Vanilla cakes with cream cheese frosting and chocolate coated sunflower seeds

PA180308, originally uploaded by Christina Sparkle.

I’ve been on holiday to Nice recently and have fallen out of my blogging routine completely! However, I haven’t fallen out of my baking routine.

These beauties were made using my favourite vanilla cupcake and cream cheese frosting recipes. I then decorated them with these fruity looking chocolate coated sunflower seeds.

I managed to source the sprinkles from Harvey Nichols in Leeds (as well as some marshmallow fluff!) and, although they might sound a little strange, they are extremely delicious.

Cupcakes

It’s hard to be a crochet blogger today without admitting that you admire (and are even inspired by) Twinkie Chan’s food themed crochet projects. Seriously, Twinkie’s crochet is amazing and I often drooled over her tasty treats before I learned to crochet myself. But at that price?! Surely I could make one myself?! …and so I did – using the Yummy Cupcake pattern from YouCanMakeThis.com. The pattern is by Sweet Crochet Designs which offers some great Twinkie Chan tributes as well as some fab and unique food-themed designs.

I found a delicious coconut-looking yarn that I hoped would work really well as frosting and a beautiful chocolate coloured wool for the actual cake. Unfortunately the coconut yarn was too difficult to crochet with – I couldn’t see my stitches!! But my granny donated this lovely marshmallow-style yarn which works perfectly. I modified the pattern a little and used a 5mm hook to make cupcake brooches:

I blocked the brooches with my steam iron and used a strong craft glue to attach a cupcake-shaped felt backing to the crochet which holds the brooch pin perfectly in place. I love this blue felt with white polka dots – it’s from Hobbycraft (as are the brooch pins).

Next I decided to venture into making a scarf; the brooches had taken about 30 minutes each to make, I figured a scarf would take me about a week:

Well…  I was wrong! This has taken me sooooo long to finish. I did this pattern with a 5mm hook, which is small for what the pattern recommends but anything bigger was too hole-y; this did mean that I had to make quite a few more cupcakes than the pattern suggests. I did crochet each cupcake to the previous one which saved time on sewing together, but still I had to sew in the ends, sew on the cherries, etc. (this is the bit that I dread the most!). It does look absolutely delicious though. I’m very happy with the result

Crochet Hooks

So after all this crocheting with a boring grey metal hook I’ve been getting a bit bored, especially when I’ve seen so many pics with metal and plastic hooks in so many delicious colours!!

I headed to my local Hobby Craft first, and found these three lovelies in the sale section, only 99p each

Then I took a look on eBay. I found an amazing array of incredible hooks; glass, wood, plastic, metal; pinks, purples, greens, blues, yellows – a whole rainbow of colours and materials!! So I bought these two packs as the were so yummy looking:

So now I was so inspired by my rainbow of crochet hooks I started on my next project (come back next week for that), but I hit a BIG problem!! My crochet hook broke :’( In fact, I broke firstly my HobbyCraft red 5mm, then my eBay yellow 5mm, and then my eBay blue 5.5mm!! Perhaps plastic hooks were not such a good idea after all?!

I had to venture to my local yarn shop which I knew had a limited supply of hooks, but when I got there I found a lovely blue metal hook (no grey in sight, horray!) and I’ve been using those ever since.

So… for anyone else who is looking to buy some bright or more interesting crochet hooks; I would recommend trying eBay – they have a big selection. But if you do go for a plastic hook, don’t buy anything that is below a 7mm – because it’s just going to break!

Heart Scarf

The next thing I’ve hooked up is this gorgeous heart scarf from YouCanMakeThis.com by Hip Chick Crochet. This is the first pattern that I had ever downloaded from the internet. I actually made this with my sister in mind, but she is yet to receive it, oops! And again, I’d say it is a good pattern for beginners. Firstly, it is very repetitive so you get loads of practice doing those key stitches, and it’s nice to see your tension improvement by the end. I just made a new heart every time I got on a bus or train and actually, I have far too many hearts, the scarf is really long, but I definitely had fun.

The pattern actually produces hearts that are really small. I made my first heart with a 3mm hook, then I did a second with a 4mm. These hearts were still really small so I bumped right up to a 6mm and I decided to add some rows of single crochet stitches. I also made the top of the hearts with triple crochet stitches instead of doubles, these made the heart more round, instead of long, and I preferred this shape.

The worst part of the process was sewing all those hearts together! Next time I make a scarf with this pattern, I think I’ll crochet the hearts together. I plan to use the technique I learnt in the Garden Scarf pattern to sew the hearts together. This will be far easier to manage and helps me to see how many more hearts I need to finish the scarf (rather than do a hundred hearts and then have to sew them all at once!).

Having the hearts in the “wonky” shape, as if they are falling, might look great when it has just been made but in my experience that makes the “un-sewn” edges curl up. I’d recommend making them straight.

To block the scarf, I again used a steam iron and hovered the steam over each heart, pressed the heart flat with my hand and then left the scarf to cool. The wool is now really soft and the red colour is so bright and full of love!

Anyway, I hope you like and maybe you might also give this pattern a try and “Wear your heart on your sleeve neck”!!

Unfortunately, no amount of “googling” has enabled me to find any one else who has made this scarf before. If you’ve made one from this pattern and would like a link to your blog or website here, please leave a comment

Boy Beanie

My second ever crochet project was a boy beanie for my boyfriend, Andy. He has a very large head (you know what they say… wait a minute, what do they say??) and finds it very hard to get hats that fit!

This particular pattern, by Laura Killoran, is again from The Happy Hooker and is actually supposed to fit a 20″ head (stretching up to 24″ max). But, my boyfriend has a 25½” head! So firstly, I started out with a 6mm hook, instead of 5.5mm, so that it would be a little bigger. Plus, I thought that as this is only my second project so my tension is still reasonably loose, which will make it bigger again. That sorts out the size.

I was hoping to find a camouflage yarn but although my local wool shop has quite a large selection, I quickly realised that this was something specialist that I might have to hunt over the net for. I decided to settle for a similar multi-dye wool in camouflage colours. I wasn’t keen on the red stripes that are shown in the pattern and decided to go for a chocolate brown, which I intended for another pattern (more later ), but that I could spare a little of for Andy.

It took so little time, it was unbelievable! I had it finished according to the pattern one evening TV session. So simple and great for practicing those double crochet stitches!

I tried it on myself, as Andy wasn’t around and it seemed short to me. More like a skull cap than a beanie. So I undid the last row of single crochets and kept adding more rows and stripes of brown. When I had added enough to make the beanie too big for me I added an extra row for luck and re-did the single crochets to finish off. Voila! The finished product you see above.

The pattern for this boy beanie is now, in fact, available for free from All Free Crafts.

And, this is how it looks on me –>

Here’s some more people who’ve made the boy beanie:

Garden Scarf

Please excuse the myspace-esque photo, unfortunately no one else was around at the time to take my picture.

Here is my very first crochet project! A beautiful flower scarf using the Garden Scarf pattern from The Happy Hooker. The pattern was written by Michelle Ameron and is great for a beginner, I think. The pattern requires chain stitch, single, double and triple crochet stitches as well as teaching you to join pieces together with crochet stitches. I had never crocheted before and just followed the tutorials as to what to do for each stitch.

It is a very repetitive pattern so you can practice each stitch to perfection and carry on creating flowers until your scarf hits the floor, if you wish!

The pattern actually suggests using three colours, but I only used two, as you can see. And, by the time I got to the end, I had got my tension just right so I undid the first two flowers I had done (from the opposite end of the scarf) and re-did them to fit with my improved tension.

To block the scarf, I hovered a steam iron over each flower and pressed each one with my hand to flatten out any lumps and bumps, then left it cool down. This also gave it less of a ‘look what my granny made me’ look and more of ‘look what I found in a boutique’ look.

Here are some more people who have made the Garden Scarf:

New Layout

I’ve uploaded a new theme which I designed and built myself (starting with the free Sandbox theme).

I’ve used images from iStock Photo and Shabby Princess as the basis for the design and with a little CSS know-how, voila!

I’m still to do something with the Archives and Links page (and maybe the footer, and the post meta data, and the dates?! I could just carry on forever with these things!) but overall, I hope you like it.

I’m hoping to upload some pics into my flickr account a.s.a.p., but the cable to my camera appears to have gone AWOL. I hope it turns up soon! Without it I can’t post up any of my projects, or illustrate any of my blogs

Are you a happy hooker??

Ok, first things first. My inspiration for teaching myself to crochet was the Happy Hooker book from Debbie Stoller’s Stitch ‘n’ Bitch series.

I actually bought this book for my sister for Christmas for all the cute designs and to give her a new hobby. But I now need to buy her a new copy as I’ve used it so much the pages are falling out!!

I would definitely recommend this book, it has fab patterns, it is straight forward and is really simple to follow. Especially for a beginner, like me. I plan to do lots more patterns from this book as I advance, for myself and as gifts for others.

What I have learnt, is that the British do things a little differently from the Americans (i.e. how they name their stitches), but as the Happy Hooker is an American book, I will continue to do things the USA way. I’m happy with that, even if my Granny is not!

Hello I’m Christina…

You may know me as Christina Sparkle, Christina Fowler or the girl with loads of Gwen mags!

I plan to use this blog as a diary of my crochet adventures. So come here to see me experiment with all kinds of patterns, yarn and other crochet stuff!

I just taught myself to crochet only a few weeks ago (with a little help from a book and my mum) and I’ll document my progress right here!

Anyway… I hope you like!

Christina