Finished the Romantic Boho sweater coat!

I finished this two days before xmas which was good because I needed it for xmas eve to give to my mom.  Overall I’m happy with how it came out, but as I mentioned before I would not use the Unforgettable yarn for the squares again.  Besides the previously mentioned problems, the squares tended to stretch out a significant amount especially at the corners.  I ordered some ‘stripes’ yarn from Caron Simply Soft in Rose Garden and Plum Wine and I’m going to make one of these for myself. Someone on reddit also recommended Lion Brand Shawl in a Ball or Landscapes for similar color changes but in actual worsted (4) weight.  If I make a third I may do that.

That being said, I love how ‘virus’ shawls look and apparently it can be adapted to blankets.  I am going to use all the Caron Big Cakes in Nightberry that I bought to make a virus blanket, while I also work on new bathroom mats using repeated front post DC.

Red Heart Unforgettable

I like how this romantic boho sweater is coming out, but when I make one for myself I think I will do it entirely in Caron Simply Soft or another yarn.  Red Heart Unforgettable is amazingly beautiful with nice color striping and complimentary colors but it has equal downsides.

For one thing, it sheds.

It is also rated as a “4” (medium) but after going through about 6 skeins already, I’d guess that less than 1% of the skeins are even close to that.  THIS is roughly a “4” on the hook

but most of it feels like a 2

I have to crochet considerably slower because it can just pull apart like it’s roving and snarls against itself if it as much as looks at rubbing up against itself.  Frogging it also out of the question because of that.  .  I actually wrote Red Heart and asked them to rerate their danged yarn since it’s so terribly inconsistent but their reply was basically “well sometimes it’s a 4 so we rated it as a 4”.  Yeah ok.  The Sweet Roll yarn had the same problem of sometimes going down to a 2 but it generally stayed closer to a 3 90% of the time.

Live and Learn

I’ve done a number of patterns from other people lately, but I find myself rewriting the steps to make it work better one way or another.  A good example was the gentleman’s scarf from Yarntopia.  I had followed the initial chain in the video without measuring it before doing a lot of work and what do you know, it was 10 feet and just way, WAY too long.  If I had also followed how many times to repeat the pattern, it would have been insanely wide as well.

Well I ran into this again with the cute romantic boho coat from Annoo.  I was using the Tealberry Unforgettable yarn and followed the directions to sew it all together with a bone color.  Only, Unforgettable is terribly thin and although Caron Simply Soft is rather thin as well, it’s uniform as opposed to Unforgettable which is about .5% a “4” yarn and 99.5% a 2.  So you know what happens if you are using a mostly dark thin yarn and using a light color to stitch if all together? This. I am going to use a dark yarn and try to repair that, but next time I will use a darker yarn to begin with or just the original yarn.

Vintage Yarns

Since my order from Michaels took so long I decided to make a sweater based off another of Annoo’s crochet patterns for my mom.  Despire the yarn claiming it would wash and hold it’s shape, it unfortunately did not.  It may have been my fault because I shampood and conditioned it by hand to try to make it softer because it was rather scratchy, but now the sleeves fall below my hand and instead of falling at hip length, it’s nearly down to my knees.  So, it’s back to the other romantic coat instead.  I just wish I had been working on that instead of this.

Torso Mannequin

Well it is now the 18th and the Michaels order still isn’t here.  They called me on the 16th to let me know it shipped, on the 15th.  So seriously, you order on the 2nd, and nearly 2 weeks later THEN it ships? Give me a fucking break.

At any rate, in the meantime I ordered a torso mannequin from Walmart to help me list some of my stuff on Etsy.  It’s so much easier to put something on SOMETHING body shaped and then take the picture, than try to put it on yourself, have someone else take the picture, and nitpick about it.

In my shop!

Etsy’s thumbnail system needs some work though.  You can only zoom IN on the picture, not out.  So I can only assume unless you made it at small dimensions, you just can’t get the whole thing in the thumbnail. I also lowered some prices, because I’m building up a number of things and it would be great to sell some.  I’ve read all about selling on there but, competition is a real thing.  I don’t just mean other sellers, but when you see ads for sites like Wish where they offer what looks like a 1,000 dress for like 9 dollars, THAT is what you have to worry about. I make 9 dollars in like 10 minutes of work, people making those are nowhere near that.  So, that is really the biggest problem.