Life is not all about renovation, and writing, and editing and mentoring – and good grammar. Nor the outings seeking ancient monuments and woodlands; trawling lakes for microscopic lifeforms; and scouring Ireland for geological data. In our day-to-day life my husband and I have our eyes firmly glued to microscopes and screens far too often to be healthy, and now and again we indulge in a little creative work.
When I was a teenager, I made the shawl, below, for my mum. Seeing the fringe, I think I must have had a lot of patience in those days. It’s gratifying that she kept it all these years.
And I made this one with a ‘magic mushroom’ pattern for my sister, Marion, who died in a car crash not long after this photograph was taken.
Many of the things I made are long gone, and mostly forgotten. But during a recent five week stay in UK, rather than ‘twiddle my thumbs’, I bought a cotton cake of fine 4-ply yarn, dark blue fading to almost white, and a pattern from the internet (Rain Forest Retreat), and created this triangular shawl. It is fine enough to be used ruffled up as a scarf, unlike the double-knitting wools of yesteryear. It took 1000 metres of 4-ply, and I was getting nervous as I saw the yarn disappearing… but there was just enough twine to finish, and make three sleek tassels. Shawls can be ‘blocked’ when wet to tweak them into perfect shapes, but I don’t do that because they are not usually viewed in this spread-out fashion.
This traditional shaped scarf is made of a fine 4-ply, 100% pure wool. I simply did a repeat of pattern 195 from the Complete Book of Crochet stitch designs, and then did a shell edging to finish.
This tablecloth is made from a cotton cake using a leaf design in the centre and the well-known ‘pineapple’ design for the outside rows.
This shawl is made from a a mercerised 4-ply cotton-cake called Sultan, in the Rainbow colourway, from Hobbii. The pattern is called Moni, obtained from CrazyPatterns. I didn’t realise that this cake had only 800 metres of yarn, so had to buy another and work from the opposite end of the colourway to complete the final rows. This left me with a smaller ball of rainbow yarn without the purple colourway. 2021.
So I made another for my granddaughter, Layla, working from the dark colourway towards the orange. It is missing the whole outside pattern row, but then, she is a lot smaller than mummy, so that worked out well!
This shawl is called ‘Spiderdream’, and can be found on CrazyPatterns.net. It’s an easy enough pattern, but not something to be done while watching TV. It’s all about counting the chains. I think I unpicked more lines in this work than any other to date. 2021. My mind was on other things!
The shawl below was created off the cuff, no pattern, November 2022
