A Crocheted Make Up Case

Hello! How is everyone? Today, I am catching up on blogging about a recently completed project, which became a birthday gift for a friend. A crocheted make up case:

It was crocheted in rounds in a variegated mercerised cotton (Katia Jaipur) on a 2mm crochet hook.

I then lined it with felt and added a zip:

And that was it! I slipped a bottle of funky nail polish in it and gifted it to the birthday girl, who's a big fan of purple.

I had good fun making it and would definitely make more with the same yarn or even a different one.

Thanks for reading, folks, and see you soon! :)

The Pesky Poncho, part 3

And so, back for another instalment of the Poncho Saga! 

In the previous related post, I left you with an unbearable cliffhanger... After hours and hours of feverishly trying to finish the back section, I finally realised that the two shoulder sections were not symmetrical. The photo below shows it, well that is if you know what you're looking for. Basically, the orange treillis on the right hand side of the neck opening has fewer rows than the beige one on the left hand side.

There was no way, absolutely no way, that I would be willing to undo the whole back section. If I did do it, I was pretty certain I would never touch the thing again. On top of that, the frogging might damage the yarn, and I had little to spare. So I thought I would try to do a little bit of what I consider haute voltige, that is, to undo just the problematic section and to redo it the correct way. A while before, I had come across a very interesting tutorial to repair a torn granny square, here. So I thought I would give it a go on the Poncho.

Before I did it on the main thing, though, I luckily remembered the swatch I'd crocheted when I'd first set out on the long Poncho journey.

After much pondering, I finally cut through one of the rows of treillis and pulled a string of black yarn through the stitches that had now become loose.

I then proceeded to redo the row of treillis. It didn't go too badly... 

...but the process was extremely fiddly, especially as the unravelled yarn kept tangling up, and the more I progressed, the more I dreaded what it would be like on the much larger scale Poncho.

Around the same time, a friend of mine came to visit me, and I showed her the Poncho, of which I had by then finished the main body, which meant there were only the fringes to attach - and of course the shoulder to redo. I showed the work to my friend, who said she was incapable of spotting where the mistake was, and her input helped me make up my mind once and for all. I would not risk ruining the whole garment to try and correct a mistake that was hardly visible, if at all. I might add a couple of rows around the neck to secure the opening, but nothing more.

And with that decision made, I was now free to proceed with the fringes. I have to say, the task of attaching the fringes had always seemed daunting to me ever since I had started the project. It did not help that the pattern said to "cut 960 strands of yarn of 30 cm". 960!!! That's almost 1,000!!! How on earth do you go about a business like that? The good news is, though, that they have to be attached in bunches of 8, so that makes it 120 groups of 8, 60 for each panel. So I came with a quick and easy way to cut the fringes. Wrap the yarn eight times around a magazine (roughly 30 cm long). It's best to wrap it loosely, otherwise the yarn gets stretched and the fringe ends up being shorter than it should. 

Then, cut at top and bottom, and attach with a slipknot at the bottom of one of the panels.

Because the yarn is variegated, I had to do a little bit of thinking as to where the fringes should go. I didn't want the gradual colour change to go uninterrupted around the whole garment, as I felt it might look unbalanced, so I spaced the first groups of fringes evenly and then filled the gaps as I went.

So far, I have done half of it all, and I have to say, it worked up much quicker than I expected. A very pleasant surprise.

I haven't been able to carry on with the rest, as I was unwell after that, but the return of the sunshine will be a great incentive to start again. I really want to be able to wear the Poncho this summer.

See you next time, hopefully for the big reveal :)

The Pesky Poncho, part 2

You may remember from an earlier post that sometime last year I embarked on a long-term WIP adventure involving a particularly gorgeous poncho. I left you at a thrilling cliffhanger whereupon I had finally found the yarn I wanted to use (in Bruges, no less) and was about to make a start.

The first step was to make a swatch to test the tension. Now, this is normally something I dispense with, as I am of an impatient nature and rarely crochet things where tension is critical anyway. But for this one, unless I wanted to risk ending up with a mini snood or a maxi skirt, I had to check my tension. So I did make a swatch, using the diagram provided in the magazine (which, I now realise, is sporting some fetching coffee rings).

And that was the result, a lacy swatch with exactly the measurements required. Woohoo, success!!!

With the assurance I was using an appropriate yarn and crochet hook, I set out for the next challenge... The foundation chain. Or should I write the "Foundation Chain". For that alone was one hell of a task. The Foundation Chain had to consist of... 667 stitches. Gulp. I proceeded, relying heavily on stitch markers every 100 stitches, as well as triple-counting my stitches. The result was almost as long as my front room! 

Crocheting the first row into that never-ending chain must have been even more unpleasant but thankfully my mind seems to have blanked out most of it. The rest was no picnic though, and I do have vivid memories of it. You see, it's not that the pattern is exceedingly difficult once you get the hang of it, it's just that it's rather fiddly, especially with a 2.5mm hook.

For example, one of the key stitches of the pattern is the sweetly named "qtr15tog", meaning "15 quadruple trebles together" (that's UK trebles). For this stitch, you start by casting the (*) yarn over your hook 4 times...

...you then put your hook in the next stich, yarn over again and pull through the stitch, (**) yarn over, pull through two loops, repeat from (*) 3 times. Then you repeat from (**) 15 times, until you have a very crowded hook indeed...

...and finally you yarn over one last time and pull through all 16 loops...

You then let out a few choice expletives when your *$@! yarn slips off your @£%*!? hook and half your carefully elaborated quadruple trebles unravel as if in slow motion before your horrified eyes. You start again from (*) a few times, and finally, a good 15 minutes later, with a sweaty brow and trembling fingers, you complete the stitch. Phew!

Well done. You win the privilege of moving on to the next bit and start all over again. And there is more. There's the treillis bit. The treillis stitch is by nature quite simple. It's literally chain, double crochet, chain, double crochet and so on. It gives a lovely, delicate, lacy look to the work. You can see three rows of treillis in the left upper section of the photo below, in beige, orange and purple.

Simple and pretty enough. Except when you miss one of the chains from the previous row, of course, as in the picture below.

Can you spot it ? Can you spot the offending, standalone chain I left out THREE loooooong rows before? Aaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!!!! There went three painstakingly crocheted rows so that I could correct the mistake. Sigh. And frog.

Still... despite those obstacles, by mid-summer last year I had finished the front section and took the project with me on holiday to my native South of France. That's when I tackled the neck opening and shoulders, and that's where everything went wrong. Said sections should have been straightforward enough, since they just consisted of treillis stitches. But try as I might, I simply could not get the right amount of chains. Worst of all, the first time I became aware of the mistake, I had already done a few rows of the back section, complete with the offending succession of 15qtrtog stitches (which are also interspersed with 3qtrtog stitches, because why make things simple, eh?). So I obviously had to frog it, frog the shoulder section and start again. And again. And again. At my third attempt, one of the shoulder sections was still not quite right. For the life of me, I could not see what was wrong, so self-righteously decided there must be something wrong with the pattern itself. 

I then carried on again with the beginning of the back section, but the constant frogging had stripped me of my crochet drive. Yes, reader, I had developed CPAS (Crochet Project Annoyance Syndrome). For the rest of the holiday, I did not touch the Poncho again. Neither did I once I got back home. I needed a good sulk. Winter then settled in and I suddenly felt like working with thicker, warmer yarn, and the Poncho fell to the bottom of my WIP basket.

But eventually, sun and (relative) warmth re-emerged, and with them returned my appeal for lighter, lacier things, and therefore for the Poncho. I once again pictured myself wearing it over the summer, so one day I took it out of its basket, dusted my 2.5mm hook and off I went, gradually getting closer to the final stitch. There were a couple of missed chains and stitches and some frogging needed but all in all I made good progress.

I was getting confident with the pattern as well, much more than I had been last year, when I was still quite new to crochet. So I actually came to enjoy those 15qtrtog stitches for the rythmic dancing they allowed my crochet hook to indulge in. I crocheted for hours on end, and with hindsight, I wonder whether this didn't actually trigger my wrist injury.

And then there was another snag. I had been trying on the Poncho ever since I had hooked up the neck opening. It never fitted properly, as in it kept sliding off my shoulder, but I thought it would eventually get balanced out once the back section was finished. At some point along the way though, I realised the neck opening was definitely too wide for me. So I started to think about ways to fix it as inconspicuously as impossible. I spent quite some time pouring over the stichwork and imagining small additions and bypasses to correct the problem. And it was during one of those sessions, when I was about three quarters of the way through the back section, that I realised with horror (OK, I'm going a bit overboard here, but it's for dramatic effect) that I had missed a row in one of the shoulder sections. Cue Luke-I-am-your-father-style screamed denial... and another thrilling cliffhanger!

Thanks for reading, guys, to be continued... :) xxx

The Pesky Poncho, part 1

Last year, I fell in love. Well, sort of. Let's just say I set eyes on a particular crocheted garment whose pattern was conveniently provided by my favourite crochet magazine. None other than... drum roll, please...

the Bergère de France summer poncho!

Just look at it, isn't it absolutely gorgeous? So elegantly bohemian, effortlessly chic. Yes, as soon as I saw it, I knew I would make my own. I could already picture myself wearing it while strolling on the sun-kissed beaches of my native South of France, my first very own handmade crochet garment.

Only little thing... I did not like the colour of the original. Nope, not one bit. You see, unlike the dreamy vision who wears it in the picture, I have a very pale complexion, so put anything remotely beige on me and it's like camouflage. I simply disappear. No, I needed colour, and plenty of it.

My first move was to make a bee-line for the Deramores website and look at what other colours were available in the Bergère de France coton mercérisé line. You can find them here. Pretty enough, but... not what I was looking for. The trouble was, I didn't really know what I was looking for. So I started looking around for a colourful lace weight yarn, without much luck.

A couple of weeks later, I went to Belgium for a music festival and stayed a few nights in the lovely town of Bruges. Well, just around the corner from our hotel, and from this adorable little fellow by the way...

...I found the most amazing yarn shop ever. Although I didn't know it yet, because it was shut. And at that point, as if by providential intervention, the owner, who was still inside, saw me look desperately through the window, took pity on me, and reopened her shop just for me to have a look around. Yes, reader, that she did. I could have kissed her on both cheeks. She was the most adorable little old lady I had ever seen (no, no, I am not biased) and went to great lengths to try and communicate in English with us, for which I am very grateful, since my Flemish is not all that great. 

I quickly started browsing. The shop was like a grotto, with a bit of everything everywhere, and yarn that I had never seen back in the UK. Soon enough, my eyes fell on a collection of vibrantly colored skeins.

Variegated cotton yarn! That was it, I was in heaven. I frantically started rummaging through the various colourways, squeaking in delight with each and every one. The shop owner - perhaps slightly concerned by my emotional display - came closer, and proceeded to show me a lacy scarf in progress she was crocheting in the blue colourway (top left). We then started a conversation about various crochet stitches, which was slightly surreal since I only knew their names in English and she only in Flemish. Meanwhile, my poor other half was patiently suffering by my side.

I think the idea of using that particular yarn for the poncho came to me almost immediately, but there were three problems, of varying degrees of significance:

1) I didn't know yet which colourway I wanted

2) I only had 5 euros in cash and there was no card payment facility at the shop 

3) I didn't even know if the yarn was the right weight for the poncho

#2 was easy to solve: I would come back the following day after visiting my friend the ATM. #3 was not so bad either: I would check the exact weight of the yarn online as soon as I was back at the hotel, which meant I totally had to buy one skein just to make sure, right? If it wasn't the right weight, well so be it, I could still crochet something out of it, right? And one skein was only 5 euros! How convenient was this? Right? Right?

Ok, so problems #2 and #3 were kind of solved, or at least postponed. Problem #1 proved far more, well, problematic. I agonised over the various colourways for a few minutes, fully aware that this lovely old lady had probably had a long day and was looking forward to going home. So, in the end, I went for...

Isn't it dazzling? A true psychedelic firework! Look at the gradual blending of colours, so subtle, yet with such a bold result. I was in love, again.

We went back to the hotel, and I feverishly checked the weight of Bergère de France Coton Mercérisé, made a few calculations... aaaaaaand... the yarn I had just bought was bang on perfect! Joy of joys!!! I was one step closer to having my poncho. I simply couldn't wait to go back to the UK and start working on it. The following morning, with fresh cash in hand, I went back to the sweet old lady's shop and bought seven more skeins in my chosen colourway (plus one from the middle of the top row, and one from the left of the middle row, oh and one ball of crochet thread, just because I could). Incidentally, I was quite lucky, because she had exactly eight skeins in that colourway. I bagged them all and left the shop with a very broad smile on my face, dreaming of flowy ponchos and balmy summer evenings.

I didn't know what I was getting myself into.

To be continued... ;)