A Heart to Mend Friendships

This was a little pattern that I found whilst scrolling through Pinterest. It was a crochet pattern, but one of the picture ones, and I thought I would give it a go with a little wool from the stash.

The pin that I read the pattern from can be found here, I also believe that the written pattern can be found on Ravelry (a link to that website is in the sidebar) but I'm not sure where on Ravelry.

I did really enjoy making this little heart. This one is now on it's way to a new home, but I might make a few more and find a cute project to put them into.

SOCKS!!!

I have finally made my first pair of socks, and I can say, I love them!

I also loved making them. I know that some people say they are confusing and complicated, and in some ways they are. But if you manage to get your head around what the pattern is asking you, it gets easier.

For this pair of socks I used a pattern from Love Knitting, as well as selling wool and needles, they do also sell patterns, and the pattern for these socks are free, and can be found here.

I used a similar wool and needles that it specifies in the pattern. That is five 2.5mm double pointed needles (DPNs) and some sock wool, which is 4 ply. The sock wool I used was a Regia yarn, which is very much known among sock knitters as some of the best. I found a nice variegated wool in my local wool shop!

The pattern in some places was really good, and I could understand the first part. There were a couple of places, where I feel that if I had not of read a couple of other sock patterns, I wouldn't really know what to do.

When knitting the heel flap, one stitch is knitted and the next one is slipped, as you go along the row. What it doesn't mention is that the stitch that is slipped should be slipped purlwise. The other thing that I found really quite confusing was when I had finished knitting the heel flap and was starting on the heel gusset (which is a bit that joins the heel to the rest of the sock so you can carry on knitting). When the pattern says " Pick up 1 st at top of gusset" it means, so pick up a loop from the gap between the two needles, and make another stitch. This means that there will be one more stitch on the needle. It is then used to help decrease stitches as you decrease the gusset.

Also at the end of the section "picking up stitches for the gusset" you should have 16 stitches on needle 1, 16 stitches on needle 2, and needles 3 and 4 need the heel stitches shared equally between them, with the middle of the heel being between the two needles. You can end up there by following the pattern, but it does get ever so slightly confusing.

Apart from the few confusing parts, the pattern is good, and gives quite a nice looking pair of socks. And like I said at the beginning I am in love with mine, and may have to make some more for some christmas presents, for other people, or maybe just for myself...

Buzz Buzz - My Sonic Spanner

My love for Doctor Who is known among

my close friends. So recently when looking for something to do with my BBC Microbit, I came across a Doctor Who Challenge on the BBC website. It was a great challenge aimed at young people, but great fun for the young at heart! 

One part of the challenge is to build a sonic device, and it can be ANYTHING! Which leaves a massive margin for creativity, but being the engineer I wanted mine to also be functional, and opted for the trusty adjustable spanner (I never use adjustables unless I really have to, so it was just laying around). 

I got designing, and using a bit of cardboard left over from some packaging I made somewhere to be able to attach the bits and pieces of the sonic spanner, to the actual spanner, which I did using bluetack (for every single bit). 

For the sonic spanner, you need a battery pack, (unless you want to be tethered to a computer - not a good idea!) a buzzer and a spanner. 

My buzzer is a piezo buzzer and I did have a right old time finding out that I couldn't control it digitally, and finding out that an analogue output was only as difficult as changing "write_digital" to "write_analog". I felt like an idiot for a bit...

One of the requirements for your sonic device (as well as buzzing) is to show a picture of the TARDIS on the LEDs on the Microbit. This took a little bit of designing, mine is a simple outline of a TARDIS, that I drew by lighting up individual LEDs and defining them as an image and naming it TARDIS. But I am sure if the mood took you, you could create any image you wanted. 

As there isn't really any guidance on how to get the sonic spanner working, it really is left to you as to what language to use and how you go about doing it. If you know about the Microbit, you will know that there is a few different languages you can use, some are harder than others and require a different way of thinking. I prefer to programme in Micropython. I've included a picture of my code at the end of this post, I hope it is useful to anyone who needs it.

The end product I made I got very very excited about. After having struggled to figure out what to do with my buzzer, (and finding out the answer was simple!) I felt quite proud of it. Now to go buzz at some cupboards..!