AND SO LIFE CARRIES ON... 1st December 2021

An audio clip will appear  HERE  in due course...

I am always amazed at just how much crochet I churn out.  I suppose it IS my main occupation now, but there are quite long stretches where things just 'progress' towards completion: Work In Progress, or WIPs as they seem to be known.  Well, of late, several projects seem to have come together in quite quick succession:-

In the wake of my Ocean Waves wrap came a scarf using the same pattern and yarn, but in a slightly different way:

On the tail of that was probably my favourite so far - a pineapple shawl worked in hand-dyed alpaca-and-silk yarn, to a pattern by my guru Fiber Spider on YouTube.

It's 6 ft by 3 ft 6" and thus this photo really only shows half... The upper photo shows the blocking process, where one dampens the shawl and stretches it out to open up the lace-work.  As you can see, an awful lot of pins are involved, but the end product IS worth it.  It's one of those patterns that seems initially complicated, but once you've been working it for a while a rhythm clicks in and away you go.

Quickly followed by what I'm calling the Wavy Way scarf; very similar to certain short row scarves I used to knit, but this one simply uses the height difference between single, half-double, double and treble crochets (USA terms).  The yarn I got from Hobbii, but found it wasn't quite as lovely as I'd hoped.  In the end it looks great in this pattern, which shows off the colour changes to great effect:

Then I finally finished a shawl I've been working on - picking up and putting down - on and off for several weeks.  The yarn is made from recycled materials: wool, cotton and plastic if I remember correctly, which I hand dyed... The yarn had a nice fluff to it fresh from the factory but, alas, some of that went with all the washing...

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself some frightfully expensive yarn produced by Rowan from silk, cashmere and mohair.  To say it is soft is an understatement - and now I have to find a pattern worthy of it.  I have to bear in mind that the mohair element will make it extraordinarily hard to unpick - or frog - so anything with lots of chains is out I think...  

Anyway, there's no hurry - I have several other projects in the pipeline........  One of which will be to make myself another pair of trousers.  They will be hand-sewn as that seems to be how I do everything these days.  Some fabric samples from Croft Mills have just arrived (below).  It will be good to have something other than 'just' crochet (and music) to occupy me.

Not the greatest of photos, but from the left we have:

Navy cotton moleskin; thin tweed; thick tweed, thin but luscious wool, soft but heavy wool/poly; two lots of 'boiled wool'  - no good for trousers (too stretchy) but perhaps suitable for a soft-shell jacket.  Trouble is, with the exception of the cotton moleskin, they are all around £30/m AND I would need to line them, as wool against my skin makes me itch.  So... I may in fact opt for something in the line of one of their heavy  corduroys...

So dear reader, if you have not yet mastered the art of crochet, then now is a VERY good time to start.  Forget the dreaded 'granny square' - I would like to say they are a thing of the past but, I fear, so long as there is a need for charity blankets, the 'granny' will remain with us!  But there are some excellent teachers out there in YouTube land - my favourites are probably Fiber Spider, Hooked by Robin, TP Yarns, The Crochet Crowd to name a few. If you ARE interested, just spend an evening surfing through 'beginner' channels until you find someone you like - whose voice you like - and remember that it takes a certain amount of time and persistence (like anything worth doing).  The really good thing about crochet is that it is SO easy to undo when one makes a mistake!  Remember, I only started back in the first UK lockdown in 2020, so  Good Luck!