Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast - mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Category: Crochet Page 2 of 3

2013 Spring Cleaning #2

SC2

No before picture for today’s installment. I came across a partial top down sweater while digging through my stash. The last time I remember working on it, we were living in the little Zen tea cottage* when we first moved back down to California — in 2004. I didn’t have enough yarn to make the sweater I originally intended. I wasn’t happy with the fabric. I should have gone down one more needle size, but that meant I would need even more yarn than what I had available. So it sat. For 9 years.

Last weekend, I pulled it out of the UFO box and ripped the sweater. I had thought that I could make another vest. That was a surprisingly wearable and comfortable vest. I wanted more.

But last night, I finished the last hexagon on my crochet hexagon shawl/blanket thing. Except it wasn’t large enough.

Hexes1

The current size is 15″ deep by 40″ wide. The width is workable — elbow to elbow on me. But 15″ doesn’t cover enough of my back to keep it warm, just the shoulders.

A light bulb turned on. Perhaps I can use the yarn from the former top down raglan to frame the hexagons to make it larger all the way around. I think I even have enough to turn it into a shrug.

Hexes2

Here is the hexagon piece on top of the shrug. The shrug is folded over so the hex piece is about 1/2 of a shrug. I weighed everything. The hex piece weighs just under 8 oz. The former sweater weighs around 9 oz. I definitely have enough to turn this hex piece into a shrug.

The shrug will be colorful. It will be wild. It will most definitely not be everyone’s cup of tea. But it should definitely keep my back warm while I sit and drink a cup of tea.

Myth Busting

I love the show MythBusters, but I have a something that you will never find featured, dissected, and blown up on the show.

I have always heard (*) that if you are spinning yarn for crochet, the yarn should be spun opposite of how you need to spin for hand knitting. Typical yarn is spun Z then plied S. The saying goes that crochet will twist the yarn in the Z direction, therefore, unply your yarn. For this reason. You have to spin S then ply Z.

* I don’t know where it came from, but I read it on the internet.

I’ve been crocheting all those hexes and it just dawned on me today to take a careful look at my working yarn. I spun this yarn without any project in mind so it was spun just the normal Z then S. Nope. It hasn’t tried to unply itself as I’m working along. In fact, the yarn still looks fine and just as sound as it was when I first spun it.

busted

As with all things found on the internet, you should take it with a grain of salt and test it out yourself before you make any decisions.

I’m really enjoying crocheting this. I had forgotten how much fun crocheting is. I need to dig out some of my old crochet pattern booklets.

Hexes!

Hexes

That crud that has been going around finally caught up with me last week. I was down for the count with fever, chills, and all that nastiness. When I was finally able to sit upright, I pulled out some yarn I spun up from rainbow bright fiber that I won as a raffle years ago and started crocheting hexagons.

I don’t know if it will be a bed shawl or a lap blanket. I’ll see how far this yarn will go. I do know that my grist had changed from the start of the spinning project to the end — from light fingering to almost DK. This is because this was spun over the course of a couple of years. It was my island spinning project for that period of time. I should add that this is why you should keep a spinning record card.

I am alternating from the 2 sections of the spinning project to mix it up.

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