Stash Avalanche

50g of Fabel

When I was having my major yarn shop for supplies for this lovely cardi a few weeks ago, I thought what the heck, and treated myself to a ball of Drops Fabel in Berry Dreams. Really it was the colour that sold it to me, following on from my established (and not yet exhausted) obsession with another Drops yarn, Big Delight in Rose Garden.

I bought it with no idea in mind other than I liked the colour and I might use it as some sort of pseudo swatch for the cardi to come (which will also be in Fabel). If you don't know this yarn - and I'd never even heard of the Drops range until I moved to Ireland - its a 4ply sock yarn, 75% wool and 25% polyamide, and it comes in 56 colours (plains and prints), which is a pretty good number if you ask me.

(Apologies for the photos - I took them on my phone in a hurry and they're, frankly, not the best).

Well, the swatch idea kind of went out of the window due to being to tired and  not being able to think straight. The cardi pattern calls for a 3mm crochet hook and I couldn't find one so I used a 2.5mm instead, but I like the end result. The colours a fab, and - although you can't really see it in the photo above - there's a lovely gradation of colours with the brights all ending up on one side and the more subtles on the other.

I used an ever-so-slightly modified version of Lucy's Granny Stripe starting with just over 100 chains ( I forgot the exact number). Being more of a knitter, I'm more used to a softer end result; this made a firmer fabric that I was expecting, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Actually, I don't think I've ever crocheted with wool before so I really wasn't sure what to expect. My two previous efforts at crocheting a cardigan   were both in cotton and turned out very floppy, too big, and exceedingly frogable. There should be posts about them somewhere on this blog but I can't find them at the moment.

Anyway, 50g makes a piece of crochet 39x18cm. So the question now is, what do I do with it? I could buy a few more balls and make a cowl, or I could buy a lot more balls and improvise make a cardigan. I'm more up for plan B but I think, given that one ball only made this small bit, it's going to take some area calculations and a rather large number of balls before I get anything remotely cardigan shaped out of it. But the colours are lovely...

 

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Felt a bit bunny at the weekend...

They look so pretty all together.

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Starting to refind my mojo

Gosh, I am ridiculously excited about the fact that this is the third post I've managed in 2 weeks. Given the fact that this is possibly a higher frequency of posting than the last, what... four years, I feel pretty good about it.

As I said previously, I've been thinking about this blog a lot but never managing to put fingers to keyboard, and yet, suddenly something - I have no idea what - has shifted in my little world and I am crafting again (rather than just ticking over) and blogging again.

I have a few yarny things to mention but I'll save them for another post because today I want to gush over fabric.

There's a fabric shop in town which is rather dangerously close to my office and I was nosing about in there the other week and discovered a new-to-me design house Lewis & Irene. I had gone into the shop looking for fabric to make a headboard cushion for Stashlet's bed, and came out with quite a bit more.

See, look? It's already sewn together! As far as me and quilting goes, that's an epic achievement. I still have fabrics I bought before Stashlet was born which have not yet made an  acquaintance with the sewing machine.

This is L&I's Down By The River, and I just could not pass it by. I wasn't sure that I was going to do with it so I just winged it, bought half a meter of everything they had and came home to mull it over.

I've been wanting to make a jelly roll strip quilt for ages but I felt with some of these patterns, 2¹/₂ inch strips would lose the image too much, so I ended up cutting the width to suit the pattern, which became a little like fussy cutting, choosing the best place to cut so that each element, particularly of the willow tree and pond pattern, had at least one strip to call it's own.

I think my favourites are the otters swirling around in the water weed, and the swans. I feel there may be a future top in some of that swan fabric. Possibly with a little water lily border.

Anyways... I cut my strips and spent a happy half hour on the floor with them, trying to get an order that had every design even distributed across the quilt, but have a random element to the organisation too. It was so nice to spend the afternoon sewing them together. I really felt that for once, I had spent my Saturday on something worthwhile.

I'm planning a border now. The finished centre strips piece is 43x80" so proportionally not very good. I'm toying with a few ideas for the long sides to widen it out and something zig-zaggy is the current plan.

 

This is what I doodled at work the other day. Something along these lines anyway. Possibly with a very thin pale/white border around the centre strips before the zig-zag goes on: I feel it needs a little breathing space with all that pattern going on (thinking about that Lila Tueller quilt from way back - lovely but visually very busy!). So I shall be mulling that over for the next few weeks.

In the mean time, I have some other L&I fabric for another quilt, a cardigan to finish knitting, a cardigan to start crocheting, and a few tops to think about. I think with all that lot, there is definitely a reappearance of my mojo taking place :-)

 

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