Woven Lapghan

OK so I'm working on the white mesh part of this lapghan. When this is done, I'm going to use another yarn to weave into the mesh. I haven't yet decided which one to use. 

In this photo I did the top row with Lion Brand Fettucini, a t shirt yarn that may not be the best choice, because I can't guarantee I can buy enough of it to use for the whole blanket. It's made with scrap t shirt material, so finding more than 2 matching rolls is challenging. The Fettucini yarn is the one with shades of blue, in the top center of the picture.

The second row is woven with Starbella ruffle yarn in Toucan colorway. I think I like this color best, but this yarn can be expensive. At about $5 a roll, I may have to drop about $100 on that yarn by itself to get the whole project complete. Not sure. That's a bit costly. The Starbella yarn is the brilliant rainbow yarn top left in the picture.

The third row is a chain of Lion Brand Homespun in the Barrington colorway. This yarn is very soft and rather bulky, and that would make for a very warm lapghan. Hiding the ends in when I complete the weaving would be very easy too. It's a bit more affordable than the other yarns, and I get more of it for my dollar. Hmmm.

What I originally had planned was to chain some orange and some green and weave the chain into the mesh, and it would look like the Irish tricolor:

But then I thought "oh come on, get CREATIVE woman!" And I came up with the idea of weaving a more novelty type of yarn into the mesh. 

I do need to stash-bust, so I might use my Lion Brand Homespun, doubled, with some lavender sport weight yarn included, which I have. That might be my best bet. I know it doesn't show too well in this photo - the texture of the yarn is lost in my picture, but this is a closeup of the Homespun:

This shows the ripple in the yarn and the beautiful colors in it too. I find it's not easy to just crochet with, but there's plenty of other ways to use this yarn if you think outside the standard knit/crochet boxes. 

Given some of the other shades in this yarn, I bet if I made another mesh in seafoam green and wove this Barrington color yarn in, it would look stunning. Or do a soft rose mesh. 

Food for thought. 

Yarns

Here's a stash buster project I've started on - partially to burn up some cheap yarn I have, and to practice the chevron stitch I've just learned:

The thing is, the red yarn and the variegated yarn here are Craft Smart yarns, bought at Michaels craft stores. I gotta say - this yarn feels like SANDPAPER. It's SO scratchy and rough! There is nothing soft about it!

I'm hoping that I can wash this with some fabric softener and it will feel a lot better; I know I had some good luck on that front with Red Heart Super Saver yarn, which also feels very rough. I made a mesh market bag with some of their deep red Claret color yarn, and with Red Heart, their dark colors are often very scratchy. Black is the worst. Well, I tossed that bag in the wash with some fabric softener, and the difference was amazing.

The pink yarn in this project is Red Heart Super Saver, and it's not too bad as far as roughness is concerned. I made a scarf with some of this, as well as some black RHSS. I've used the scarf all winter long and it's held up well, it's not too scratchy, and it has some nice drape to it (but I did make the scarf in a mesh pattern, with a slightly larger hook than is normally used with this yarn, and this gives the work some nice drape). I'm not sure if I want to continue using this pink yarn with the Craft Smart for this; perhaps I could use the pink RHSS for something else?

Well, RHSS is cheap enough yarn; if I need more hot pink I can get some.

I did find a new favorite yarn: Bernat Super Value yarn. I'm doing this with a couple of colors I found:

It's sooooooo soft and buttery. I love this yarn. This may be my go-to yarn from now on.

In The Works....

I worked on this blanket today...I have a LOT of rows to go...

And I do mean A LOT. But methinks the colors look nice. :)

I have noticed that a lot of people think that this stitch is Navajo crochet, saying "oh we used to do a lot of this in the 1070s" - but it's not the same thing, from what I can tell. Navajo seems to involve doing rows of single crochet, cutting the yarn and finishing off at the end of every row, and adding a new row of yarn each row, instead of doing a turning chain and continuing with the next row.

That's not what I'm doing here. I'm doing 4 chain stitches, and on the 5th stitch I connect to the previous row with a single crochet. So my scarves and anything else I make with this stitch are mostly chain stitches, not sc.

So no, what I'm doing is not Navajo. It's Joseph's Coat, after Joseph's Coat of Many Colors.

EDIT May 20

This past weekend, I did more rows on this. Now it's this far along:

Still plugging. It is really getting some weight to it now, and is more blanket-like. I do have to admit that I wish I'd made the original chain longer, like about 350 stitches or more. Maybe the next one I do, I'll make it longer.

Camo Shawl?

 

OK well, my hand seems to have recovered fairly well from the radial cardiac cath I had on 4 March, so I think I can crochet now. I'm doing something fairly easy - a box stitch shawl with double strands of Lion Brand Homespun yarn in "Mediterranean." Eh. I don't know about Mediterranean - more like Duck Dynasty/1980s US Army camo to me. I'm kinda sorry I chose this color, quite frankly. I should have gone with the "Tudor" color, which looks like this:

 

Maybe I'll just get 10 skeins of this next time I shop for yarn. I think I like these colors better than the "Mediterranean." 

Scrap Yarn Ball

All of this yarn is some of my extra yarn that I had left over from other projects. I took each color and cut it into pieces about twice as long as my armspan, then used the magic knot to connect them pretty much randomly.

This to me looks almost like the earth as seen from the Apollo spacecrafts, when they orbited the moon and came around the other side and snapped that famous "Earthrise" picture...

So if I ever get crazy and combine those colors again, I'll call it my Earthrise color combination. :)

New Chain Stitch Scarf

This is a closeup of the new chain stitch scarf I just made. I unraveled a white & gold ruffle scarf and added that into the mix of yarns, and that just really made the whole thing.

I took a few pictures of different ways to wrap it too...

Since I didn't join the ends, it's not an "infinity scarf" but it can be made into one if one knots the ends together, as seen on my right shoulder in the last picture. 

It's definitely warm, and definitely scratchy! I'm not sure washing it with fabric softener will take care of that either; I think it's the glitter that is making it scratchy. Well, either one lives with it or wears it on the outside of one's other garments and allows as little of it as possible to touch one's skin directly. 

But there ya go. New chain stitch scarf. 

Pattern Link: Joseph's Coat Scarf

I really like this pattern: Joseph's Coat Scarf

So easy, and such a great stash-buster project, far better than the fringe scarf I made. LOL! :)