Summer Vacation

With a Great Sigh of Relief, my summer vacation has started.   So far I have done some spring cleaning and organizing, weeded the backyard within an inch of its life,  and spent a few days visiting my parents.  I also finished my second sweater for the Afghans for Afghans 500 sweater campaign.  This sweater, the Quince-Essential Fair Isle, is from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Top-Down Sweaters.  Being bulky weight it knitted up pretty fast.  There's still time to contribute toward this campaign, which ends in July.

Toward the end of the semester, I was totally smitten by the BBC series The Great British Sewing Bee, which you can watch on YouTube.  There are four episodes, and the show is like Project Runway for home sewers.  Don't be put off by the fact that the first challenge is and A-line skirt, it gets more interesting, and it is quite inspiring.

In the process of watching the show, I became fixated with the granny square scarf Ann wears each time she arrives and takes off her coat.  The scarf, Bohemian Rhapsody, is available as a kit by Marylene Lynx, made up of 70 skeins of hand-dyed lace weight wool.  I would buy this kit if it crossed my path, but I decided instead to make up my own "inspired by Bohemian Rhapsody" project.

Last Fall my friend Catherine gave me these weaving yarn samples that had been in her grandmother's stash.  They are a sturdy lace weight.

I decided to make my motifs with the lace weight yarn doubled, roughly fingering weight, on a size F hook.  Crocheting lace weight was a bit more fussy than I wanted to get, plus I didn't want to be at this for the rest of my life. The main feature I liked about the pattern was the alternating sizes of the motifs.  Bohemian Rhapsody uses motifs in 3 sizes, and I chose a very basic granny square motif in two sizes.  The small squares are two rounds of the larger 4-round block.  The pattern is an abbreviated version of the motif in this free Red Heart pattern.

Crochet gets a bad rap sometimes, but I'm enjoying the process, and the color play.  The ergonomic Clover hook makes for much less hand strain than I remember from crocheting in the past.

Now that I'm on vacation, you might find me here, making a few squares.