Beach Hut and Bunting

I'm having a productive week, not so much with the crocheting but the spare room decorating has got off to a good start, all the horrible purple paper has been stripped off and I am left with a rather depressing beigey brown colour.

Just a load more preperation to do and I can get the walls papered and painted. I am really quite excited to get it done, I have a completely free rein on how to decorate it and I plan to give it lots and lots of wooly additions to make it bright and cheerful.

Talking of bright and cheerful, I stumbled upon a very sweet little picture of a beach hut by my extremely talented friend Caroline. I have had the idea of making a 3D crocheted beach hut/seaside scene for a few months now and been mulling it over as a possible future make. As I was clearing the spare room for decorating I found a few long forgotten little picture frames so decided to have a go at a two dimensional seaside picture instead, very much inspired by Caroline's beach hut.

I grabbed my bag of Rico Creative Cotton and started by trying to get the shape of a beach hut which was fairly simple to do. Just a few rows of Double Crochet, with extra stitches at one end and then fewer stitches on the other side to get the pointy gable bit.

The frame I wanted to use was fairly small and the yarn is an aran weight, so I just wouldn't have space to make anything too intricate. I settled on keeping it simple with just a beach hut and some dinky little bunting accross the top to add a bit of interest.

I wanted to crochet the whole backing piece, starting in yellow for the sand and then carrying on in blue for the sky. It was just too thick for the frame so I used a piece of acrylic felt and bonderwebbed everything to it so that it fit snuggly in the frame.

 

Isn't it sweet? I love how cheery it is. It may well be the closest I get to the seaside for the rest of the year! I have a few more frames like this and would like to fill them with other scenes similar to this one. 

Another find while I was clearing out the spare room was a bag of colourful 4 ply merino I bought at last year's Yarndale. It would be so much better to use for this sort of thing than the bulky Rico, and I seem to have quite a lot of it. I think I had intended to make some sort of cushion with it originally but as often happens with cushions, I lost interest. I got this far before moving onto something else.

As much as I do love the wonderful colours of Rico creative cotton, everything does seem to come out very childlike - not that there is anything wrong with that, I really like big, bold colours and shapes, but from a crocheting point of view it is nice to be able to do something a bit more fiddly and intricate. This 4 ply might be just the stuff to make my next picture with, I just need to decide what that will be. :)

XXX