Tag: shawl club

Lunchtime hooky…

crochet, Shawls, yarn

So I am not the only yarnhead where I work. I have two colleagues who are also demon crocheters and we are trying to get into the habit of meeting up at lunchtime to crochet together and share our makes.  One of them has been pattern testing the first shawl to go into shawl club (no major issues, I am pleased to report, so that is a relief!) and the other one is going to pattern test shawls for me but is in the middle of a textured cowl using yak yarn at the moment and cannot put it down.  Anyway, lunchtime is now a bit of an oasis in what can be some very long days, and a good excuse to turn away from the computer screen and have a non-work related conversation.  We have made a pact to go to Fibre East this year  and already getting giddy at the prospect as last year we had perfect weather on the day we went and we are hoping for a repeat.

I love these women.  One of them is responsible for teaching me to crochet in the first place, so she has a lot to answer for.  The other is great fun as we send each other pictures of our latest hand-dyed purchases when we get home, and we egg each other on to make completely unjustifiable yarn purchases when we are stressed.  We all need a friend like that, right?

Anyway, I am busy experimenting with my pattern for Shawl #4, which I have a concept for and its working from a technical point of view but I am not sure whether I love it yet. The other shawls so far have been more open / lacy and this one is more of a solid looking shawlette, and I am worried that people will have reservations about it.  The colours pictured here are not the ones that I will eventually be using for the finished shawl, I just needed to grab a couple of skeins from my stash to play with and these seemed to fit the bill.  They are pretty though – the one on the right is a King Becky pixel yarn (colourway – Soma) and it is lovely to work with.  I will probably keep this for me regardless of whether the finished product ends up in shawl club but we will see.  I will have a think about whether I can make it a bit more open without messing up the main concept too much.  I have an idea, but I just need to play with it a bit more.

What’s my style?

crochet, Shawls, yarn

Well, it has been a very exciting couple of days, and I am so thrilled with the response to shawl club.  The best thing about it has been the enthusiasm for it given that I am a new pattern designer and I haven’t yet put too many examples of my own patterns up on the blog, so people are trusting in me to give them some interesting projects.  One question that has come up is “What is your style?”  Its a great question, and one that I have been thinking about a lot since I was asked it.

I guess at the moment I have more of a set of guiding principles that influence my design choices, rather than an overriding style, which I suspect will become apparent as time progresses.  So here they are:

  1.  Simplicity: I enjoy the act of crocheting and I have made so many shawls since I became addicted that I have learned that I prefer patterns that are simple enough that they are not stressful to produce (easy to remember repeats of stitches), but that have enough variation in them to keep them interesting.  I get frustrated with lots of hook changes, or with patterns that are very strict about gauge, as they take the relaxation out of crocheting for me.  I admire these patterns as they usually look amazing, but they aren’t me, or at least they aren’t me at the moment anyway.
  2. Practicality: I love a make that gets used.  So the shawls have to be practical and wearable.  I have made sure that there are lots of different shaped shawls in shawl club to suit different tastes and styles, but all of them can be worn out without fear of people pointing and laughing at you.
  3. Colour: A (knitter) friend of mine has a joke about crocheters having an inexplicable love of ‘clown vomit’ yarns.  By this she means the sort of bright and clashing colour combinations that look great in the stitch but offend against Principle Number Two (i.e. people not pointing and laughing).  I have favourite colours of course (see picture above) but I like colour combinations and contrasts that are harmonious.  I do like the odd riot of colour, and I love vibrant colours, but this is tempered by a desire to put together a more restricted and complementary set of colour combinations.  So having experimented with clown vomit in the past, I have now moved down the road towards more restricted colour combinations, with a preference for jewel tones and colours inspired by nature.
  4.  Comfort: A shawl should be a comfort to wear – a great big yarn-y hug.

I hope this helps those of you who are trying to get a sense of what you might expect from shawl club.  I am really enjoying making them at the moment – I hope that you will enjoy them too!