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Disaster narrowly averted.

This is by far my favourite yarn in my entire collection. A warm salmony pink that is feminine yet not girly. It’s also gorgeous to handle and work with, warm, coarse and pliable. I am slowly developing a very strong love for Shetland wool. So it’s little wonder I wanted to make something for myself with this yarn. Greedy, yes I know! But how decadent…

I started with a front panel for a vest. Now by this point I must confess – I hate measuring, anything. I am generally over confident that my approximations will be quite exact. And this from a scientist?! It’s just that measuring things means I can’t start knitting ASAP. So I casted on what I thought would be fine for my waist measurement and went to work. I love this little border pattern from Alice Starmore’s gorgeous Fairisle knitting book.

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But soon I began to realise I was being rather optimistic about my cast on. I had a few options now, and one of them was unravel the whole thing and start again. But then the other problem that I wasn’t convinced I had enough yarn to make a vest for myself made me rethink the unraveling. Now here I display another unscientific nature of my personality. I buy yarns before I have any project in mind. In fact it almost always is the other way around, the yarn inspiring the project.

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So I made the rookie decision to convert this vest panel into a beanie side panel. I was happy with its length if it were to transform into a beanie. So I set out and made a second panel exactly the same. Thus knitting my first beanie without any pattern help from the pros or circular needles.

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Then I did the stupid thing of joining the two panels in flat!…

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…realised this won’t work, and started watching some tutorials at last after eating my ego. It was at this point I knew that there was only one right thing to do, order a set of double pointed needles. I unravelled all the flat joining the top of the two panels, left the side joins intact. I then unravelled the two cast off rows and picked each stitch carefully on the double pointed needles.

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Did I make sure I had equal stitches on each needles? Yes, approximately!
This is what I have now…

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Phew! So have I learnt my lesson on making sure I know my measurements before starting? Well all I can say is, I have realised that the bigger and more ambitious the projects get the less of an escape route I will have If I don’t get more organised.

Yoga slippers

This is a little present I made for my cold feet. I use these slippers now during shavashana and they are wonderful in keeping my feet cosy not to mention very easily stuffed in my yoga bag (which is not massive as I go after work).

I adapted another slipper design to suit my yarn. As you can see from the video the yarn used by that artist is chunky and soft and my yarn was quite the opposite…fine and coarse. This is a 2ply pure Shetland wool. I have used two different colours together creating a 4ply yarn that is self patterning.

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This first set of colours is a earthy yellow and blue green yarn. As the yarn was finer than the original pattern I had to work on a flat for a few more rows than the pattern suggested and then create the wall. This was not too hard but required trial and error in increasing the stitches (all DC) to achieve a flat round rather than a wavy round. If you are working on a pattern in the round and you get a wavy round then you have probably increased one too many stitches and if your work begins to curl upwards then you have not increased enough. Use this guide on any yarn rather than being restricted to using the yarn mentioned in the pattern.
Once I was happy with the flat round circumference, which I checked with the broadest part of my feet, I then stopped increasing the stitches. This created the curl automatically, then I continued the same stitch count to achieve the wall.

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I must confess that the reason this is a two colour project is because I did not have enough yarn in the first two colours to complete both the slippers. I could have had one slipper or two halves! For the second half which was essentially the part where you create the slit for the foot to slide in, I used darker shades of maroons. Once again these were 2ply Shetland wool used together.

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I quite liked this two colour pattern in the end. This was a straightforward project and I will highly recommend this to anyone who wants to move on from the basic crochet to making a wearable object.

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I wear these at yoga all the time now and this has inspired me to make a crochet yoga mat carrier bag. I recon the principles will be the same. Crochet the flat round as per the circumference of the rolled up mat and then work on the length of the wall depending on the breath of your yoga mat.
Hope you like my slippers and please let me know if this has inspired you to create something new yourself.

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The yellow and green ribbed scarf project.

This cashmere and silk blend yarn is beautiful to work with and lovely to touch. The rosewood needles give a very good controlled slip. This is among my first projects (I started three at the same time) that I have now finished.

 

The casting on…

A simple all knit and slip stitch pattern for the scarf.  This was the first time I was using a slip stitch, it is not only very easy but also creates a beautiful ribbed effect.

The complete scarf… a lovely handmade present this season.

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