Five not-golden rings

I’ve been knitting assiduously this year, but I haven’t been finishing a lot of projects, and I tend to blog only when I have a completed item to show off. So, hey, just letting you know that I finished something for the first time in months.

Last year, I learned about the Worldwide Annual Solstice Advent Sun Wheel Celebration. I signed up for updates and watched it go by via other people’s Facebook posts, and it looked meaningful and interesting, but I had no experience with observing Advent and anyway, it was 2020 (’nuff said). This year, with a bit more time to prepare, I decided to try it.

Bare minimum, I needed five candles. Any five would’ve done—I saw all sorts of beautiful variations in other people’s photos—but I used flameless tapers. (I’m a bit of a pyrophobe, plus I’ve never been quite sure how candles fit into the nonsmoking terms in my lease.) One limitation of flameless candles, though, is that they don’t come in as many colors as real ones do. Not that there’s anything wrong with snow-white candles, but having gotten them set up, I realized I wanted more. In a perfect world, I’d have flameless candles in the colors associated with the four elements and Spirit. In the real world, I was going to have to improvise.

My first idea would’ve been easy if it’d worked: get ribbons in the five colors and tie them around the candles. But my local Michaels was having the same supply chain issues as every other store and the ribbons aisle looked distinctly picked-over. Wandering the store, trying to think of an alternative, I found embroidery floss. Which, yes, I could also have tied around the candles. But embroidery floss looks a lot more like yarn than ribbon does, and while searching for the “perfect” shade of each color, I thought I might try crocheting it instead.

And lo, I have candle rings.

To make these, I crocheted strips of single crochet stitches that were 5 stitches wide and 24 rows long. You can alter the width to whatever you find attractive. The strip should be long enough that when joined into a ring, it’s big enough that you can slip it over the end of the candle, but tight enough that it’ll stay where you want it without dropping to the bottom of the candle. I wouldn’t recommend these rings for real candles because it’d be easy to forget about them and cotton is flammable.

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Candle Rings for Flameless Candles
Pattern: see above
Yarn: DMC Six-Strand Embroidery Floss
Colors: 444 (Dark Lemon), 321 (Red), 796 (Dark Royal Blue), 909 (Very Dark Emerald Green), 3837 (Ultra Dark Lavender)
Hook: B (2.25 mm)

Cowl comfort crochet

I am getting into a groove (rut?) with cowls made from super-bulky yarn that hug my neck and shoulders. I’ve made a few versions of The One-Ball-of-Rasta Version of the Triangle Cowl (indigo! blue-green! pink!), and I may make some more in the future. But in making them, I learned that Malabrigo Rasta and Malabrigo Caracol don’t behave identically when knitted, even though they look a lot alike, and that the knitted Caracol cowl I’d made was limper than I liked. Uh-oh.

I wanted to use Caracol again, but it presented me with a couple of challenges. Avoiding a limp final product was my primary goal. Also, this particular hank was a tonal deep blue, so dark that seed stitch would be a waste of time. I didn’t think garter stitch would work either: the texture would still be lost in the yarn, plus, it would need to be stretched to death to go around my neck which would just make the cowl look strained. Stockinette stitch, of course, was going to curl inconveniently.

Okay, maybe don’t knit the next cowl. How about crochet, my go-to craft when I want a final product that’s more firm than stretchy?

Searching Ravelry, I didn’t see any crocheted cowls that were just right. But the pattern for The One-Ball-of-Rasta Version of the Triangle Cowl was about as straightforward as a project gets: knit a strip, block it, sew the ends together, and sew buttons on it if desired. Surely I could do the same in crochet without a pattern. If there was no point in doing fancy knitted stitches because they’d be lost in the yarn, there wasn’t any point to doing fancy crocheted ones either, so I decided to use single crochet. I tried out a few crochet hooks until I got a working gauge that I figured would hold the Caracol together but wouldn’t be too tight to crochet comfortably. And then, using my knitted cowls as templates, I copied them in single crochet. And lo, the Deep Blue Cowl was created.

Deep Blue Cowl

That was in late 2018. Apparently I was so distracted by how much I liked the cowl that I completely forgot to blog about it. Nor did I do anything organized like take notes on my made-up pattern. So late last year, when I wanted to make another cowl using a hank of Rasta, I had to reinvent it. At least I’d recorded the hook size in my Ravelry notes, plus this time, I had a crocheted cowl to work from. And now I have two:

Natural Crochet Cowl

So here’s that barebones pattern:

Crochet Cowl

Row 1: Ch 15. 1 sc in 2nd ch from hook, 1 sc in each ch to end, turn (14 sc).
Row 2: Ch 1, sc in each sc, turn.
Repeat Row 2 until you’ve used up most of the yarn, leaving a tail long enough to sl st the end to the side of the other end. Pull the yarn end through the last loop to fasten it, but don’t cut it. Block, stretching the piece as needed. When dry, sl st one end to the side of the other end. Sew on buttons if wanted.

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Deep Blue Cowl
Pattern: personal pattern; inspired by The One-Ball-of-Rasta Version of the Triangle Cowl
Yarn: Malabrigo Caracol
Colorway: 150 Azul Profundo
Hook: 12 mm

Natural Crochet Cowl
Pattern: personal pattern; inspired by The One-Ball-of-Rasta Version of the Triangle Cowl
Yarn: Malabrigo Rasta
Colorway: 63 Natural
Hook: 12 mm

Fortune’s Wrap

Once upon a time—some unremembered year before I joined Ravelry, so probably in the early 2000s—I bought 10 hanks of Koigu Kersti Merino Crepe. I hadn’t been planning to buy it when I went to the yarn store—I’d never even heard of it before—but they were closing it out, there was enough of it to make a vest, and I liked the colorway.

Fast-forward 15 years or so. I moved a couple of times; the yarn moved with me. I’d see it every now and then when I was digging through my stash looking for something else, and I’d feel a bit guilty that I wasn’t using it. More than once, I seriously contemplated getting rid of it, but then I’d have an attack of the sunk cost fallacy and end up reburying it in the stash and pushing it out of sight for a while longer.

A few years ago, I discovered the Fortune’s Shawlette pattern. I’ve liked it enough to make four of them so far. (I admit I’ve liked some of the finished shawlettes more than others.) Crochet often makes a stiff fabric without a lot of stretch, but between fingering weight yarn and a very open stitch, the Fortune’s Shawlette is drapey enough to make wearing it easy. And because it’s worked sort of like entrelac, it breaks up the color in a short-repeat yarn differently than knitted rows do, in a way I find quite attractive.

With all that going for it, you’ve probably guessed that I was happy to learn that the designer had taken this pattern stitch and turned it into a wrap. I got thrown a bit at first, though, because this pattern uses DK yarn. Also, the designer measures the gauge differently than she did in the Fortune’s Shawlette pattern. For the shawlette, the gauge may be measured on an unblocked swatch—at least that’s how I measured it, and the shawlettes have come out just fine. The pattern for the wrap, however, specifies a blocked gauge swatch. Somehow, that threw me, and that delayed my starting the project by several months. But I didn’t forget about it, and eventually I decided that, like the shawlette, I’d work with whatever hook was large enough that I’d feel as if I was about to lose control of the crocheting. That doesn’t sound all that promising when I write it out like that, but it worked—I even had to drop down two hook sizes from what the designer had used.

The wrap was bigger than I’d imagined. (Because why do anything sensible before starting like use a tape measure to see just how long the finished dimensions would be?) I’d hoped to use up all ten hanks of the yarn, but I’m short, and at nine hanks, it was sufficiently large for my height. As lacy things do, it grew during blocking, going from 17″ x 66″ to 27″ x 86″ (43 x 168 cm to 69 x 218 cm). I suspect I’m going to need to use a shawl pin to fix it in place for anything more active than posing for a photo.

There’s a warm glowing feeling at having finally used a yarn that’s been in your stash long enough for its origins to have almost been forgotten. Although my stash is large enough that it doesn’t seem at all smaller with this yarn out of it…

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Fortune’s Wrap
Pattern: Fortune’s Wrap
Yarn: Koigu Kersti Merino Crepe
Colorway: K451
Hook: K (6.5 mm)

Yarnbombing!

My friend S. recently acquired a walker. Now a walker is a good and useful thing and its benefits are many, but it must be admitted that this particular walker was not all that exciting, aesthetically speaking. S. is a passionate, inspired woman. This walker was about as passionate and inspired as gruel.

Obviously it needed to be yarnbombed.

• 

• 

Consider it a collaborative effort. I did the actual crocheting, but E. and Suncat and I chose the yarns together. S. knew we were doing this—we got her informed permission before embarking on this project—but the details could still be a surprise.

Two fun yarns: the solid purple one on the horizontal bar has a sparkly metallic thread in it, while the one on the vertical bar mixes green and purple nicely.

As you may have guessed, S.’s favorite color is purple.

This was supposed to be a blue and purple yarn. Somehow all the purple avoided getting into this piece.

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Yarnbombed Walker
Yarn: Caron Simply Soft Paints
Colorway: Oceana
Hook: 4.5 mm

Yarn: Caron Simply Soft Party
Colorway: Purple Sparkle
Hook: 4.5 mm

Yarn: Lion Brand Homespun Stripes
Colorway: Petunia Stripes
Hook: K (6.5 mm)

Well-loved patterns

With summer over, I found myself with more time to manipulate yarn. I had fun using patterns I already loved, mainly to see how they looked in new yarns.

First up, another Fortune’s Shawlette. By now, three times in, I’m quite familiar with the pattern. But when I saw this colorway, I knew instantly that I wanted it and that this is what I wanted to do with it. I mean, seriously, it’s in shades of blue, pink, and purple. That’s basically the heart of my wardrobe—how could I not use this yarn? And the joy of the Fortune’s Shawlette pattern is that variegated yarn shows up as spots of color rather than streaks.

Fortune’s Shawlette

And after that, as promised, another Be Simple Variations shawlette. I’d planned to make another one of these, and maybe more than one, since they wear well in the sense of not falling easily off my shoulders. The last thing I made in this colorway just never was much fun to wear, and I wanted something that I actually liked. The colorway is out of production, so I figured this was my last shot at it. There’s the tiniest hint of orange in it, a color I so rarely get to wear, but with this much pink and purple around it, I can carry it off.

Be Simple Variations shawlette (pink)…

…and a close-up of the stitch pattern and the picot bind-off.

And there they are: two more shawlettes in favorite styles and my shawlette drawer that much closer to bursting at the seams. Oh yeah, wrecked furniture—now that’ll give me a sense of accomplishment!

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Fortune’s Shawlette (blue/pink/purple)
Pattern: Fortune’s Shawlette
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock
Color: 26 Wisteria
Hook: 7.0 mm

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Be Simple Variations (pink)
Pattern: Be Simple Variations
Yarn: Dream in Color Smooshy
Color: Cool Fire
Needles: 5 (3.75 mm)

Fortune’s Shawlette: the sequel

As wearing my first Fortune’s Shawlette proved to be as fun as I thought it would be, I went ahead and made a second one. This time, I was determined to fix all the (mostly minor) problems I’d had with the first one. To start with, I was going to have enough yarn. That was fairly easy to manage since most skeins of fingering weight yarn have more than 375 yards, the amount in a hank of Hawthorne. I was also determined to get the right gauge. I’d thought I was getting the right gauge last time, only to discover that I’d tightened up as I crocheted, and was getting 7 blocks to 4 inches rather than 6 blocks. I’m sure the truly dedicated soul would have ripped out and started over, but I was too close to the end to consider that an option. On the bright side, I’m obviously outgrowing my perfectionistic impulses. 😀

Gray, pink, and fun.

I ended up using a generous hank of Shepherd Sock. The model hank has 435 yards to 100 g, but I weighed mine and it came in at 108 g: 470 yards to play with! Looking at the yarn in the hank, I’d thought it was about 75% gray and 25% pink, but once I started working with it, it was closer to a 50/50 split. Fine with me: it looked great in the shawlette.

I like the shawlette both from a distance and up close.

Getting gauge was a bit more of a struggle. I really am a tight crocheter, it seems. I had to go up to a 7.0 mm hook, and when the only one I had turned out to hate the yarn, I bought another and pressed on. The extra yardage helped. I was able to fit in another row, and this time I remembered to add the final row before starting the edging. It makes the top edge smooth rather than with little corner points poking up. I’ll have to test this further, but I think if I reserve 20% of my yarn, that will be enough to work the final row and the edging on future shawlettes.

Shawlette in action.

Yes, “future shawlettes.” I’m plotting more of them. Just not right this moment. Maybe one in green? Purple? Green and purple? (I have a yarn with both those colors in it.)

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Fortune’s Shawlette (gray/pink)
Pattern: Fortune’s Shawlette
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock
Color: Once Upon a Time
Hook: 7.0 mm

Fortune’s Shawlette

This project is Facebook’s fault. Years ago, I “liked” some knitting and crochet-related pages. Now Facebook occasionally tosses “suggested posts” about knitting and crochet onto my Wall. As this beats all the ads they’ve ever shown me about Older Men Seek Faithful Women (shudder), I haven’t been complaining. Some of these posts come from Moogly, and if the pattern looks appealing, I track it down on Ravelry and favorite it, which is how I met the Fortune’s Shawlette.

In its full glory.

All that remained.

What called to me about it? It’s crochet, and I’m still in a mighty crocheting mood. It uses one hank of KnitPicks’ Hawthorne Fingering: I had two single hanks waiting to be used in great patterns. It was lacy: a change from what I’ve been making lately. And above and beyond all that: I saw it and I wanted it.

Unfortunately, fortune was not as kind to me as it was to the designer. I knew from the get-go that making the shawlette exactly as written was chancy because the designer had said she finished with only one yard left, and when I read through the project notes on Ravelry, most people who’d used Hawthorne had run out of yarn before the end. I had to rip back two rows to gain enough yarn to do the edging. Later, I realized I’d left out the last row, but judging from how much yarn I have left, I don’t think I could’ve done the entire edging if I’d remembered it. It’s along the top edge of the shawlette, though, the part that’s bunched up around my neck, and the only time the loss is obvious is in photos when the shawlette is laid flat.

Pre-glory: unblocked.

I like how the pattern stitch shows off the color bursts in the yarn. This is a variant of a crochet stitch called the Diagonal Box Stitch. For those of you who knit, it’s worked somewhat like entrelac: you make rows of little squares tilted diagonally. If you knitted or crocheted this yarn the “normal” way, the patches of bright blue would show up as bright lines in your knitting, but this stitch turns them into little boxes instead. Cool.

Up close.

Result? Love at first sight. I wet-blocked it, pinned it out, stood back to make sure everything was symmetrical, and wanted it dry right that moment so that I could try it on. I’m not going to start another one until I finish another current project, but that shouldn’t take all that long. Meanwhile I’m studying my stash, trying to find another excellent yarn—one with more yardage. I’m determined that my next Fortune’s Shawlette will be full size, so even though my other hank of Hawthorne would look great in this pattern, I’m going to use something with at least 420 yards (384 m) to it. (A hank of Hawthorne has 357 yards (326 m). Too much for a cowl, not enough for a shawlette. Aargh.) But trust me, it’s not like I’m lacking viable candidates in my overflowing stash. Depending on how long my passion lasts for this pattern, I may be making several of these.

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Fortune’s Shawlette
Pattern: Fortune’s Shawlette
Yarn: Knit Picks Hawthorne Fingering
Color: Irvington
Hook: J (6.0 mm)

Alkira Cowl

More crochet! Yes, I still knit. I’ll get a knitting post or two up here sooner or later.

This is one of those patterns that can be customized to different weights of yarn and made in different sizes. I was in the mood to use up a skein of sock yarn, and it’s not hard to find shawl and cowl and scarf patterns for about 100 g of fingering weight yarn. But I wanted to use that skein of Smooshy I’d tried to use for a Damson and which had proven to be a bit short. A design that would let me stop whenever I ran low on yarn and not at a specific point in a pattern was perfect.

I’d say the pattern was fairly easy to crochet. May Cheang deserves credit not only for the pattern itself, but for presenting it in such an easy-to-understand format. She included a photograph for practically every step. (The things you can do when you’re not limited by printing costs.) This was great, since she uses what is possibly a unique pattern stitch. It’s much easier to follow instructions that say “Insert the hook here, here, and here” when a photo clearly indicates where each “here” is. Many crochet patterns include charts, but I’m not sure even a good chart would have been much help with parts of this stitch.

Okay, Cheang adores the pearl edging, but it was a lot fussier than I wanted to deal with. The cowl may be a bit smaller in circumference than I’d intended just because I was tired of making one little pearl after another. But the finished effect is a nice change from standard chained edgings, and it was great not to have to count zillions of chain stitches and hope I wasn’t off by one or something. Still, if I do this cowl again, I’ll probably use a different edging.

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Alkira Cowl
Pattern: Alkira Cowl
Yarn: Dream in Color Smooshy
Color: Cool Fire
Hook: G (4.0 mm)

Elnora Cowl

It could be argued that someone with multiple tubs of yarn in her stash doesn’t need more yarn. I try to remind myself of this whenever I go somewhere where yarn is being sold. This reminder worked as well as it always does when I went to Shepherds’ Harvest this year: I came home with two balls of yarn. At least I also came home with a plan for one of them. Annie Modesitt had a stand, and along with the yarn she was selling, there was a crocheted cowl on display. The pattern was free on her blog, I’ve been wanting to do more crochet, the cowl only took one ball of yarn…a sale was made.

Modesitt warns you that the pattern hasn’t been tested. It worked fairly well, although I did better following the chart once I got started than trying to figure out where I was in the written directions. The two weren’t exactly alike when it came to joining the round, but generally I only needed the written directions for a couple of rows of a six-row pattern. But I’m mystified as to how she got the gauge she did for the original cowl. The pattern gauge is 8 sc/1″ (2.4 cm), using a size F (3.75 mm) hook, with the option of using a G (4.0 mm) hook for the first and last rounds to keep them from being too tight. I’m a tight crocheter, so I figured that if anything, I’d go up a size. Instead, the best I could manage was 7 sc/1″ on a size B (2.25 mm) hook, the smallest hook in my set. I refused to drop down to steel hooks to work with fingering yarn! So I resized the cowl for the gauge I was getting, eliminating a couple of pattern repeats. I want to see the display model again and see what 8 sc/1″ looks like! How did she crochet that yarn that tightly on an F hook?

I should have seen one problem ahead of time. This is a gradated yarn, but it’s also symmetrically dyed instead of starting at one color and ending in another. Since the cowl needs to end on a specific round of the pattern stitch in order to look right, I didn’t make it all the way through the yarn. So I have less purple at the top than at the bottom. Not that that’s going to be apparent when I’m wearing it, but I liked the purple and would’ve liked to have seen more of it. I’m happy to report that the yarn texture improved after its first wash. I’m wondering if the yarn started life as a sock blank to be dyed. Whatever its origins, it looked and acted as though it had been knitted and then unraveled, with a limp, unspun look. But the tight gauge kept that from getting out of hand, and then it bounced back after it had soaked in water for a while—at least until I stretched the heck out of it while blocking it to open up the mesh. The yarn, a merino/bamboo/nylon blend, feels nice, although the tight gauge robs it of a bit of its softness. With this pattern stitch, it has a nice drape.

And I’m still in a mood to crochet, so on to another crocheted cowl pattern! I don’t know why I even bother to maintain a queue on Ravelry. When it’s time for a new project, I look over the queue, decide I’m not in the mood for anything on it, and go off to browse patterns until I find something entirely unexpected. Then I put it into the queue at #1. Is that cheating?

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Elnora Cowl
Pattern: Elnora Cowl
Yarn: ModeKnit Yarn ModeSock Flow
Color: Hydrangea
Hook: B (2.25 mm)

Feeling virtuous

There’s nothing quite like the warm glow of having used yarn from a failed project. Last year, I decided to make the Tru Love Bites cowl and bought a hank of the recommended yarn: Lorna’s Laces Sportmate. When the cowl failed and I frogged it, I dutifully balled the yarn up and tossed it back in the stash. Now what it was supposed to do was sink into the depths, not to be seen again until after I’d finished the grieving process. As my stash fills half a closet, there were plenty of places for it to go missing. Instead, you’d think I’d deliberately planted it front and center. It seemed like every time I went into the stash for something, I’d run into it. After a few rounds of this, I figured I’d better either get rid of it entirely or make something else out of it, since being ambushed with bitter memories was doing nothing for my creative impulses.

Off to Ravelry’s pattern browse. My requirements were simple: a pattern that looked at least moderately interesting, that used no more than 270 yards (247 m) of sportweight yarn (all I had to work with, since I refused to buy another hank of this yarn), and was free (I was feeling rather miserly about this project—hadn’t I sunk enough time and money into its predecessor?). This cowl looked pretty, peeking out from a collar on the sample photo. And it edged out the competition by being a crochet project—I keep meaning to do more crochet!

The project itself was fairly simple. It’s worked in the round and the join gradually slips to the left so you don’t have an obvious line down the back. It’s a nice pattern stitch, but you need to put a bit of distance between you and it to see it clearly. While I was crocheting the cowl, at first I thought it looked dull and flat compared to the photos in the pattern. Then one day I laid it down, walked away to get something, saw it as I returned, and the pattern popped out when I was several feet away. But here’s the puzzling part: the pattern calls for 210 – 220 yards (192 – 201 m) of sportweight yarn, which I figured would be a good inroad into my hank of Sportmate. I got gauge and I made the cowl the same size as the pattern called for. A little taller even, since I got swept up in the pattern and overshot the height by about an inch. Yet I’ve only used 162 yards (148 m). So I haven’t got enough to do much of anything else with, but too much to casually toss in the trash: aargh!

The Sportmate makes this “autumn” cowl light and airy. A Cozy Summer Cowl, perhaps?

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Pink Marble Cowl
Pattern: Cozy Autumn Cowl
Yarn: Lorna’s Laces Sportmate
Color: Galena
Hook: F (3.75 mm)