LornaJane

I'm a software developer, so I like to make things. The fact that some of these things involve yarn, fabric, or wood rather than code doesn't make any difference to how I feel about building things. For the most part my programmer friends think I'm strange for making woollen things, and my craft friends think I'm strange for working with computers!

Since spending more time online and getting to "meet" (in a virtual sense) more people, both crafters and coders, its becoming clear that I'm not alone on this one. First I saw a this thread about crafts on the phpwomen forum and then I also noticed that on ravelry (a social network for knitters. Yes, really) there's a group for PHP knitters.

Are you a geek who also makes non-code things? Let me know :)

Some time ago I started a project, using laceweight mohair, which I blogged about. Its take 6 months to finish the first skein, which was wound into a ball by friends, and now I'm ready for the next one. I've been chasing around trying to find a wool winder I can borrow and also considering using a nostepinne but at 400 yards of yarn in a skein, I'd be there for some time doing that.

To cut a long story short, my boyfriend ordered me a surprise wool winder so I was off to a flying start - but I don't have a swift (and I don't plan on winding wool often enough to justify buying one as they aren't cheap). So I googled and found this home-made swift on instructables - and decided I could make my own. Our lazy susan (5 quid from Ikea) is wooden so I didn't really want to tape onto it, so instead I found a spare piece of MDF and clamped it to the lazy susan. With two coat hangers cable-clipped to the MDF, I was all set.





It actually worked really really well, I had the two remaining skeins wound into balls in no time at all and I can carry on with my project, which is growing, if slowly! Look, I think I'm half way there:

Yesterday I took the opportunity to pop along to the Maker Faire in Newcastle - its so exciting to see events like these in the UK! The marquee there was pretty small but what it had was great fun. I saw several things there that had me really drooling - one was a harp, another was a bracelet with LEDs on it, the idea being that you could have the LEDs get more intense or more agitated when you received more tweets/emails (except this wasn't a working prototype, just a pretty idea). There were all sorts of other people there, including folksy and oomlout and an O'Reilly stand where I bought an instructables book.

We also popped over to the Discovery Museum, just up the road where there were a few more events happening. I haven't been before and had a lot of fun looking around the various bits, especially the Science Maze. At the back of the science maze was a workshop where you could make a "throwie" - an LED taped to a battery and some magnets, for throwing at fridges and things, and then a darkroom with surfaces to throw them in.



Later on there was an appearance by the "robot" Titan. He arrived, and stood up ... I was astonished to see a walking robot (walking is really tricky), especially since his shoulders seemed very large - and in the next heartbeat I realised it was a man in a grey plastic suit. There's a few photos though on my flickr stream along with a few others from the day.

All in all I am very excited to see something like this happening in the UK and am on the look-out for the next event of this kind.

It was a long time coming but I finally finished the blanket I was making for my granny - and in time for Christmas as well (well, almost. The border didn't get finished until Christmas Day but I didn't see my folks til Boxing Day anyway!). She was suitably surprised and impressed, here she is with the blanket:



Actually Grandpa looks more impressed in this photo ... or maybe he was trying to hide until the blanket?

The pattern was rotationally symmetrical in terms of which pattern block went where, and the colours ran from purple in one corner to green diagonally opposite with pink and cream as accompaniments. I could have been braver with the colour placing, but, you live and learn. Here's a photo of the blanket (without its border, I couldn't photograph it with the border as there simply wasn't enough floor space once Christmas hit), and a little closeup:





The squares are all from the "200 Crochet Blocks" book - granny square, corner granny, shell lace and willow.

We're hosting Christmas for family this year (actually its Kevin's family, but that's a technicality), and between preparations for that and having a new camera in the house, I have some nice photos. After all that we've done on this house, suddenly it feels like its coming together into a real home.



The garland on the mantlepiece (the mantlepiece that I dismantled, sanded down, and restained earlier in the year) is a bit of a craft project. I'll write a separate post at some point but suffice to say the baubles were in the discounted set that I wanted because it had snowflakes in it. They are attached to a plain garland with cable ties, and a set of lights my sister left behind added in too.

I also have a photo of the Christmas tree, I really like this photo (thanks Kevin!)

Last year in January I bought (actually my dad paid for them, thanks dad!) a whole box of Christmas decorations from IKEA, for about 2 GBP. In the box were some snowflake decorations, and yesterday I made a little hanging snowflake decoration to go over the stairs in the hall. I think it looks cute!



It was just a little crocheted string (to give the hanging snowflakes some texture to get tied onto so they didn't all slide around on the string), then snowflakes threaded onto the cotton, tied into a loop, and then looped onto the string. You can't really see in the photos but the snowflakes are all glittery and sparkly. Then we put a few nails into the wood over the stairs, and just hooked crochet stitches over them - here it is from the stairs side:



The whole thing took about 20 minutes ... so although the snowflakes have had a long wait, it was worth it!