Wooly Combe – Joanne’s Craft Site
A site to show off my crochet and other crafts. Plus a secure online store.
A good friend from back in London asked me if I could produce a Nativity scene for her. In the event that someone reading this wants one for this year they would need to be really quick in placing the order. (Use the Comments below)
I got some patterns from here and from here so if you want to try this yourself you can do. I made up the pattern for this sheep myself.
Here are some pictures of the figures set against my own little nativity barn (normally populated with littel ceramic figurines).
I’m a bit late posting this, it was going to be about ‘last weekend’, but now it’s about the weekend before that. Well, my excuse is that I have been busy catching up on crochet after that weekend.
I don’t generally get an annual holiday as such. We do live in a holiday destination and I still have to pinch myself even after ten years, and say “I live here! I don’t have to go back to London next Sunday.” It’s a lovely feeling. Nevertheless, we all have to have the occasional break where we get pampered and someone else does all the cooking and washing up. So the last weekend in November saw me packed and ready with my daughter, whose school was having a teacher training day on the Friday, and we scooted off with another friend down to the Manor House & Ashbury Hotels down near Oakhampton, Devon. (Specifically the Manor House Hotel)
I’ve stayed here a few times now. We save up and book in the off-season because it’s not exactly what you’d call ‘budget’, but it’s worth it for what you do get. It is all under cover too, so unless you plan on playing golf or some other outdoor sport (No thanks!) you can keep indoors the entire weekend. Booking includes full board, you can even pay a bit extra for lunch on the day of arrival and/or departure. The buildings are old and as a result they are not as wheelchair friendly as one would like (this doesn’t affect us, but it did affect another guest who had a little difficulty with narrow corridoors). The age of the building is also reflcted in the slighted dated room decor, but you can live with that for the benefits.
The food is plentiful and well cooked. It’s not haut cuisine, you wouldn’t expect it to be, but it is good wholesome fare ranging from the most standard British meat and two veg to oriental styles and vegetarian options. (Preusmably vegan is on offer but it’s not something I check for). It is served in a buffet style arrangement and you can keep going back until you are sated. This meant that between my daughter and I we could sample all the desert options every day.
Then there’s the crafting; the reason why I didn’t get much crochet done. There are loads of crafting sessions across the weekend including pyrography, glass etching, ceramic painting, silk painting, candle making, enamelling, glass, fusion, and so much more. My only gripe here, and it’s another minor one, was the booking system was a bit unwieldy and we ended up not doing pyrography, which we were looking forward to trying.
Each session includes a tutor and all the equipment you might need. the materials cost extra. So, for example, you buy a glass bottle and perhaps a pattern, and then you engrave it accordingly. Similarly, you buy the silk form and a pattern and paint the design so you end up with something that looks really good even if you are not a great artist.
You could easily spend the entire weekend doing one craft after another, and forget to leave enough time for lunch. not that you need lunch after the huge breakfasts on offer and knowing the amount of dinner that is about to come your way, but if you did decide you want to do something else, these hotels also have a range of free sports and leisure activities on offer.
There’s a golf course, about which I know nothing. Ditto tennis, archery, football etc. But we did find the hydro pool. Well, actually it’s a bit complicated because there are several pools dotted about. There are two swimming pools, slide pool, a large hydro pool consisting of three interconnected areas, and a smaller hydro pool, as well as several saunas, steam rooms, ice room, and spa. We found the smaller hydro pool to be almost deserted, so we took advantage of that. There’s even a little slide which, of course, we had a go on.
I haven’t completely neglected the crochet though. I managed to finish off this elf who should be available to buy in the store for £10 by the time you read this.
OK, to many readers this might seem like a stupid question, but there are no stupid questions, only stupid ways of dealing with the answers. According to Wikipedia “crochet is a process of creating textiles by using a crochet hook to interlock loops of yarn, thread, or strands of other materials,” but it would be a sorry old article if I just reproduced the Wikipedia article here.
Random reader: “That’s what a lot of websites do!”
Wooly Combe: “Well this isn’t a lot of websites!”
Besides, that definition on the Wiki page is just a quote from a dictionary anyway.
By the way, if you’ve only ever seen a word written down, you don’t get to know how it is pronounced. Crochet comes from French, and for that reason the CH is soft and we don’t pronounce the T at all. So it’s “Crow-Shay”. N.B. You can get the pronunciation even better if you drink a bottle of red wine* and smoke 40 Gitanes** first, then attempt to say it while chewing a mouthful of pain-au-chocolat.
*Alcohol is harmful to health.
**Ciggies are even worse.
Anyway, this whole thing about crochet being a French word is an oversimplification. Just as England was invaded by Angles and Saxons so France was invaded by Franks. And their word for a hook was “krok”. The word can be traced all the way back to Proto-Indo-European, which is why it crops up in so many langaugages.
The “et” on the end is a diminutive, so crok-et (which later became crochet) is a little hook. Not to be confused with a crotchet, ♩, which is a small musical note that looks like a little hook, or with croquet, which is a game in which you bang a ball though a hoop using a mallet. I believe the name refers to the hoop, and not an early form of the mallet. There’s no evidence that the game began among bored shepherds. And, by the way, it’s also not the same as a shepherd’s crook which is a bit too large for crochet, although ironically, crochet needles are sometimes referred to as shepherds hooks. Isn’t etymology fun?
Right, to the point. Crochet is similar to knitting in that it produces a fabirc from intertwining yarn in specific ways, but it differs in a number of fundamental ways. The most obvious of these is that it uses a single needle with a hook at the end to pass yarn through its own loops to form each stitch. In crochet, usually, each loop is closed off as it is done, whereas that is not the case in knitting. What is especially curious is that crochet appears to have emerged only fairly recently, the earliest record being from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Knitting is known to have existed for many centuries longer, dating back to the eleventh century. Even older than both of these techniques is something called nålebinding, of which I had never even heard until researching this article. I won’t get too bogged down on it, but it seems to be a laborious method compared with either knitting or crochet, involving pullin the entire yarn through each knot. I’m, I can’t even …
Another vaguely similar process is lace making. Often, the more delicate forms of crochet, using a small hook and fine yarn, can look a lot like lace, but the process is certainly different. Traditional lace is made either using bobbins or needlework. However, crochet and indeed knitting, have also been used to produce lace type fabrics.
The popularity of crochet, and knitting, appears to have increased significantly in rcent years. Possibly the exploits of Olympic champion Tom Daley at the poolside may have helped. Or perhaps it is the people yarnbombing postboxes with decorative covers. Whatever the reason, tying little knots in lengths of wool to make stuff has become a hugely popular past-time. You can easily do it while watching TV or chatting to friends. And the choice of patterns available, many of them free, is astonishing. Sometimes it is worth paying a little extra to get the best ones. You are also free to create your own designs, once you have mastered the basics.
