Sunday, August 28, 2016

Yak and Yarn is back

My Yak and Yarn group resumes it's meetups this week after a big summer break. I have so missed these sweet crafting friends. In June we moved our daytime meet up to the yarn store where I teach. Our coffee shop venue had become far too busy during the day. I finally decided a change was due after hearing that one of our group had driven around the parking lot three times and then returned home. The back room at Nimblefingers is a peaceful and welcoming space surrounded by beautiful yarn. Aaaaahh, what better? Bliss!


 

I designed a sampler crochet baby blanket and distributed patterns modified for two different yarn weights before we broke up for summer. I do tend to give myself these self-imposed deadlines. So we will see how everyone is getting on with these! They are my test crocheters and I'm interested to hear their feedback. I haven't yet completed joining my nine sampler blanket squares or decided on a suitable edging but I must do this before the meeting. I know I will be presented with several more gorgeous baby blankets for our charity cause and as the fearless leader of the group I need to keep up!

I had such fun choosing which nine stitch patterns to use in my sampler blanket. One of the great joys of crochet is the huge number of stitch pattern possibilities. It's impossible to ever get bored. I selected patterns from two of my favorite resource books: The Complete Photo Guide to Crochet by Margaret Hubert and The Complete Book of Crochet Stitch Designs by Linda P. Schapper.

My criteria was that they had to have a similar amount of open space to match, be suitable for advanced beginners, have a small number of repeats to easily convert the pattern from worsted to sport weight yarn and have straight edges all the way around for easy joining. On our very first joint charity project, where we all made single crochet squares, joining slightly different sized squares (because everyone works to a slightly different tension) was difficult since single crochet is a dense stitch. Doing the initial joining of my sampler I can see that these more open squares are forgiving and stretchy.


 
 
Anyway, do let me know if you'd like a copy of my sampler blanket pattern and once I've had feedback from my group and updated it I'll email you a pdf copy. You can send me a private message via my Crafty Escapism Facebook page or @craftyescapism on Twitter or Instagram.

2 comments:

Jodiebodie said...

What a lovely crochet space, Tamara. "Yak and Yarn" is a great group name too. Fun, punchy names should be expected from creative people I suppose; e.g. knit and knatter, stitch'n'bitch etc.
Your exlanation of your design choices based on your past experience was very interesting and useful. I was making mental notes as I read. Let's interpret that as an interest in your sampler pattern when it is ready! ;-)
Good luck in reaching your deadlines. :-)

Crafty Escapism said...

I'm glad you found my tips useful Jodie. Yes I'll send you a link to the sampler blanket when I've made it pretty and uploaded it to Ravelry. I haven't done this before so bear with me....!

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