A flurry of activity over the Christmas break..

 

It's been a busy few weeks, and literally as soon as I had time off from work I got really sick, suffering from the weird heavy cold that's doing the rounds at the moment (thankfully not COVID, though I did the usual paranoid testing to make sure). 

Having time off and being ill at least meant lots of time to get back into knitting and crocheting, making several Amigurumi items (including this cute little No-Face from Spirited Away, complete with a big gaping gob full of teeth!). 

Crochet definitely took most of my time, I realised that as much of a fan of knitting as I am, I'm still not as good at knitting as I am at crochet, and speed-wise I can knock out a piece of work using crochet in double quick time, whereas knitting anything seems to take me forever and a day. 

Over Christmas, my mum bought me some yarn for Christmas Day. It's the first time I've ever received yarn as a gift, and it was a welcome addition to my yarn stash. 

The WI yarn from Hobbycraft is a 20% wool / 80% acrylic mix and it feels quite weird when you first start using it. It's not quite as 'crispy' as normal cheapo acrylic yarn, the wool does at least give it a bit more tactile softness (and hopefully means it won't be as irritating when used for clothing). 

Mum bought me 6 balls of yarn, all in different colours. Experienced needlecrafters will know instantly that 6 balls of different coloured yarn sounds great until you have to actually knit or crochet something so the challenge was to make something that would use about 100g of yarn in a single pattern. 

So what could I make? 

I opted for two things: 

A giant granny square suitable for use as a cushion cover (you can't quite see the other half, but it's behind the nice self-striping yarn version in the photo)

A crochet scarf. There are all sorts of good reasons to crochet a scarf if you're a beginner, and this is the first time I've actually crocheted one rather than knitting one. 

The pattern couldn't be more simple. In fact here it is

1) Chain 224 (yep, you read it correctly, 224 for a foundation chain)

2) Single crochet that chain (giving you 223 stitches)

3) At the end of each run, add 1 turning chain until your final run where you tie off

What I also did was ran SC along the ends of the scarf to tidy them up (because I inevitably end up with my crochet looking like a horrible mess at the ends). Voila! The world's easiest scarf to knit, and if you use nice chunky self-striping yarn with fairly loose stitches your scarf should be nice and flat and not twist in on itself. 

I'd never thought to crochet a scarf 'lengthways' before but it works, as long as you can overcome the initial obstacle of chaining 224 stitches. 

Happy new year, happy new yarn-wrangling!