Sometimes I Doubt Your Commitment to Sparkle Motion

I've been a bit tardy keeping up with this blog again but I did have a good reason. I've been really busy coming up with designs for that new mug printing venture I mentioned in the last post. That has been going very well, the test mugs have come out even better than expected and I've listed the first 18 designs in my Ebay and Etsy shops.
Here is a photo of the first test mug (which my husband has now stolen to use in work).

It's all very exciting.

Also, my brother-in-law and his girlfriend just had twins. That's not really to blame for me not posting because the hospital isn't allowing visitors yet so we haven't been to see them. It's just really great news and added to the general excitement of the week.

Anyway, to make up for the fact I haven't posted all week, I'm going to do another double post; two squares from the blanket of doom and a free chart thrown in too.

For the first of the squares, I went back to my husband's favourite films and decided to do a Donnie Darko one because who doesn't want a terrifying giant rabbit on their cosy blanket. right? I actually really wanted to do a Sparkle Motion square but that's just too girly - it'll have to be on my own blanket of doom if I ever get around to doing that.

I managed to find a few cross stitch designs of Frank the rabbit but none of them were small enough to fit on my square so I made my own chart which I then knitted up in black and sky blue.

Square number 20: Donnie Darko

[This is a design that I made for my own personal use and is not endorsed by or being used by Lamas and Lattes or the official Geek-a-long blanket. I am merely a fan of their project and have decided to make my own version. Don't forget to visit the Geek-a-long page to show your support for the official Geek-a-long blanket project which is raising money for a great cause and if you'd like to donate to that cause then please visit The Child's Play Charity here. ]





The next square was one that I'd been putting off for a while. When coming up with the initial list of squares one of the more obvious choices was Doctor Who. The problem is that my husband is a fan of old school Doctor Who and isn't all that enamoured with the new series if I'm honest - especially since Russell T Davis left. So I really wanted to try and find something that was more geared towards the pre-Eccleston era.

I did come up with the idea to make a stripey square that would represent Tom Baker's scarf but I just didn't have the right colours in my stash. Eventually, I threw my hands in the air and informed the husband that he was getting a dalek square and that I wasn't going to listen to any arguments; to which he shrugged and said that he really likes daleks and didn't know why I hadn't gone with that in the first place. Typical!

Square 21: Doctor Who

I found this great chart by meredee on imgur and it was perfect. The right size and a really good portrayal of a dalek (there are some dodgy ones out there).I knitted it up in sky blue and grey because I wanted to get a metallic feel to the dalek just like there was in the really early stories.

I hope you like the squares and if you're at all partial to mugs, please visit the links to my shops where there is a very geeky selection of them ;)

Smoke Me a Kipper, I'll be Back for Breakfast

Not only is this the second post of the day, it includes two of the squares I've knitted for the Blanket of Doom. The second post is because I've neglected the blog over the past couple of weeks (although I have still been knitting up a storm while binge-watching 'Spooks' on Netflix...or 'MI5' as is seems to be called in the US). The second square is because the pattern is one that I purchased, therefore I can't give you a link to the chart or post it here as I normally would: I will link you to the Etsy page though because it's a great little pattern that I would recommend anyone to purchase.

If you asked my husband what his favourite TV show is, he'll tell you either 'Breaking Bad' or 'Twin Peaks' but the TV show that he's the biggest nerd over is definitely 'Red Dwarf'. You can quote a line from the show and he will tell you the season and episode that it came from and then tell you everything that happened in that particular episode...in great depth. So there had to be at least one Red Dwarf square on his blanket but the problem is that it's difficult to come up with a clever design to put on a square. The only one I could find said 'Smeg' which is just a lazy reference in my book.

It quickly became obvious that I had to come up with my own chart for this square but even then, I struggled to think of a good reference to use. I attempted to make a Starbug square but because I couldn't use too much detail, it just looked like a green blob. Eventually, I decided to go with the London Jets logo, which is a bit more obscure than I'd like but this blanket's not for me and my husband loved the design.

[For those who don't know, The London Jets is Lister's favourite Zero-G Football team and he wears a few different t-shirts in the show all bearing their logo].

Square number 18: Red Dwarf

[This is a design that I made for my own personal use and is not endorsed by or being used by Lamas and Lattes or the official Geek-a-long blanket. I am merely a fan of their project and have decided to make my own version. Don't forget to visit the Geek-a-long page to show your support for the official Geek-a-long blanket project which is raising money for a great cause and if you'd like to donate to that cause then please visit The Child's Play Charity here. ]


As I mentioned above, the second square I'm showing you in this post is one that I purchased from Richearts Etsy Shop. I originally bought it to make a cross stitch but, with a little tinkering to make the design suitable for two colours, it worked amazing well for my next square.

Square number 19: Alien

 Hopefully, I'll be back to my normal blogging schedule from this week on but I hop you enjoyed my bumper blogging day today <3

Not So Frolicking Reindeer (Or The Family Friendly Version)

Wow, it's been a couple of weeks since I last blogged; time really flies when you're ill and then super busy with other stuff. Yep, I got that whole flu bug that's immune to the flu jab lurgy again and this time passed it on to my dad, who passed it on to my mum etc... It's a nasty little bug and I hope you've managed to avoid it.

But in far nicer news, my new sublimation printer is here! My new mug heat press is here! It's time for a whole new venture! It'll be sad to move away from having t-shirt printing as my main business but big sites like Qwertee and Teefury have knocked my little Ebay shop for six and I've been really struggling for the past year. A new direction was needed and I hope my sublimation printer will lead the way. I'll be overhauling my Ebay shop and building up my Etsy shop and I'll keep you updated on that.

In my last post, I mentioned knitting another Reindeer hat (this is the third one I've made so they're pretty popular this winter). This particular version was for my father-in-law who didn't want the naughty reindeer side to his hat so I had to try and find a new design that he'd like. I eventually found a lovely little cottage design that would work nicely with the trees that were already in the reindeer pattern. This time I worked the hat up in navy and dusky blue colours and I think it looks great; the alien from Toy Story agrees...

With the two sides to the hat, the width is the perfect size but it's a very long hat which works well for my husband but I did remove some of the pattern to make it a little smaller for my father-in-law. It still looks great though and it'll definitely keep him warm on his early morning milk round.

I Am The One Who Knits

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a great Christmas. I had a geektastic one with some graphic novels, a load of X-Men DVDs and four, count them, four Hogwarts t-shirts. Santa knows me so well.

Despite Stephen Fry proclaiming on Christmas QI that decorations should stay up until the end of January, we're taking them down today. It's best to do it now before the cats get home from their holiday at the in-laws. They'll already be on edge and expecting us to shove them into their pet carriers again at any moment so I don't want to disrupt them all over again, bless 'em. So that's it; it's all over for another year. Our flat's going to be at least 50% less glittery until November ;)

We've been at my parents for the past week (hence the cats having to go on holiday; my parents' house is a pet-free zone) so I did the same trick as I did the last time we went to my in-laws, I took just one craft project that I knew would last long enough to tide me over until I got back home. And, funnily enough, it was the same project as I took to my in-laws: the reindeer hat (although this time I changed the pattern to a more family friendly one which I will show you at a later date). So I've had to take a break from the Blanket of Doom while I've been working on that. It's probably a good thing though, I've reached that point on the blanket where I'm beginning to think longingly of working on something, anything, else.

I'm still a bit ahead of this blog in real life so I still have squares to show you and today's is from my husband's second favourite TV show of all time, ever! And it's a show that I still haven't watched myself; partly because when so many people tell me that I have to watch something right now, I tend to automatically push back and refuse and partly because my husband loved it so much that he would explain every episode to me after he'd seen it and I pretty much know everything that happens in the show anyway. I'll watch it one day but I'm going to do it in my own time, dammit!

Square number 17: Breaking Bad

If you click on the link, you'll find that the pattern is actually for a friendship bracelet but it's a great design and I think it turned out pretty well when knitted up.

If anyone is up for making a blanket of their own then a brand new Geek-a-long challenge just started and it looks like it's going to be a really fun one; this year's theme is Mad Scientists and I'm already loving the first square. It'll probably be a lot easier when you only have to make one square a week rather than trying to make them all together because you didn't know about the challenge until November; just saying ;)

Did you know that the original name for Pac-Man was Puck-Man?

Woo! It's almost Christmas! Which means that it's time to catch-up with any TV series we're behind on so that we can make room in our Sky+ planner for all the Christmas shows and films we want to record. So I'm now completely up to date on Doctor Who (how amazing were Capaldi and Michelle Gomez in those last two episodes? It's a shame the story let them down a bit) and I believe that we're going to tackle American Horror Story tonight and tomorrow.

In non-fandom related life, I'm surprised by how on top of things I am. The Christmas gifts shopping is almost done and the food is completely done. There is a turkey in my fridge as we speak and I am in no way terrified of cooking it because it's the first time I'm doing it all by myself. I'm armed with my mum's stuffing recipe and I'm pretty sure that I'll only have to call her once, in tears because "the turkey doesn't look right and I've ruined it!".

Maybe twice.

Seeing as my shop closed a week ago, I thought I'd be raring ahead with the knitting in all this free time but I've decided to give the shop an overhaul in the new year so I've been busy coming up with new designs. So the knitting has been plodding along at the same old pace.

I really enjoyed knitted the striped colours design for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles square so when I saw that GAL had done a similar one but for the much beloved Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde I knew that I had to do that one too.

Square number 16: Pac-man

I'm really pleased with this square and I love the 'wrong' side just as much as the 'right' side.

I hope to get another post in on Christmas Eve but just in case I don't get a chance (in between all the crying and attempting to cook), have a great Christmas and I hope Santa brings you everything you want <3

When There's No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Walk the Earth

If you go back to my post about the Arsenal square I knitted, you will see that one of my husband's five favourite things is zombies (seriously, zombies beat me and made it onto the shortlist...zombies!). So I knew that I had to do a zombie square but I had no idea how to go about it. I didn't want to go with a specific TV show or film because that would be more about the film than the zombies themselves. There are a few shuffling zombie cross stitch designs out there that I could have adapted but with only 45x57 stitches, I could've only fit one zombie onto the square and without the others, that's not a zombie - that's the outline of a man walking a little tipsily.

Then I found this little beauty, designed by Hyraea and turned into a cross stitch pattern by carand88. It's a zombie cat! And it's perfect (purrfect?) because I've been looking for a way to represent our cats in this blanket that wasn't too girly.

Obviously, I had to change it slightly so that the design was two colours, which took a little something away from the pattern so I added flies to emphasize the rotting flesh aspect.

Square number 15: Zombie Cat

Weirdly, I think it looks better on the reverse side with the red cat on a green background.

I'm not sure that this was a complete success but my husband likes it and it means that we got our cats on the blanket so I'm happy to leave it as it is.

You wouldn’t last five minutes in a Ninja pizzaria!

Time for square number 14 of the Blanket of Doom and I turned to the Geek-a-long.

I don't know about you but there was a period of time where every single day after school I'd have to watch 'Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles' on TV. It didn't matter how many times I'd seen a particular episode, I'd have to watch it again - you know, just in case I'd missed anything the twenty previous times. And I believe that it was the same for pretty much all the kids of my generation. What do I base that belief on? Probably the fact that  I can name three items of TMNT clothing my husband owns, just off the top of my head. It doesn't matter that we're (apparantly) grown-ups now, the turtles were such a big part of our childhood that we all still love them.

The GAL TMNT squares was one of the ones that first attracted me to the whole blanket project so it had to be done; even if the original plan changed from making a blanket for myself to making one for my husband, it still worked.

Square number 14: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

I seriously love this square. When I first looked at it, I thought it would be more difficult than it was. I don't know why; when you think about it, it's pretty obvious that you're just knitting stripes as the contrast colour instead of a solid contrast colour. But even my best friend asked how I did it, then gave a slightly disappointed 'oh', when I told her. I guess it's just one of those things that makes you look like a Master Knitter when actually anyone can do it :D