Blimey! It’s been a pretty bonkers few weeks round here and in all honesty there really hasn’t been any time to blog.

There can be no more excuses though, as I really couldn’t delay posting about Blacker Yarns Brushwork on the Olann and Blog any longer and to do that, I kind of needed to post here too.

We’ve just about recovered from Storm Ophelia and happily no one was hurt.  I have had to remind myself of this many times since it hit though and the whole thing did leave me a little traumatized for about a week.

We lost two trees in our garden and had to cut another down.  One of the big ones on the track up to the house came down as did whole sections of the gutters and brickwork on one of the old barns.  Our fences just tumbled and although we only lost a few tiles off of the house roof, loads more had slipped and needed repairing.

Perhaps the most frightening thing that happened was how the roof on one of our outhouses lifted.  I took the first photo from my landing window,  whilst the storm was happening.  It was literally waving in the wind and as you can see, had got itself caught on the power and telephone cables.

The second photo is post storm and what you can’t see is that at least one cable has been sliced.  Fortunately it turned out to be the earth wire, but that meant the roof was sitting on the live and refusing to budge.

Despite appearances, the ground floor in the building is in use and has been tanked and insulated.  Before the storm it housed my yarn and a den, so you can imagine the fun and games we had moving everything before the torrential rain hit two days later.

We were without power for two days, technically it was seven, but my hubby came back from working in the UK and ran something into the house from the farm.  I was almost at my wits end by then because fridges, lights and teenagers just don’t function without electricity.

We only had candles for the first night, which with the very high ceilings barely give off enough light to prevent you from tripping over something.  I’d bought a couple of torches for the next night and myself and Kye even managed to play a couple of board games before he got bored 😉.

Not everything can be fixed so easily at this time of the year, but the important things are sorted and I was able to stop panicking about organising the Olann and #Knockeralong Event when the electricity was back.  In all honesty, I was still panicking as people were arriving on Wednesday night, but everyone made a point of telling Deirdre and I how much fun they had.

SUCCESS!

Can we just take a minute to look at the goodies in the Goody Bag………OMG!

Anyway, I probably should get on with the real reason I’m here and stop prattling on about windy women and knockers.

If you saw the latest post on the Olann and Blog, you’ll notice it was a review of Blacker Yarns, Limited Edition Brushwork Yarn?  With my knitting time at some bit of a premium of late, I really didn’t want to waste my time just knitting a swatch for the review.

As I said in that post I happened upon the idea of making something ‘useful’.  By useful, I mean something that’s potentially gift worthy.  Green at Christmas equals Christmas Trees and I knew I wanted to use as much of the yarn as possible

Popping straight over to Ravelry, I had a quick look through the Christmas Decorations, but nothing particularly stood out and asked me to knit it.  Taken as I was and still am, b the rustic look of the Brushwork yarn, I envisaged a garland of little garter stitch trees.  I even had a vague recollection of seeing something similar in a magazine or on a website, but when I went looking.  Undeterred, I sat down with a few different sizes of needles and the Brushwork Yarn and set about trying to knit what was I my head.

Note to self:  If you increase stitches at either end on every third row it makes an Equilateral triangle, which isn’t really what I was after.  However, if you work the increases on every fifth row you create an Isoceles triangle, which is the perfect shape for my mini trees.

I think they look pretty effective in the Brushwork yarn, which is just so lovely and traditional (rustic in other words).  The one on the left is the back and the one on the right is the front.  Personally I prefer the back, but I don’t think it really matters?

Each little tree weighs in at 4 grammes which equates to only 13 metres of yarn, so I managed to make seven out of the sample ball we’d been sent.

That didn’t leave me with enough yarn to crochet a chain to display my little trees though.  Instead I decided to go all out with the rustic theme and suspend them with mini pegs from a length of garden twine.

Now I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too.

Christmas Trees are usually decorated and an angel or a star is usually perched at the very top.  I did consider working a little blanket stitch around them, or embroidering some French Knots on the fronts, but I really do love how basic they are.  My one and only concession was a little wooden star, which I glued to the mini pegs.

What do you think?

I took a couple of ‘arty’ photos outside, but it was a bit too bright, so I’ll have to do them again.  Not sure what I’ll do when I no longer live here with all the run down farm buildings to use as the backdrop to my photographs?

I’ll type up the instructions up later and get them posted on Monday at the latest.  (I’ve committed to it, so I’ll have to now)

Happy Making

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