April 2007 – a not so ordinary month
It has been a very strange month here in France – it feels more like June (or some days even August) than April. It’s nice – but rather unsettling. If we have summer in spring, how will summer be?
News-wise, it hasn’t been an ordinary month for me either.
In the news:
Interweave Crochet is on the newsstands, and I’m on the cover! Well, at least my name is. In addition to the two patterns I’ve designed for this issue, Brenda Dayne, of Cast-On fame, has written a very nice article about me. Thank you, Brenda!
The article is based on a phone interview, and Brenda has also used a part of this recording in the last installment of her fantastic podcast. You can listen here. No need for an mp3-player if you don’t have one – just click the download link and listen on your computer.
On my hook:
I’m finishing up my projects for the fall issue of Interview Crochet, and still have quite a few accessories to work up for the French publisher Editions de Saxe (these projects will appear in a special issue of one of their magazines next winter).
One of these accessories is a shawl, based on a motif I found in a Japanese crochet book. Japanese crochet patterns are wonderful, and very easy to understand, as long as you can read crochet stitch diagrams.
I wanted to share the following tip with you – in itself it epitomizes the elegance of Japanese crochet.
This method is applicable when you work a motif in the round containing « overlapping » rounds of chain arches, as in the sketch below.
(I don’t think it’s necessary to stress that I’m a crochet designer, not a graphic artist).
What happens when you work this kind of motifs is that round X doesn’t stop exactly where you want round Y to start.
You need to « travel » some stitches to create the overlapping « rose petal » effect. The solution I had used earlier was to close round A with a slip stitch, and work slip stitches to the center of the following chain arch. But I have now realized that there is a much more elegant and less noticeable method:
Here we arrive, ready to work the last chain arch of round X.
We start by working the number of chains in the arch minus 3 (in this example, there are 6 ch in each chain arch, so I work 3 ch):
And here comes the simple trick: we make a double crochet in the first stitch of row X:
Chain 1, and make the first single crochet of round Y where you are. Voilà, we can continue our work:
Simple and nice, don’t you think? And not very difficult to adapt to a different number of chains in the chain arch.
By the way, the motif in these pictures is worked in the yarn Harmony from Fonty, a cotton/viscose blend. A quite yummy and summery yarn!
See you soon!
