Experiments in yarn
Today I'm here to right the wrong and let you know what I've been up to.
Last week, once Little Miss had been safely delivered to school, I decided to treat myself to a whole day of decadent laziness. No housework, no jobs, no errands. Just pure unadulterated crochet time. How blissful. How perfectly perfect.
I don't know how it is with you, but normally, as I reach the end of a project, I'm so full of plans and schemes for the next that I work in at fever pitch to finish the one I'm on and then immediately jump into the new one. Occasionally however that doesn't happen. It's rare, but sometimes I haven't exactly settled on the next thing and I get to enjoy a strange feeling of freedom and 'world is my oyster'-ishness that is a very exhilarating and joyous thing. I could make anything I like? What should I choose? The possibilities are endless.
This time, I think there were too many ideas jostling for a place, too much inspiration. So many things to make that the possibilities were too much for me. A happy problem maybe but still a confusing and a hook paralysing one.
What to do? How to solve the confusion?
Get some ideas out of the head. Have a play, try some ideas and see what was good, or not. That was my plan and how I spent my first day back at school. It was a good day. A very enjoyable one, obviously, but a productive one. I worked on two ideas that made me particularly happy and at last, I had a direction to take.
Inspiration for the first was a new dress. It's a CK one, as you might well guess, and I adore it. As I've been wearing it I've been immediately taken by the gorgeous colour palette. Hardly original, I know, using a Cath palette for a project but it's that navy that does it for me. The way it makes all the other colours just sing and shine. Beautiful. I notice also, that navy has been floating my boat in a major way lately and been giving me lots (more) new ideas for projects... but let's not get ahead of ourselves. One thing at a time.
I had to rummage through the stash to see what could be dug up to approximate these colours as closely as possible. Happily I had enough colours that more or less fit the bill. A little bit of a yarny mish mash in there but the colour was the key to this for me, so details like weight and fiber content fell by the wayside.
Experimentation with these colours lead to these little puffy flowers. Daisy Puffagons I've decided to call them as I'm nothing if not literal. I'm rather in love with them actually as I've found a way to make them look virtually perfect to my mind. You can't see the beginning and ends of rounds anywhere I don't think and that makes me a happy little soul.
What happened was a bit of fillet crochet and a patchy sort of pattern that I'm liking very much. Actually, I think it's mostly the colours selling this to me. They are absolutely beautiful colours, so adorable, so compatible with each other. I love the texture of the yarn, I love the sort of fluffy hairiness of it. It looks divine. It screams 'fair isle knitting' at me and it's got my brain clicking into overtime with ways to use it. But...
There's one thing stopping me falling head over heels with this yarn. It's my old nemesis, the dreaded Itchy Factor! The very hairiness that I love is also my downfall. Drat to me and my sensitive skin or whatever the problem is. Darn and poot a hundred times over.
I will have to confine myself to making things that don't need to sit right next to the skin where this yarn is concerned, which is a shame. Still, these things can be worked around and I'm thinking maybe a little cushion cover. Actually part of me is longing to make this into a baby blanket. But there is no baby in need of a blanket. And anyway, would a baby want an itchy blanket? I can't help think it really wouldn't. Even if it existed. Which it doesn't.
Oh well, I shall make it cushion cover size and see how I feel then. Or maybe you have a better idea?
