Mulling It Over

I had no intention of including a felted crochet scarf in the 2014 collection. While many people do successfully created felted (fulled) crochet, I've been less than satisfied.

Throwing caution to the wind, and avoiding the label of being a crochet bigot (I actually crochet more than I knit), I'm including this scarf, "Felt Like Crochet".

And, for the record, it did felt quite nicely.

The felted piece did, however, sit on my cutting table for over a month as I puzzled over what I could do with it. The stitches are still slightly visible, which means there are tiny weak spots throughout the piece.

I wanted to take advantage of that. Only yesterday I finished a technical edit of a beaded jewelry book. And that got me thinking about beads … then jump rings (the round metal circles that you can open) … and so, here you go.

Click here to download the instructions for "Felt Like Crochet" and see how it's done.

A Hole in My Heart...

…and a mangled cookie cutter. My plan was to fast-track the heart cutting by tapping a shaped cookie cutter through the scarf. The felted was too bouncy. And did you know a cookie cutter collapses really easily when you hit it with a hammer?

I made this scarf just a few days before Christmas. Like most stitchers, it's best to start holiday scarves long before that holiday arrives. This prevents the 11th-hour scramble to finish a gift on time.

Did you just snort? Me, too. It was just a fluke that I started early on this one.

I had a hankering for felting. I'm going to stop here because, although I'm not a stickler for specifics, I am about this term. Felting is packing loose fibers together. What us stitchers do with our knitting and crocheting is fulling.

It took a while to develop a nice ratio of red to yellow rows for "Heartless."

Click here to download the instructions for "Heartless".