Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

I have to make a wrap and make it fast. Because I am a fussy little princess about yarn, I have to wait for the yarn to come in the mail, taking up precious time, so I’m planning while I wait.

What I know is that I am going to work with two strands of lace weight yarn held double. I will have 8 hanks of Malabrigo lace yarn in colors ranging from deep to light purple and blue to bright, deeper blue. I could do a nice fade with this. I could marl the colors, randomly or in well organized stripes. I could make motifs, but with only two weeks this seems a poor plan, unless I can conscript one of my children into weaving ends. 

The recipient tends to wear only solid colors, so a fade seems like it would be best received, yet I am inclined to try something more ambitious because I will have scrumptious yarn and I’m clearing my calendar of everything else (even writing) to be able to just crochet for hours each day. It will be done on time!

Stripes would be easy and probably safe. I could start with two colors and go back and forth between them for a set number of inches, then change one color, work with that combination for the same number of rows, and then change one color, repeating until I am done. Safe, quick, a little planning at the beginning, and then just work the yarn until the wrap is to size.

A fade would be easy and safe. I have 8 shades of yarn and I want the wrap to be 72 inches wide. I could use each color held double and marl it with another color to slowly change color across the wrap. I think, if my faulty math is right, that would be 14 transitions, so, well, math. Let’s bump the width to 84 inches so each stripe of color can be an even six inches across. This is much easier for me to measure and makes a wide wrap that the recipient can really cuddle up in. 

I could do random stripes. I could do a fade, but pop the “wrong” colors in occasionally. I could do a fade and work single rows of the new color in before we get to that block. Valid options and only slightly more time consuming. The extra ends would be a pain, but there we are: Ends are the means to greatness.

These would be pretty wraps. People would like them. But they aren’t hard and I like being challenged. Like I am by this example of Isobel Moore’s work. 

This is gorgeous and it even has a bit of crochet in it. Granted the entire thing would be ends and counting as I worked out curves and marked starts and stops with a thousand stitch markers. I might have to draw a life sized diagram as I work to keep it all straight, but it would be stunning if I pulled it off. 

But then I could scroll frenetically to the work of Paul Klee. This is his work entitled Ancient Sound. 

Imagine it in those rich shades of blue and purple. I have bits of yellow left from other projects. I could throw those in to make it pop. I’ve always wanted to make a project inspired by Klee’s work. This could be a very satisfying project.  

And we’re off again to a photograph posted to Pinterest by Gill Bunce. 

I’m envisioning thin stripes in a narrowish triangle bordered by varying sizes of motifs. Again, I could pull bits of yellow or orange from my remnants jar to add some visual interest, but I wouldn’t have to if I didn’t want to. So many ends though. 

We shall run like wild chinchillas outside for the next inspiration and find it with the spiders, who because of an error with my phone’s voice to text feature are all canonically named Jenn now.

This stunning iron curl covered in a spider web was posted to Pinterest by Milly Quill Hunter. I can just see the hook portion being worked in the darker yarns and the web portion being worked in love knots in the light yarn colors. Less ends, probably. Love knots work up quickly. Hmmm. As far as weirder, more challenging projects go, this one might work up much faster. Two weeks fast, I’m not sure. One must account for frogging with experimental projects.

We shall stay outside now to look at an image taken by Anatoly Mikhaltsov of a cross section of a Ginkgo Stem. 

This one would be a half wrap with tiny motifs at the center, stripes going sideways worked in short rows bordering the motifs, and then more motifs for the edges. Again, it’s the damn ends. They are the means to both greatness and my own destruction. While I would love to make this, and I will have the right colors to pull it off, I cannot justify the time even if I could conscript my entire family and the pets into weaving ends and constructing it as I churned through making the parts.

Then, because somehow I always end up back at quilts, there’s the work of Erin Wilson.

I could do horizontal and vertical stripes in a rectangular shawl in which the lighter colors come together in the middle to meet motifs created with the darker colors. It would be very visually entertaining. I would have to plan so very carefully, but I can do that! I would enjoy doing that! But you know what it is? It’s the ends. I don’t have time for the damn ends. 

I think I need the yarn to come so I can just force myself to start a gentle fade or some other quick to work idea and be done. Too much time to plan and play on Pinterest may be bad for my deadline.