It’s Easter weekend, my favorite weekend in all the year because it has a holiday either end of it. A glorious bank holiday weekend sandwich!

Charlie and the micro chicks agree as they’re obviously custom made for spring shenanigans. They haven’t been out of their Easter egg themed bucket since I brought it into the studio on Tuesday. They don’t like chocolate much so this was the perfect gift 🙂

Sunshine has been pouring down, daffodils have been blooming, both outside…

…and inside.

My desk has been invaded by all things springy and a naughty cat has been hogging all the yarn.

Minnie and I share the same level of passion for the woolly stuff and she’s rarely off my desk these days. She’s often to be found in a basket somewhere nearby, snuggling down for some warm and well deserved shut-eye after sitting in the garden for a full hour watching all those busy birds building their nests.

It’s a hard life being a pampered kitty you know! Minnie prefers a prefabricated nest and thinks the birds are mugs for going to all that trouble to have a bespoke des res. Personally, she’s not too fussy about what she sleeps in, as the following snapshots taken during the past few weeks prove.

Pompoms are always a good choice… even if you have to share the space with a wide-eyed, oversized, purple gonk.

…and this heart print canvas covered box complete with a colourful deep sprung mattress is a popular haunt too.

Note the smug ‘cat that got the cream yarn’ look!

Size doesn’t matter… Minnie’s quite happy to perch on top of a rather small basket jam packed with my hand knitted mittens as she doesn’t appear to be up for sharing her favorite hangout with a panda.

And with those crazy panda eyes staring at her, I’m not surprised!

If the whole of you doesn’t fit, what the heck… just squeeze in what you can. Though I think this basket doesn’t have nearly enough yarn in it, hence the somewhat disgruntled look!

As a last resort, if their are no wool filled baskets or boxes in sight, an uncomfortable plastic tray filled with lumpy crocheted baubles will do just as well.

Of course she has had several snoozes on my newly finished pompom cushion too.

But she generally prefers a work in progress to a finished one. Here you can see a skewered kebab of crochet squares, which is the very, very beginning of something new.

Now my pompom cushion is finished and the poncho is nearly there too (final update on that coming soon – just got the hood to figure out), I’ve begun to think about a new oversized spare time crochet project to keep me occupied during evenings, weekends and trips out during the summer.

I want to make a blanket and some cushions for my bedroom in really girly colours (sorry hubby!) and I’m getting the hots for pink and aqua right now, as you can see from my pinterest board of the same name. But I love pink and red too. Maybe it’s just pink and anything that will do at the moment.

All the pretty Easter colours have got under my skin, probably because I’ve been working with them quite a lot recently and some of the last few year’s Easter makes have been unpacked to add a touch of festivities to the place.

So I sort of know what I want to achieve but it’s all a bit fuzzy in my head still until I see the colours together in real life. I figured the best way to start would be with some plain circles so I could see how different colour combinations panned out.

Once it was my turn with the yarn basket (thanks Minnie!), and with my usual working method of ‘make it up as you go along’ I started to make a few more decorative circles, because if there’s one thing I know for sure at the outset of this new venture it’s that I want circles to feature prominently. I’ve made several types of granny squares for blankets and have worked quite a lot with stripes too. Now I’m getting the urge to get dotty and spotty with my next design.

I had fun developing the circle theme a little more, adding in some extra rounds of single crochets and extending the colour range…

I finally decided on which yarns I wanted to use and got busy winding them all off into big, fat yarn cakes.

Yarn cakes are much easier to work with than standard balls of yarn. It’s so easy to pull the yarn out from the middle from where it will gently unravel to give a smooth, even flow without the remaining ball jumping about everywhere.

I highly recommend going to the extra trouble of winding these little nuggets of convenience if you are going to be frequently changing colours. Anything that makes things more efficient, faster and frees up more crochet time is surely an excellent thing!

I’ve also been making unicorns. I wrote the pattern for a UK magazine a while ago and have now got around to tweaking and improving on it.

Pattern testing, as always, results in many replicas. Well, four, to be precise.

I really loved making the variegated yarn versions.

And I am so digging those curls. They’re just as unruly as mine!

Hopefully I’ll be listing my Curlicue the Unicorn pattern on Etsy soon. I really just have to get a good photoshoot of them and I can finish the final pattern layout tweaks.

As you can see I’ve got plenty to be getting on with this.  I need to be quick though, before minnie appears and beds down for the next few hours.

All that yarn does look rather inviting in many ways. I certainly can’t wait to get stuck in and see how my blanket and cushions start to take shape.

Have a lovely Easter weekend everyone!