Lace

I think we tend to forget how things used to be made. You can walk into any craft store and pick up a piece of lace for decoration, and it's not expensive. Some of it is, some of it is dirt cheap. Most of it is machine made: I don't know if any lace you can buy in a store is handmade anymore.

Lace is one of those things that you can crochet: not fine "Irish" lace, but a lot of cotton lace (doileys, fine bedspreads) is crochet, if it's handmade. I've always looked at the beautiful pieces that some people have made and gone "Gosh, I'm not sure I could do that". I worked with some heavy cotton last year and made the little fan bookmark:

Which I was super proud of. But I haven't tried any more lace/fine work again.

So when I picked up some 2/3ply remnants from Bendigo Woollen Mills, I ... I have no idea why I picked them up! *laugh* They're beautiful and very very fine.

Beautiful soft colours, very soft yarn. You can see why I got some :)

I decided that I'd try to make up a pattern in a book that I'd gotten out of my local library. Foundation row: 338ch. Did not help that I had to completely unravel two rows on my 2nd attempt at the piece.

*head/palm*

It's got two side pieces and a centre piece that 'joins' the two edgings together. I'm partway through the centre piece, but I had to just put it aside for a bit. The yarn is so fine that I was having a hard time working it up.

Not exactly the kind of lacework I was talking about earlier, but you can see the similarity. It's very fine work that's going to take a bit of time to get done. I hope the recipient likes it ;)

A little project...

I've picked up a little project.

I love the Willow square. As evidenced by how many I made last year. I wanted to make it into a cushion, so I'm doing a front panel of 9 Willow squares, and then I have to figure out the back. I'm thinking maybe just a plain TR in the light colour (which is actually a very light grey and works better than the white that I was thinking), but now I'm thinking a little ripple in the grey with thin strips of the two different colours between them.

Different coasters & different ways to start a row

I'm on a coaster bender at the moment. (Probably has something to do with the small business I've started - LizzieBee: Handmade) 

Nice, huh :) 

Kinda my own pattern as well. Started using a pattern from a book, but it had a funny second row, so I kept making new coasters to see how it worked versus a different way to hook the coaster up. They're all made with the Morris & Sons Avalon 100% cotton. The pink & purple ones are using the 4ply and the green was made with a bit of leftover 8ply. 

You can see the different the ply makes to the coaster. The 4ply coasters were worked with a 3.5m hook and the 8ply coaster was worked with a 4mm hook. They are all the same diameter, however the green 8ply coaster has an entire round less. I've also worked a round of dc around the entire coaster to give it a defined edge, something I think that the coasters need. 

One of the other things I wanted to trial out was a different way to start of a new row in the round.  

If you have a look at the above picture, you can see that the two circles look a bit different. There's a pronounced downwards line in the coaster on the left, but the coaster on the right fails to have this.

Traditionally, you start a new row with ch stitches. I worked this coaster in treble crochet, so my new starting row was 3-ch. But I'm not particularly happy with it, since you can visibly see where the new rows start. So, I asked a few of the girls on the Krista group that I'm a member of, and the majority who answered said they started with a dc+ch. Some of them started with a dc+1ch, and some of them started with a dc+2ch. 

You can see with the right coaster that the starting row is more camouflaged than the coaster on the right. I was much happier with the way this looks, so I'm going to continue working a dc+2ch with a new row from now on. I have to do a bit of experimenting to see how it works on a piece with rows, rather than in a round.  

Coasters

The best part of being able to create lovely things is creating them for people, specifically friends. 

I hooked up these coasters for one of my best friends as a christmas present, and they were received with joy, which made me so happy.

I decided to make them up in two kinds of yarn, so there was a nice difference in the set, even though they were all purple. The darker eggplant colour is Panda 8ply DK acrylic, and the lighter mauve is from Bendigo Woolleen mills, and is their 8ply luxury wool in 'plum'. I just love the Bendigo yarn.

This year I've decided to only buy good quality yarn ( I have a bad habit of wandering into Spotlight and grabbing some acrylic because it's cheap... ) and I think I might end up buying only yarn from Bendigo. I just love their Luxury wool & their cotton yarn as well and it's such a high quality. And not only that, I've decided to donate a whole heap of yarn off to a project that's always happy to have donated yarn. So today, I sorted out two little boxes of yarn (the Ikea box I keep by the sofa with all my current bits & bobs in, and a bigger woven basket that has older yarn in it) and ended up with an entire square shopping bag of yarn, ready to go! I feel better already :) 

Block #72: Seville

Today's block, from Jan Eaton's 200 Crochet Blocks...

Is block #74: Seville.

This block let me learn a new skill: the lace features you can see that are in a cross shape, are in fact lengths of chain from each round and gathered together with a dc in a higher row. I quite like how it works. 

Errors in Patterns

I was working up a new square from "200 Crochet Blocks..." on Monday when I realised it was happening again. The pattern was misleading me.



I'd just finished working up #2: Tiny Textures, and had moved onto #10: Openwork Square. Straight away, there was something different. #10 starts with ch 34. #2? ch 32. That might not be too bad, I can hear you thinking. #10 might begin with a row 1 of TR & #2 might have begun with DC. Except it didn't. Both squares started off with a foundation row of double crochet. Which meant that by the end of it, #2 Tiny Textures had a base row of 31 and #10 Openwork Square had a base row of 33.

In any given world, if you work up these squares with the SAME yarn and the SAME hook, the square that has a base width of 33 stitches is GOING to be bigger than the square with a base width of 31.

Look:

The completed square is the one I featured on Monday: #2: Tiny Textures. The beginning-as-yet-unmade-square strip featured is the beginning of #10: Openwork Square. It's only up to row2, which means I've worked the 34 ch, turned, worked dc's along & ended up with 33dc. Then I worked row 1 (the treble lacey row) & row 2, which is where I really ran into the ... trouble.

Row 2 reads thus: 1ch, 1dc into first tr, 2dc into each 1ch sp along row, ending with 2dc into 1ch sp formed by turning ch, turn (33dc).

Which would work, if row 1 hadn't read like this: 4ch (counts as 1tr, 1ch), miss 1dc, tr into next dc *1ch, missing 1dc, 1tr into next dc; rep from * to end, turn.

The little pattern repeats itself along and works itself over 2dc's of the previous row. (1tr, ch1 missing a dc.) Row 2 has you working 3 (THREE) stitches into each of the 2dc space of that foundation row. This means you end up with a count that looks like this:

See how much LONGER the 33dc wide strip became with row 2? It ended up being 44dc wide with those extra dc's added in.

This is WHY, when you work up a new pattern or square, you do a quick trial run first. Does the square work up correctly? Is it the same size as the other one? I've talked about this before, last year when I posted about "blocks that should match, but don't" funnily enough about a few other blocks from 200 Crochet Blocks. It's not that this block is incorrect - in fact it's perfectly fine. It's just that it's size in relation to other blocks is different. If you make it up before hand and notice this sort of size error, it's then relatively easy to adjust the pattern to fit your other squares.

This book is terrific. I can't recommend it enough to people who like to crochet, and especially to learners. But don't open the book and expect to be able to work up every block to the same size. It's not going to happen. The best of intentions can sometime backfire, and even experts like Jan Eaton can sometimes end up with errors in their work.

Block #71: Tiny Textures

How 'bout this: starting off the new year with a new block :)

From Jan Eaton's "200 Crochet Blocks..." Block #2: Tiny Textures.

I kind of feel like I want to work this up again, in a plain cream yarn. I love this yarn. It's the same one I did my other block last week in: the 100% variegated cotton from Morris & Sons. But because it's beautifully variegated, you almost can't see the texture of the block. Almost.

Should be a good dishcloth!!