Category: Chit and Chat

Chit and Chat

An obvious choice

Sonja

Mouse-2The animal I am making next is quite an obvious choice I think, if you remember my house mouse invasion. Yes, they are still around. They now have to share the food in my tiny city garden with a grown group of sparrows, some starlings, blackbirds and a hedgehog. Although, I do think the hedgehog is feasting on the snails feasting on the bird food.

So what is coming up next? Yes, a house mouse! Maybe the choice is not that obvious to some of you, as I already made a mouse once. That was Trin, a forest adventurer mouse. Mouse-3This house mouse will be a classic Popke, one without clothing and accessories.

I really indulged myself making the mouse sketches, could not stop with one but made many. At the moment I am working on the body, the head is almost finished. I never expected a mouse head to be very complicated to design but that was a wrong assumption! Getting those curious and daring features of my mice was not easy. Maybe that is because I got to know them so well.

Mouse-1The following weeks I will work on this pattern and hope to release it soon. I’m also working on updating all my patterns to a new and better standard. The improved patterns have a different font, the difficult colour changes are written colour coded now and I have improved the text. Some of you will receive a lot of emails from Craftsy about the updated patterns, sorry about that.

Have a lovely start of summer!

Chit and Chat

Can you blame me?

Sonja

la

Can you blame me for getting distracted with this view? It is so utterly delightful watching tiny mice stuffing themselves with bird food. At first, I only noticed them on the ground, very fast and agile, moving trough garden plants and rocks cashing bits of bird food picky sparrows throw away. But recently they discovered the (additives & salt free) bird peanut butter and they love it.

They climb up through the ivy and if you sit outside and look long enough, you see several mice hanging out there waiting to feed from the peanut butter. At first, I only saw ‘large’ adult mice but last week suddenly there were these tiny newcomers, baby mice. I have babies I thought! Some people I tell about my mice say, ‘oh, be careful, they quickly become a plaque’. But I’m not at all worried about that with all the cats around here. I’m very proud the mice actually survived them and were able to successfully have young. I do try keeping the cats out of my garden, we have a happy indoor cat ourselves, but I know they do visit occasionally. I hope the mice have enough places to hide in.

I made a gallery to show a bit of mouse action. I probably won’t win a wildlife photography award with these, but I do consider myself lucky getting even these pics. They are very shy. Sometimes there are three mice in the pot sitting on top of each other, but as soon as they hear a squeak, they flee away. In the pictures you see three adult mice and in the second row the youngsters. If you look closely you can see several mice in some of the pictures.

Despite my tiny friends joyful visits, I did manage to make a sweet dog head. I’m very pleased with it. He looks much better than the drawing, more a puppy version of it and I can’t wait to finish him. Here he is in my ‘cat proof box for unfinished Popke heads’.

FullSizeRender

Chit and Chat

Summer Popkes

Sonja

amigurumi crochet patterns

The Popkes and I risked a heath stroke this afternoon, doing a photoshoot outside whilst it was 35 degrees celsius! Admitting, it was probably just me getting a bit over heated, they seemed to rather enjoy themselves really.

What a thrill, my summer holiday has almost started! Just relaxing, watching wildlife and doing long forest strolls are the things I am looking forward to so much.

I had to postpone the puffin pattern a bit, but not to worry. I think during all the relaxing and wildlife watching, I probably cannot stop myself from working on it every now and then. The puffin pattern will be the first pattern to be released.

I hope everybody is enjoying themselves as much as my crochet animals in the picture above. I wish all of you a lovely summer, cheers and see you soon!

Art, Chit and Chat

Kiekeboe

Sonja

Bunz

Back, when I was in the holiday cottage, I tried to take some interesting pictures of Bunsie. I thought the result was not very exciting, but when looking through the pictures yesterday, this one caught my eye. Recurring visitors might recognize this bush as the bush in the drawing of the actual event. This is the bush the polecat ran past and I felt like sharing it.

Also, I wanted to give you a heads up about my upcoming pattern. A crochet tiger pattern. Some of you might think, ‘but that one wasn’t on your list’ and you are right dear reader. A while ago I joked to myself that if a certain person would see a tiger on his trip to India, I would make a crochet version. Later on I found it a rather silly idea, as tigers are more than just complicated to make in crochet. But the longer I thought about it and looked at pictures of this gorgeous animal, I decided it was not such a bad idea at all, and he did see a tiger. I definitely wanted to make a tiger, and a very good one! Now let’s hope I can succeed…

Art, Chit and Chat

Illustration of an actual event

Sonja

Last week the most fabulous coincident happened. We were on a short holiday in a little cottage in the woods. Every so often I worked a bit on my polecat pattern, so I could release the pattern this week. I was just about to start on the tail when I looked outside and saw the most amazing thing, an actual polecat running passed the window, followed by a cat! Full of utter joy, I shouted to my boyfriend, who was taking a bath, there’s a polecat outside!!!

What a coincidence. A real polecat, while working on the pattern of one. They are not the kind of animal you see very often, especially in daylight, so what a pleasure indeed. I quickly made a drawing of the short and special moment. And yes, the rabbit was sitting there too, not at all bothered by that strange event. I do wonder what that cat was doing there. It isn’t a very common place for a house cat to hang out, disturbing all the wildlife. Luckily, the Polecat did got away safely.

Actual-event

Art, Chit and Chat

In the field

Sonja

Lumi-out

We are having this terribly dreadful winter, it rains, rains and rains, but the weekend after I had finished Lumi, some snow did fall. I gladly took that opportunity to make some nice pictures.

Enjoy your winter! I hope mine will get colder!

Note: I am already working on a new project, something a bit different and will tell more about that next week.

 

Chit and Chat

Squirrels encountered by me

Sonja

The crochet red squirrel pattern is beginning to take shape. I’m very glad it is, because I was a bit worried.

And here are some high quality, beautiful pictures of red squirrels I took. Well, maybe two, or one….Enjoy.

LOL!

These pictures could have been so beautiful! But, it’s not about the pictures, I loved watching these squirrels and the pictures are just blurry reminders of those moments.

Now back to the crochet version!

*EDIT* I just tweeted a first prototype image of the crochet red squirrel head.

 

Chit and Chat

And then there was green

Sonja

Mysterious-back

The mysterious back of the designer. Wink…

I’m sorry for the lack of interesting posts for the last two weeks. We are having a spring holiday in the Netherlands and we decided to go and enjoy the rising green in our environment. The autumn is my favorite season, but the spring makes a good second. This year we were really longing for green after a cold, grey and longer winter.

Next week I’m back to business. I’ve got two ideas for tips & tricks posts and I’m going to start on a crochet squirrel pattern. (We saw a cute’sy squirrel climbing a tree carrying nesting material!)

See you next week!

 

Chit and Chat

Sorry for the confusion…

Sonja

My header and blog icon has changed again. There are a few reasons for that change.

First of all, I missed my happy cat! Another important reason is, when I started using Flam the fox as my ‘logo’,  it didn’t feel right. Suddenly I realized that having a neutral icon is better than an existing doll. Especially when someone bought a Flam the fox pattern, it made me doubt my decision.

Also, I got some feedback form people whose opinion I value, who liked the cat better.

The funny thing is, I had to make the change before I realized this, because I was convinced I needed and existing doll as icon. Now it’s all good.

Thanks for understanding this silliness.

p.s. The sheep head is finished and he’s all cuddly, hehe.

 

Chit and Chat

Sheepke

Sonja

SheepThe next animal I will make in crochet is a sheep. Fits spring I think. I’ve made a simple sketch of how the sheep should look, but some things I have to decide while making him. Like will the head have wool on it and also will the arms and legs have wool on them? I’m not sure yet, looks good in the sketch but I’m not sure it will also look good on the actual doll. So that’ll be a surprise 🙂

I hope I’ll have him finished in about two weeks. Past week I was working on my Sons Popkes business card, something I didn’t have yet. The card gave me more trouble than I expected, because I had a hard time deciding which one to use….I made a few. I now have an email signature card with Flam on it, like my blog icon. My Dutch card has an image of Finse on it and the international card has Trin on it.

The card is finished now so I can put my full attention back to crocheting. I’m back here later this week with a post about shaping amigurumi’s.