My niece is doggy crazy. Real, plushie, animated or doodled, it really doesn't matter - she loves them all. So when it came to her second birthday, it was only natural to crochet her a dog of some kind. There are lots of patterns out there on the internet, but I really wanted to crochet something from this book that my mum had bought me for my birthday one year. The book is "Cute Crocheted Animals" by Emma Varnum, and can be found here.
The book itself is filled with easy to read patterns for a handful of animals - cats, rabbits, etc - and a lovely selection of outfits to crochet an entire wardrobe for your creations. The animals work up at around 10 to 12 inches, depending on the hook used, so in theory could also be used with many of the Build-a-Bear costumes.
At the time my niece had to most adorable little beagle puppy called Molly, and so I decided to make her a matching Molly dog. The book, as wonderful as it is, doesn't have a pattern for a dog, however!! This greatly surprised me, as a dog is probably one of the more popular crochet animals, surely? Up there with rabbits and cats, I'm sure. While the book didn't have a dog it *did* have a fox pattern, and so I decided to use that as a base. The colours and markings were almost perfect, however to be a beagle the ears definitely needed to go. I could probably have free-handed a pair of floppy ears, but I decided to be lazy and instead to search for a free pattern, and I found a perfect one on the Hello Stitches blog (the pattern is for an entire beagle, though I only used the ears!).
Apart from the ears, I followed the pattern "by the book", and I thoroughly enjoyed crocheting this little lady. The pattern was easy to follow, and she worked up pretty quickly! I can't say I'm a fan of carrying yarn for changing colours, but that's personal preference - I find it an awful waste of yarn. That said, it's better than the whole thing unravelling, so what can you do?
When it came to the wardrobe, I couldn't only do one outfit. Every little girl I know likes to be able to dress and undress their dolls and toys, so I made two outfits with the intention of making more at later points (which I still haven't done - Ooops!!) All of the clothing patterns I used can be found in the book, along with many more accessories, such as shoes, ties, etc. So this little doggo has a casual outfit, complete with shopping bag, for when she's popping about running errands, and then a sparkly, frilly outfit for going to parties! Maybe I went a bit gender-stereotypical with that (bad Tig!) but there was so much to choose from!
As with the plushie, the clothes pattern worked up very quickly and were easy to follow, although I have to admit to getting a little bored by the time I was making the second outfit. But then, I was using up scrap yarns for that outfit that I wasn't particularly fond of. The crazy thing is, I later went on to make my daughter a matching Molly cardigan, and she's worn it quite a lot, so even though I found the small one boring and didn't like the yarn it can't have been that bad!!
Wow, I make a lot of blankets! Yes, I know I've said it before, and to be honest I'll probably say it again. For example, I still have the disastrous rainbow ripple blanket to finish, or my small spotty blanket. Also the Star Wars intarsia blanket I haven't touched since I last blogged about it two years ago, or the two C2C blankets for my nieces. I'd also quit like to make a blanket for my grandma one day very soon (tm). But this post isn't about any of those however. This post is about a blanket that I was posting about two years, and one that I actually finished. This post is about my Square-a-day blanket.
About three years ago I had the fantastic idea that I could easily create a blanket with very little effort. All I had to do was to create one square every day for a year. I even had a great starting point - Crochet to Go by Ellen Gormley, a book that I had previously picked up in the Range, though is easily available on Amazon.
Unfortunately, as with any "resolution" to do things on a daily basis (I haven't kept my promise to go to the gym regularly for about 4 years, for example) I often faltered in my goal and it took much longer than a year to complete the requisite number of squares. And as much as I had promised myself to do every square out of the Crochet to Go book, I regularly browsed the internet looking for....well....more interesting squares. Using as many scrap ends as possible, the patterns I used in the end are as follows:
Square patterns from Ellen Gormley's "Crochet to Go!" book, published by D&C:
- Puddles Gather Rain
- Eyelets
- Oscar Square
- Cherry Cordial
- Pick a Posie
- Team Captain
- Star Power
Patterns found online:
- Manghan linen stitch square by Dedri at Look At What I Made
- Sweetest Baby Blanket found on Moogly blog
Other patterns:
- Standard granny square
- Solid Granny square
- Circle in a square pattern (improvised!)
In the end I had to do slightly more than a years worth of squares, as 365 squares don't really make an even rectangle, so there were 374 squares in total Still fewer squares than my sock weight My Little Pony blanket though, which had 493! I finished crocheting the squares in August of 2016 (wow, that was forever ago!) and it took me a whole month to join them all together in a simple SC join!
For the border, I had some wonderful hand-dyed rainbow yarn from Arwen Makes. (She has an etsy store, though we conducted my custom order through her Facebook page). The yarn was wonderfully soft, and exactly to my specifications. I had two skeins dyed and caked up, and they edged the blanket wonderfully, and I still have one whole gradient left over (about half of a cake) which I intend to use to edge the Spotty blanket I'll probably never finish!!
I didn't want the border design to detract too much from the rainbow gradient, so I opted for a simple scalloped edge. I did consider adding little picots to the top of the scallops, but it really did look too busy so I scrapped it pretty early on.
The end result was a wonderfully large blanket which managed to cover most of my (UK) double bed. It's incredibly warm and - unlike my Truly Hooked blanket - it has held up well in the face of repeated washing over the last two years. There has been a small amount of fading in the hand dyed border, but very little colour bleeding into the surrounding yarns. It has also been peed on by the resident Hellbeasts, and so I'v put the lack of colour bleeding down to the fact that the cream edging yarn was not natural merino as in the TH blanket, but cream Wilko acrylic. Cheap and cheerful!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Ahem.... Good to finally get that out of my system...
The amigurumi Amish animal puzzle balls (or amamani for short) are exclusively designed by Dedri Uys of Look At What I Made. I have blogged about her patterns many times before - I can't help it. They're great! The animal puzzle ball patterns themselves are available from a variety of sources. The free ones such as the plain ball, or Olive the Octopus, can be found on her website, while the paid ones can be found in downloadable PDF form from Annies, or paperback form from Amazon. Apparently I'm crazy, as I bought the digital download but then decided that I wanted the paper copy of the patterns anyway. (Or maybe they're just that good!)
Currently, I have completed the turtle ball - who we are calling Atuin - for my daughter, and am partway through the dinosaur for a friends' nephew. These patterns are actually much simpler than I originally thought - so much so that I can already complete the basic puzzle ball pattern from memory, without the book to hand. They don't take long, either. Or at least they wouldn't, if I wasn't juggling my nursing daughter as well as my crochet!
The yarn for this project came from my new local yarn store - Westcliff Wools. I had originally planned on using left over yarn from my crochet Christmas jumper four years ago, but I couldn't find it. I assumed that I had used it in my Fugly blanket, and after I had been to the yarn store and bought new yarn I found the original yarn in my wardrobe. Ooops! Still, it spurred me to sort my yarn out into colour coded bags so that I would always know where everything was in the future!
The yarn used for the turtle was a chunky weight yarn - the pattern called for an Aran, but there weren't enough suitable colours at the store in that weight. I did um and ah for a while, weighing up the choice of a funky coloured or a larger turtle, and as much as my friends were pushing me for bright colours, I had my heart set on more realistic colours - well, I have to use my degree somewhere, right? To that end, I left the store with three 100g balls of King Cole Big Value chunky, one eack of Bayleaf, Caramel, and Koala for the turtle, as well as two balls of King Cole Fashion Aran for the dinosaur - one each in Stonewash and Hint of Denim.
The pattern is pretty easy to work up - sometimes in the round and sometimes with rows for shaping - and in total it took me about six days, on and off (though mostly off!) That said, I did get a little confused when trying to navigate the book - Rather than step by step, the turtle pattern starts off with "Make x number of wedges from this page", and "crochet this number of lids from this page", before continuing to give the instructions for the head, legs, tail, etc. In addition, the back leg follows on directly from the front flipper - something that took me quite a while to figure out. The flipper ends with "do not finish off", but you flip over the page and there's a new heading and you're back to "row 1". However, I eventually worked it out, and once I did I had no further issues, and overall I enjoyed the pattern enough that I do plan on making several more. I definitely would like to make the Octopus, and I think the basic ball pattern would make a great gift for future babies.
Except my baby, apparently. The turtle didn't impress her... Maybe my friends were right and I should have made it more colourful?
Ah well, maybe she'll grow into it?
It feels like forever since I last blogged about my Truly Hooked blanket club. It's been almost two years! Whilst creating the blanket, I was so impressed by the vivid colours of the yarn, and how unbelievably soft and squishable it was. I was so excited for each month to bring me new yarny post so that I could add to the blanket I was slowly creating.
I never did receive another pack that quite matched the yellow for brightness - I mean, that pack was practically glow in the dark bright - but the colours continued to be just as rich, and the yarn was just as soft. The gradient continued with a yellow-green, a turquoise, and finally ended with blue, the last of which I forgot to take photos of before I worked them up, which is a shame. I was in such a hurry to complete them I forgot that tiny little detail...
The pattern that I chose for this blanket was the Sunny spread, free from Red heart, with an added crab stitch around the original border. It is a lovely pattern, but had I known then what I know now, I would have chosen a different one. And I would have partnered the colours with a charcoal grey rather than cream. I didn't want to use a pattern that worked in rows, as I was worried that I would run out of yarn before I finished the row or section that I was working on. Now I feel that rows would have shown off the wonderful gradient a lot better. Also, rows wouldn't have been so affected by colour bleeding. *facepalm*
Unfortunately - and as mentioned before - I live with three cats. Although I'm not sure "cats" is an appropriate term for the monstrous creatures that I happen to live with. More like furry little hellbeasts from the ninth dimension. They're evil. Not long after I took the photograph that I am about to post, one of the little assholes decided to pee all over this nice new blanket that was spread over the bed.
And.
It
STUNK!!
Unfortunately for my soft, squishable, gorgeously vivid hand dyed merino rainbow blanket, the only way to get the stink out was to machine wash it. At a high temperature. The washing instructions for such yarns are usually to hand wash, at cool temperatures (and to dry flat, for what it's worth!) The beautiful vivid colours that I loved so much....well....they didn't survive. There was colour bleeding. Lots of colour bleeding. The stark contrast between the bright rainbows and the soft cream? It's gone. The blanket now looks as though a toddler was let loose with finger paints on a dirty grey canvas. Technically? It's still rainbow. And it's definitely still amazingly soft. But it has broken my heart. I was so in love with that blanket, and now it's ruined. And I haven't been able to used hand dyed yarn since. I love it, I keep buying it, and man, do I want to use it. But I'm ruined for hand dyed at the moment...
When I found out I was pregnant this time last year, to say I had mixed feelings would be an understatement. Obviously I was happy - It was what we had wanted for some time. But I was terrified. After our previous problems, culminating in losing our son in 2015, pregnancy was a terrifying concept - every day that went by should have been something I enjoyed, a celebration, but instead it was just one more day that something could go wrong. Even though we were offered a new scan every four weeks, I struggled to believe it was possible that everything would be okay.
It was for this reason that I was reluctant to crochet anything. I had previously started cross stitching the Vermillion Stitchery Fantasy bears onto a 16 count afghan for Quinn, and to this day it is sitting in a drawer, unfinished. I found many beautiful patterns online for everything from blankets to booties, rattles to cardigans, and more. But I was frozen in fear. While people around me were excitedly baby shopping, I was to scared to believe. Melodramatic? Maybe. But no less true.
After we passed the six month mark, I decided to risk crocheting something. But what? It had to be a blanket. Every baby born into my family has had a blanket. Both of my sons, my nieces, even my mum and sisters. I knew our baby had to have a blanket. A rainbow blanket for our rainbow baby.
I had originally wanted to use the My Little Pony yarn from Dye Candy for this blanket, but my son had previously claimed those and was not letting go. With only 12 weeks to go before bay arrived, buying more yarn wasn't exactly an option - babies are expensive!! So I raided my stash and discovered an unused Easter yarn box - nine mini-skeins of sock weight rainbow yarn. The rainbow gradient wasn't complete, however. I had a lovely deep pink-red, all the way through to bright yellow-green, but nothing beyond that. I couldn't have an unfinished rainbow, so I took to my trusty online yarn supplier - Wool Warehouse. There, I was lucky to find some mini skeins of sock weight cotton for only £0.59 each! Buying several of each colour needed to complete the gradient - as well as several skeins of Drops Safran cotton in off-white - I knew I had my colourway. I just didn't have a pattern!
One pattern I had always been fond of was the "Call the Midwife" blanket. However, at the time I was considering making the blanket, the CtM was a very popular pattern choice - and it still is, actually - and I wanted to be different!! By chance a pattern was posted to one of the many Facebook groups I follow, and I fell in love with it. Firstly, for its pattern - similar to the CtM, but different at the same time. Secondly, for its name - "Rainbow Spirit". A bit cheesy, maybe, but I felt the name embodied the very feeling I was trying to convey. I was sold!
Combining each colour with a strand of off white, I was able to work up the blanket as if it was DK weight yarn. Following the pattern, however, I soon encountered a problem - I had too many colours!! Ok, not your average crochet problem, I'll admit, but the blanket was going to work up too long and narrow for a baby blanket. I had come too far to frog it, and I certainly didn't want to leave any colours out... I would just have to widen the blanket in some way. Though when it came to the end, I didn't have enough yarn left over to do much of anything. A simple SC rainbow gradient down the right and left sides was all my leftover yarn could muster! Still, with all those colours, I managed to add several inches onto the width. It was about twice the size that I had originally intended, but that just meant it would last her longer!!
To finish, I decided not to use the edging that came with the pattern, but instead used an eyelet lace pattern that I found here on Ali Pyper's blog. Blogger is a great place for crochet patterns, it seems!!
Since her safe arrival I have been inspired to crochet so much for her, but this blanket was the first ever item crafted for her by me, and I'm hoping that she continues to use it for many years to come!
Always on the lookout for new patterns, I jumped at the chance to crochet something new when a friend asked me to make a couple of ninjas for her. She wanted specific ninjas in bright pink and purple - she had seen pictures of them online and fallen in love with them - and I was fortunate enough to find the pattern on Amazon for relatively cheap.
The pattern is relatively simple, although I still don't quite understand the unusual pattern of increases when crocheting in the round. I find that - more often than not - a pattern requires increases every n*6 stitches. This pattern didn't follow that formula. It still works up lovely though, and was a welcome distraction from the multitude of blankets I have been making! The pattern worked up so quickly that I feel fairly confident that I could make several of these in a day, were I not baby-wrangling at the same time. It was darned cute, too! I used scrap DK acrylic yarn and a 4mm crochet hook.
In fact, they are so cute that said baby saw them, and she fell in love with them too!! Have you tried telling a four month old that they can't have something? Ok, she is a bit too young to understand reasoning. I might have gotten away with putting the ninjas high on a shelf while she wasn't looking...but....well....she's just too damned cute as well! I can't say no to her! So against my better judgement I let my baby play with the purple ninja. She played, she drooled, she chewed and she threw the ninja around... Luckily the ninja held up through it all, but I couldn't send my friend a drooly ninja... So I made another one!!
To thank her for letting my daughter claim the first ninja, I also made her a baby elephant, Meimei. Meimei is a free pattern, available from Look At What I Made. As a side-note, this blog happens to be the same pattern blog from which I got the pattern for Sophie, and the same designer who has written the patterns for the Amish puzzle balls I am currently making. I love these patterns so much and will often browse the page looking for new ideas.
There are several elephant patterns by this designer, and they all use the same head pattern. I own the pattern for the elephant puzzle ball, and had previously crocheted the elephant lovey for a friends baby, so I felt confident crocheting this mini elephant plushie.
Meimei herself is easy to make, and as all of the pieces are crocheted into the body as you go, there's actually no sewing involved! Amigurumi often involves a lot of sewing, and the Little Lady Ninjas are no exception - arms and legs must be sewn onto the body, which must be sewn onto the head. It's not a difficult task, but it gets very boring very quickly. It's nice to find a pattern which doesn't need any sewing. One downside to Meimei is that I found it very difficult to place the eyes levelly due to the asymmetric way the head/face is formed. Maybe it's just me - again I used scrap yarn and a 4mm crochet hook, so maybe I just crocheted too tightly for the safety eyes to fit in the right place.
Difficulties aside, she was still an enjoyable make, and I hope she's very happy in her new home!
Another blanket post! I get the feeling that I make more blankets than anything else! Still, at least people are warm, am I right?
This wonderfully colourful blanket was recently made for my friend's nan. She (my friend) came to me in March to tell me that her nan had recently been admitted to hospital and diagnosed with dementia. She asked if I might liaise with the local crochet and knitting group, "The Crafty One's" (sic) and maybe come up with some sort of fiddle blanket that she might give to her nan.
Now, this woman dragged her ass out of bed in the middle of the night to pick me up and take me to hospital after our taxi abandoned us on my doorstep when the driver realised I was in labour. Contractions were two minutes apart - my daughter was on her way and would have been born on the doorstep were it not for this lady. There was no way I was going to say no!!
Stash wasn't a problem - I have yarn coming out of my metaphorical ears. I had more than enough buttons, beads and patterns, and I even had some left over pink granny squares from when I was making blankets for the preemie ward at the hospital. However, with a relatively new baby to care for, there was no chance I was going to be able to do much in and short space of time. So even if my friend hadn't suggested I ask the Crafty One's for help, I was going to have to ask for it anyway.
I put a plea out for donations of squares - any colour, any size, any stitch, and of course the wonderful ladies of the craft group were more than happy to help! I had an influx of wonderful squares from people, and added to the 12 that I had somehow managed to do, we had the makings of a great blanket after only a week, including some knitted squares.
What I hadn't considered previously was how I was going to join said squares. I had squares of all shapes, sizes, gauges and stitch counts, and I am a person who likes things to be precise, neat and orderly. When I realised that it would be impossible to make all of these squares the same size and stitch count, I had a little bit of a minor melt down! It was a real challenge to accept the "chaos" of the mismatched squares, the lack of coordination in the colours. I opted for a join as you go method, as my usual method of simply crocheting the squares together was not going to work here, and I again turned to Wilkos Stripes yarn in rainbow colours. Its a relatively cheap mixed fibre yarn, a little scratchy at first but very warm and washes well. The self striping rainbow colours enhanced the patchwork random feel of the squares, and in the end it actually worked up quite well.
To truly make it a "fiddle" blanket though, it needed an assortment of appliques, buttons, and other varied textures. I had mentioned that the blanket was hopefully going to have a garden theme, and one of the ladies at the craft group had kindly donated a bag of flowers, which I sewed into the name squares to look like entwined vines. I added flowers of my own, as well as a fox, rainbow, and squares which spelled out the lady's name. I used the chunkiest buttons I could find in my collection, (and they're really not going anywhere now - very securely attached!!)
Overall, the whole blanket took four weeks and cost only £8 in rainbow yarn. Despite this relatively low cost and me feeling very outside of my comfort zone the entire time, I did feel good when it was finished and I got sent a photo of the lady snuggled under her nice new blanket. A lovely community project which only serves to prove that - if you look for it - you can still find the sense of community in people. :)
About two years ago I took delivery of some My Little Pony sock weight yarn from Dye Candy. Originally, I blogged about how I would like to make a knitted mitre blanket, buuuut...that didn't happen.
This yarn was always going to be for my son - He might be 13 years old (now) but he's always been a My Little Pony fan. He has so much of the merchandise, and even did a presentation in school 18 months ago about how he liked MLP, and that was OK because people can like whatever they want. I did try to get him to let his little sister have the yarn for a blanket, considering they were very feminine colours and he did already have a blanket, but no. He was adamant. And so in July last year, I started work on what would become the most frustrating granny square blanket ever...
It started off well. I wanted to make a solid granny square blanket with a rustic feel. The size of the blanket was always going to be an issue because it was a comparatively small ratio of sock yarn to a much larger teenage boy. As such I worked out that I could get 13 2-inch squares to one mini-skein of yarn, and that if I added some white and cream I could make blocks and make the yarn go further. I had 5 months til Christmas and it would be a great gift! It was a great idea, in theory...
I was pregnant at the time. Hot, heavy, tired, and struggling with all of the negatives that pregnancy could bring. There were days when I was so ill that I couldn't bear to lift my hook, days that were so hot that working on a blanket was out of the question, and towards the end, days when I would just sleep. All day... But still I thought I could do it. I pushed through, often running out of the Drops Safran cotton that I bought from Wool Warehouse and having to wait while more was delivered - I had miscounted so badly. I was only getting 18 squares per ball, as opposed to the 25-30 I had expected.
Then December arrived. "I'm so close" I thought...."Only...how many squares to go..?" It was then that I felt the impending failure... I still needed over 150 squares... The blanket on a whole would later comprise of a total 493 3-inch squares. My contractions started on the morning of the 4th. The never-ending blanket felt like it would never be completed. I tried crocheting while I was in labour but I couldn't focus on my counting... It was just too much of a distraction. My daughter arrived on the 5th. I tried crocheting while she was sleeping, but I was just too tired... Christmas came and went, and I felt so guilty, like I had let my son down.
But as my daughter got older, I learned to crochet while she was feeding, or sleeping in my arms. But I had a lot of long nights in those early weeks, and I needed something to keep me awake after the midwives had put the fear of God into me. It was still extremely slow going, and as I started top-stitching some definition onto the blocks I felt that it was going to last forever, it was getting just that tedious.
Obviously it didn't last forever, though how I found the will to continue through to the end, I'm still not sure... On Mothers' day in March, (funnily enough, four years on from the Mothers' day on which I finished the Minecraft blanket) I was ready to give my son the blanket which he had waited two years for. At least the end project is enjoyable, even if the act of creating it was somewhat of a chore.
Yes - my name is Mister Fliiiibble,
Mister Flibble, Wibble, Nibble, Dibble!
Yes - my name is Mister Fliiiiibble,
Mister Flibble, Wibble, Nibble, Woo!
Meet Mr Flibble:
Mr Flibble is a mischievous imp from the bottom of the garden. Mr Flibble likes mud pies, throwing snowballs, and making little green stains appear on your trousers when you're sitting in the grass unexpectedly. He communicates in a series of squeaks, and you can detect his presence by the mysterious rattling sound he makes wherever he goes.
Mr Flibble is a toy I made for my daughter after spending around 9 months making blankets. I needed a break!! I was so bored of squares it was unreal. I still am, to be honest... So one day I went browsing through my book collection and I found "Edward's Imagination Emporium". It's a book some good friends bought me for my birthday nearly 2 years ago, and I never really did anything with it until now. Mr Flibble is a very basic model from the book, and he took a whole 50g ball of Wilkos Stripe yarn. But he didn't take very long to work up - near instant gratification. With an large bag of squeakers and rattlers to use up from a project I never even bothered with, he seemed the perfect make.
After he was finished, I was flipping through the book and I realised I could probably make a unicorn pretty easily... So I did. Jacqson even has a butt-heart. He took me a lot longer because of his curly mane and tail though. Trying to find the time to finish each one of those spirals while wrangling a small infant was not easy. It took WEEKS. As such, I probably won't make another one!! He too used a whole 50g ball of yarn, albeit this time from Poundland sparkle yarn.
Like Mr Flibble, his arms rattle and his feet squeak. Unlike Mr Flibble, whose limbs are just sewn on as per the book's instructions, Jacqson has limbs that were crocheted into the body as I went, for safety. And if I were to ever make a third toy from the book, I would change the pattern slightly so that the limbs crochet from the feet/hands up, rather than from the shoulder/hip down. I have more faith in my starting chain to hold true and not work loose. Maybe I'm weird?
It's all irrelevant though. All that matters is that he's a hit - My daughter loves him! So, I've been inspired to make more toys for her. Plushies, stackinf rings, Amish puzzle balls, dolls, even crochet play food! She's going to be drowning in crochet toys!!
Wow. I can't believe I didn't think of this before! I've been unable to post properly for a while as I haven't been at the PC, and I didn't want to faff with blogger on my dinky little Samsung mini. Who'd have thought there'd be an app, huh? ;)
So, I guess the biggest crochet related news is...We have a new wool shop!! It's called Westcliff Wools and is literally just down the road from me. This development has devastated my bank account. Not even the birth of my daughter five months ago caused such chaos.... Seriously - this is my yarn collection as it now stands:
And even that didn't stop me from buying an extra 11 balls on Monday for my amamani puzzle balls. I recently bagged it all up by colour - red, orange, yellow, green, blue,purple, pink, cream, white, grey, black, variegated, and hand dyed.... Even though I AM using it, I guess I'm still buying faster... on the up side, this benefits me for when I want to start doing craft fairs next year. I literally have every colour I could possibly need!! Yay me!
This is not a crochet related post, but it had to be made. Back when I was more active, studying my BSc, I used to post my travel experiences to a website called MyWanderlust. Due to the rise of websites such as Facebook and twitter, MyWanderlust as it was doesn't exist anymore. I didn't have a lot posted there, but during the time I was posting I was featured twice in the editors "Best of" section for 21st December 2012. I found out today... The article I wrote can't be read on that website anymore, but for posterity I decided to post it here. Just because.
Welcome to the Jungle
My top three experiences from the university trip to the Brunei rainforest.
Do you know, I wouldn't even know where to start. My trip to Brunei was the most amazing experience of my whole life, and currently I'm not sure of anything that could beat it. Rather than describing the entire two weeks in great detail, I just picked out a few of my favourite moments as highlights, so even if nobody else ever reads this, when I'm old and forgetful I can look back and think "I did that!" :) So....Here are my top three Borneo experiences.
Canopy Sunrise
Watching the sun rise over the Bornean rainforest canopy of Kuala Belalong may just be the single most awesome moment of my entire life. No matter how much I try, and no matter how many photo's I took, I still can't describe how amazingly peaceful it was, nor how unbelievably beautiful.
We got up while it was still dark to take a boat to the walkway before the sun rose. The ride to the walkway in the dark was rather uneventful, and we got to the walkway pretty easily. Walking up the path along the side
of the valley to get to the walkway entrance was pretty harsh though! After two weeks of kayaking and forest hiking, I had thought that I was getting fit. Apparently not! Heheh. As with most of the forest hikes, I was bringing up the rear in our little group. Still, walking through the forest in the dark was a whole new experience, and I found myself more focussed on where my feet were going on the ground than where everyone else was ahead of me.
When we got to the walkway, it was definitely not what I was expecting, although right now I'm not entirely sure exactly what it was that I WAS expecting. The walk way consisted of a large scaffold structure, with staircase towers and long gang-planks between them. I've never really been afraid of heights, (although I do get vertigo at times due to my crazy glasses prescription!), but standing there at the foot of the tower and looking up, I had the craziest urge to run away, and I actually hesitated. My lecturer had to look at me and say something along the lines of "Well, go on then" before I even moved. But move I did, and before I knew it I was climbing up the seemingly-neverending ladder of doom, passing several small wasps nests on the way to the top.
At the top, the view was so absolutely amazing, that the evil pathway-of-stumbling-and-tree-roots and the daunting staircase-of-infinite-steps suddenly didn't matter any more. The sun wasn't peeking over the horizon just yet, although the sky was lightening up all around, and the birds were beginning their morning chorus. Bees buzzed past on their way to places I can only imagine, and fine clouds of mist were floating just over the top of the trees, following the path of the river that we had left behind a while ago. I felt like I didn't dare speak, lest I completely ruin the moment, so I just took my camera out and started taking some video recordings. I stood there just watching for what felt like hours as the sky lightened and the sun rose, and more and more calls joined the dawn chorus.
I don't think I'll ever experience anything that peaceful again, (certainly not with a hyperactive 8 year old!), and so of all of the amazing things I did that fortnight, the canopy sunrise was possibly the most amazing moment of them all.
Crocodile-spotting
The water was perfectly still and black, and all of the stars were out in a cloudless sky when we decided to go kayaking on Tasek Merimbun lake and look for crocodiles. Stealth-kayaking behind our lecturer who was shining a torch around the lake until he found the eye shine of a croc, we could barely see anything. I never knew there were so many different shades of black!
When a crocodile was found, we'd all turn our torches on and point them in that direction, lighting up its eyes even further, before quietly paddling towards it. What amazed me was that the crocodiles were actually scared of us! I never expected that in a million years! Of everything I've ever heard about them, shy was never one of their descriptors.
We stayed on the lake for over an hour, paddling around as quietly as we could, talking in hushed whispers while listening to the fish splashing around us, jumping out of the water to eat the midges flying above
the lake. At one point, a fish landed in my kayak, and so I had to reach around to catch it and let it loose over the side, and believe me it was the slimiest thing I've ever touched, xenopus frogs and aquarium fish included.
Overall, it was one of the most relaxing things I've ever experienced. The blackness of the sky seemed to wash over everything with an almost muffling effect. Nothing could be heard of the people in the hall, and the few out on the lake seemed almost afraid to break the silence, so it was just us, sat in the starlight, listening to the chirping of insects, splashing of fish, and trickling of water over the paddles.
I have no words to explain adequately how amazing this was. It was just.....perfect. Absolutely perfect.
Snorkelling
Disaster!!! I'd never been snorkelling before, and I am an appalling swimmer. So why in the world I thought I was suited to a lifetime as an aquatic biologist, I will never know. Nevertheless, despite my first foray into water deeper than my waist being incredibly humiliating, trying, and immensely difficult, it was still amazing, and I now I have the knowledge that I should really ask Santa for a lifetime membership to the local pool!!
My first difficulty seemed to be with my sense of balance. There hadn't been a considerable amount of rain in the Brunei area for quite a while, and so the Kuala Belalong river water level was very low in areas. This meant walking (and wading!) across slippery rocks in order to get to where we needed to go. Apparently, slippery rocks plus me equals Bambi on ice. If you've ever seen that movie, you'll know what I mean. Legs in all directions, with frequent landings on my backside. It was physically painful, and unfortunately for my ego - not an amazingly large presence at the best of times - it was destined to continue the entire way down the river, into the tributaries, and then back again. Ouchies! I thought I'd be safe once I reach the deeper water, but that was not to be. I had not been swimming since I was 9 years old, at which point I had managed to get my 25 metre swimming badge before being banned from the pool for running into breathing difficulties! I kinda forgot about that in the excitement of going splashing up river. Ooops! So, combined with my incessant falling, my weak swimming led to my trailing a good distance behind my lecturer and peers.
We got to the tributaries, and went snorkelling in the confluence of the river, looking at the different fish there. Of course, like the numpty I am, I kept holding my breath under the water. Hello?! Snorkel here?! Heheh - my scuba-loving high school biology teacher would have been SO ashamed of me! I had to keep coming up for air, which was quite ridiculous, but I did eventually begin to override my innate sense of silliness and I even got to see some fish! My lecturer pointed out this really cool eel, and as he poked it out of it's hiding place, it shot past me in a streak of brown and was gone as quickly as it had emerged. The endemic suckers were the best though. Amazing vibrant greens, with streaks of yellow and little black spots. There were other fish, too. I was actually amazed by how many fish were present in the river, and even more surprised by the fact that 9 students and a lecturer splashing about in the river didn't scare them away!!
Moving on up the tributaries turned out to be just as much an exercise in bi-pedalism as getting to them! Climbing up the waterfalls was much easier than staying on my feet once I got to the top, for example. At one point, I slipped so badly that my friends thought for sure I *must* have broken something! But I didn't. I did find a teeny weeny little frog stuck to my arm though. He was black, and shiny, and I very nearly wiped him away thinking he was river ooze! And I'm not sure whether I was more or less embarrassed when the lecturer turned around and said "Get to solid ground before you begin multitasking Alex - Three points of contact, not seven!" On the one hand, it was kind of funny and took the heat off of me, but on the other..... >.<
Still. As black and blue as I was by the time I got back, and as stiff and achy as my muscles were the next morning, I would do it again in a heartbeat. And I *clearly* need more practice in the water. ;)
