Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

As a rule, I do not like hand-painted yarns with lots of color transitions. To my eye, they make crochet look muddy and strange, especially when I use lace stitches, and I use a lot of lace stitches. The color in hand-painted yarn just jumps too fast and takes over the work so all you see is the flashing colors and not the beautiful stitch work. If you put the time into doing really nice crochet stitch work, people should be able to see and appreciate that readily without having to battle color transitions to get there.

Hand-dyed yarn is an entirely different animal. It is lovely, especially when it has subtle tones of a color. The subtle variations lend a lot of interesting little effects to crochet, enlivening the surface while not muddying the stitches. I’m all for that, but those hand-painted hanks never make me happy.

Hand-painted roving, on the other hand, can be spun in a way that is wonderful for crochet. Hannah spun me a bunch of hand-painted rovings that have very long color repeats and gentle color transitions because she spun them to very nearly, if not fully, cobweb weight yarn. Just a little spot of one color in a roving can be teased out very far in a thin yarn, so, with patience, hand-painted rovings can be spun in ways that really let you control the color and transitions. Hannah’s final products spun from hand-painted rovings are beautiful, tightly spun, z twist yarns that crochet stunningly and are nearly magical in the way they make sharp stitches while still being soft to the touch. 

I used four hanks of yarn made from hand-painted roving in a project I made nearly three years ago now. It was such a fun process, I want to try it again. I still have some of her handspun that fits the bill, so I may have to pull it out of my stash soon and have fun playing with color placement again. 

Come with me now, and I’ll tell you the tale of this project. It is a story of Covid, crochet, and color.

In 2022, after years of the pandemic canceling plans, I saw my brother (who lives on the West Coast while I live on the East Coast) for the first time in four years. My mother decided to make an event of it and have a family reunion for my father’s side of the family. The final guest list included my mother and father, my brother, his wife, their daughter, two of my cousins and their spouses, one of their children and his significant other, and my family. Fifteen people. Now for the very short lived mystery of it:  Who had Covid and who would they pass it to?

We met on a Saturday morning. By Sunday, my darling brother and his daughter were testing positive. By Monday, my father had it. By Tuesday, I had it. By Wednesday, my mother and my sister-in-law had it. That’s it. No one else got it. Fortunately, we were well vaccinated and everyone recovered well, if slowly. My brother was up and taking walks near my parents’ house days after he was diagnosed. I hallucinated my daughter’s beloved former cat swimming through the air to visit me. Same disease, different people, I guess. Thank goodness for Paxlovid, it changed the whole course of my time in isolation.

Really, I should have expected this. Forty years ago to the year, my brother contracted chicken pox. We waited with quiet patience to see if I, too, would fall to the chicken pox. The incubation period is twenty-one days. My first pox arrived late in the evening of the twenty-first day. The indignity! I still have a scar because I scratched it bloody before my mother caught me at it and made me stop. I should have known he would bring me some sort of illness.

Because I was the only one in my household to have contracted Covid, the first time any of us had ever had it, I was quarantined away from my family until I tested negative. We were being extremely cautious. This was very trying and took two full weeks. I had not realized how hard it would be to be in the house but not part of the life of the house. I did take my current crochet projects into quarantine with me, but one was too fiddly and the other needed to be tried on regularly to ensure proper fit, so I could not work on either of them. 

In a move that turned out to be terrible, I had recently cleared my entire stash from my bedroom and moved it into the (now former) bunnies’ closet because the bunnies weren’t using it. The bunnies were consummate nudists as far as I knew, so the closet was nearly empty and ready to be used. Just to be clear, nearly empty means it was holding stuff other people were storing, not random and elaborate bunny dresses to be worn to extravagant bunny balls held under the new moon with an all bunny orchestra, fancy herb based appetizers, and dancing until dawn. If I ever find such a bunny-sized stash of elegance, I will let everyone know and get lots of pictures. 

In my own room, nearly devoid of yarn, I did have some UFOs under the bed that had been left alone because they were not, by the luck of already being on hook, what I count as stash. That did not stop me from declaring one to be newly found stash and frogging it to start a new quarantine project. I was sick. I gave myself complete decision making power over everything in my tiny domain. Frogging it would be!

I decided to make off with several hanks of Hannah’s handspun for whatever mischief I was about to get into. They were all z twist, single ply, very fine lace weight spun from Malabrigo Nube. One was dark purplish blue, two were medium bluish green with highlights of purple, and one was lighter purple with bits of blue. They all looked similar so I decided to use them all together. 

To my credit, I had all of my crochet books and a good number of my hooks, though, weirdly, many of them were 3 mm to 3.75 mm hooks, trapped with me. I was ready to start my adventure. 

Try one: The yarn was a very fine lace weight, so I got myself a 2 mm hook and set to work. Hannah has always been a fan of shells, especially open shells. Guess which book I pulled?  That’s right, the Crochet Every Way Stitch Dictionary! I used the Grand Arches pattern and decided on a point to side triangular wrap. I started with one strand. Disaster. I don’t know if it was the light, me, some spirit of crochet that said no, or something else, but the project looked terrible. I frogged it. I captured no pictures. I do have this picture of a very unimpressed face I noticed on my water glass, though, from later in the project. 

Try two: I decided to use the same pattern, a 5 mm hook, and two strands of the yarn. This would create some neat color blending as the yarns moved through their variegations. Or not. There was no blending. There were just two distinct yarns looking awkwardly at each other and wondering what I thought I was doing. The hook size was fine, but the project was going to fail spectacularly. Failing spectacularly with someone else’s handspun is never an option. 

I frogged everything, rolled up the balls, and put it all away. Then I went to sleep to be plagued by weird images from dreams that I could only remember snatches and feelings from the next day. It was a bit disconcerting and strange for someone who keeps a detailed dream journal and was looking forward to recording the much hyped weird Covid dreams.  During my Covid sleeps, I was hoping to have dreams about the bunny balls and the elaborate gowns the culturally refined bunnies would dance in, alas now I shall just have to imagine such things on my own. Despite this, the next day I sat down in the chair by the window so I could channel my inner 19th century tuberculosis patient, or apparently someone from Kansas, and set to work. Meg was helping.

Try three: I got a 3 mm hook. I like a 3 mm hook. It’s a happy size, just wanting to be recognized and used. It stood tall and ready because it knew this was its time.

I started the project with that 3 mm hook and a single strand of yarn. I laid all the balls of yarn out before me and changed colors when the yarn in use started to look like one of the colors next to be used in one of the waiting balls. I kept changing colors this way throughout the shawl. Sometimes the color is dark, sometimes very light, but all of the balls were used and the effect is wonderful. The shawl winds between colors and shades like light over water. In color, it reminds me of Monet. It really needs all three colorways in the balls of yarn I made off with. With only one colorway, the depth and variation would be lost. 

I am so happy with it. The colors were a joy to play with and the stitch pattern was really meditative. For the set up row, I had to count to either three or five, on the return rows, I counted to eleven with a beat between for a lone single crochet. That counting was a powerful way to pass the time focused on color and light and breathing. It truly helped me through both Covid and being separated from my family. 

The final shape of the shawl changed when Hannah decided that she wanted a longer, narrow wrap similar to one I had made her before. The final version has narrow, pointed ends and a wide, flat middle bit. It measures about eighty-one inches long enabling Hannah to be as necessarily dramatic as she needs to be while still looking amazing. 

I really went back and forth about the border. Part of me wondered about a row or three of single crochets, but I worried that it could look weird with the decreasing side. I thought about an elaborate bead and bubble looking confection, but I worried that that would take over the wrap. I finally settled on a border worked side to side and attached at one side edge to the side edge of the wrap. I used the Highland Edge stitch pattern on pages 128-129 of Crochet Edgings and Trims by Kate Haxell. The chain loops at the edge give it a little foamy, bubbly look, and I like that given that the body of the shawl looks like mermaid scales or ripples on water. The border does what borders should do: It pulls the project together and gives it a cohesive edge that doesn’t dominate the project. 

If you would like to try this for yourself, find a nice stitch pattern that makes you happy. It doesn’t have to be fancy or elaborate, nor does the shape of your project have to be complex. You can just make a basic scarf if you don’t want to do shaping. Just find a shape and a stitch pattern that you understand and enjoy playing with and use it. I recommend using several shades of variegated yarn with longer stretches of color, if you can find them. Perhaps a self-striping sock yarn? Get one that is dark, one medium, and one light in shades that are close to each other and can be blended yet each have their own look so they all bring something special to the colorwork. 

You do NOT have to work this project in nearly cobweb weight yarn. In fact, don’t do that. Perhaps a nice fingering weight? I do like the look the single ply gives because the stitches are so nice and sharp, but it doesn’t have to be so if plied sock yarn speaks to you. The most important thing is that you use three or four variegated hanks that will coordinate with each other while allowing you to play with changing from hank to hank as you feel like it.

This project is about letting the colors talk to you and guide you in changing from one to the other to get the most aesthetic, watercolory, Impressionistic, light capturing look you can get. Have fun and, if you try it, drop me some pictures!