This is the last scarf that I have planned for the time being as I will be returning to doing some spinning, as the next Fibre Advent Calendar will be arriving next week in readiness for opening throughout December. I am using some Stylecraft Special DK in three shades of grey that I have had since last 2011, 13 years! All yarns are 100% Acrylic and will be held double.
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| 1063 - Graphite for the centre |
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| 1203 - Silver for the stripe |
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| 1099 - Grey for the outer parts |
I have once again been stash diving deep into the past and come out with the left overs of a huge ball of Peach double knit acrylic yarn that I remember buying either just before or just after my first child was born and the little shopping precinct I got it from was demolished a few years ago. The yarn is at least 20 years old and not such a bright peach as the previous one, this one is a bit warmer in tone and I have paired it with the Stylecraft Special Aran in shade Watermelon that I bought on my return from Blackpool.
Having not enough of the Peach to complete the three rows either side of the stripe, I decided to work the last row in the Watermelon too to give a whole new effect. Both yarns are 100% acrylic.
I have dug deep into my yarn stash and pulled out something that is potentially vintage that I got off Ebay years ago. Its called Foxy DK by Charles Fox. I am pairing this with the new Stylecraft Special Aran in shade cream that I bought last week. I have to use the Foxy DK held double and the Aran as it is and because I won't have the meterage that I need for the main colour from the Peach, this will be the stripe on the mainly cream scarf.
This scarf used 69g of the 104g of Peach and 105g of the cream Aran. Both yarns are 100% Acrylic.
My original plan was to make a scarf using Nil and Cream but given the fact that the last scarf used up some of the second ball of Nil this is no longer an option so Plan B is to use what I have of the Nil, add some cream and also use some of the left over Aspen as well.
So the yarns used in this one are King Cold Big Value Baby 4ply in shade Nil, worked using 2 strands.
Stylecraft Special Aran in shade Aspen, worked just as it comes.
Stylecraft Special Aran in shade Cream, worked just as it comes
I decided to use the darkest yarn in the centre, flanked by cream and finished off with the Nil. I done it this way as it takes up less of the cream so that I can then use the left overs in conjunction with the second ball of cream on the next scarf and also it uses up as much of the Nil as possible.
I used the Nil held double and used 81g of the 90g that I had left, 50g of cream and 23g of Aspen and they are all 100% Acrylic.
It is only when I took the scarf outside into proper daylight, if you can call November in the Northern Hemisphere "proper daylight", that it became apparent that the pale blue-green aqua kind of colour yarn in the house is actually leaning more towards pale blue and away from any kind of green tinge. Whoopsy! Silly school girl error and I've been doing this far too long to have made such a silly error as checking colour combinations in natural night. Still makes an interesting scarf, just not quite as I had expected.
For the next scarf I have picked out two more balls of King Cole Big Value Baby 4ply but this time it is in shade Nil, which is a pale blue-green aqua colour and this was bought at the same time as the lilac that I've already used to make scarves and was bought new from our local craft shop 7 years ago. This yarn has had to be worked holding two strands at the same time.
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| 100% Acrylic |
The other yarn is Stylecraft Special Aran in shade Aspen, also 100% Acrylic, which I bought on my last visit to the same local craft shop and is thick enough to be worked as it is.
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| 100% Acrylic |
I ended up using more than one ball of the Nil, it took 10g of the second ball that I had of this which means I now have to figure out something different for the next scarf as I no longer have enough left in the remaining ball. This is strange because the other two balls of this yarn in the lilac made one scarf each.
Following my unsuccessful yarn shopping whilst in Blackpool myself and my two kids have been shopping at our local craft shop again. It would have been nice to see what different yarns the other shops stocked but hey-ho, for now at least. I have bought us tickets for a big yarn and wool event that is being held locally in December that has something like 85 different vendors but right now I need a few balls of yarns that will work with some of things that I have pulled out of my yarn stash so I have shopped locally. I only bought 5 balls of yarn, and two of those are the same colour! My youngest bought a few balls and my eldest bought a big bag full.
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| 97% Acrylic, 3% Polyester |
My next scarf is made using the same 12 year old King Cole Haze Glitter in Teal as the last scarf but this time I have pair it with something new that I have just bought which is King Cole Baby Glitz in white, which is shade 483 and on the ball band this states "Dinamo White" but on both Ravelry and on the actual King Cole website 483 is Diamond White. Most of the same letters but not in the same order. Odd!
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| 97% Acrylic, 3% Polyester |
To make this scarf I have had to work both yarns with 2 strands and because they both have the exact same fibre content there is no change to that this time.
Diving down into my yarn stash again and surfaced with some King Cole Haze Glitter in shade 124 - Teal that has been in my stash for just over 12 years since I bought it new from a local yarn shop that opened but didn't survive very long, maybe 12 months at best. It was poorly located but the main problem was the woman that had decided to open a yarn shop upon retiring from her main job at the age of 65. She was neurotic, watched customers like a hawk with a look of disdain on her face as if everyone was out to pinch stuff and made everyone feel uncomfortable when she glared at them. I only went in that one time and tried to strike up a friendly conversation/chit-chat only to be met with a tongue that could skin a man alive at 50 paces.
Anyway, let's get back to the yarn itself. King Cole Haze Glitter has been discontinued for a number of years now. It is in the double knit category and yet is 100g/466m (double knit is usually around 100g/300m, give or take). I had two balls of this yarn and it had to be worked holding two strands together for this design.
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| 97% Acrylic, 3% Polyester |
I'm pairing this yarn with the 57g of left overs of the Stylecraft Special Aran in Storm Blue that I had bought specifically to got with the Jarol Rambler Aran that I had used to make the first scarf in this design. As this yarn is thicker, I only had to use a single strand.
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| 100% Acrylic |
The sparkly thread on the Haze is loosely wound around the plied yarn and has a tendency to pucker-up the yarn so I had to keep pulling it out straight and then other times the sparkly thread would just break, which relieved the puckering. I've never had this happen before, ever, and it's not as though I had any kind of tight tension on the yarn or anything that would cause the thread to be pushed along the surface of the yarn in any way, shape or form
I made a start on this and then we had a couple of days mid-week break in Blackpool to see the illuminations and do a bit of shopping but unfortunately the one yarn shop I had intended to visit was closed due to her being on holiday and the market wasn't open on the days we were there but I did buy come scented candles and a new winter coat. We hadn't been to Blackpool since I was pregnant with our youngest child 18 years ago and our other child was only 3 years old back then so neither of them had seen or had any memories of Blackpool and the illuminations. On our last visit I had met Geoff Capes, of World's Strongest Man fame, who was waiting for my father-in-law to be ready to go with him and a couple of other guys on an aviary visit to another Budgerigar breeder as both Geoff and my father-in-law bred and showed Budgerigars and strangely, despite the age difference, both of them have passed away this year, with Geoff only passing away about a week ago and my father-in-law passed away back in May of this year.
I didn't take any craft projects with me and so I completed this on my return home and the overall fibre content is now 98% Acrylic, 2% Polyester.
Now that I have gotten that brown slippery yarn out of the way and made up into a scarf I can get on and enjoy making another one. Unusually for me, I have some brand new mass produced yarns, only a few balls recently purchased in order to make a hat for my mother-in-law and I gave her a choice of all the yarns and now I can use the other yarns.
First up is some King Cole Glitz DK in Orion's Amethyst, a dark purple with a multi-coloured pastel metallic thread that is so pretty.
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| Orion's Amethyst is 97% Premium Acrylic, 3% Polyester |
Because this is quite a thin yarn I have had to work this with two strands held together and the accompanying yarn is some new Stylecraft Special Chunky in shade Proper Purple, which I have worked just as it comes.
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| Proper Purple is 100% Premium Acrylic |
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Carrying on with scarf making but switching to a different pattern. I already had some old, but not yet vintage, Jarol Rambler Aran in white in my stash and I had recently gone to my local craft shop to find something use with it and purchased some Stylecraft Special Aran in shade Storm Blue. Both yarns are 100% Acrylic.
This one is worked sideways from the centre working outwards then re-join on the other side of the centre chain and work the other side. Interesting construction which is a little fiddly to begin with but once you have one row worked on either side of the chain it is easy.
No work-in-progress photos so straight to the finished item.
This time I am using some yarn that I bought recently from a visit to my local craft shop and I saw this and could not resist the colours. King Cole Riot Chunky in shade "Cosmic" and I used both skeins but I did have to colour match the join from 1st to 2nd skein as it didn't flow but then I used the length removed at the start to add to the end.
Because this yarn is thicker I only used 6 pattern repeats across the row instead of the usual 8 and then I done 142 rows instead of 118 to use up the yarn and also so that both ends of the scarf were the same colours. The yarn is 70% Premium Acrylic, 30% Wool.
With the colder weather and a need to create more storage space quickly I've decided to work on items made with the thicker range of yarns. I've had this pattern earmarked to have a go at for quite some time. It's a vintage pattern, from a 1976 publication to be precise, printed in the USA and the specified yarns for this haven't been made in years so I've found an alternative in my stash.
I will be using Jarol Baby Rambler Aran, a 100% acrylic yarn that I've had in my stash for a number of years. I rarely use Acrylic yarn these days due to the fact that, whilst it is relatively cheap to buy, comes in a whole range of colours, textures and weights, is easy to care for and fairly hardwearing, it's production is not particularly environmentally friendly as the main chemical used in its creation is a fossil-fuel based substance and so has a fairly large carbon footprint. Also, when you wash Acrylic fibres tiny microplastic particles are released into the water and eventually end up in the Ocean and when you are done with the item it is not biodegradable and so goes to landfill, where it will stay for hundreds of years.
The issues surrounding the use Acrylic yarn have plagued knitters and crocheters for years. You will always have people who don't care about the environmental impact of manufacturing and using these yarns, you will have people who will categorically not use these yarns under any circumstances and then you have people like me who are torn about its use, some will use it because it's the only type of yarn in their budget range and that's OK. For me, personally, whilst in my younger and teenage years I used Acrylic yarn all of the time as I've grown older, wiser and more experienced in life in general my views have changed and I don't particularly like using Acrylic yarn.
My way of looking at it now is that I feel that it is OK to use if I already have it in my stash, as it will have been there for a number of years, having being manufactured years ago and there is nothing I can do to change history. If I just bin it it will go into landfill straight away. If I sell it on, donate it to a charity shop for them to sell on or knit/crochet with it at least it has a chance of being a useful item for a number of years but regardless it will eventually end up in landfill at some point in the future. That is a given so I may as well use it to make something pretty and useful. What I can do though is not to add to the environmental impact going forward by not buying newly manufactured Acrylic yarn and help in a tiny way to reduce the demand for new. In general, I don't buy any new yarns at all as I have a vast stash already and I also spin my own yarns but if I do buy new yarns it is usually 100% Cotton, because I can't spin that myself or its a really fine laceweight yarn, usually pure wool, again because I can't spin that myself either, it's a specialist skill that I've not yet mastered. Sometimes it's hard to avoid it in blends and a yarn that contains 20% Acrylic is better than 100% Acrylic but I still try to avoid it if possible and these purchases are rare and only occur in exceptional circumstances for custom made items, but again I will try to avoid new and look for yarns on the second hand market to reduce the demand for new.
Right, now that I've got that off my chest, shall I show you what I've made?
With this pattern, you start at the widest part of the triangle and reduce down each row until you reach the top. Oh great, I just love counting hundreds of chain stitches. Quiet everyone, I'm counting!
It's actually a really easy pattern once you get going and yet it creates a stunning shawl. I will definitely make more in this pattern in the future.
It's been a while since I knit a shawl and I think it's time to start doing some more making. I decided to use the other one of the yarns that I bought as a potential candidate for the custom a while back, I bought this one and then the same but in pink and I am knitting the same design. Its made with King Cole Drifter Chunky in shade "Barcelona" and is 69% Acrylic, 25% Cotton, 6% Wool.
I enjoyed making that last shawl so much that I've made another. This time I've use one of the yarns that I bought as a potential candidate for the custom make last year but then it turned out not to be anything like what the customer was thinking of. Its made with King Cole Drifter Chunky in shade "Jakarta" and is 69% Acrylic, 25% Cotton, 6% Wool.
I finally got around to taking photos of the finished item, if it was nearly 2 years later but then I have been up to my eyeballs in British Sheep Breed fleece and Covid Lockdown and all sense of time passed just vaporised into thin air!
My final shawl using the acrylic yarn I bought recently is the same again but this time in white. This design works up quickly and I think is quite pretty.
I love turquoise, aqua, teal, sea green kind of colours, which is in part why I chose this colour yarn when I was shopping online recently.
Again, this one has a matching brooch that you can use as a fastening or you can attach to a bag or other accessory if you choose.
Following on from making this design in bright yellow I have now made one in black.
I recently sold one of these designs in blue cotton, but the customer had previously asked if I could make it in black and so I searched to see what appropriate yarns were available but the customer went with the blue anyway. I discovered that higher quality yarns in this thickness have sky rocketed in price since I made the blue one and would probably double the price of the finished item but I did find some acrylic yarn of the right thickness at a good price and so I bought some in 4 different colours with the purpose of making some more of this design.
These work up really quick and I made a giant flower brooch with the left-overs.
