Category: Quickposts

I blog straight from my crochet studio most days per week. Why not? I’m here all the time!

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New Crochet Yarn Preview Photos

Want to see some preview photos I took of my new crochet yarn? I’m adding two new yarns to my shop: Treat and Lotus Snacks.

Top row: Treat fine merino wool yarn! I couldn’t resist a special purchase of this premium hand dyed crochet yarn in a gazillion colors. It comes wound as a Hook Ready™ center-pull cake-shaped ball. This means it sits flat while you crochet. It’s packaged in its own clear protective project bag. Hook Ready™ means just add crochet hook and crocheter, and go!

Second row: Lotus Snacks: cupcake-size balls of our original DesigningVashti Lotus yarn. They’re shown in sixpacks below but they’ll be available singly too.

More about Lotus Snacks: All 14 colors of my Lotus yarn in cute cupcake-like balls! They’re a third of the size of the large 256-yard Lotus center-pull cakes. That means 85 yards per ball (approx. 33 g or 1.16 oz).

More about Treat Medium-Z: It’s a standard worsted weight single ply z-twisted pure premium imported merino wool. A luscious new crochet yarn. I’ll also be adding more kinds of Treat in other thicknesses, colors, and plying.

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Crochet Glow-in-the-Dark Yarn Idea

I crochet pretty little things for my bedroom that glow. The one pictured here is from about three years ago and it has kept me from bumping into this bedpost every night since then.

Glow in the dark crochet bracelet pattern
Glow in the dark crochet “Jasmine Rope”

I like to sleep in total darkness. This puts me at risk of bumping into something if I have to get up in the middle of the night, but even the dimmest night lights are too bright for me.

My favorite solution is a bit of crochet that glows in the dark! It glows just enough in the middle of the night that I don’t notice it while I’m in bed, only if I’m walking around in total darkness. I can make it any size, shape, and color.

I also crocheted a snug mesh cover for the bathroom doorknob in the same yarn.

(Pattern and yarn info: the yarn is Bernat Glow in the Dark, discontinued. Other glow in the dark yarns or carry-along threads should work. The soon-to-be-published pattern, Jasmine Ropes, has a project page that you check in on to find out when the pattern PDF is ready.)

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I Wore Starwirbel as a Ponytail Lace Veil

I’ve been waiting for photos to surface from this summer’s CGOA’s Chain Link crochet conference (end of July in Manchester NH). Here’s the only one I have from the night I wore a crochet lace funnel cowl as a short veil covering my ponytail! You can barely see it in the first photo. In the second photo is Starwirbel – the flaring star stitch spiral of fine sequined mohair and silk.

It was fun and judging from the comments I received, it worked! I wouldn’t have thought of pinning a lace capelet as a veil-like hairpiece, but I was dressed in mostly black with some paisley and a sparkly silver belt. I wanted to include Starwirbel, but not as a cowl…and…voilà: un voile!

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Beaded “Delta” Types of Crochet Lace

I have some fun photos of beaded crochet swatches to share: overflow from newsletter issue #62, “Delta-Type” Crochet/Hexagonal Lace Types. Click on each photo to enlarge it and see comments.

Note: I’m using “delta crochet” to refer to a category, not for a single kind of stitch pattern, and not for triangular items such as shawls. I mean geometrically a type of lace grid. In the four-sided lacy net category we have the filet type (square/rectangular spaces that stack up in columns), and the fishnet or diamond mesh type, which have diamond-shaped spaces that are offset/staggered. “Delta” is pretty well known to mean triangle, whereas a term like “isometric” might be less helpful. If you have a better term to suggest than “delta,” please leave a comment, thanks  🙂

The gist of the newsletter is: Crochet nets of three-sided triangular lacy holes (or “spaces”) have a fundamentally different kind of lace structure, or grid. You can create them with several different kinds of crochet stitches, and they all differ from nets with four-sided spaces in looks, stretch/drape properties, and the experience of crocheting them.

When I experimented with beading delta laces, interesting things happened. Adding beads to love knots is in some ways very similar to beading chain stitches. I haven’t even tried several more ways to add beads to the ones shown here. Adding beads to the classic tall-stitch delta type, though, is more limited. It would be super tricky* to add beads to a whole post of a tall stitch.

*By “super tricky” I mean unpleasant and perhaps impossible LOL.

Check back, I’m swimming in swatches and blogging them all – my goal is a short blog post most days per week. I love comments!