New beginnings for Spring!

Well, that step back did me a world of good. I restarted the Cozy Striped Kerchief, and I have never before been so glad to have frogged a project and restarted it. What an improvement! I'm close to being finished, but here's a peek:

I just love the alternating bands of color and the brown garter ridge piping all along the way. It will make for a less formal accessory in the end, but lovely still. Best of all, I'll have plenty of the ladder yarn to finish it to the correct size, and will have used up more of the silk/bamboo and brown silk/cotton to clear out my stash. And after all, that my goal here. :)

A great deal of the stash has yet to be documented, and much of that is in cotton crochet thread. A bin under my bed holds the major part of it, mostly in white or ecru in various weights. Remnants of different colors have been wound into balls and tucked here and there throughout my storage spots. Here are a few of the pastel colors:

With Easter quickly approaching, I remembered making some sweet little ornaments several years back. Our family was in the process of packing for a move, and we had delayed in taking down a small Christmas tree in a corner. When it became mid-January, the kids suggested we keep it up for a "holiday" tree and decorate it throughout the year for the respective holidays and seasons.

That was such fun, and the ideas started coming like gangbusters! We immediately removed all the "Christmasy" ornaments and left only the white and silver ones, including the crocheted snowflakes, giving it a wintery theme.

Then I started planning for Valentine's Day. Sarah and I began crocheting red and pink and white hearts of all sizes, and when February 1st arrived, down came winter and up went hearts. We filled in gaps with artificial red and white flowers.

Towards the end of the month, I began thinking about spring and Easter and went searching online for something to create. I ran across a site which offered Victorian Egg Covers. These enchanting little sacks have a drawstring top to allow for the egg to be inserted and then drawn closed. They also have a loop worked into the top by which to hang them like ornaments. I printed out the patterns (there are seven) and got to work. I filled them with plastic eggs of different colors, added some spring flowers, and the tree loooked beautiful.

Fast forward to last week, and I couldn't find my Easter ornaments. Anywhere. I can't imagine I got rid of them, but they may be tucked away in boxes that we've never brought into the new house since the move. So I pulled out the patterns, rounded up my threads, and started crocheting. Here's what I have so far:

Aren't they sweet? I'll be making more and bringing them to the yarn shop today to see if Judy would like to use them as decorations for the next couple of weeks.

As for the pattern, it has disappeared from the internet...sort of. Thanks to the Wayback Machine, I was able to see the snapshot of the original site. If anyone would like to find these patterns, go to the Wayback Machine and enter in http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/jacobean/141/eggcovers.html. Then click on 2009 on the timeline along the top of the page and choose the February date circled. That's where I found most of the photos still intact.

Buona Pasqua!

Two Steps Forward, One Back

Ribbit, ribbit. Do I hear frogs in the backyard? No, it's the sound of me ripping out the entire Cozy Striped Kerchief that I had just finished.

I know it sounds crazy, but it just didn't look right to me. And if I'm going to do this challenge, I want to be satisfied with the results and not just waste my stash making dumpy things.

Though it drives my husband bats when I number things, here are my three reasons for frogging:

#1. It was making me crazy that I didn't have the brown contrast stripe on every garter stitch ridge. Sometimes, almost good enough isn't good enough.

#2. The brown silk/cotton yarn, looked great, but I miscalculated the thickness. The 8-ply that I created was a DK weight, when what it wanted was a worsted weight to match the bands between the ridges. So, out comes the drop spindle again.

and the clincher,

#3. The finished kerchief was too small. I had to end it sonner than I should have because I ran out of the ladder yarn. However, I have plenty of the silk/bamboo and plenty of the brown silk/cotton, so.........

Ribbit, ribbit.

Everything's back in the bag, and I'm going to start again. The solutions to the above problems, as I see them (sorry, Bob):

1. Every garter ridge will be brown, but first....

2. I will re-spin the brown yarn into a 10-ply worsted weight and try again.

3. To help extend the ladder yarn, I'll take my daughter's advice to alternate the 6-row bands between the garter ridges: one with the silk/bamboo-ladder combination, and one with just the silk-bamboo. That way, I can make the pattern the correct size and be happy. :)

*****

In the meantime, I'm continuing with the Zig Zag Baby Blanket. No new photos, since it looks the same as before, only longer. It's nice, sometimes, to have a simple pattern for a reliable outcome.

I'm also slowly getting on with the Irish Lace collar. After figuring out my dilemma (see last 2 posts), I've worked another row and a bit more of the next. Here's how it's looking so far:

And last night, I got to use a little of my scratchy Icelandic wool and the remnant of some brown Fun Fur to make an ancient Mongolian hat for my son's presentation on Genghis Khan to his homeschool co-op class today. It took 4 tries, but I finally got it to look the way I wanted:

He did a great job on his report, by the way! 

An epiphany!

<cue Lone Ranger music>

I no sooner post my troubles with my triples (hee hee) on this blog and on Ravelry, but then my cousin Jody rides in (well, calls on the phone) and saves the day! Hooray!

Sometimes I am so one-dimensional in my thinking I scare myself. I couldn't get past the "single crochet in the slip stitch in front center of triple picot." All I could think was that this would be working "on top" of the picots and would hide them.

Uh...duh. We can always flip the silly thing upside down, right? That way, the Row 4 stitches, instead of covering up the previous row, would appear to be coming out from under the previous row! Yay!

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jody! You had just the answer I needed! I'll post again with photos when I get it done. xoxo

(BTW, Jody is an expert knitter and crocheter herself and has a great blog of her own: http://chickswithsticksofglenmontny.blogspot.com/2012/03/spring.html?spref=fb)

And thank you also to kaycrochet from Ravelry who echoed Jody's idea just moments after I got the phone call.

I appreciate you ladies so much!

Running into snags

I didn't do much knitting or crocheting this weekend, having the opportunity to spend precious girl time with my beautiful daughter Sarah. We got some work done at home in the morning, and  then went thrift shopping with thrifty friends and found a few treasures, brought home dinner, and snuggled together to watch the first two episodes of the first season of Dr. Who. Hurray for girl time!

It was back to the hooks and needles yesterday. I'm almost finished with the Kerchief Scarf, and really liking the way the brown silk/cotton yarn looks in contrast with the main color:

The last ball of the brown ran out,  however, so I had to stop and spin some more from the unraveled sweater.

In the meantime, I picked up the Irish Lace Collar and ran into a snag on the fourth row. It's an old pattern from an old magazine, and I haven't located a reference to it anywhere online yet. Here's what the mag photo looks like:

Isn't it beautiful? The work begins at the top near the neck, and the first two rows are very easy. The third row creates that first line of Vs that you see, with triple picots at the bottom point of each V. Here's what I've got so far:

Of course, it's not blocked yet, so the Vs aren't straight and the picots aren't flat. Here's a closer look at a couple of those Vs with the triple picots on the points:

The problem is at the fourth row. The pattern instructs me to single crochet in the slip stitch in front center of the first triple picot, and then create a second row of these Vs and triple picots the same way I made the first, except that instead of single crocheting into an sc from the row below (as in Row 3), I'm to sc into the slip stitch in front center of the triple picot from the previous row. That's where I'm stuck.

Normally when crocheting lace, each row is built on top of the previous by crocheting into a stitch or a space. I've never crocheted into the front center of anything, and I just can't figure out how to do it. I tried approaching each triple picot from the right or the left, but it causes that little three-lobed picot to "bend its head" to one side or another. When I tried to treat it like a "front post" stitch, it lays across the top of the picot, mostly hiding it. Could that be right?

Anyone out there have experience with a similar pattern? I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'll keep at it and see how I fare.

BTW, during my research I found that the issue of White Crochet Magazine whence I found this pattern was not the one-and-only issue, as previously thought. It seems it was published until at least 1994. My apologies.

Time for some crocheting, too!

I was mentioning my challenge and this blog to a sweet friend this week. She has a terrific little e-Bay boutique called The Ivory Mannequin (http://stores.ebay.com/The-Ivory-Mannequin) where she sells beee-uuu-teee-ful vintage dresses and lingerie, as well as more modern, quality women's clothing. She has seen an exciting trend in lace trimmings such as collars, cuffs, and chokers, and she encouraged me to set my hand to it.

I haven't crocheted any lace in a long time, apart from snowflakes each Christmas, so I was enthusiastic to take her suggestion. That directed me to another corner of my bedroom (actually under the bed) where I have a bin full of cotton crochet thread in various weights. It also propelled me to dig out some old patterns, books, and magazines with crocheted lace patterns.

I found the 1990 Premier issue of a magazine called White Crochet - actually, it might be the only issue they ever published! Ravelry had no record of it, in any case. I wasn't crazy about most of its patterns even when I purchased it, but there was a lovely Irish Lace Collar that I'd always wanted to try, so I decided to give it a go. It called for a size 30 thread and, fortunately, I had one ball of that size in white:

This is a nice, fine crochet thread, though admittedly not the finest. However, the size 11 steel crochet hook it called for was small enough for a first try without making me cross-eyed. Time for Project #3! Yay! Here's my progress after working just a little while the first night:

I'm having fun, and of course it just gives me another thing to prevent boredom with my two knitting projects, which are still in progress. So, thank you, dear Laura, and all you Steampunkers, Victorianas, and other lace-loving vintage afficianados who keep styles fresh and beautiful!