Meanwhile, Back at the Wristies

I concentrated on display props and spring blooms for my recent market. These frilly wristies lingered on my needles. Today I've finished them off.

My earlier versions of these have all been in my handspun wool. These ones are a Bendigo 8-ply, hand-dyed by me. I'm particularly keen on how the colour has distributed to form little stripes in the finished result. That gets broken up in the ruffle to add to the playfulness of the overall result. It's going to be a wrench to put these on the "for sale" stack, but I do have plenty of happy wristies for myself.

Another Scarf

I finished this scarf yesterday.

I decided the yarn was just the thing for another go at the ruffles design I made here. The yarn is a mohair blend which turned out to be too soft for its original purpose. There's no such thing as too soft for one of these scarves and the crochet structure adds strength. Now it's in a box on its way to my friend D along with her blanket and other bits and pieces which have been waiting to make the trip north. Whether she's out in the elements or curled up on the couch my friend can have a bit of woolly goodness to keep her warm. 

Just Ruffles

You know how it is when you go to a restaurant and order from the dessert menu first, just in case you won't have room for both main course and sweets? That's exactly the approach I took to this scarf.



 

I have been known to enjoy a ruffle or two embellishing my accessories. This time I bypassed a base structure and just built my ruffle on a row of single crochet. It's the last of my sea green handspun merino. 

Ruffled Now

The garter stitch scarf now has its crochet ruffle.

It's a gentle ruffle as ruffles go, more like gentle waves lapping at the edges of the sea colours.

Ruffles to the Max

This crochet collar began with a bit of leftover wool. It was spindle-spun, hand-dyed Finn-Cashmere, so a rather special scrap. In my ongoing exploration of neck adornment possibilities I made a rough elipse. My next step was to add a few freshwater pearls. I wanted some matching seed pearls to finish it off, but there were none to be found. So it sat for a while. Then I dug out some hand-spun silk. It's usually a bit of a gamble to try to dye a matching shade, but I decided to try anyway. It worked! Today I stitched around the basic shape with the silk. Once that was done, it was time for adornment.

I endeded up with a mass of ruffles. I like ruffles. In this context I'm thinking of them as being like coral--a sea blue-green coral collar. It should be fun to wear in the coming cooler days.

Oxymoron?

I've been working through a list of requests for my ruffled wristies. I have to admit I've been putting off knitting the first on the list. The thought of a pair of pale grey ruffled wristies just didn't sit well in my mind. Well, I've made one of the pair. The second is on my needles.

What do you think?

I'm still not convinced. I'm going to try to dye a paler shade of grey. And the good news is that I can always overdye the finished pair in a completely different colour.

Ruffles

I've featured mostly beading here in these summer days. It seems to be the perfect type of craft for hot weather, since it's easy to do no matter how warm my hands get. But we have had some milder days and I've been knitting away at some of the ruffled wristies I have requests for. The question with ruffles is "how much is enough?".

I make the ruffles by doubling the number of stitches in each of the final rows. There's one row difference between these two. I decided that either might appeal, though my personal preference is for as much ruffle as I can get. So there's a pair made with a little less and a little more. I'll see how they go.

Today is going to be hot. I need to do some more spinning before I can tackle the other wristies on the list. I need grey and black. I'll wait for a really cool day before I sit down to that task.

Sea Foam

I'm still fighting the battle against black on black. I made myself another cowl. This one is a bamboo-wool blend and not as warm as the last one. Bamboo already has lots of drape and I knitted this on large needles, so it really flows. I was a little bored with the dark colouring, though. so I added a cute little ruffle in a variegated blue-green crochet cotton. Now it makes me smile. As I was crocheting around--I ended up with some crazy number of stitches to make the ruffled edge, 900 on the last row!--I was thinking of the colours of the sea and the frothy tips of the waves, so this one is my "Sea Foam" cowl. Given the weather around here and the winds that come off the antarctic ice, it will probably be the only sea I experience for quite a while.