More fun with pyrography

Blessings of Imbolc to you all. Finally we are seeing the light lasting that little bit longer each day and the first stirrings of green shoots can been seen in the brown earth.

The past week has been quite hard for me as one of the members of my family is quite ill in hospital and we are unsure at the moment for their future.

I have been keeping myself busy of late with my pyrography. Since I last posted about it I have been bust practising the craft on paper, wood and leather.

here is a selection of what I have burnt so far:

Lady of Avalon and Badger keyring

keijo our dog

Dia De Los Muertos 

  

 Mountain Lion and cub with a work in progress showing sketch, outline, shading, shadows and finish.

Thor's hammer

Taking photos of pyrography is turning out to be quite difficult and they look better in the flesh.

I am loving this new craft and have many requests for designs which I look forward to starting on. I am currently waiting for some small plain wooden chests to arrive that I plan to decorate.

Why yes, I do knit.

Recently I have started to learn to knit. At first it was to get my mother to pick up the needles again as she didn't have any hobbies and I remembered she was an avid knitter when I was younger and also because I wanted to learn a new skill.

To begin with I knitted some arm warmers and then a bag for my Druid Animal oracle cards, practising my knit, purl and blanket stitch.


My mother had made a few blankets for people in our family and I decided that a blanket would make a perfect gift for my friends Handfasting so I got set to work on knitting 30x30 squares in greens and purples. My mum helped me out with the knitting and I was able to lay the squares out to make a pattern.

Apologise for the bad quality photo. This was taken on my iPad to get a sense of how big the blanket would be and how I wanted it to look. Here I still needed to knit four light green squares.

Once I had all the squares I was able to start sewing the patches together. This was the most laborious part of making the blanket!

The finished blanket!

A close up of the blanket with silver Pentacle charm and the striped squares knitted by my mum.

I tied the finished blanket up with a cord made using a lucet tool. A two pronged fork that was used in Viking times!

This photo shows the lucet cord in Vandrake's hands.

I really enjoyed making this blanket and  the bride and groom seemed very happy to receive it!

I look forward to sharing more of my knitting endeavours with you in the future.

I am now off to go and cheer on the Olympic torch bearers as it passes through my town.

Until next time!