shawl club – The Knackered Psycho

Meditating on friends and gratitude…

crochet, shawl book, Shawls, Uncategorized

Ok, so this is a little embarrassing and exciting in equal measure. This week I launched a kickstarter to see if I could raise funds to get the book project underway. The plan was that this weekend’s blog would be a chance to spread the word and nudge a little more interest. However, I completely underestimated the response I would get, so here I am already in a position to confirm that we have hit the minimum target I needed to get the book printed! I am so overwhelmed and buoyed by the support I have had. The kickstarter stays open for more backers until 10th Feb, when it closes and the work begins in earnest. So there is still a chance to support the project and get a copy of the book as soon as it’s printed (ahead of its official launch in May) if anyone is interested in getting involved.

The cover image for this week’s blog is an extreme close up of the shawl I designed for the Christmas shawl club, known as the Friendship Meditation Shawl. The reason for this is linked to the beading. I love crochet because it is the closest I get to meditation and I also love a bit of beading, as you know. At the end of the year it’s worth taking stock of all that you have to be grateful for, and my friends are a big part of that. So every bead is a prompt to think of a person or memory that means something to you. And this is a shawl that just grows and grows, so you can keep going and make it huge! I love the grey silk one I made using some elegance yarn that Sam dyed, but I am planning a bigger one using the yarn that Lollipop Guild Yarns put in their End of Year box. It’s loud and proud and I just need to get some beads to go with it. I love the colours in this.

I am starting to plan new shawls for this year’s shawl club that will start again soon (we plan the first box for March). I have some themes in mind but I would love to hear from you if you have an idea you would like us to explore. Last year we were really impressed by the response to the unicorn themed box. The unicorn rainbow wrap I designed to go with it is a mini-skein project, pictured here using an ombré set in blue, but for the box we went with our interpretation of a unicorn rainbow, so bright pink, orange, turquoise, blue and green. But I have to say that I love the colour blend in this one.

Shawl Club – Season 2

crochet, Shawls, Uncategorized, yarn

So I am now in full on crafting mode again after a little bit of a sabbatical. Shawl Club Season 2 (“the sequel, just when you thought it was safe to go back into your stash…) has just launched over on the Unbelieva-wool page. As I type, Shawl 1 is on the floor and on my mannequin, and I am pleased with the pattern as it is one of those easy to do and relatively easy to remember patterns.

Last season I tried to vary the style and shape of the patterns so that there was something for everyone (the patterns are all available on my Ravelry store if you want to review them). It is quite a challenge to come up with a one skein shawl, especially those that will work with shorter as well as longer length skeins. The firm favourites last time were the Thank You Shawl and the Shieldmaiden Shawl, but I also have a soft spot for the beaded arches shawlette – more of a scarf than a shawl but there is something special about that beading and it seems to be a popular shawl for gifting.

This time I have learned a lot from what I felt worked well last time and this time I also want to keep with some easy makes with the occasional challenging element from time to time (but not too often). I am trying to vary the shapes again, but it seems that you like it when I play with textures and lacework as much as I do, so expect me to revisit those themes again. I also have an idea for some colour work shawls, and as ever Sam and I are keen to use as many luxury bases as we can.

I hope you enjoy Season 2, and if you haven’t tried it before consider giving it a try. As ever, I am always here to help if you need me!

Nidhogg Shawl

crochet, patterns, Shawls, Uncategorized

Shawl 5 of Shawl Club came out about a week ago, and it is the Nidhogg Shawl. It got its name from a conversation with Hutch of Dye Candy, who commented that an early prototype looked like a dragon’s wing.

There is already a well known Dragon’s wing pattern on Ravelry so I needed a new name. With a bit of googling I came across the Nidhogg, a Norse dragon who apparently gnawed on the bodies of horrible people. For some reason that appealed to me (can’t think why…!).

Anyway, Sam dyed two colourways for this shawl – a green and black one, and a purple / red and black one, which sadly I don’t have to show you. I love this shawl – it is really adaptable to different tensions and styles. It also suits being made in softer colours and can be worn as a shallow scarf rather than a large shawl. Its all in the tension, the amount of yarn, and how much you want to block it. I love the texture it has, and it is a relatively straightforward repeat. It is just an asymmetric triangle, so you increase on one side only to get the shape. You can also add a thicker stripe down one edge with the border yarn, or leave the border off altogether.

All Change…

crochet, knitting, Shawls, socks, yarn

Small person is now at school. After a blissfully long period away from work, chaos ensues. The working day has been chopped and changed to try to fit everything in around the new routine of the school day because I don’t want small person to be stuck in after school clubs unless we really have no alternative, or because there is something she really wants to stay late to do. To be honest, I think we are doing better than I thought that we might, but already I can see that the only way I am going to get everything done this month for the day job is going to be through some very late ones where I can sneak them in. Small person is coping well, other than having a strained lunchtime relationship with a boy who claims to be allergic to peas. My insights into her world are often piecemeal and a bit surreal…

A random positive from this is that now that I am back at work I am now into the routine of crocheting in the car on the way into and out of work (not when I am driving, obviously), and to and from work meetings on the train. These regular but shortish bouts keep me on track, which is just as well as I need to test some of the shawl projects that will come out later this year, as well as crack on with some birthday and Christmas presents. I have a lot of knitting to get through on that front, so little and often will be the way to go. I think everyone will be getting socks this year…

That includes me. Maybe. I decided I needed a treat so I am working on these slox in a yarn by Made by Jude. I haven’t bought her yarns before but I saw this yarn in Etsy and fell in love with the colours in it. It has worked up even better than I dared to hope. I even have a little flame up one side of my heel. I am hoping I can replicate this colour pooling on sock number 2! Not sure whether to keep them or not but I think I will, just for a change. The response to them on my Facebook page has been great though, and I think I need to explore more of Jude’s yarns. The depth of colour in the yarn is just beautiful.

Beating Heart Wrap

crochet, patterns, Shawls, yarn

So the other thing I was working on whilst I was away last week was a quick final test of the Beating Heart Wrap. This is shawl number 4 of shawl club and I designed it a while back using yarn from Unbelievawool and Jo.Knit.Sew that I had in my stash. I am not normally a pink person but I love the way that the pink contrasts with the black and white variegated yarn. The spike stitch reminds me of an EEG trace and so that is how the wrap got its name. The shawl pin is a Knit Pro one which works well with the colours I used. The shape is a bit unconventional but when it is folded over is creates a nice shape around the shoulders.

To make it practical for shawl club, I needed to change the colours to 3 x 50g skeins. Sam sent the new colours to me a while ago, but they arrived during a particularly crazy time. Then time caught up with me and I realised that I needed to get the new colour way version done immediately. So the long drive to the south coast and the first day or so of the holiday was spent hooking up the shawl club version, which also showed off the alternative ending of a button to secure it, rather than a shawl pin. Personally I still feel a shawl pin gives you more flexibility about how to wear this, but the button is often more practical, and is certainly less expensive.

So the shawl club colours give the wrap a very different look – sugar sweet candy colours with a glittery handmade button from the amazing Cross Crafts which matched the yarn perfectly. If you fancy making this yourself, you can find the pattern here.

Re-emerging from the abyss

crochet, knitting, Shawls, socks, yarn

So, as you have noticed, things have been very quiet on the blog front. July is, for me, traditionally a month of stress – it is when all the work deadlines for the day job come into conflict, with an added topping this year of trying to get end of year gifts made for the very special women who have helped to look after my little one. In September she starts school, and so this summer is going to be extra emotional. Everything I have made doesn’t seem to be enough, or good enough, to recognise what they have done for us as a family. I said goodbye to the first of my daughter’s current nursery teachers this week. The only thing I could think to give her was the very first Thank You Shawl I ever made, as it was in her favourite colours, and it was huge. I hope that every time she puts it on, she feels hugged.

So this week should be the beginning of the end of the crazy season, assuming I can get all my work done on time. One more week and then it is Fibre East (oh my, I cannot wait), which signals the beginning of the end.

Shawl Club continues a-pace, and one of the things I can finally show you is Shawl Number 3, otherwise known as the ‘Forget Me Never’ Shawl.

Two pictures of it – the first one shows it unblocked – highly textured and cosy. The second shows it blocked (and shows nicely how much blocking can make a project grow. It is called Forget Me Never, because Sam and I agreed on a pretty forget-me-not colour way for the yarn. The pictured shawl shows the very subtle first dye of this. We subsequently decided to ramp up the colour contrasts, so the final yarn colour is a stronger blue, with purple and green accents.

I need to update my archive with this and the previous shawl, but that is a job for the summer months. I also hope to get some designing done too, so I can launch a new collection of items ready for September, when we all start looking around for ideas for Christmas present makes. It may not be a very big collection, but it will be exciting for me. This is all baby steps. I am still only 3 months into this experiment, and so far it has exceeded my expectations. I just need to keep all the plates spinning.

And of course, because I don’t know when enough is enough, I asked Phyllis from Rosebuds and Rainbows if she has a DK sock pattern, to help me with my stash busting. She sent it over – a new pattern for testing – and I used a very special neon yarn by Dye Candy, called ‘Blacklight’, to try it out. As you can see, it makes a very nice (and super quick) winter sock. Merino cashmere mix. A treat for the toes.

The pattern is now up on Ravelry as the ‘Easy Peezy Socks‘. I am already on my second pair, which I hope to finish to give as a gift to my daughter’s key worker, along with this lazy waves shawlette, which I made on retreat last year.

I am not sure if either the socks or the shawlette will hit the mark, but here’s hoping.

The featured yarn at the top of this post illustrates how I feel – a bit of colour is creeping back into the darkness and not before time. The yarn is called (perhaps appropriately enough given how crabby I have been on occasion this month) “Kill the Witch”, and it is by Lollipop Guild Yarns.

Anyway, lots more to follow soon, including some new free patterns, the end of the retro blanket pattern (you thought I had forgotten, didn’t you?), and some more videos as you seemed to enjoy my first foray into video making. I may even speak in the next one, who knows…!

Nothing clashes in nature…

Blanket, crochet, patterns, Shawls, Uncategorized

I am experiencing the rather odd sensation of starting my blog during the early evening rather than at the dead of night. This is because, in a random act of good mummy-ing (not a regular feature of my life, although it is a daily aspiration), I took my daughter to the swimming pool and then to the park. It is a warm day, and so the combination of all these things has resulted in the small one crashing early; what I had assumed would be a nap is now looking like it will be her night sleep too.

So, here I sit, rather disorientated if I am honest. I have been working on a circular blanket as a thank you gift for my daughter’s nursery, but I have run out of yellow yarn and so I have had to put that WIP down for now. I wandered out into my overgrown garden (it is too hot to start weeding) and started taking some pictures for inspiration. That is, sometimes you can get stuck in a colour rut. As much as I love rainbows and ombre colour schemes, they can get tired sometimes, and I also have a tendency to gravitate to the same colours time and again. So, it is nice to go a bit crazy and put some different colours together occasionally. I love the way you can get a mundane colour to pop or to take on a new look by changing the colours they are combined with. Colours I wouldn’t necessarily go for on paper can look amazing when used in the right proportions together.

My garden provides masses of inspiration for this. It is wild this time of year, with lots of self-seeded flowers mixed in with the intentional planting. I can take credit for none of it, as I inherited it from the previous owner of our house. It is far from formal, especially as I don’t get as much time to tidy it up as I would like, but somehow it works for me.

Shawl number 3 from Shawl Club has gone up on Ravelry (blog post reveal to follow), and the yarn is being mailed out by Unbelievawool tomorrow morning. It has also been inspired by one of the flowers that self-seeds itself though my garden, but that I have a real soft spot for. The yarn I used for the Ravelry pictures was an early play with colours which we were not entirely happy with, but the final club yarn is a wowzer, and should look amazing.

Anyway, the colours in my garden have succeeded in giving me some ideas this evening. That is, I have some ideas for new projects that I want to test and develop over the summer whilst I have some downtime from the day job. I was rummaging and re-rummaging though my drawers of yarn earlier and couldn’t decide what to do. But a little wander through my garden has done the trick. Now I just need a little time to play.

Somewhat appropriately for the remembrance activities this week, I also found these stray red poppies growing in the gravel of my path. Lest we forget.

Colour me happy…

crochet, knitting, yarn

So this has been a very odd week. Big events in the real world that have implications for my day job, my colleagues and my friends. A real sense of devastation, and disquiet for what is to come and what has already started to happen. It turns out that I live in a very different country to the one that I thought I did at the beginning of the week.

So here I am, in my yarn room, trying to come up with something to write and resisting the temptation to curl up in my chair with my yarn pets all around me, gently rocking to some suitably maudlin music. On Friday I broke my yarn ban and bought some skeins to raise my spirits. Fibre East – the yarn show that I was planning to refresh my stash at – was too far away. I needed some solace to come this week.

What has been interesting is that I have become more obsessed than before with trying to finish off projects. My latest set of socks are on the blockers, a test shawl for shawl club is blocking on mats on the floor, and I have three blanket projects that I am determined to finish before I start another project. And yet the desire to start something new that will cheer me up is overwhelming.

I dive into the yarn drawers then, to seek inspiration. I find the yarn pictured at the top of this post, the ‘colour me happy’ skein from Pollyorange that is almost too perfect to use. More rummaging, this time to find this skein of Bluefaced Leicester and Silk yarn by Lollipop Guild Yarns.

It is another skein I am keeping to make something very special for myself. For now I just wanted to remind myself of what it looked and felt like. I turned over the tag to see what the name of the yarn was. ‘Premonitions’. How appropriate.

I will stick to the plan – finish those blankets, get shawl 6 nailed, continue to stashbust. I need to focus on what makes me happy, and hang onto the fantasy of one day being able to concentrate on this properly. Who knows, I may need the second career option a bit sooner than I had originally anticipated.

Doing it for the kids…

Blanket, crochet, patterns, Uncategorized

Its been a while since my last post. It has been super hectic at knackeredpsycho HQ, such that I had to take a bit of bed rest at one point to catch up on sleep! The day job is crazy busy until the end of July, and so my precious hooky time is being sidelined at the moment. And my obsession with knitting socks as a way of destashing has also meant that the time I have had has been spent with the pointy sticks rather than my hooks. But come August I plan to bury myself in yarn and work up all the designs I have been scribbling down on bits of paper. I have some plans for a little set of children’s items which I will share with you as they develop. All my shawl club bits I have had to keep under wraps, but I am looking forward to sharing some more of my projects with you as they develop.

The other things that are keeping me busy include the need for me to make a special blanket for my daughter’s nursery as a thank you before she leaves this summer, and to make lots of cute baby things as one of my friends is expecting her first baby and its a good excuse to produce lots of very quick makes. The added bonus is that these makes have to be in a practical yarn, and so I get to use up some of my nicer acrylic yarn as part of Project Destash.

I cannot show you my friend’s gifts as she reads this blog (!), but I thought I would show you some of my favourite baby and small child makes from the last year. Firstly, I love to make blankets, and these are firm favourites. This was my first star blanket, which used baby soft merino DK and was for a newborn. When I had my daughter most of the blankets I was given were too large to tuck around her in her car seat. This one is the perfect size. It used up yarn left over from a Peppa Pig jumper I had knitted for my daughter, which is why the colours are a little unusual, but putting them in this order really made each colour pop and I loved the final effect!

My go-to cot blanket is a shrunk down version of an Attic 24 cosy stripe blanket. If you begin with a starting chain of 120 it comes up the perfect width. For baby versions I prefer to use a neutral on the ‘plain’ rows and a variegated yarn in the granny treble rows, like this one I made using left over Ice Yarn:

At Christmas I was asked to make an owl themed blanket for a friend’s sister-in-law. I used The Hat and I’s pattern for this one, and added the lettering using the Moogly Alphabet patterns.

Clothes are always fun for little people. Last year we were stuck in a traffic jam and I made this circular cardigan for my daughter in the time I was trapped in the car (we missed our ferry to Ireland, so I had extra hooky time). The yarn was King Cole Riot, but my little one found it a bit too scratchy to wear, so I would make it in a cotton or bamboo for her next time. But this was so quick and easy to make and I loved the final effect. The pattern was a free one from Drops yarn, found on Ravelry, but there are lots of similar ones out there too.

In terms of hats, I like this, the Little Sister hat, without the flower. This one is worked in some left over merino sock yarn from Fleabubs (the Scientist was the colourway). It can look girly but in this yarn I think it works for a newborn of either gender.

You can see that I like to use strong colours with little people – something that will hide the messes but that make a really nice statement piece. I am toying with making a very special little set in honour of my friend’s baby, and as soon as I have done it I will share it with you here as a free pattern. I just need to put the socks down long enough to make it!

Beaded Arches Shawlette

crochet, scarves, Shawls, yarn

OK, so I am very excited to be able to reveal Shawl 2 from the Shawl Club collaboration with Unbelieva-wool. This is the Beaded Arches Shawlette, so named because of its beading and arches (I lack imagination).

The yarn is a pretty special merino / nylon / yak base, dyed in reds and plums in a colourway called ‘Loving You’.

So, the story behind this one is that shortly after we agreed to do Shawl Club, Sam said that she really liked the idea of a long, thin crescent shaped shawl. So did I, but boy, that is a hard shape to nail without making the pattern so involved that your head explodes from tracking where to place the increases. One of my rules of pattern design is that ideally it should be something that is mainly simple and meditative to do once the pattern is set, with the occasional bit of complexity. So I tried to find a way of coming up with the shape, without the headache.

This was what I managed to come up with. It is a complete cheat, as the shape is achieved through cunning use of blocking.

I also wanted to incorporate beading because, as you know, I like a touch of beadwork in a shawl and it suited this particular shawl well. In trying to get the shape right, I made loads of these shawls, and I have to say I have fallen in love with them as I wear them as scarves, like this:

But here are some early contenders I am also very fond of…

These are using a vibrant grad from Dye Candy, and the one below is using a silk mix yarn (also from Dye Candy) entitled ‘Scream Queen’, without the beads.

I have more but I will spare you here, although you may see them crop up on Instagram from time to time. So there you have it: a cheeky cheat. Forgive me, but it does work!

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