Crochet And Pom-Pom Hearts

Couldn't pass up the opportunity to hook up a few of these cushiony hearts after seeing Lucy's post here last month. The pattern is the same lovely one by BeaG that Lucy used which you can find here. I've used my favourite Cascade Ultra Pima cotton yarn in a range of Spring-inspired colours and a 4mm hook and I love them!

I thought they would make nice lavender bags, both to keep and to give away as small presents, but of course the crochet is a bit porous and the lavender flowers have an unhelpful tendency to make their way out through the crochet again instead of staying fragrantly put. Not being keen on finding bits of scratchy lavender in my clothes and suspecting that anyone to whom I might give one of these, might not either, I made little pillows out of loose weave muslin to fit inside. The muslin was in fact an unused jelly-straining bag that I cut up, and stitched by hand into small pillow shapes, filling them up with lavender before the final seam - perfect, loose-meshed fabric for allowing juice to drip through for jellies or to keep lavender from making its way out of my crocheted hearts!

The little lavender pillows sit nicely within the crocheted hearts and I just filled out the remaining space with soft toy filling. This was also an economical way to use my precious Provençal lavender, as you don't need so much just to fill the little pillows as you would to stuff the entire heart and they are still beautifully scented.

I played around with various flower patterns to embellish the hearts and in the end plumped for the Centifolia Rose in Lesley Stanfield's 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet, making some in two colours and some in single ones.

This coming week, with Valentine's Day in it, is my excuse to go fuzzy, pink and girly.

In a predominantly male household, "fuzzy, pink and girly" is not often welcome, but every once in a while I feel the urge to give in to it, regardless of disapproval ... so I've also had a go at making some pink heart-shaped pom-poms with ... a pile of pink yarn

... and a pair of those heart-shaped pom-pom-making gizmos.

The heart-shaped pom-pom-making gizmo is slightly daunting compared to the simple spherical and oval pom-pom-making gizmos I had as a child (and still use). But with a bit of perseverance I managed, more or less, to get it to work. If you acquire one of these to have a go yourself, (you can get them from Purplelinda Crafts here), do read and follow the accompanying detailed instructions carefully and take my advice: not a single word in them is superfluous!

There is quite a bit of happy snipping involved in order to shape the results properly which was rather enjoyable and created a lot of pink fluffy mess everywhere.

I've always loved wielding scissors and snipping away, whether it's paper, fabric, yarn or hair on the receiving end of my attentions!

As a small child I was so taken with the glamour of using scissors that Really Cut instead of those dreadful plastic "safety" scissors that wouldn't cut anything and with which I was generally fobbed off, that I tried to "help" my mother's dressmaking efforts by copying what I'd seen her do when cutting out a summer dress for me. It was rather unfortunate that the fabric I cut was the pieces she had already cut out for the dress! As you can imagine, I was not very popular! Not that I blame her. I would have been pretty livid in her shoes, I can tell you!

Nor was my popularity rating high when I led my sister astray into cutting the hair on a pair of dolls we had. My doll ended up with quite a pretty, gamin kind of bob, but L didn't know when to stop nor, aged only three at the time, did she realise that the doll's hair would not grow back after cutting, so it ended up with a very comical, and irrevocably drastic, crew-cut! I am afraid, at all of six years old, I unkindly laughed the superior laugh of the knowing older sibling but my poor sister was rather upset and my mother was not at all pleased!

As you can see, I need outlets for my happy snipping tendencies and these pom-poms fit the bill nicely - I particularly love the ones made with the variegated pink yarn - Patons Fairytale Dreamtime Baby DK, if you're interested - and there were no tears or fall-out apart from the pile of drifting pink fluff all over the floor!

Pink dust bunnies anyone?!