this week’s awesome finds

Llama/alpaca love con­tin­ues with this adorable blan­ket, I need to make this! From Make and Do Crew.

 

Also this hook-keep­ing lla­ma! A paid pat­tern by Irene Strange on Rav­el­ry.

 

I spot­ted this sweater at a local yarn shop, Yarns Untan­gled, and was instant­ly in love, then learned that one of the staff wrote the pat­tern! This will be my next project, with the pink hand-dyed wool that I’ve been sav­ing for a good project for the last cou­ple of years. Paid pat­tern by Nicole Tavares on Rav­el­ry.

 

Sim­ply a great bag, I espe­cial­ly love it with the pom poms! From Life is Cozy.

 

These are bril­liant. Flo­ral hoop ear­rings from How Did You Make This.

Hap­py last week of August! Sweater weath­er is just around the cor­ner! :D

 

 

lately

It is granny square day today! So I thought I’d take the oppor­tu­ni­ty to final­ly take a pic­ture of my fin­ished mitered square blan­ket :D it’s loom-knitted!

150 squares! It took about 2 months to make, it’s the biggest blan­ket I’ve ever made, 42″ by 63″!

I made a series of tuto­ri­als if you’re inter­est­ed in mak­ing your own! (a dish cloth / pothold­er with four squares is a fun make too if you don’t want to com­mit to an entire blanket)

After the blan­ket and the c2c top in my last post, I found a pat­tern that would be per­fect for the yarn I won at the Yarn Hop raf­fle, from Yarns Untan­gled, in “untan­gled” colourway :)

The pat­tern is Retro Sol­stice Eclipse by JL on Rav­el­ry. And look! I’m knit­ting in the round! (I’m always kind of afraid of pat­terns that knit in the round, but once I get start­ed I find it actu­al­ly eas­i­er than knit­ting flat) I also fig­ured out why my last in-the-round sweater had this weird gap at the joint — my stitch mark­er was too big. That seemed like a real­ly sil­ly mis­take. But now I have these sleek stitch mark­ers that came with the raf­fle prize so it’s all going smoothly :)

Speak­ing of the Yarn Hop, since we’ve had so much fun the day of, we’ve been meet­ing through­out the sum­mer! Here we were enjoy­ing the park…

And here were were at Spin Me a Yarn, who gra­cious­ly host­ed our meet­up last week!

Can you spot Albert the Alpaca shar­ing a chair with me? :D Albert final­ly got to meet Lam­bert, the res­i­dent lamb at the shop, look­ing spiffy with sock in his own “Lam­bert” colourway.

If you live in Toron­to and would like to join us at our mee­tups be sure to fol­low The Great Toron­to Yarn Hop on Face­book!

Hope you’re enjoy­ing sum­mer and much crafting!

 

 

8‑bit

So ear­li­er in the sum­mer I start­ed writ­ing a num­ber of cro­chet pat­terns that I was hop­ing to com­pile into an e‑book for sale. But the sum­mer is quick­ly going by, and I’ve had more free­lance work than expect­ed (which is a good thing). So then I real­ize I don’t real­is­ti­cal­ly have the capac­i­ty to pat­tern-test, cal­cu­late for dif­fer­ent sizes, etc. in order to make the pat­terns sell-able. So! I’m just going to con­tin­ue in this blog’s tra­di­tion in shar­ing pat­terns for free! :D It’s just that it will require some creative/math work if you’re not mak­ing the exact same size I’m wear­ing. But that also means lots of rooms for cus­tomiza­tion! This is the first of the few pat­terns I was work­ing on :)

I’ve always want­ed to try using cor­ner-to-cor­ner (c2c) cro­chet to make a top. My first idea was a cozy sweater with a dinosaur on it (I might still do that, we’ll see!), but all these heat waves we’ve been hav­ing are not con­ducive to cozy sweater-mak­ing, so I thought I’d try with a lace weight yarn for a breezy sum­mer top. 

The “tiles” made in c2c cro­chet reminds me of colour­ful pix­els, and Nin­ten­do video games of my child­hood, and sum­mer vaca­tion spent play­ing these games. So I called it “8‑bit”.

It can be worn both ways, either with the but­tons on the front, or on the back!

But­tons in the front makes it a cardi­gan, which can be paired with a spaghet­ti strap sum­mer dress!

The top is made in 4 pieces then sewn togeth­er. So you can also sew the v‑neck pieces togeth­er and place the but­tons on the round-neck side.

There is also some shoul­der shap­ing so that the cap sleeves will fol­low the shoul­ders rather than stick out. I thought that goes bet­ter with the gen­tle, del­i­cate feel of the lace weight Noro Taiyo.

Size: Bust 36″, arm­hole depth 7″, neck open­ing width 8″, total length 17″

Size is easy to adjust as you go with the c2c cro­chet stitch. There will be tips for adjust­ment through­out in ital­ics.

Gauge: 5x5 “tiles” = 2“x2”

Mate­r­i­al: 

3.5 mm hook, and the small­est hook you have for weav­ing in ends (mine is 1.5 mm)

Lace weight yarn about 1100 yards (I only used a bit of the sec­ond skein of Noro Taiyo Lace, one skein of this is over 900 yards), larg­er sizes will require more yarn

Sev­en 1/2″ buttons

Sewing nee­dle

Cor­ner-to-cor­ner cro­chet: this pat­tern requires famil­iar­i­ty with c2c cro­chet. If you’ve nev­er used this stitch before, no wor­ries! It’s quite easy and I find it rather med­i­ta­tive too. There are tons of very detailed tuto­ri­als out there. I learned from the pho­to tuto­r­i­al by One Dog Woof, take a look and use some scrap yarn to prac­tice, and I’m sure you’ll be ready in no time!

Charts:

 

 

Pattern/recipe:

V‑neck piece (make 2):

Start from the low­er left cor­ner, tile 1. Con­tin­ue through chart. Chart is read diag­o­nal­ly. Fol­low this excel­lent pho­to tuto­r­i­al by One Dog Woof if you need some help!

When there are 22 tiles on both edges, begin decreas­ing on the right edge by work­ing 1 sl st through each dc just made, and sl st in turn­ing ch, then ch 3, 3 dc in turn­ing ch, and con­tin­u­ing on.

For a larg­er gar­ment, con­tin­ue work­ing more tiles until desired width before decreas­ing. To deter­mine “desired width”, decide on fin­ished bust mea­sure­ment you’d like for the top. Say 40″. Divide it by 4, which is 10″. Then con­tin­ue c2c cro­chet until both edges are 10″ long before decreas­ing on the right edge. Note the num­ber of tiles you have at the bot­tom edge when you reach desired width. You will need to have the same num­ber of tiles on the bot­tom edge of each of the pieces.

Con­tin­ue increas­ing on the left edge but decreas­ing on the right edge until the left edge has 37 tiles. 

For a longer gar­ment, con­tin­ue increas­ing on the left edge until desired length. Note the num­ber of tiles when you reach desired length.

Shape shoul­der:

Begin decreas­ing on the left edge after the 37th tile (or desired length). Work one row towards the right edge, then one row towards the left edge. After cro­chet­ing the last tile on the top edge, work anoth­er tile on top of the pre­vi­ous row (I placed an addi­tion­al white tile on top of the brown tile of the pre­vi­ous row).

Then, as usu­al, turn, sl st in next 3 dc, sl st in turn­ing ch.

And con­tin­ue down the row.

Repeat the above steps for shoul­der shap­ing until shoul­der resem­bles the chart. 

(We’re of course not going to leave the shoul­ders jagged! We’ll fill in the cor­ners as we sew them togeth­er later.)

Then, decrease on both the top edge and the right edge until there are 9 tiles at top edge. End with work­ing loop on the top edge, don’t fas­ten off.

If you have increased in the bot­tom edge, increase the same num­ber of tiles at the top edge.

Neck edge:

*Work 3 dc in the cor­ner between first two tiles (where the low­er left cor­ner of the tile the work­ing loop is on meets the top right of the next tile), sl st in next turn­ing ch* repeat from * to * until end of row (the neck edge is shown in the next pho­to). Fas­ten off.

Round-neck piece (make 2):

Fol­low pattern/recipe until neck edge. (mak­ing the same increas­es if you’ve made them in the v‑neck pieces.)

*Work 3 dc in the cor­ner between first two tiles, sl st in next turn­ing ch* repeat from * to * 3 more times, ch 3, 3 dc in turn­ing ch.

Con­tin­ue in c2c stitch pat­tern, decreas­ing on both edges until there final tile is made, fas­ten off.

Sew halves together:

Sew togeth­er the cen­tre seams of the two round-neck pieces.

Seam­ing shoulders:

With wrong side fac­ing, attach yarn to low­er edge of shoul­der on one piece.

*Work 3 dc in cor­ner between the first two tiles, sl st in next turn­ing ch* repeat from * to * until end of row, don’t fas­ten off.

With right sides togeth­er, place shoul­der of v‑neck piece to the shoul­der of the round-neck piece just com­plet­ed, match­ing both pieces. With work­ing loop still attached to the round-neck piece, sl st in top of shoul­der of v‑neck piece.

*Work 3 dc in cor­ner between the first two tiles, sl st in next turn­ing ch* repeat from * to * until end of row, leave a long tail for sewing, fas­ten off. 

Sew entire shoul­ders togeth­er (the slopes we just worked on and the top edges). Repeat on the oth­er shoulder.

The rest of assembly:

With wrong sides fac­ing, sew side seams togeth­er. For my top I count­ed 17 tiles down from shoul­der for 7″ in arm­hole depth, then start­ed sewing to the bot­tom edge. If mak­ing a deep­er arm­hole, mea­sure the desired depth and count the num­ber of tiles with­in the measurement.

But­tons:

Sew but­tons on one edge where the turn­ing ch on the edge will form nat­ur­al but­ton holes, which is every 4th tile.

Weave in all the ends with a tiny hook, and we’re done! :D

Leave a com­ment if you have any ques­tions or need clar­i­fi­ca­tions! Hap­py crocheting!

 

this week’s awesome finds

Beau­ti­ful cor­ner to cor­ner cloud blan­ket and chart from Kikalite.

 

If I con­jure up enough patience, I will make these. Bead­ed ear­rings how-to from How Did You Make This?

 

We nev­er grow tired of lla­mas <3 Video tuto­r­i­al from Picot Pals.

 

Also from Picot Pals, Ice­land pop­pies! They’d make great brooches would­n’t they?

 

These made from, can you guess it? — hot glue sticks! Tuto­r­i­al from AdTech, the com­pa­ny that makes the glue sticks.

 

This one’s a planter! <3 paid pat­tern by Hel­lo Hap­py on Rav­el­ry.

 

Hap­py Thurs­day, and have a love­ly week­end, everyone!