This is the first of my finished projects since establishing the ‘Rule of four‘:
The pattern is the XY scarf by Mijo Crochet. Made in Yarn Art Flowers shade 263. It comes as a 250g cake and is 55% cotton, 45% Pac (which I think may be polyacrylic). I made mine on a 4mm hook. It is an asymmetric triangle shape – 156cm along the base and 82cm high.
Shawls are definitely not in my home territory, and lacey ones are a foreign country to me, so when I bought the yarn to make this shawl it felt like embarking on a journey.
The pattern is by Carmen Heffernan and is available on her blog here
My thoughts on the pattern? It is a simple repeat decreasing slightly on one side, increasing more on the other to create a crescent shaped shawl. I had originally planned on saving some of the yarn for the edging but felt the shawl wasn’t really big enough, so carried on until I had used all 100g, and chose a different yarn for the picot border. It definitely needs the border, and the increase edge of the shawl was very keen on curling inwards, so I did block it too.
The yarn is Knitting fever painted desert pure super wash Australian wool in colour 07 Artic ice (their spelling!), The border is Coop Knits Socks Yeah! in colour 120 Azurite. I used a 4mm hook for the body of the shawl and 3.5mm for the border. This one is a Christmas present – so I had to keep it under wraps until now!
This was a crochet-along gift from a lovely friend, who chose both the yarn and pattern. It was quite challenging for me as it is made in double crochet throughout but into the back loop only – a stitch which seemed remarkably unforgiving of any variation in tension.
The pattern is Mijo crochet’s XY scarf and the yarn is Scheepjes Skies light in 17 Circumcumulus and 116 Cumulonimbus. I used a 4mm hook and started with cumulonimbus.
I love the texture of this stitch, the subtle colour variation in the yarn, and how well it photographed in today’s winter light.
This month’s challenge was ready a wee while ago, but the sunshine to photograph it in has only just arrived!
I used Tamara Kelly’s Chevron lace fingerless mitts pattern as my starting point and added a row of double crochet in Natural between each pair of coloured rows:
To keep the Natural rows the same width visually they all had to start on the same side of the scarf, so there were times when I didn’t turn at the end of a row, but worked over the previous row in the same direction in order to achieve this.
Made in Stylecraft Linen drape Coral (3906), Peacock (3905), Lime (3902) and Natural (3901) on a 4.5mm hook. I started with a chain of 64 to give me three pattern repeats and the finished shawl is 28 x 156cm. It used 1 ball of each of the 4 colours – with a bit to spare.
I came across this crochet pattern by Ana D on Ravelry, and it seemed to suit some yarn that I had in my stash admirably..
The variegated yarn is Kunstgarn which is a Danish sock yarn – 75% superwash wool 25% nylon. Mine is colour 28 which is apparently called ‘ceramic’. I bought some Scheepjes Our tribe which is 70% superwash merino 30% polyamide in colour 884 ‘Iris Garden’ as the base colour, and made the shawl on a 4mm hook. It took about 150g of the base colour and 100g of sock wool, and measures 130 x 66cm.
Now I have a difficult decision to make – do I wear it or sell it??
I actually started this way back in the summer holidays, and was taught the pattern by my friend Clare.
The pattern is called ‘Taiga’ by mijo crochet and the edging pattern is called ‘Royal Starling’ (see here)
It is made in Drops big delight which is a self striping 100% wool aran weight yarn. I chose ‘Blackberry’ and used a 10mm hook for the main body of the shawl, and an 8mm hook for the very last row of the edging.
The finished shawl is 200 x 100 cm and took 5 x 100g of yarn.
May’s challenge has a nice story to it…
A visit to a (relatively) local yarn shop at Armadale on the Isle of Skye, and a conversation with Birgit, the lovely owner, brought this pattern to my attention.
It has the somewhat unattractive name of the ‘Virus shawl’ presumably because you start off with one motif (the virus?) and the motifs multiply with each row.
Anyway there is a very wonderful youtube video by Bella Coco (here)which takes you few the first 8 rows step by step, and after that the pattern is a simple 4 row repeat.
I think the thing that I am happiest about is how well the yarn fitted with the pattern. I used 200g of Stylecraft Batik swirl ‘Blue Ocean’ and a tiny bit of Stylecraft batik ‘Indigo’ to finish the final row. All done on a 4.5mm hook
