The Craft Giraffe: Happy 2012 everyone

Hi Everyone,

Happy New Year to you all. I'd planned to post last week but it was a busy week with some slight injury. I fell down the stairs with Ben in my arms. Thankfully my back and arm took the force of the fall. Main thing is Ben was ok. My nerves were in bits after, as was my arm. Luckily with some ice packs it returned to its normal size by the weekend and I even managed some crochet over the weekend.

I rarely do new year resolutions. It's my birthday so I never find that starting a diet or the likes with birthday cake and treats all around works and usually by the 2nd any novelty of resolutions have worn off, so I don't make them. This year though I've felt the need for change. I insisted that all the decorations were taken down on the 6th(I have never taken our decorations down on time, one year it was march and last year it was the earliest at the end of january). Its been very mild here and yesterday Ben and I were out for a walk. The birds were singing and it was a beautiful day. I decided that my new years resolution was going to be that I'm not going to be so afraid all the time. Now don't get me wrong I don't live my life cowering in fear but I do care way too much about pleasing others and what others think of me. Crazy isn't it??? So this year I'm not going to bend over backwards to please others, especially ones that constantly let me down, and i'm going to concentrate on my son, my husband and myself and making our life a happy and relaxed one.

Now to crochet, I love it so I plan to do lots more of it. As always I have a queue of projects. I'm really looking forward to getting back to the one a day. 100% cotton yarn arrived this morning so i'm going to get working on that today and enter the beautiful blogger blanket 2012 make it together project on Stocki's blog. This year I want to enter some craft competitions at the local agricultural shows over the summer so i'm trying to plan projects that I can enter.

I also have some finished bits and pieces to show you. I gave some candles as Christmas gifts and so to personalise them I made some doily's for under them. The first was a lavender candle in a triangle shape glass so I made a triangle shaped coaster/doily for underneath using motif #62 from Edie Eckman's book Beyond the Square Crochet Motifs. I added an extra round so it was the right size for the candle. Unfortunately our cat Mr Man(AKA The Destroyer) took offence at the present and knocked it off the table when we were wrapping it and the glass broke so we had to keep it for ourselves.

This is Mr Man, the glass breaking culprit. He likes to help in everything we do as you can see in this photo of him helping me felting.

I also made two doily's for two yankee candles. I made both the same. I used the Granny Mandala tutorial from Crochet with Raymond. I used less rounds and I changed the edging to a row of dc's with a 3ch picot over the chain spaces from the previous round.