All posts tagged: product review

Crochet Book Review: Cutest Crochet Creations, by Alison North

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Hi, y’all! I am super honored today to be participating in Alison North’s (KornFlake Stew) book tour / blog hop, for her recent release of Cutest Crochet Creations. I’m sandwiched in between two of the greatest in the biz – taking the baton from the great Sarah Shrimpton of Annaboo’s House who gave a wonderful review yesterday – find it here, and handing it off to the talented amigurumist, Lauren Espy of A Menagerie of Stitches, who will be giving us her perspective tomorrow. Can’t wait to see! Even Alison’s banner for the blog and IG tour is adorable! I shamelessly lifted this image off of her gorgeous Instagram feed, because I just had to show you all. What a precious representation of her book! [Related: Find Cutest Crochet Creations on Amazon.com – affiliated but I love Alison’s work and highly recommend the book!] A Confession Okay, I must confess something: I have never amigurumi’d! I’ve never, not even once made a stuffie, because as you all know, I am blanket obsessed. This has made me intimidated …

KnitPicks Palette Yarn

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Where to buy: KnitPicks Palette* When you have a winner, you have a winner. I’ve been collecting Palette for a couple years now, ordering when a certain color combo grabs my fancy, and adding the 50g candies to my special Palette Tupperware bin. I just love this yarn. It comes in 150 colors! And it’s a dainty fingering weight with a recommended hook size of teensy, but I use an F hook and sometimes even a G! The yarn has a fuzziness since it’s wool, so you can get away with going up in hook size and not worry about losing stitch structure. Peep some of my Palette lounging in a candid action shot. Honestly you can’t go wrong with your color combo here. And certain shades are delightfully heathered, which I truly love for the added depth it gives the finished piece. Here is some of my Palette stash on the second row down, hanging out with a group of coral and sea junkies. And another pretty group of sweets – my kiddoes at …

Papatya Batik

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This gorgeous quality yarn is available at Hobfy.com Papatya Batik page I used Papatya Batik and absolutely loved it! It’s so incredibly squishy and soft – I felt in love instantly. And if you think there’s nothing you can do with long color-change yarn like Papatya Batik, you may just need to do some web surfing for inspiration! Check out all the Ravelry projects to get you started! I’m making a top secret project with it 🙂 You’ll find out soon enough! ❤️❤️❤️ I recommend this yarn. Free shipping worldwide, and very good value/pricing. So pretty too! Look at the beautiful collection of colors I got! It only made sense to make a rainbow heart pic 🙂

Shiny Happy Cotton and Billie Jean Yarns

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Made by Wool and the Gang, Shiny Happy Cotton is a fabulous yarn! It is a worsted-aran weight, somewhere in between I’d say. It calls for a smaller hook, but it hurt my wrist to work at that tension with cotton. While I’d normally use a J for worsted or aran, I chose to try out an I size because cotton has a tendency to “bloom” and grow slack with use.  I read some reviews online that said SHC is splitty.. So I’ll say that if you hack away at it with the hook, you can split it, but if you keep even tension and control your movement, you’ll be just fine. The matte color look (despite the name!) is what drew me to this yarn, since most cottons have a heavy sheen. The smoothness,  matte finish, saturated color, and beautiful stitch definition are worth the occasional split of the yarn. And the color range is lovely! While there are currently a limited amount of shades, they are very trendy and off-beat colors like mustard …

BQueen Dye Box

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Today I dyed yarn for the first time! I couldn’t have fathomed beginning a new hobby like yarn dyeing, but I certainly wanted to at least try it without committing to an expensive slew of new gear. Enter BQueen Collection!  At bqueencollection.com you can buy this beautiful kit which includes a hank of yarn and a precious little corked vial of natural dye material. Here’s a good look at all the items in the Dye Kit. Those are gloves in the paper cup. Safety is important! You have to use a pot that you’ll dedicate solely to your dyeing adventures, and I had just the one. My Emeril Lagasse pot set is absolutely gorgeous, but alas, the quartage is just not enough for my hungry family of six. So this wee one will be my dye pot! Before its new job, it was an adornment anyway – on the pot hanger that my husband made for me 🙂 (Idea from andthismarinewife.com) When I used the dye kit, I followed the detailed instructions to the T since …