Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

And I’m back again! Aren’t you excited? Well, either way, you’ve navigated yourself back to my blog, so here we go!

This week I have been working a lot on Adia’s marled, color-changing shawl. It’s a ¾ circle shawl worked in various colors of lace weight yarn held double with a 3.75 mm hook. It’s all done in linked double crochet because I absolutely hate the way double crochets look when worked in a large group. We all have our thing, this is mine. I change one color when I feel like I am going to creatively extinguish if I have to keep working in the same color group, so each color section is a different size. Each new yarn is just a bit off of the color that stays in the working group, so the color change overall is subtle and quiet and gentle. Pretty, pretty, right?

I was feeling very lazy about the increases on this shawl and the potential endless counting, so I placed stitch markers to mark each of the eight sections (and increases) needed for each row and then I increase every so many stitches from the marker. I change the increase point each round so the wrap stays circular. I was working within 2 to 6 stitches of the markers in each row, but it started to look weird, so now I’m just increasing roughly at some similar point in each section. 

I watched ComplicatedKnots “I’ll never have scrap yarn again” video (I’ll never have scrap yarn again!) and her discussion of increasing in freeform crochet makes me think that perhaps I can be a little less uptight about the exact placement of my increases without wrecking my project. So I’m increasing roughly in the middle of a section now or roughly in the first or last third or quarter. We shall see how it goes.

In how it started, how it’s going news with this project, the beginning of the shawl is a bit more sudden in its color changes because I was using up tiny bits of scrap yarn and there wasn’t much of each color, and the colors were only more loosely related. Now that I have worked through those I can be more picky about the rest of the color changes. To be fair, almost all of the yarn for this project was leftover from a marled sweater I made for Adia several years ago. Some of the leftover bits were just very small.

Could I have been picky about the middle bit, too, you ask. Yes. I could have, but I felt like I needed to use some little bits of yarn up because they were looking at me in a very judgy way. Now they feel they are fulfilling their life’s purpose, and I can go back to making new odd, tiny balls of yarn that will beget a new project in which some of the colors are just a little weird because they are scrappy while the rest of the project is carefully planned, even if it is all technically scrap yarn.

Chaos. I swim in my creative chaos, and I am happy.

This shawl is going really well. I’m happy with the way the colors are flowing, one into another. I know some people are much more free with their color choices in a marled project, but not me. My chaos is small and only beeps quietly instead of screaming.

I set up a line of colors-to-come that I’m happy with. I have to ball up a hank, but I can do that. Hannah and I are watching five different shows right now (One wants choices!), so I’ll just put one on while she works on her stuff and I’ll get it all balled up and ready. Look at me go.

Now, one might wonder, why was this the project of the week? Well, it’s because my joints are aging faster than I wish them to, and I worked a whole bunch on the project with the little squares and ended up hurting my hands. My left pinky, specifically. It seems to have some arthritis developing and working with tiny yarns for a long time is seriously not good for it. It needs to rest, but I need to crochet, so we compromised with a bigger (slightly) yarn and hook combination. 

I have been responsibly weaving ends on the squares project and making a circle everyday, so there’s that. I am not without my beloved lace weight yarn. There’s just less of it standing proudly alone and a lot of it held double. 

In other news, I got word from a place I put into about teaching crochet. I’m super happy to report that I’m invited to their open house for new and returning prospective teachers! Here I was thinking crochet was going to be just my hobby and it comes roaring back. 

I have to say I’m very happy about this. I spent yesterday doing my new, official work and then, because I had done as much as I could do for then, I cleaned the house instead of crocheting because, you know, crochet is the hobby now. You have no idea how much I wanted an excuse to just sit and crochet for half an hour to round out my morning, but it felt irresponsible when there was housework to be done. 

Not so now! Now I have a reason to crochet quietly to myself and watch the birds. I’m keeping up my skills and project base for prospective classes. I am a responsible person. Oh my house isn’t super clean, but I am doing what I can within the confines of my work.

I feel like life is falling into place for me on many fronts right now, which makes me feel very nervous about what horrors the good news is hiding. And I think we all know whose fault the horrors would be, don’t we?

Fingers crossed that the tumult ends soon and we can all stop wondering what fresh hell each new day will bring.