Ethical Mirasol Blanket Project

Look at the absolutely exquisite colours in this embryonic blanket project. I think I could be in heaven and given this wool comes from such an ethical project makes me feel good too. I don’t want to lecture anyone about social responsibility and ethical consumerism as I think this yarn could make the argument for me. I have just received a variety of skiens of Mirasol Hacho and I’ve decided to be very selfish and make myself a huge blanket, throw, afghan.

Here are some sneak preview shots of what I hope will become a magnificent piece of work when finally complete. I am also very lucky to have found what has become my favourite online yarn store. To visit the store pleas click here Aileen's Wool Shop. Those of you who know my name please don’t be confused this is not my shop but it is an incredible place to source a variety of ethical yarns such as Mirasol. The really competitively priced yarns include Artesano, Louise Harding, Debbie Bliss, Noro, Araucania, Colinette and Rowan. The shop also has all manner of knitting and crochet accessories.
I would highly recommend a visit to this store if you love quality yarns but don’t wish to pay top dollar. Aileen is a lovely lady and provides exceptional customer service, give it a try you’ll be delighted.
Aileen's Wool Shop

I am writing up my pattern as I go and will publish it once completed. I will update regularly with progress photos. It’s so very exciting to work with such ethical and sublime yarn. For information on the Mirasol project click here.

Call for Contributors – Create a Blog Dialogue

As many of you will know Anjie & I have been busy this month doing Thing-a-day. Now as we approach the end of February and the end of thing-a-day, We are inviting like minded crafty, artistic & creative people to join as a contributor to Create A Blog Dialogue.
This is a communal blog that I set up at the end of 2009 along with Anjie from Pompomemporium.com
We intended the blog to be a space to showcase current creative work as well a place to discuss, review and document the whole creative process in whatever medium. Hence ‘A Dialogue’  So we now cordially invite you to join us on our journey – you can comment, contribute and show case as often or as little as you want.
Please contact either myself via email at thesunroomuk@googlemail.com or contact Anjie via http://www.pompomemporium.com/  and we can add you as a contributor.

Process – The Initial Concept

Okay what exactly are we hoping to achieve here? I guess I should be blogging about it, as we go, then you can all follow what’s happening and what we are trying to create and achieve.
I first came across Anjie’s site during the summer and found a lot of her ideas to be very inspiring. I find when you work with others or at least bounce ideas off one another and feed each other inspiration new possibilities emerge and new directions can occur.  I also learned about ‘thing a day’ on Anjie’s site and this seemed like an excellent idea to me. I approached Anjie and asked if she would be interested in working on a blog format and dialoguing our creativity. The process is to undertake a creative activity every day for a month and thus instil the ‘habit’.
Now this may seem a bit strange as we both are regularly creative anyway. So to refine the concept even further another premise is to try new things that we wouldn’t normally try. Push the envelope, so to speak. Due to time commitments we have decided that January would be the best month to undertake the project. In the meantime we thought it would be good to blog about ideas, concepts, thoughts and plans.
I guess it’s like the stone in the pond, ripple effect. I may come up with a notion and blog it and Anjie may have a different take and inspire my creativity in a new direction. Rather than doing all our planning and debating offline (400 miles between us) or between private emails – we thought part of the process should be to blog from the start.
I/we also envisaged that we may just get other peoples creative habit going so they too could work on getting the habit. There is a school of thought in psychology that states that it only takes 6 weeks to establish or eradicate a learned behaviour. If that is the case or you but into that theory then perhaps it will only take a short while to develop the creative habit.