Window shopping in Venlo

Craft shops are really hard to pass by, especially when there is a pile of yarns on the window. But as the saying goes, when travelling light, do not enter a yarn shop.
Here are some impressions of craft and souvenir shop displays in the small town of Venlo, the Netherlands.

Inspiration from around the world

My weekend trip to visit Floriade, World Horticultural Expo in the Netherlands, quite unexpectedly proved to be interesting craftwise as well. Many participating countries had included souvenirs and textiles in their expositions, for some it was the main attraction with very little to show in the gardening area.

This tree with a colourful knitted sweater was probably the only living creature on the fair grounds not suffering from the fierce cold wind and frequent rain and hail showers of the weekend:




Crafty hands could easily make a garden sculpture like this cyclist from Luxembourg



or any other decorative willow object:




Motive of a cosy knitted throw on a garden shed chair:




Bobbin lace samples of Sri Lanka



and how they are made by diligent hands:




Chinese silk lantern:




Fine printed fabrics of Indonesia:




Patterns from Afghanistan:




Colours of Tunisia:




Moroccan sofa with a beautiful patterned fabric in chocolate and turquoise:




Andean knits and textiles from Ecuador:




And some more pretty textile patterns with mystery origin:






Last but not least, some fashion ideas to steal from this performer's costume:

Easter eggs and chirpy chicks

My first food post: the Easter eggs have not been dyed yet, instead this year's chicks are extremely bright and colourful. And absolutely non-angry. On the contrary, they have very soft characters and big warm hearts inside.
Have a happy Easter!

Digital crafting

Wouldn't it be convenient to have all sorts of real life tools available also while being online? For example, scissors for cutting, glue for pasting, safety pins to put something on hold, pins for pinning?


I turned some of such tools and small craft related items into digital format. The images are free to use for embellishing your craft blog or website. These are .png files without background and will blend in anywhere.
To save an image, right-click on it and choose 'Save Image As' or similar.

All images are shown in actual size. They can be made to appear smaller by using the code marked in green inside the image tag in HTML and adjusting the width in pixels:
<img width="50px" src="http://..." />

If your default web template adds border to images, you can add this green code to the image tag to remove the border:
<img style="border: none; background: transparent;" width="50px" src="http://..." />

Between the Lines fingerless gloves pattern

These gloves feature simple vertical stripes with a twist: easy colourwork and a few cable crossings on thumb and at the back of the hand. Thumb gusset shaping ensures a good fit and knitting with two yarns makes the gloves wonderfully warm.

The fingerless gloves fit an average woman's hand and are approximately 19 cm (7.5'') long. Only 25 g (100 yds) of fingering weight yarn in each colour is required.

The pattern is available on Ravelry and on my pattern page.










The sample gloves are knitted with Garnstudio DROPS BabyAlpaca Silk, shades No. 5670 (brown) and No. 7820 (green).