think t...