In a change from making bookmarks, weaving project #11 is a lavender bag. I was gifted a box of dried lavender a few weeks ago after a creative and imaginative friend of mine suggested the idea of making a woven lavender bag and not content with supplying the idea, she also supplied the lavender. 

I decided to use draft #11158, again sourced from handweaving.net, which originates from an Old German Pattern Book,  It is a 6 x 6 repeater, and I set the loom up to carry 4 repetitions across the fabric. I managed to do both sides of the bag on the loom at once, although my consistency across both panels wasn't great - the first side, the side not shown in the photographs, is tighter and has 11 repetitions of the weft, whilst the second side, my favourite, has 9. The dimensions are 7cm x 6cm with 2 cm long fringes.

The yarns used are Sidar Snuggly Baby Bamboo DK for warp, and again Jarol Supersoft DK for the weft after my original choice, a different colour of the Sidar Snuggly Baby Bamboo, was declared a failure and I needed to improvise. After removing the panels from the loom, I sewed them together with a bit of trepidation (sewing isn't a favourite passtime) and left an inch or so gap to stuff lavender in. I managed this without tipping it all over the floor which I claim as a success. The sewing was ok, and I didn't destroy the project at the final stage which was a bit of a concern.

The finished article feels and smells lovely. The weaving pattern has a good bit of depth and actually felt three dimensional even before I stuffed it with lavender. I see more lavender bags in my future.

Draft 11158 is going to be the first draft that I repeat - I have the loom all set up and ready for weaving project #12, another bookmark, but this time for me.

Quite a few months ago, I blogged about an idea I had to create Mum's storyline to help her carers understand the lady she was before dementia took over her personality. I thought it was about time I wrote an update on what has happened since then.

As I mentioned in November the postcards were being well received, and have continued to be so. They have been commented on more than once by more than one carer. The favourites with the carers seem to be ones of Mum in her youth looking all glam'd up and of things she'd made - I sent one with a photo of an embroidery she did in her teenage years. The end result is that they are filling in gaps, and helping the carers learn more about who she was. This is good.

I've also made two more photo books for her. The one I did as a gift for her birthday is an album of photos of the first 5 years of my childhood, mostly pulled together out of a box of slides that Mum had (thankfully!) carefully annotated with dates, names and places. For her Christmas present I did a book full of photos of her wedding to my Dad, including both the official photos and the photos that friends and family had obviously taken. 

I sent letters to quite a few of her friends asking for stories and memories of time spent with her, and received letters or emails from 3 or 4 of them, 2 of which were incredibly detailed - the one from a school friend of hers was incredible and fills in a lot of gaps. I didn't find a perfect tool, and after attempting to use Scrivener decided that it was too manual, and so have mostly been using evernote which seems to be working reasonably well. It's obviously only as good as the tags I use, but by having year related tags, as well as "chapter" related tags (more in a moment on this) I seem to be able to get to the pertinent bits of information as and when I need to.

After a lot of thinking, what I decided to do with Mum's storyline was to break it down into chapters, and work on a chapter at a time, trying to have one ready for each trip to see Mum. The chapters I've decided upon so far are:

 A lot of these chapters are inter-related, but I don't see that as a problem, it all adds to the depth of the information that her carers can share with her.  

So, I started with the houses chapter, and am taking that up to Mum at the weekend. Next up, probably schools.

I found this pattern a few weeks ago and thought it looked simple and achievable with my limited (4 week old) crochet skills, and what's more I rather liked how it looked. So, I decided to give it a go. I ordered 3 balls of Sirdar Snuggly Baby Bamboo Dk and got going. 

It really is very simple - it is a well named project - and it's not much more complicated than doing a granny square.  It is just two rows repeated time and time again. It doesn't need a lot of concentration - ideal for keeping restless hands busy whilst listening to podcasts or watching tv. In total it probably took me 8 - 10 hours to do so a pretty quick project, and I would imagine super quick if you're a bit more practiced with a hook.

I used 2 full balls for the length of the scarf, and then used my 3rd ball to make the fringing. I kept measuring the scarf against other scarves in my cupboard to try and work out what was the appropriate length and a full 2 balls seemed to be about right.

Here's me modelling it to give it some form of scale :-

Overall, rather pleased with myself. I made something useful. Hurrah!

Last weekend I had the good fortune to visit "Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination" at The British Library. What an incredible exhibition. 150 beautifully illustrated and written manuscripts on display for us to be absorbed by. We didn't read the information before going in, so failed to realise that there were 150 of them to look at - we probably took an hour looking at the first 15 before looking beyond the next manuscript and realising the extent yet to be seen. Definitely the kind of exhibition to take your time over, and to be absorbed by, and also to think a bit about what these manuscripts have survived - 500 years of fires, wars etc.

The British Library have put images from some of the manuscripts into Facebook albums and whilst they are good to look at and study the detail of, they look so very flat and ordinary when compared to the real thing - no matter how good the photographer is, it's very hard to get gold to shimmer in a still image.

On Monday, Richard spotted the BBC Four series Illuminations: The Private Life of Kings which provided to be an excellent resource of post-exhibition information, although I did find myself saying "Ohh, yes, I remember that one" quite a lot.

All in all, definitely one to try and get to.