This week I’ve been mainly working on the Jewelspun shawl. It has grown a lot and I’m loving the colour changes. I’m going to keep going until the ball runs out and then it will be done 🙂 It’s so simple and soothing to make and so pretty!
I had a belated birthday present this week after somehow a parcel was lost. It was 2 hanks of pretty blue yarn from my sister. It’s called Moonlight Medley from a company called Jubilee Yarn that I hadn’t heard of before. It’s 50% wool and 50% acrylic and is DK weight with 200g per hank. It feels nice and soft and had a lovely fade through the shades of blue, a bit like a Scheepjes Whirl. Unfortunately, due to the way this hank was constructed, it was an absolute nightmare to wind, even though it looked so pretty! There were 7 loops of yarn which were all attached to each other in a single length of yarn. I’d never seen a hank like this before so wasn’t sure how to approach it. I started by trying to wind it on my winder, but because it was too small for the swift that really didn’t work well at all. And when I tried to wind from one of them while attached to the next, things kept getting tangled with the other end of the yarn (where it joined the next loop) getting caught up with the end I was trying to wind. Things got into a big mess with the first hank and I ended up separating the loops from each other and winding it by hand. Some parts were so tangled at this point that I cut some even from within the same loop! The 2nd hank was smoother than the first as I had a better idea of what I was doing, but it still took me ages and kept managing to tangle itself up. All in all it must have been approaching 5 hours total, although not all in one sitting!
After all that, I was determined that I was going to make something cool out of this! So I was browsing Ravelry looking for inspiration and I saw a shawl that used 2 cakes of colour changing yarn with stripes of both so the different parts of the 2 fades contrasted and faded together (if you see what I mean). I liked this idea, but it was in regular crochet and I wanted to use my lovely new Tunisian hooks & cables, so came up with the idea of a simple stitch triangular shawl (yes, it appears I am now obsessed with triangular shawls and Tunisian crochet!) using yarn from opposite ends of the fades in stripes. Originally it was going to be forward pass (fp) one colour, return pass (rp) the other colour then switch again, but that would have ended up with the yarn at the wrong ends so I came up with a plan where I did light blue fp, dark blue rp and next fp, light blue rp & next fp, etc. If you don’t know much about Tunisian crochet, you’ll be very confused now, but suffice to say it makes some cool stripes with the colours switching round.
Once I reach the end of these two colours we’ll have the dark blue getting one step lighter and the light blue getting one step darker, and so on. In the middle somewhere we’ll end up with an area where they are both the same colour I guess, and perhaps at this point I’ll switch to decreasing and the triangle will get smaller again. We’ll see how it goes.
In jigsaw news I have finished the first of my birthday jigsaws, really enjoyable with all the animals, and a very nice quality jigsaw.
I’ve now made a start on the 2nd birthday jigsaw which I hadn’t realised was made with “smart cut technology” which means that the pieces are all kinds of weird shapes rather than the standard jigsaw shapes. This makes it a fair bit more challenging, which is cool. I’ve found it more difficult than usual to find all the edge pieces as there are some parts that look like they might be edges and actually there’s the slightest curve and it’s not actually an edge at all! Fun to find something new in my jigsawing!
Suzy Clair's Cosy Corner 