Yet another new design - A360 in pure cotton

I'm getting back into making new things again and this time yet another new design for the shop.  Its a comfort style shawl, roughly three-quarters circular so the edges don't actually meet at the front but the shaping makes it hug your neck and the increasing makes it sit on your shoulders and then it just gets more full from thereon down.  I've had the pattern for some time but I have so many it will take years to get to some of them.  This one was published in 2009 by a well-known American yarn company, again with the freedom to sell what you make using their patterns, as long as you are not going to make thousands of them, obviously and the pattern instructions themselves are copyrighted to them so can't be shared, photocopied, distributed, blah, blah, blah the standard legal blurb.

I've had this one in my queue of projects for a while now and I am using some cotton yarn that I picked up second-hand off Ebay sometime ago.  The lady selling it didn't enjoy working with it, it didn't work up as she hoped and so she had "frogged" what she had started making and put it up for sale.  To frog means to rip it back/undo it and is referred to as frogging in the knitting/crocheting community because the vocal sound of "rip it" sounds like a frog.  There are other dictionary meanings of "frog" or "to frog" but those don't apply here.

Ah, I don't have a photo of the actual yarn from my stash so here is one I pulled from the internet of what it would have originally looked like.  It is Garnstudio Drops Paris in shade Apricot and is 100% Cotton aran weight yarn.  Not all of the yarn I bought has yarn labels, a couple missing, that's OK as she had started using it, it's one of those things as not everyone keeps the labels until they've finished making something.  In natural daylight all of the yarn looks the same, no obvious differences in shade or anything so we're good to go.

I make a good start on the crochet and it takes me a couple of days to get to finish line.  A nice pattern, soft cotton yarn, very happy and I've even got some leftovers that I can use on another project or two, depending on what I make.  And then I throw it out open on the floor to take some pictures before I wash and block it.  My happy heart sank like a tonne of lead.  Oh dear, ermmmmm, let's just wash it and see what happens, maybe any excess dye might leak out and then it might look more even in colour.  

No, that didn't happen, that was just wishful thinking.  What did happen though, after quite a while of putting it off and procrastinating for over 6 months, was that it went into the dye pot in September 2022 with some dye that I bought in specifically for plant-based fibres, my usual dyes aren't suitable for plant-based, and I changed it's colour.

Do you see it? I've marked it on the close-up photo.  It was more in-your-face in real life that what the photo suggests.

Burlesque Red, sounds a little risqué and certain glamourous images spring to mind, think along the lines of Dita Von Teese... apparently this particular shade of Dylon dye has since been renamed as "Plum" and no longer features a feather - boring! What's wrong with being a little risqué every now and then.  I love the film Burlesque that stars Cher, Christina Aguilera, Stanley Tucci, Cam Gigandet (James from Twilight) and many others.  Brilliant film, if you've not seen it and like films where the girl down on her luck finally fulfils her dreams then it might just be worth the 2 hours it plays for.

Anyway, its a cold water dye, so other than warm water to start with I didn't have to keep it on the heat or anything and I kept checking on it to make sure it was taking, yes, but I could see a few patches where the dye hadn't been taken properly or at all in a couple of places so I moved it around in the pot and made sure to get as much dye into a much of the fibre as I could.  Its turned out ever so slightly patchy where some little areas are slightly lighter than rest but I think it looks good and I actually love this shade of red, obviously the original start colour of the yarn has had an affect on the final shade and tone but there is no longer any obvious stripe across it.

I will be making this pattern again in the future, I have a couple of yarns in mind for this that I have in my stash.  I just need to find the time to make them, which might not be until early 2023.

Pure Cotswold Lamb Shawl - Design S203

This is my second attempt at this shawl, the first being when I discovered that I didn't have enough of the yarn I was making it with, or should I say that the figures for the amount of metres of yarn I would need was massively out in the pattern.  This design was originally a really old Danish pattern for a doily and has been re-purposed/adapted/re-published as a shawl design using yarn rather than fine crochet thread.   Had I read to the end of the pattern before I started I would have seen that there was a note from the designer to say that she had run out of yarn before the end of the design.  My question is "why didn't she have the yarn requirement figures adjusted before publishing the pattern?"

Anyway, the yarn I was originally making this design with was used on another shawl and for this design I chose some Cotswold Lamb that I spun from an award winning flock, not only because its beautiful but because I know I will not run out of yarn this time as I have so many skeins of this and I used three full skeins plus a tiny bit from another one.

I had a total panic towards the end of making this shawl.  With 15 rows left to complete the metal knitting tip fell off one end of the wire of the circular needles.  With more than 800 stitches on the needles at the time you can imagine that I let out a little scream but thankfully it happened just after I had finished knitting a row and was putting my knitting down to take a break so all that fell off was 2 stitches but they were so clearly defined I was able to just pop them back onto the wire until I super glued the end back onto the needle.

The cast off was a special stretchy kind of cast off that took me over 2 1/2 hours to do so that the edging was stretchy enough to make the beautiful shaped edge you see below.

 I have plenty of yarn left so keep a lookout for more Cotswold lamb shawls in the future.