My Yarns

I wanted to get different shelves for my yarn but, I think I’m going to try to not have an actual stash.  Sure it’s fun to have piles and piles of yarn (cough…7 huge skeins I recently bought) but I really need to tie it to an actual product and do something with all the scraps.  I am pulling all the non Simply Soft “4” yarns into a scrap blanket, use other scraps for a hat or something, and probably give away the yarn I won’t use.  I had some yarn given to me in colors undesirable for anything I’d like to do so I may do the reddit yarn exchange/give away to clean up things.

Also, no more pastel baby alpacas.  Natural colors only with pretty decorations!

Knit Llama

It look like Red Heart came out with another No Drama Llama only in knit this time.  It’s cute, definitely.   The only unfortunate thing is, it’s clearly unbalanced in the head and body because it includes directions to weight down the body (a problem I was running into before I scaled down my patterns head and lengthened the body again) using a bag of rice, and the head and neck is too big so it requires support of a dowel.  Tsk tsk. The head is like 90% of the body size, so, yeah. The legs appear to be useless decoration and do not hold the llama up nor balance it, and you are still covering at least 50% of your cool loopies with a blanket. They also removed the leg loopies and put stripes of color instead.

Like I said, super cute.  It’s a style choice I’m sure. I was also considering doing the ‘loopies’ on mine but the chains makes it look fuller.

Pretty Ponchos

Hey I’ve been slacking in writing.  I’ve done a few ponchos lately with that big old pile of yarn I bought recently.  I was doing 8 rows of the virus stitch but I’m kind of short so I dropped it at 7, which on me still hits below an untucked shirt.  8 rows I’d consider to be large and would almost hit my knees.  We’re all not short though!

The black and white ones are longer!

Troubleshooting Patterns

It’s been somewhat rare I keep a pattern exactly as I find it, either revising quite a bit or just a little.  Here are a few I made tweaks to and why.

Basic grannie square cocoon cardigan:  I learned this originally from Yarntopia .  It drives me bananas to crochet with a hook larger than the yarn, but it really does make it drape better.  However, the double crochet border in my opinion, felt too light.

The other one was from Annoo Crochet Designs where I picked up the front post/back post ribbed effect on the sleeves.  She did a front post crochet all around the border, which looks good if you sew it together like for a sleeve of the sides of the coat, but if you do it by itself, it curls up because it’s literally stair steps of crochet on top of each other.  I didn’t care for that so I did the front and back post to even if out even on the border.  I really need to use a bigger hook though, I just ughghghg.

Romantic Boho Sweater Coat: Another one from Annoo which is very, very pretty.   I just learned to really dislike how delicate Red Heart Unforgettable is and felt it did not pair well at all with the thick front post crochet layers for the arms and sides, and felt the double crochet inner border didn’t match the rest of the coat.  I substituted Lion Brand Landscapes for the Unforgettable, and used double skein Caron Simply Soft for the inner border.  But, if I ever make it again, I will probably just use a worsted weight yarn instead of the Caron, and the Landscapes.  That way both types of yarn will be on par with each other.  I actually started to make a third but then said NOPE and I’m going to make a bag.  Whenever I get around to it.

Ivory Virus Cocoon Sweater

Finished a white one! This takes considerably longer than a poncho, but I think I’m going to focus on just a few patterns these days.  The alpaca, virus poncho, and virus cocoon sweater.

In my shop now!