Sunday, December 5, 2010

Remnants scarf and other cool things

I created a slim scarf out of leftovers from a couple other projects that I'd like to share here:



This was a crochet experiment that originally did not have any particular objective. I just had some extra of the two colors and thought they would play nice together. I made, essentially, granny squares, some with pink centers and brown outsides and some with the reverse. When I ran out of the brown alpaca, I sewed them all together in a single long zigzag (Adam’s idea) and that was the scarf. I love how it came out.



Here is yours truly wearing the scarf:



It's a slightly dark pic but it's an iPhone shot, what do you want.

I'm going to type up the instructions and put it up as a free download in the next few days. It is super easy and will work with many different yarn weights. I used worsted, here, but sock yarn would work, as would even laceweight. If you used laceweight you might want to have two rows of zigzagged squares to give it decent width.

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I'm influenced by (read: I'm a huge fan of) Sophie Digard, a French designer of, as her website puts it, "Scarves, shawls, gloves, fingerless gloves, head gears, necklaces, bracelets, brooches, hairpins, bags, 'espadrille' shoes, plaids, ..." She designs gorgeous items that are made using thread in multiple colors. The way she puts colors together blows my mind. I saw scarves by her a few years ago in a shop down in Tribeca but they were outside of my comfortable price range. I got a bee in my bonnet about her earlier this year and finally bought a bag by her:


Click on "Views" to see more detail.

The bag is stunning! It smelled like lavender when it arrived, too. I kept it in the plastic wrapper until Thanksgiving, though, because I felt like it was too nice to use. But when my mom was here she was in my studio using my yarn winder and she saw it stashed in there; she asked me about it and I realized as I said it how stupid it was to buy something and then not use it because it's too nice! Anyway, after that I got it out and I've been using it lately.

You can see a selection of other items here at Ped Shoes. I think I have a very good color sense, but I am humbled by the things she makes. I love how she puts colors together that I would never use together, and makes them work and makes them gorgeous. It doesn't hurt that they are made in the tiniest scale. I seriously tried to buy yarn that fine and couldn't - I do think they are made from thread. Check out this amazing necklace at The French Needle:



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Over at the Purl Bee they have the most astonishing, amazing, simple technique for two-color garlands:



I love when people are just noodling around and invent something like this and then just go ahead and share it with the world. Go read the instructions - you won't believe how easy it is. I can see many amazing uses for this technique!