2KCBWDAY2 - Learning

Day Two: 29th March. Skill + 1UP

Look back over your last year of projects and compare where you are in terms of skill and knowledge of your craft to this time last year. Have you learned any new skills or forms of knitting/crochet (can you crochet cable stitches now where you didn’t even know such things existed last year? Have you recently put a foot in the tiled world of entrelac? Had you even picked up a pair of needles or crochet hook this time last year?

“Learned new skill. Gained new knowledge."

Well, last year on Knitting & Crochet Blog Week, I went on at great length about trying out broomstick crochet. Have the tools and the technology but I just didn’t get Steve Majors Austin out of the wreckage in time. [Character/actor mishmash - my bad. 3/31/11]

However, I did manage to take a stab at hairpin lace which I also mentioned last year,if only in passing. I wanted to play with the Berroco Boho Colors ribbon yarns I acquired in a protracted fit of “oooh that’s pretty” and hairpin seemed the way to go to preserve their lovely tapeyness.

So with loom, hook and ribbonated yarn in hand and an article in Interweave Crochet propped up against my tumbler of scotch uh, “diet soda”, I started hairpinning my little brains out.

The idea was to make longish panels in a combination of colors that I probably wouldn’t want to wear in public and assemble them into some sort of vaguely defined, poorly imagined and imminently ill-conceived tunic top that would allow me to bear the heat waves bouncing off my beauteousness while avoiding the violation of any uptight civil laws against rampant nekkidness. Trouble is, the pattern I was looking at for inspiration/instruction was for a fancy scarf with an intricate joining technique that resulted in lots of curves and open spaces and that kind of garment wasn’t gonna keep me of any episodes of COPS. But I’m a preternaturally clever thing (when not leaving my keys in the car door lock overnight) and between the article, the instructions on the back of the package the loom came in and some judicious web stalking I figured out how to make and join straight panels. Kind of.

Hmmm. Helpful.

Under my cat's watchful gaze and with the pins set arbitrarily at about 2.5” apart I went to town:

Loopy Goodness

I liked it but didn’t think that the loops would offer much coverage at these widths. So I moved the pins in to the approximately 1.5” marks and tried again:

Eh. O. K. I. Guess.

Not sooo bad. In fact, I rather like the tight packing of all the pretty colors. Besides, to complete what I see in my head with panels of this width will probably be much more tedious than necessary with the added bonus of requiring way more product than a sensible person would commit to a single project. Perfect. My kind of ordeal!

Being a curious but lazy monkey, I had no intention of undoing the larger strip and redoing it at my newly preferred setting. So I just ran keeper threads through each set of loops as recommended in one of my source materials (Good Lord, No. I don’t know which) and have the two strips in storage/limbo. But before relegating them to the land of blurry flying saucers and even blurrier yeti peepshows, I managed to catch a wild hair about trying to join the strips:

Comfy Chaos

Hmmm. The scarf in the magazine was made with a solid color ribbon yarn so the joins were less... dramatic. I have no idea if they are allowed to be as blatantly noticeable as mine or not, but I march to the beat of my own Tim-tom and like the zippy, vaguely Morse code/ bones on the fish skeleton look of this join. So why did I only join about a fourth of the two strips together?

I have no idea. I did this months ago now. I think I might remember something about wanting to have strips/panels in alternating ribbon color patterns because I didn’t have more than one ball of yarn in any one colorway. See, I knew full well that one ball of any yarn wasn’t enough to cover even my collar bones and since I was ordering more than one ball anyway I couldn’t resist buying different color patterns. Individual balls. On sale. Closeout sale. Discontinued in perpetuity sale.

So, I have the one purple based yarn you see in the photos and one beige based that I know doesn’t sound at all like something I’d like only it has this gorgeous coppery bronze segment in it that I can’t stop drooling over. Sigh. Two lonely little balls. (ooo, irony) That’s not getting me covered up in any kind of way. Maybe I’ll wait for a sale and get some of the solid colorways still available and just commit fully to a full on Frankenshirt.

Monkey likes to see progress when working on something or she’ll get frustrated then bored then distracted by something shiny and everything will get put into back burner storage hell. So, even though I liked learning/blindly struggling through how to do hairpin crochet, I’ll need to wait for the muse to strike me upside the head before I recall the project from perdition. Hey, speaking of Hades, summer is coming pretty soon. Maybe another heat wave will wake up that peaky muse.

Here's hoping that the ape-ling hasn't written the technique off as "figured out - don't need to proceed". Curious, lazy, clever and apparently crazy monkey signing off now.

Hook On!
C