Thursday, December 27, 2012

#48

Figured that I'd better get another scrumble posted to the blog pretty soon, seeing that it is almost the end of the year already.  Where does the time get to?

I suddenly realized that the last one was posted here back in March, so my resolution to post photos reasonably often throughout the year didn't quite work!  Perhaps I will manage to update on a more regular basis in 2013...you never know ;-)

Apparently I am still in red-and-orange-mode, by the look of it; this one, like the previous scrumble, is very much in those tones.



This piece was actually the trial scrumble that I recently made when I was trying to decide on which yarns to use in a new freeform vest I am currently creating.  Most of the threads that I have used here are going into the actual garment...but not the one that was used for the slightly lighter, soft and bubbly section just under the bullion stitches towards the top right.  That yarn turned out to be a bit too soft,  and it felt as though it might be likely to snag, and also the colour looked lighter and had a much more pinkish tone when viewed in daylight (although at night it definitely seemed to go well enough with all of the other oranges)...but I wasn't intending to keep the vest for evening wear only, so unfortunately that particular yarn will just have to bide its time in the stash for a little longer.

Most of the yarns used are 100% cotton, and some are handpainted, but I have also included a little bit of angora in a fabulously bright mix of oranges with hot pink undertones, plus an interesting synthetic, tape-like one that I bought in San Francisco about 10 years ago (that's the dark bit on the left) and another bright orange rayon mixture that I found in the marketplace at the CGOA conference in Reno a few months ago.

This scrumble is nearly all crochet, but I am adding a bit more knitting to most of the others that I am creating for the vest.  Doing that, along with keeping things fairly 'open' by using lots of lacy crochet stitches, will help keep the weight down a bit, and make it more suitable for our summertime in our sub-tropical climate.   It will be one I know I will wear a lot, but it is also being done to help illustrate another book, which I hope to get done in the not too distant future.

Once again my new year's resolution will be to update the blog a little bit more often.  I hope that everyone reading here has managed to fit some creative fibrearts into their lives this year, and fingers crossed that we will all have time for even more in 2013.

and as a PS, and because I guess it's OK for me to do bit of self-advertising here...since I have almost run out of reprints of 2 of my books, and because I have decided that I won't be printing hard copies of either of them again, then I'm going to add that we have just made 'Freeform: serendipitous design techniques for knitting & crochet' and 'never too many Handbags' available as e-books...both can now be purchased in PDF form through http://www.knotjustknitting.com/freeform-tutorials   ;-)