Design A447 - Pinks, purples and white

I'm carrying on with my mission to use up as much of the Aran weight cotton yarn as I possibly can and this is the best time of year to do it because it's cooler weather and heading into even cooler weather.

I've picked another vintage pattern, this time it was published in the USA in 1976.  The photos in the book are not the best but it does look like it could be visually stunning.  I started to follow the instructions but I was finding it awkward to get "inch length loops" or for what I was able to do to look equal and neat and I didn't like the massive "hole" in the middle of what would be a flower.  I decided to start with a magic loop for a smaller "hole" and instead of having a number of long loops of yarn which formed the petals of the flowers I changed these to clusters of double crochet (US)/triple crochet (UK), which meant working 5 of those stitches up to, but not completing the last pull through, and keeping them on the hook until all 5 were done and then just pull through all 5 loops on the hook to make the cluster.

To get them all to be equal in size, I popped the non-working end of the crochet hook into the hole and pulled up against that and secured the ends.  I guess a biro pen or something similar would also do that job.

I had no solid colour plan when I first started, but I knew that I would not be following the colour plan of the pattern, which is rows of colours that form the V's of the triangular shape.  I did know that the main colours would be white, ecru or black as I have large amounts in each of those colours, and just to make as many flowers as possible from each colour that I have left in my stash and see how things go based on how many flowers I get from the left overs.

Because I am using different yarn to the original pattern and the fact that I have altered how the pattern is worked my motifs are coming out a tad smaller than the measurements on the pattern so having done some figuring out I need to work enough motifs to have 15 of them across the shoulders, not the original 13, and this then works to the original measurements of 60 inches across the shoulders.  It does, however, mean that I need to make 64 motifs as opposed to 49.

I've decided that the first one will be a random mix of pinks and purples with the main colour being white and so I focused on working just those colours for a while.

In terms of how many motifs of each colour I was able to make from the leftovers and how many I made from the slightly larger amounts are as follows, in order from top left to the bottom right: 

white = main colour, light purple = 4 motifs, powder pink = 1 motif, medium pink = 3 motifs 

light old pink = 3 motifs, heather = 8 motifs, dark purple = 9 motifs, medium purple = 2 motifs 

red wine = 1 motif, candyfloss pink = 11 motifs, cherry = 11 motifs, rose = 11 motifs

Two of the pinks and the two reds are very similar in colour but are slightly different.  I laid the motifs out in the shape of the pattern in a random order and then spent a long time playing about moving them around so that not only were two of the same colour not next to each other but also so that the colours were as evenly spread out as I could get them because at point I had all the dark purples loitering together on the left and the reds were all huddled up together too and that just won't do so I made sure they were as mixed as I could get them.

At the point in the photo above, where the motifs have one row of he main colour around them and are joined together I only had 38g left to do the small motifs that fit in the spaces and the fringing. This was not enough so I had to order more of the white yarn because although I started with 200g my yarn has slightly fewer metres per 50g than the original pattern yarn plus the fact that I have made a mine bigger. 

When the yarn arrived and I started to make the little motifs I wasn't happy, they looked messy so once again I had to figure out a better way to work them so that they are neater and more even whilst keeping the original style of the pattern. 

I also increased the fringing lengths from 10inch to 15inch, looped through, pulled each one tight and trimmed the lengths straight. 

I think the finished shawl is very visually stunning and I will be making many more of these in an array of colours.