Design A197 - Moss green cotton

I've been continuing to work on making motifs in a range of colours but I have quite a lot of cotton in this moss green/olive green colour and so I have decided that I will make a small shawl with it first and then I can use up any left overs on the multi-coloured shawls.

I've made a few of this design in the past, but not for a few years, with the last one I made being a custom make for a larger version of this.  This one has turned out a little on the small side even though I have used up almost all of the yarn.  I can't even add one more row as I don't have enough yarn to do that.  The left overs from this were just enough to make one single motif for the other shawls that I am working on.

Because of how small this is it is probably best worn like a bib with an open fronted style of coat. This one worn in the traditional way with the pattern down the back will fit either a very small woman or would be ideal for a child.  The only other thing it could be used for is a head covering perhaps? I remember my late mother wore headscarves in the 1970's when I was a small child.

Design A444 - In Green Cotton

I am still ploughing on with using up the aran weight cotton yarn, I'm getting there but not there yet.  I have some very bright yellow that I have used as flower centres but it's not really the colour that I hoped for when I ordered "lemon".  I was expecting a nice pale yellow and I got this "lemon rind yellow" colour.  That'll teach me for shopping and ordering when I am tired, I obviously wasn't paying full attention. 

So, now that I just have a whole load of bright yellow doing nothing I decided to over-dye it to make it more usuable and a more appealing colour cos it's going to take someone really special to pull that bright yellow off.  Pass the sunglasses.  I bought some dye for cotton, Dylon handwash dye in shade "Ocean Blue".  I wound the balls of cotton onto my niddy-noddy and tied each one off loosely so I had 7 and a half skeins.  You have to make the ties loose when you dye otherwise you can get a tie-dye effect, I don't want this at this time. This dye is a "cold water" dye, you don't actually use cold water per se, it is warm but only hand-warm, not really hot to boiling like my other dyes that I use.  I made it up in my dye pot as per the instructions and lowered the skeins of yarn in and followed the instructions for timings etc.

All dyes that I have used, no matter what kind, react with the base colour of the yarn or fabric that you are dyeing so you have to take that into account and so "standard colour mixing rules" apply i.e yellow + blue = green, yellow + red = orange, blue + red = purple, blue + red + green = brown, you get the idea.  So I know that blue dye on a yellow yarn is going to make green, but what shade of green.  I am hoping, based on the shade of blue dye I've picked, that it might come out leaning toward the olive green tones but I am not familiar with Dylon dyes so I don't really know what their shades are like.

So, its not come out Olive green but its decent but if you look closely its not totally even, a few flecks of yellowy-greeny bits still exist, not bright yellow but not fully green either.  Not what I'd hoped for but it does add interest that I can live with.

Once dry I decided to make the same design shawl I made earlier in the year.  Due to the fact that this one is cotton and smooth and more dense it looks different to the white fluffy acrylic version, its not as cuddly, but that's different fibres for you, they all have their own look and different properties

Design A193 - Olive greens

My final colour combination that I have sorted out to make these shawls with is olive/khaki green.  Can't wait to be done with these now, getting a little bored, want to make something else, have ideas, hmmm, will they work though?

And that's a wrap, quite literally!

Design A1932 - purple stripes

I really enjoyed making the last shawl, let's hope this one goes the same way, it is shades of purple after all.  Lovely!  I am getting through some of my stash of cotton yarns but nearly as much as I had hoped that I would.  Lot's of leftovers, I will take a photo once I have finished this and the next one but I already have ideas of how I'm going to go forward with it as I really don't want to make anymore of this particular design after the next one.

Design A193 - the sunset

I kept looking at the range of colours of aran cotton that I'd got and couldn't get away from a particular thought so I decided to go ahead and try it.  That thought is that a certain group of colours reminded me of a sunset when in the right order.

When my 15 year old saw me making this one they started singing the opening lines from The Lion King, which they learned when they were in Yr6 as that was the end of year performance they were part of when they left primary school, and followed it up with "that looks like a sunset".  Bingo, the exact reaction I was hoping for.

Reminds me of a cross-stitch picture I done years ago...

One day I will get this framed, along with all the others that still need to be framed.

Design A193 - Red wine to white

No rest for the wicked, on to the next of crochet shawls.  Aran weight cotton again, in shades red wine, rose and white.  They're pretty quick to make but can become boring, if like me you make one after the other, after the other.  I've not got a lot to say about it other than that you work from the bottom up and then the last thing you do is go around the entire edge and create the shells across the top and add definition to the points along the bottom.

Design A193 - Bottle to cream

I'm made another one of these wavy crochet shawls.  I like this one a lot more than the last one.  Sometimes you think "yeah, that could work" and then afterwards you're not so sure, but everyone has different tastes and I try to cater for that.

The next one is bottle green, light mint and cream aran weight cotton.

I'm definitely happier and more proud of this one.

Design A193 - blue-greens

My second crochet shawl in this design will be using up some of the blue-greens that I have.  These shawls are quite quick to make and produces something that I think looks pretty and functional.  Again, different brands of aran weight cotton.

This one isn't my favourite now that its finished but I'm sure someone will love it.

Design A193 - Coffee Cream

It's been about 4 years since I made one of these, apparently, doesn't seem that long ago but we have just gone through the time zapping, mind numbing Worldwide Covid-19 Pandemic that just took 2 years of our lives away.  I still feel like a zombie!

I am continuing on with my plan of using up some of the thicker yarns and I've picked on a few big bags of aran weight cotton yarn that I have.  I seem to have a lot of this and I vaguely remember buying it because a potential customer had commented that she would most likely have bought from me if I had more things made of cotton.  So I am rectifying that issue and was happy to buy cotton as I can't spin it and it's a natural plant fibre and a renewable resource.

I have put together a number of project bags to make this shawl in several colourways.  Let's begin with the brown range of colours...

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.

Another new design - A444 in white acrylic

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.

Design B528 in King Cole Drifter - Barcelona

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 think that the design I have chosen works well with this busy yarn.  I don't like overly busy colours. The stripes of the lace pattern work nicely with the stripes of the yarn. 

I finally got around to taking photos of the finished item, 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!

Design LF433 - Pretty in Brown

It seems that I started making this sometime ago, possibly at the end of 2020, as it's been a while since I made anything and I can't remember starting to make this.  I've really been loosing track of time these past couple of years what with menopausal foggy brain and Covid-19, I really haven't known whether I've been coming or going at times.  Making dated notes is a must and looking back on social media posts helps a lot at times too. 

Since the last time I made one of these shawls, I have discovered that Thomas B Ramsden, the parent company that owns yarn brands such as Twilleys, Robin, Wendy and a couple of others, did actually go into Administration after dwindling profits over the past 15 years or so and they had already sold off a lot of the old buildings and sites that they once owned in a bid to streamline the business and the business has now closed down after over 100 years.  Very sad.

The colours for this one are WG10 Pale Orange (Twilley's Goldfingering), 313 Orange (Anchor Artiste Metallic), 064 Burnt Orange and 065 Chocolate (both Twilley's Goldfingering).  The Anchor Artiste Metallic is almost identical to the Twilley's Goldfingering.

When I picked this project up to work on earlier this month I discovered that all of the flower centres were finished and some of them had petals on.

As I worked on adding the rest of the petals I did notice that about half of the centres were a tad lighter than the others so I put them into two piles so that when I assemble them into a shawl that I can space them out equally across the finished item, like a checkerboard.

All finished, including all the many many ends all sewn in and fringing cut and added.

I finally got around to taking photos of the finished shawl over the first weekend of October 2022.  Better late than never I suppose.

B528 in King Cole Drifter - Jakarta

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 think this is just about as busy a yarn that this design can take, anything more busy and it will tip it over the edge for me.  The stripes of the lace pattern work nicely with the stripes of the yarn but if I'd used a different lace pattern, featuring leaves perhaps, then this would not have worked out very nice. 

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!

Yet another new design - B528

This one is another simple, but effective, shawl pattern and, again, I have used another of my hand spun yarns for this one too, this time a recently spun one that you can read about here.

Knitted simply in repeating 4 blocks of 4 row patterns and the colours in the yarn balances nicely with the simplicity of the pattern, neither are too busy for the other.  The first photo of the shawl on the needles is more true to colour than the photos of the finished item on my kitchen floor.  That wintertime artificial light is playing havoc again with the colours in my photos.

Finally got around to taking photos outside on a good day, even if it was nearly 2 years after I made it.  How time flies when you're up to your eyeballs in British Sheep Breeds and Covid Lockdown.