Stash Avalanche

Cardi update

Well, we're back from our hols. Back with a bouncingly healthy Stashlet and an exceedingly poorly Mr G, who has been sitting on the sofa ever since we got back on Friday feeling very delicate and morose, and coughing like a 200-a-day smoker.

And what's with the weather? We had one rubbish week in Germany (which, admittedly, coincided with Stashlet being poorly so we didn't miss too much), one semi ok week (although not a usual German summer, and we did get rained on one afternoon while we were actually swimming in the open air pool), and now we're back and it's like October. There should be a department one can write a letter to.

Anyways, on the crochet front, I have made a decent amount of progress and am on the third colour repeat. I want to make it a bit longer that the original, so will probably do three full colour repeats and then divide for the arm holes. But again that might change.

 Sorry, not the best lighting. We've got very dull rainy weather at the moment.

That grey purple - the second colour from the bottom - hardly shows up at all against the grey, which I'm starting to like more and more, as it makes it look like there are two distinct bands of colour. I'm still completely in love with the golden rod (and I think I did it a bit of a disservice calling it  a mustard) and the dark pink. If only Drops did a DK 100% alpaca in exactly the same colour...

That's me done for now. I have a (probably muddy) Stashlet to collect from sports camp in an hour, and - just for a change - we're moving in the next few weeks so I've started packing and need to achieve a decent quota for the day. But more on that, and dresses, soon. Or at least, soonish.

Happy Tuesday!

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Holiday crochet

We're on holiday. The plan was to sit by the pool, and visit friends but instead we've had rubbish weather and a rather poorly Stashlet which has meant staying home, brow mopping, chocolate flapjack eating and dvd watching. A perfect excuse for some holiday crochet!

I did plan to bring two lots of yarniness with me, but once the Drops Alpaca had gone in the suitcase, I realised there wouldn't be enough room for more. Mind you, I don't think I'll manage more than one garment over the next two weeks and probably not even that! So here I am, crocheting the Good Vintage Cardigan, which I was trying to hold off from until I'd finished my other project.

I'm not a big crocheter and previous attempts at garments have been disappointing but I realise that in part, this is due to the fact that I was crocheting with cotton which creates a very heavy garment. And then I saw this cardi and felt that I really must try again.

The original pattern is for King Cole Merino Blend 4ply but as knitting shops are rather scarce where we are, and since discovering the Drops yarns, I'm a bit of a convert, I thought I'd give the Alpaca a go. I decided to run with roughly the same colours as the original, although I think this pattern would also be nice in an ecru and navy, so my colours are...

 

...left to right

2923 golden rod

6347 grey purple

3770 dark pink

2925 rust

6790 dark blue

2916 dark lime

3720 medium pink

7238 dark olive

and the main colour is 0517 medium grey.

I originally started a size 12-14 but after about 5 rows of the border, it seemed awfully narrow so I pulled it out (not to be recommended with this yarn as it's too fluffy) and went for the bigger size. Somewhat amazingly, my tension seems to be pretty accurate so crocheters must work at a generally looser gauge than knitters (where I consistently need to go down a millimetre or two).

I'm generally not a fan of mustard - which is pretty much what that golden rod colour is - but I am so enamoured by it that I am already plotting a golden rod jumper - possibly this, and ditto the dark pink, which is darker in real life than it is in the photos and reminds me of strawberry sorbet. Just not sure I will have the patience to knit a whole jumper in 4ply though...

It was a bit of a slow start as the yarn tends to be a bit splitty, especially when you're starting off, but once I got to the treble clusters it was much more co-operative, probably because I wasn't fighting with a snakey chain and was able to hold everything a bit more taut. Progress is moderate - you crochet the fronts and back in one piece to the arm holes so it feels like everything is rather slow, but since taking these photos earlier this afternoon, I've got as far as the grey row after the lime green. I did find the lime row very bright and was wondering if it wouldn't be too fluorescent with everything else, but now the grey is going on top, it seems to be calming down a bit and I think it might work.

Modifications so far: two extra rows in the border. I was going to do more but I wanted to get on to the clusters and couldn't wait any longer.

I'll post a progress report later in a few days.

 

 

 

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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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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Yarn shopping

Ravelry: A Good Vinatage Cardigan

Getting ready to do a bit of yarn shopping. This crochet cardigan looks fabulous, and Drops are having a sale (which ends tomorrow) so I need to get a move on!

 

What happened next...

Ever wondered what happens after a giveaway...?

Remember  Giveaway week Day back in May? And the very pink granny squares I was giving away...

The lovely Dawn from mi rincón de mariposas won the giveaway. She has been sending me updates on what she's been making with the squares and now she's finished.

Look at this blanket she made for her daughter, isn't it lovely? Dawn has a really good eye for colour and I think she's done a much better job than I ever would have.

If you can read Spanish, you'll find more information about this gorgeous blanket here, and if you don't, go along anyway for the photos,  they're so full of colour. This one is my favourite, look at those lovely snuggly toes!

Blanket photos curtesy of Dawn at mi rincón de mariposas.

 

Giveaway - last chance

Hurry, hurry! You've got about two hours left to comment before I close comments.

Granny squares giveaway

Despite the fact that I'm not that big on granny squares, I had a phase a few years ago where I was frantically crochetting them at every opportunity but without any thought out goal in mind.

I think it was pre-Stashlet and I was planning to have a girl (ha! as if you can plan such a thing!) and had great-but-vague ideas of cardigans and cot blankets. Anyway, I crocheted a whole heap of squares in pink and then got rather overwhelmed with the thought of blocking them all and put them aside for a more enthusiastic time.

Well, I've come to my senses. They are totally lovely (if you ask me, of course!) but I am never going to do anything with them so I thought it might be a nice idea for someone out there in blogland to have them and do something beautiful with them instead.

And it's Giveaway week Day all this week - what a coincidence!

There are 57 of the ones with the dark pink centres, 18 of the ones with the pale pink centres and 10 of the all-pale-pink. They're crocheted in Patons' 100% Cotton - I had a brain freeze when I bought the yarn so the cerise is DK and the other two are 4 ply but it doesn't seem to have had too bad an effect on the finished square - and I think they'll make about a 5.5cm square when they're blocked. So enough for a child's cardigan, scarf or small blanket.

This giveaway is open to everyone everywhere so if you would like to have a chance of winning the squares, just let me know what the weather's like in your part of the world and/or what you might do with them, and I'll pick a winner (using a random number generator) on Friday evening.

Good luck!

Edit 09-05-13 Thanks for all your comments so far. It looks like some people have been having problems commenting because I've had a few duplicate comments. When this happens I will keep your first comment and delete the rest, but I will check to see if there is a valid email address first!

Also: I will close comments around 21.00 UK/Irish time so you have around 24 hours left!

Edit 10-05-13 Thanks everyone - comments are now closed. I will email the winner over the weekend.

 

On (and off) the needles #1...

I am struggling. To write my own posts and to read everyone elses'. One of the blogs I subscribe to has 183 posts waiting for me in my reader. I'm a bit terrified to start to be honest.

Anyway, I had intended to do an 'on the needles' post about 67 weeks ago but that fell by the wayside and now we're into made-and-worn territory.

So.

I went to the wonderful Winnie's Craft Cafe in south Dublin for some yarn to knit up a couple of Drops pattterns (this one and this one) for Stashlet, and got seduced by some unspeakably gorgeous wrist warmers made in Lang Milli Colore. They looked very cleverly knitted but turned out to be really simple crochet cleverly applied (if you see what I mean). The pattern came  free with the yarn so I cast on one of the Drops patterns and then spent the rest of the weekend crocheting. The result was...

I will not tell you about the ridiculous poses I had to get in to get photos of these without the shadow of my head in them.

The pattern is by the Irish designer AiobheNi who also teaches crochet classes at Winnies and is lovely and helpful, especially to a newby crochet pattern reader like me. The pattern is not on her website but you can get it at Winnies if you buy the yarn. You can also see a photo of another version of the wristwarmers here on Ravelry.

If I crocheted another pair, I think I would make them longer but apart from that I can't fault them, and they crochet up in an evening (unless, like me, your counting keeps going arwy and you have to keep pulling out rows) so would make a perfect last minute present.

Oh, and just to comnplete all the info, the Milli Colore is 50% pure new wool and 50% acrylic, and I used colour 697.0065. I am totally besotted with this colour and I think I'm going to knit myself a jumper with it so watch this space (although the Toddler Caveat applies, ie. don't watch too hard as it might take me a while).

 

Quick question

I've been window shopping on Etsy and came across some Japanese crochet and knitting books. The clothes are, of course, lovely, and I would love to try them.

Has anyone out there in Stashavalanche-reading blog land used Japanese crochet or knitting patterns? The diagrams seem to be pretty thorough; are they enough to be able to work the pattern out?

I'd love to hear about any clothes you have made from these types of books.