Crocheted Roses Cape Still in Progress
The Pansy Poncho and various other projects and obligations conspired to throw off my schedule for finishing the Roses Cape.
Late in October, I finally made a fabric cape template from a commercial pattern. Then I spread it out on the living room floor and started arranging the crocheted flowers on it.
Whenever we sat down to watch football games, I hauled everything out and arranged flowers. Last Wednesday, the light began to appear at the end of the tunnel. Here it is on the dining room table at my parents’ house, where the light is fantastic. See all the white dots in the photo? They’re safety pins.
Not long after the second photo was taken, I finished arranging the flowers and pinning them in place. My calculations were a little off on the number of roses–there are about twenty left over. I used every single leaf, and there are only nine or ten extra blue flowers. All in all that’s pretty good! At least I didn’t have to crochet any more leaves or flowers.
Now to sew them all together! That will take a while, but I think I can wear this to Stitches West, at the end of February.
Reader Project: A Fern Plate
Lisa Elbertsen, a potter and crocheter from British Columbia, wrote the following to our Crochet Bouquet Along group on Ravelry:
“I do pottery and I am always trying to imprint my clay with live ferns. It usually works but it needs to be quite deep into the clay as by the time it is fired and glazed, you can’t always see the fern that well. I also can only use one fern at a time as they usually break after one use BUT a crocheted fern in acrylic yarn won’t!”
Lisa’s experiments with the crocheted fern were intriguing, so I asked her to make a piece for me. She created this beautiful plate, which is imprinted with a crocheted Fern Leaf from Crochet Bouquet. The plate arrived in the mail last week, and I am a very proud owner.
I hope you’ll visit Lisa Elbertsen’s web site to see more of her pottery designs, like tea pots, lanterns, bird houses, and pitchers. Lisa also lists craft shows and exhibitions where her pottery and crochet pieces are for sale.
Crochet Christmas Trees
Ella and I had a great time sorting through buttons to find enough to make this crocheted Christmas tree mat. The tree is a simple variation on the Fern pattern from Crochet Bouquet. Find more complete instructions here.
The mat is Shaggy Plush Felt by Kunin. The edges were wavy, and I knew it would need some kind of trim. While we were playing with buttons, I noticed how good the cream-colored buttons looked on the felt. There were plenty to trim two mats. And now our button jar is just full, instead of chock-full.
Ella wanted to make a mat, too. We found a scrap of felt, a crocheted leaf, and cute buttons for her to use. We sat together and sewed. It was fun!
Pink Sweater and TextileFusion Revelation
Ella’s cardigan may be finished before winter is over. I hope so. I had to slow down for a while due to badly tingling hands. It’s best not to push the knitting with numb fingers. But one sleeve is finished and I started the second one. The end is in sight!
Here’s a close-up of the Wheat Ear Rib stitch from Barbara Walker’s A Treasury of Knitting Patterns. I simply added several stitches between the Wheat Ears. It’s an odd little stitch, because you get the feeling it’s off by one. But it isn’t! The two-stitch rib shifts back and forth, depending on which side you are knitting on. So it takes up three stitches, total. It’s easier to see on the wrong side of the work, so I’ll scan the wrong side and post it next time.
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When I came up with the name TextileFusion, it meant using lots of textile techniques and materials together. It took me a while to tumble to this fact (it takes me a while to tumble to lots of things), but TextileFusion includes writing!
I’ve written about textiles and related subjects since 1990. Mostly I write about things I make. For a while now, I have wanted to expand my writing to include books and articles for children. Last summer I took the big step of going to the Highlights Foundation Children’s Writers Workshop. I learned a lot (and bought yarn, too).
Right now, I am writing two stories to enter in the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. Writing takes time, and it’s hard for me to put down the yarn and needles to sit at the computer and type. But I’m doing it, slowly and surely, with the encouragement of my family and the invaluable help of the young cats who check on me when I’m working at night. The deadline is the first week in March.
Don’t worry. My main characters are definitely of the fiber persuasion!
Corrugated Leaf Poinsettia
Corrugated Leaves from Crochet Bouquet make a good-looking poinsettia for a Christmas table mat. I used only five leaves. Seven red leaves will give you a much fuller poinsettia.
A fuller seven-leaved poinsettia looks good with a couple of green leaves tucked behind the red. With only five leaves, a green leaf overwhelms the red flower. That’s why I just suggested leaves with green buttons.
Crocheted Poinsettia Table Mat
You will need:
- Crochet Bouquet
- DK weight yarn, bright red and a darker red
- A package of Kunin’s Shaggy Plush Felt, cream color
- Sewing thread and needle, pins
- Five small yellow buttons and five green buttons
- Trim for edges of felt, like gold braid, rick-rack, buttons (as shown)
- With bright red yarn, crochet three Corrugated Leaves (pages 109-110 of Crochet Bouquet), with three points along each side. Make a stem with ch4, sl st in 2nd ch from hook and in remaining chain. Finish with a needle join to the base of the leaf.
- Make two more leaves with the darker red yarn. Weave in ends on all the leaves.
- Cut the felt in half to make two pieces approximately 17-1/2 x 11-1/2″.
- Pin the leaves in an uneven star arrangement, with stems toward the center, leaving space in the middle for the yellow buttons.
- When you’re pleased with the leaves, sew them in place. Sew the yellow buttons in the center of the leaf arrangement as shown in photo.
- Sew a green button between each leaf pair, as shown.
- Add trim around edges of felt.
Cable Coffee Cup
My mom and I stopped at Starbuck’s early in the week for a little refreshment. We sat in the easy chairs, sipping our coffee.
“That mug looks like it has a cable pattern on it,” said Mom.
I stood up to see, and there it was! A cabled coffee cup!
It’s anatomically-correct, too. The 6-stitch cable twists are on a purl background. The eight cable panels are separated by 2-stitch ribs. A very cute gift for a knitter.
“That’s blog-worthy!” I said. “I’m buying it.”
But I didn’t buy it after all. She bought it for me. Thank you, Mom!
Christmas Tree from Fern Pattern
Just add a few more picots to the Fern pattern in Crochet Bouquet, and you have a Christmas tree motif to embellish cards or garments, or home accessories.
I made the tree motif in a light worsted weight yarn and decorated it with red buttons, for a Christmas table mat. For a Christmas card, crochet the tree with bedspread cotton, glue to a blank card, and decorate with sequins or beads.
To crochet the tree, turn to the Fern pattern on pages 110-111 of Crochet Bouquet. First, crochet the pattern as written, so you get the hang of how the leaf is constructed.
Notice how the lower leaflets of the Fern each have two pairs of picots plus a cluster of three picots at the end.
To make the Christmas Tree motif, work as for Fern, except
- Add two extra pairs of picots to the Bottom leaflets. Look at the photo to see the extra picot pairs.
- Add one extra pair of picots to the Next-to-Bottom leaflets. Again, look at the photo. It will help you figure out what to do.
Mat with Crocheted Christmas Tree
You will need:
- Crochet Bouquet
- Worsted weight yarn, green
- Small amount of metallic gold yarn
- Crochet hooks to give a firm gauge with the chosen yarns
- One package of Kunin’s Shaggy Plush Felt, cream color
- Sewing thread and needle
- Small red buttons to decorate tree
- Trim for edges of felt, like gold braid, rick-rack, or buttons (shown)
- With green yarn, crochet a Christmas tree motif, using the altered Fern leaf from Crochet Bouquet (see instructions above).
- With metallic yarn, crochet a Baby Star from page 26 of Crochet Bouquet.
- Cut the felt in half to make two pieces approximately 17-1/2 x 11-1/2″ each.
- Arrange tree and star on felt and sew in place.
- Sew red buttons on the tree to resemble decorations.
- Add trim around edges of felt.
- Save the other half of the felt to make a Poinsettia Mat (nstructions in the next post).
Stitches Shopping
These beautiful clouds above Baltimore set the mood for the heavenly yarns and designs at the Stitches East Market.
I stopped by several times to visit a shaded pink angora by Prism, color-way “Carnation.” Likewise, a gorgeous thick-and-thin rose and moss green yarn by Schaefer kept me coming back. In the end, I thought of my backlog of projects and didn’t buy either of them, but I still remember them fondly.
Word-of-mouth turned out to be the best kind of advertising for a couple of vendors, thanks to a lady in my Dotty Knits class. She had bought a skein of glow-in-the-dark yarn, something that I’ve wanted since the early 1990s! It’s not the softest yarn ever, being made of nylon, but it really does glow in the dark.
The same lady showed me some square knitting needles, which are meant to be easier on your hands. I bought the straight needles, a square crochet hook, and the square circulars for testing. Square circulars! That makes me chuckle every time I hear it.
The needles are round at the tip, like regular knitting needles. Where you hold on to the needle, they are square. Since they fit into the angles your fingers make when you hold on, it seems logical that they would be easier to hold. I’ll test them and let you know.
Finally, there was the pink knitting needle gauge that looks a little like an ammonite. Pink and fossil-like was a combination I couldn’t resist.
The people who took my Pleasing Pleats and Seveness Knitting classes knitted great samples. My favorite part of the Seveness class was seeing the beautiful color combinations people put together, which I would never think of.
Too bad my camera was in my hotel room the whole time. Aaarrgh!
(“Nightlights” glow-in-the-dark yarn sold by Woolstock Yarn Shop. Square knitting needles, crochet hook, and needle gauge sold by Yarn Bazaar. Needle photos styled by Ella with yellow flowers.)
Books are a Team Effort
Authors get a lot of glory for the books they write, but the true story is that 99% of published books are the result of a team effort that also involves editors, designers, marketers, and family. Crochet Bouquet belongs in that majority.
Thank goodness for technical editors! KJ Hay took my crochet instructions and improved them a lot. She formatted everything properly, determined the skill level for each project, added technical information for the yarns I used, and altered the instructions to conform to conventional style.
Most importantly, KJ made sure my patterns worked. She did a lot of testing, as you can see from the pile of flowers and leaves on her desk. She called the photo “flowerchaos,” which describes my home during the time I worked on Crochet Bouquet.
We had a great working relationship, even though our only communication was by email. I look forward to working with KJ again someday!
Dotty Knitters at Stitches East
Thank You to the Ladies who took my Dotty Knitting class at Stitches East! Here are some of them, posing with their samples. It was a happy class, where everyone quickly understood how to read the special charts, and many went on to practice charting on their own.
Dotty knitting is a way to knit with color, where you carry only one yarn at a time. It’s a slip stitch color knitting method, often known as mosaic knitting, as it was labeled by Barbara Walker. The difference is the scale of the designs.
Barbara Walker designed many stunning, mostly geometric motifs for this method. In my Dotty Knitting class at Stitches (and elsewhere), participants learn how to knit from the clever charts that Ms. Walker devised. Then they learn to chart Dotty Designs on their own. That opens the design field to things like children’s drawings and motifs with personal meaning.
I’ll be teaching Dotty Knitting again at Stitches West in Santa Clara, California, at the end of February 2009.