Midsummer's night Shawl

After returning from my holidays again and having put my shawl to good use again I have decided to make another one.  This time for my mum.

I had a good look through my existing patterns but I found that a lot of shawl patterns are too light weight for what I had in mind.  I wanted to create something that had a little warmth but not heavy weight.

I found this pattern for a Midsummer's Night Shawl on Interweave Store.  It's just what I was looking for. 

It is substantial enough to have some warmth but also not too heavy.  The pattern is pretty easy to follow and has a really useful stitch diagram - actually after the first couple of rows I put the rest of the pattern to one side and just followed the diagram.

I am creating this using Adrafil Azzura 3 ply yarn, this is a 70% Wool and 30% acrylic mix.  It is lovely and soft, east to work with and comes in a pretty good range of colours.

Shade Card

I've chosen to use shade 33 Turquoise.  I've really only just stared with this project, but so far so good - I think its going to work out quite nicely, fingers crossed anyway.

.... Think I got the right yarn ....

I tried out making my swatch last night with my new yarn and the 3.5mm hook.  It honestly looked to me like it was working up too big, but when I measured it, it was still 1/2 cm too small !!!

Tried again with a 4mm hook and it came out just about bob-on.  I think I must crochet really tight.

I decided that I didn't really like the colour of yarn I had so I've ordered a couple more colours.  Its so hard to tell what the colours will turn out like when you can't really see the yarn texture and the colours are dependant on the quality of your monitor.

So in the end I've ordered up one each of numbers 5, 9, 19, 33, 58 & 95.  I'd previously got a 48 and 20.  The 48 is a little bit "school jumper" and 20 is quite nice but I think it might be a bit dark for the cardigan I am making.



I will always find a use for the various yarns, so I don't feel too guilty about ordering such a selection of colours.

Trying to get the right yarn...

This is kind of proving a point, I mentioned in my last post that I had found a couple of projects in the Crochet so Fine book.  One of them is a hooded cardigan that I really like the look of (lets see if I can do it justice!).

The pattern calls for "lace weight" yarn, and names the variety used in the photos - unfortunatly it is a brand that is not available in the UK so I have set about trying to find something that will do.

So lace weight yarn is 0 - 3ply - so I thought I'd start with 1ply yarn.  I found some at Buttercup Miniatures

So I got myself 1 skein to see if it would do the job.  The hook size called for is 3.5 mm.

I created the swatch required for measuring the guage and it was WAY too small - so I tried again and used a 4 mm hook, better but still too small.

So I have just bought a 3ply yarn to try it out and see if the size is right, the colours aren't as good but I'll worry about that if the guage is OK.

I think we should start laying bets now on me acutally needing 2ply yarn !!!