hexipuffs and hexiflats!

I've been in serious hexagon mode lately. I've been working on making The Beekeeper's knit quilt with scrap sock yarn. Hexipuffs are so fun to knit! I was going to knit a sweater over the break, but instead I knit hexipuffs. 

A few weeks after I started with the hexipuffs, a future Needlework customer expressed interest in English paper piecing classes, so I decided to investigate that as well. More hexagons! Except I call these guys hexiflats. I'm using random scraps of light weight cotton to make them. I realized going through all my fabric that my "stash" of quilting cottons is very limited. Sort of ironic, considering I'm opening a fabric shop. That is definitely going to change soon. We have SO MANY amazing fabrics coming in! Yay! Anyways, Meg is going to do a Beehive post soon about what us Bees are up to, and she'll be saying some more about this over there. Oh, and speaking of the Beehive, one year ago today the Beehive Craft Collective formed! Such an amazing group to be a part of. I'm very excited for our second year of crafting, making, and community adventures.

knit, sew, embroider, repeat.

Meg is going to be doing a blog post about what some of the Bees are up to on their own lately. This is what I'm up to RIGHT NOW. Live, from Kate's house. Nonstop crafting. 

garlic breath.

Went to the first annual Toronto Garlic Festival at the Brickworks on Sunday. Garlic is delicious. I did a post about it on the Beehive Blog.

knit night on the brain: COMPLETED!

This past weekend in Hamilton was amazing. Supercrawl was so so good. The best ever. I was so impressed and thrilled to share such a great Hamilton event with some friends and family who were visiting. And The Beehive completed our giant knit façade of The Brain, which we've been working on since June/July.



We were literally knitting and piecing the installation together as it was going up. And many of us were knitting non-stop in the week leading up to the deadline. Towards the end we pulled out the big guns to speed things up - mega huge knitting needles! Thank goodness for chunky yarn and big needles.



We couldn't have done this without our friends and family. In addition to all the knitters that helped with the actual creation of the piece, we could never have installed it without the tireless help of Gary. THANK YOU GARY! Sky Jack operator extraordinaire. And Kieran and Mike. HEROES. And thank you Heather who patiently let us take over The Brain, inside and out.



Oh, and that amazing knit recreation of The Brain logo? Yeah, that was Courtney. She's the mastermind behind this entire thing. Not only is she speediest knitter I've ever met, she's also a genius when it comes to making up patterns. Three cheers for Courtney!!!



And now it's done. It was only up for 2.5 days, but it was totally worth it. Our first giant Beehive project! If you swing by in the next little while, you can still check out the yellow section with the The Brain sign, which is still up.

Now that  knitting bricks and giant sections of yellow is behind me, it's time to get back to knitting flowers non-stop again. Oh, and school. Yeah, another year of school.

busy bees!

A couple of week ago, the lovely ladies of The Beehive got together and arranged a beeswax candle making party for me in honour my upcoming wedding! Candles for the tables at the wedding! So thoughtful and sweet. They got two huge chunks of beeswax from the Dundas farmer's market, candle making supplies (wicking etc), and mason jars, and we all gathered together at Hollie's house for the fun event.

The hardest part of the entire process was breaking up the huge blocks of wax. They'd been in Jenna's car for a day or two, and had gotten soft and sticky. First we tried using a handsaw to cut it up - a complete fail as the teeth gummed up immediately. Then Mike came to the rescue with a chisel and hammer, which worked much better. We eventually discovered that freezing the beeswax so that it's hard and brittle is the best way to prepare it before trying to break it up.

Big chunks of beeswax! Smaller chunks work best though, so we broke these ones down even more.

Hollie's cat Tanooki was intrigued by the whole process. At least he was until he fell asleep.

For each jar we tied the wicking to a pipe cleaner to keep it centred and taut.

(Oh, and a Beehive meeting isn't complete without tasty drinks and food! Especially when they're custard tarts from Ola's and strawberry lemonade made by Hollie!)

It took the whole evening to get most of the jars half full (melting wax is a slow process), so we finished the second half at our meeting the following week.

I'm super excited to have these adorable candles on the tables at the wedding. They smell so good, are super cute, and match all my other yellow decor. Thanks girls, you're the best!

pysanky eggs: an addictive craft

Instead of having our typical Beehive meeting at the Mulberry on Monday, we instead gathered at Hollie's house to make pysanky eggs! It was Anna's brilliant idea, and she'll be posting about it over at our Beehive blog next week, but I just couldn't help posting a picture of my eggs! It was so much fun, even when it turned out to be much more difficult than any of us anticipated. Every so often there would be some mild profanity as we worked away on our eggs. The tools we used had a tendency to drop out big blobs of wax unexpectedly, and it's tough to draw a smooth straight line.

Unfortunately I dropped one of my eggs ton the floor while transporting them to take this photo. That's why there's one lone cup. Poor egg. Poor rug also, egg on rug is not fun.

breaking news: the debut of the beehive craft collective!

I'm so excited!!! Today is the official reveal of something a small group of amazing people in Hamilton have been working on for the past couple of months! Specifically, The Beehive Craft Collective.

Our mission statement:

The Beehive is a craft and urban homesteading collective. Bound together by a common thread of making things by hand, this collective was formed in 2011 by members of the arts community in Hamilton, Ontario. Focusing on handmade, DIY, and sustainability, we hope to engage and promote a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity.

We have lots of ideas in the works, with both short term and long term goals in mind. SO EXCITED! Our first project? The Beehive Summer Craft Fair, which will take place this summer during the August Art Crawl on James St. North. It will be a juried show, so if you're interested in being a part of it, please apply!!

Check out our website for more information on the group members (all super talented people!), and an application form for the summer fair. And check for regular updates on our blog to see what we've been up to!

Hamilton, you rule.

Photos by Hollie, and our logo was designed by Jenna, both members of the collective!