Scrumble #45

Here is my latest scrumble, finished last night.

It started with the strip of crochet bullions in the centre, which I had just unearthed at the bottom of a suitcase I was repacking. I didn't have any other grey yarn on hand, so decided to create a purple scrumble around them....but in the light of day I'm not altogether sure if that was a particularly good idea!

This morning the grey doesn't tone with the purple nearly as well as it did in the night light...so I may need to add a few other grey bits to the surface sometime, when I come across some more yarn in that tone.

The bullions had originally been worked in a straight line, using a smooth cotton yarn. To give them a better 'flow' I intentionally skipped stitches in some places, and added extras in other spots, as I worked the other yarns along the sides. There are a few knitted sections done moss (seed) stitch using a bamboo yarn, but the rest is all crochet, mainly in wools and mohairs, plus a few little areas in silk and angora. To add dimension to the piece some of the crochet stitches were worked 'around the post', and slip stitches were occasionally worked on the surface, too, for the same reason.

The scrumble was made in one piece, by picking up and joining on the stitches each time a new yarn was added (i.e. no sewing was involved). To give it a 'completed' look I finished off with a couple of rounds of short crochet stitches, being careful to increase or decrease wherever it was needed so that the piece remained flat.

As I think I may have mentioned on the blog before, bordering a piece like this is something that I rarely do for scrumbles that are going to become part of a garment, but I don't mind doing it to 'frame' a smaller artwork.

This is because putting a 'fence' around a lot of different fibres is often asking for trouble further down the track...even if the stitch count appears to be perfect when the piece is newly completed, if it contains a lot of different yarns you could find that some are likely to relax and expand a bit whilst others might shrink and contract slightly (even just in normal wear, let alone when being laundered), and this could cause the fabric of the garment to distort and go out of shape.