Hi friends, welcome back! This past month has been kind of a slog for me crafting-wise. I had a bit of a slump. Nothing felt great to work on and I had trouble finding motivation to work on anything else. I had this self-imposed rule that I could only work on one crochet and one knit project at a time. Since my knitting project was the baby blanket I mentioned last month and my crochet project (also mentioned last month) were the shorts I was feeling stuck. More on the shorts below. Thanks to my husband I finally got my groove back and tossed out the one knit one crochet rule. So let’s get into it!
WiPs
I have 2 WiPs at the moment. The Cyclone Hat by MyGurumi and the White Lily Blanket by Elena Fedotova.
The Cyclone Hat by MyGurumi is a fun beanie with a twist (pun intended). The pattern itself isn’t available on Ravelry anymore but thanks to some helpful comments on the page linked above, someone was able to find a WayBackMachine version of it. I’m using RMR Yarn Co’s Rocio base in the OOAK and Por Ocho colorways. I thought this would be a nice mindless knit to work on as a pallet cleanser. I’m working a linen/fabric stitch for the first half and planning on a seed stitch for the second half. Both easy stiches that I could put down in the middle of the row and pick back up with no issues. Technically this is my only on the needles/hook WiP but I do have a second project I wanted to cover here.
The second WiP is the second baby blanket that’s in the planning phase. I’ll be using the White Lily Blanket pattern by Elena Fedotova I mentioned last month with a few tweaks. I’ll be taking inspiration from the geode on the left! So instead of being a symmetrical square type shape the original pattern makes I’m going for more of a teardrop. To plan out the color changes I created a grid in GIMP a free image manipulation program and then filled in each triangle trying to recreate the geode. I’m working on getting this started tonight so I’m very excited! I think that’s close enough to being a WiP so I’ll add it here!
FOs
I finished the baby blanket! The Bernat Chevron Panel Knit Baby Blanket was one of my WiPs last month and it’s done! I’m so happy to get this done because even though there was no deadline I felt like I was on the clock. The pattern itself was fun. It balanced a simple mindless knit with just enough intrigue with frequent color changes to keep me going.
The second FO I have is a crochet beanie using some yarn I’ve had for a bit. I don’t remember the brand. This was a spur of the moment, get me out of my rut, kind of project. It was inspired by the Shadow Stripes Beanie by Kim Guzman. I ended up just doing half-double crochets in the 3rd loop for the full hat which gives it a very brioche look. I also added a reversible pom-pom. Basically I crocheted the last round around a small hair tie. I then made a chain to bridge the hole. This chain is where I attached the pom-pom this way I can push the pom-pom through the hole and make it truly reversible! It actually goes pretty nicely with the knit brioche cowl I finished sometime last year. Thanks to this quick crochet I was able to get out of my slump. Sometimes all you need is a little win to get remotivated.
Speaking of motivation…. on to the opposite frogging.
Frogs
This time I was not excited to frog. The main thing I have here is the shorts from last month. I was loving the way it worked up and the drape the fabric had but my foreshadowing from last time turned out to be true. I didn’t have enough yarn to finish. So I had to frog. I think I tried to start another two random things with the yarn before giving up.
Similarly the second pile of frogged yarn, from Dye Mad Yarns in the Coonigator and Loveland Frogman colorways, was from some failed attempts to work on self-drafted crochet scarves. I just wasn’t feeling it. This was in the middle of my slump so I decided to not even think about these two piles of yarn and gave up for now. Maybe I’ll come back to them in the future.
Loose Ends
As mentioned last time I was looking forward to going to YarnCon. I did end up going and had a lot of fun. It was the first yarn convention I had been to and it was a lot busier than I had anticipated. I did end up picking up some yarn there including the yarn for the Vortex mentioned above by RMR Yarn Co, the green twice frogged yarn from Dye Mad Yarns, and 3 neutrally tones from Apothefaery Fibers. I’m hoping to maybe make The Comfort Zone by Espace Tricot with those 3 in a fade from darkest around the neck down to lightest in the ribbing. I think out of my wishlist from last month I was only successful in getting yarn for the Vortex. Oh well!
Closing
Thanks for stopping by this month! Let me know if you have any suggestions for the Truboo or the Dye Mad green yarns. See you next time!
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