Well covered

When people think of knitting they tend to think of winter woolies, gloves and hats and cozy blankets. Which makes selling knitwear during summer something of a challenge. So recently I’ve been thinking of things I can make that don’t conjure up thoughts of open fires and hot chocolate.

What I came up with was iPhone covers, and then I decided that I wouldn’t knit them after all - it was time to get out the old crochet hook and cotton. I’ve come up with three different iPhone designs so far: a plain double crochet one; a ‘RING, RING’ one; and a lacy one that I’m going to line. The first two are cotton, the final one was made from a bit of leftover wool.

Plain iPhone cover. This is a simple double crochet design in cotton.

Double crochet (or single crochet in American) is ideal for iPhone covers. It creates a nice thick, tight fabric that will protect the phone, while cotton is hard wearing and machine washable. The plain cover is simple: make a chain that’s about the same length as your phone and then do double crochet rows until the fabric is long enough to wrap around your phone; join along the edges and bottom. I also did a double crochet border in a different colour along the top to provide contrast.

The back of RING, RING. The trick, as with knitting colourwork, is to make sure
you don't pull the threads too tight.

RING, RING was much more fun. I wanted to write ‘RING’ into both sides of the cover, using crochet rather than embroidery or Swiss darning. So I would be using two colours in the same row, kind of like crochet Fair Isle. I’ve used crochet to make stripes before, but I’ve never actually done colour work using crochet before. This was going to be interesting.

I remembered from doing stripes that the trick is to use the alternative colour to do the final step of the stitch, so with a double crochet, you insert the hook through the stitch below, wrap around in your main colour and pull through, then use the second colour to complete the stitch. You now have a finished stitch in your main colour and a loop on your hook in the second colour.

It worked! One RING as ordered.

The next step was to work out how to do the actual writing. This involved working out how many rows and stitches are needed to make one side of the cover and then drawing this onto graph paper, with each square representing one stitch. Then I drew out the letters, and it was time to start crocheting. That was when it got complicated.

To change colours in a row, you run the different threads across the back of the work, making an unholy mess of the back of the work; however, when you get to the end of a row, you turn your work, making the back now the front. This meant I had come up with a new way of crocheting so that the mess remained on the back. Crocheting on the right side was simple - just go ahead as usual - but with the wrong side showing I had make sure the non-working thread was at the front of the work. The working colour I could use as normal, but once I’d finished with that thread I had to pull it over the work and hold it tight to the front of the fabric, then bring the new working colour into play by pulling that over and to the back of the fabric, and then crochet as normal.

The finished article. This was the test piece, done in what I happened to have handy,
so the contrast isn't great, but you can see what I'm aiming for.

Have I created a new way to crochet? Probably not - I’m certain that I’m not the first person to think of this, but does open up a lot of possibilities with crochet colourwork. I’ll be crocheting Fair Isle-style jumpers before you know it.

Luscious lace

I recently finished my first ever lace shawl. It’s Ishbel by Isolde Teague, and a quick look at Ravelry shows that it’s certainly a popular design - more than 11,000 completed projects. Wow! I knitted it in Sea Silk by HandMaiden Fine Yarn, a silk/seacell mix, in a variegated purple. I bought the yarn ages ago at Stash in south-west London when some knitting chums visited. I had no idea what I’d do with it, but it was so soft and silky and purple that I just had to buy it. And it turned out to be ideal for Ishbel, so how’s that for serendipity?

The finished piece. Prior to blocking, the lace isn't all that impressive.

It did take a while, mostly because I kept getting sidetracked by other things (designing, mainly. Designing is so much fun). But also because of a few mistakes. The biggest one was in the simple stocking stitch section. That’s right - the section that should have been easiest. To make the shawl a nice triangular shape, the centre stitch is flanked by a yarn over on either side; somehow I managed to move my centre stitch and yarn overs combo by one stitch. This meant there was one too few stitches on the first half (and conversely one too many on the second). I didn’t notice this until I got to the lace sections and there weren’t enough stitches for the pattern repeats. I had to undo the whole thing. Damn.

Blocking really brought out the lace pattern
and pointed edging.

But undeterred I carried on. My advice? Use a stitch marker! I don’t know how that stitch shifted but if I’d had a stitch marker in place it wouldn’t have.

The pattern is easy enough to follow - the lace sections being a set of repeated stitches to the centre then the same stitches in the reverse order to the end. Once you’ve got the repeating bit for each row in your head, off you go. My only criticism is that stitch counts aren’t given at the end of each row, just each section, so it can be difficult to keep track of things. In the end I figured that if I’ve got the right number of stitches to repeats then I must be doing OK, and this seemed to work.

The problem is that when you do make a mistake - and I made two - you don’t find out until you’re on the next pattern row (there’s a purl row between each), and when you’re knitting more than 200 stitches this can take rather a long time and involve quite a lot of counting, undoing and redoing. Both my mistakes involved missing out a yarn over, which was easy to spot so I could just make a stitch in the appropriate place and merrily carry on without too much fuss. If you’ve forgotten a k2tog or psso, however, it’s going to be a tad more frustrating as you will have to undo (and redo) nearly three rows.

This is a project that needs to be blocked. Once I’d cast off (nice cast off method, by the way: k2tog, slip stitch back onto left-hand needle and repeat. I’d never seen that before and it creates a lovely cast off edge), the lace section looked, well, a bit rubbish. All scrunched up and ugly. But after a bit of work with some pins and an ironing board, the lace really came into its own - a pretty, leaf-like pattern with a pointy edge.

I’m certainly pleased with the finished object and I’m planning on taking it on holiday with me as a posh evening cover up. Now I just need to go somewhere posh.

Lovely! Now I just need an invite to some place posh so I can wear it.

Yarn review: Manos Silk Blend

Composition: 70% extra-fine merino and 30% kettle-dyed silk
Tension: 22sts x 30 rows
Length: 270 metres per 100g hank
Colourway: Candyfloss
Price: £15 (from SoSusie Yarns at Archway Market)

Now that my Ishbel is done, I’ve been able to concentrate on testing out a yarn I’ve had for a while. Manos Silk Blend is, as you might expect, a gorgeous mix of silk and merino from fair-trade organisation Manos del Uruguay.

In progress: the colour and stitch pattern are shown off nicely.

Manos del Uruguay is a non-profit social organisation which, since 1968, has provided jobs for craftswomen living in Uruguay rural areas. The yarns are hand made and dyed in small lots, and the collective also produces clothing and artisanal goods.

The yarns really are luscious and Silk Blend is truly gorgeous: soft to the touch, smooth and warm. It has a very high ‘squish factor’, as I like to call it - a yarn’s ability to produce that need in all knitters and crocheters to grab a yarn and squash it, stroke it and hold it against our skin.

A very simple k2tog/YO pattern was used to create the lattice effect. The merino blend combined with the open-work stitches should produce a very warm yet lightweight hat.

This is not a very tightly wrapped yarn and I was slightly concerned it would be splitty but it’s not all. It’s actually really nice to knit with, although I would suggest that metal needles would be better than wooden or bamboo. I used a metal circular and the yarn slid along it nicely, but I suspect it might stick on the rougher surface of wood or bamboo. It knits up nicely and the stitch definition is lovely.

The lacy cap I designed to test the yarn shows off the variegated colour well, I think, and the super-soft blend of silk and merino means it’s safe for even the most sensitive of heads. The pattern will be available shortly via Ravelry and as a kit from SoSusie Yarns - watch this space!

The finished hat. It would make a great gift for a baby or little girl.