Serefina and Icarus

A few weeks ago I gave you some very small sneaky peak's of my 2 crochet club shawls.
The club ran from April to June 2013 and there were 2 variations, a 4 ply and a lace.

I really struggled with the design, but once I had allowed myself to use my trusty triangle it was easy.

I made the 4 ply version first and was limited to 3 colour's, 1 skein per month for the duration of the club. I really struggled with 3 colours, I kept wanting to add more, so I allowed myself to use as many colours as I wanted with the lace version.
Here are the final results, I'm afraid the photo's aren't very good, the 2 shawls need to go on a proper photo shoot.
Both of the patterns will be published in Madder Triangles, so I am afraid you will have to wait until then.
Icarus will be the only design in the book that doesn't contain orange triangles.

Icarus - named after the Greek mythological character.

And Serefina - named after a character in the Golden Compass trilogy

Incidently if any of my club members have finished their shawls I'd love to see some photos :-)

The Rising Sun - Ripple Blanket

The Rising Sun is the thrird blanket destined for my Madder Triangles book
I thought you might like to see my progress.

The blanket is named after The Rising Sun pub  (my "local"), at the bottom of the hill were I live.
Incidently its also a very good hotel and does amazing seafood - well worth a visit, especially if you want to watch the locals being idiots on a Friday night.

The pub faces east over the harbour wall in Lynmouth. If you get up early enough you can see the sun rising over Countisbury Hill.
The photo below was taken in the evening, but you will get the idea.

My blanket has waves of green and blue nestled in the bright pink and orange sun rise.
I've wanted to make a ripple blanket for ages, but struggle with crocheting straight rows, they involve counting stitches, which I never get right however hard I try, so I needed to make a ripple with motifs.

I've been crocheting for a couple of weeks.
You will have to excuse the photo's - they are taken with my iPhone.

This is what it look like before the Woolfest.

This is what it looked like after the Woolfest

And this is what it looked like yesterday morning.

I can't wait to finish the central panel so I can start the border, I think it will transform the whole blanket.
I am finding having to crochet 24 identical triangles (one row) really boring, but thats because I have a very low boredom thresehold.
I want to see something new happening with the colours every few motif's, so the Rising Sun is testing my patience.
Its almost there and every new row makes the anticipation more exciting.

After the Woolfest

Life has almost returned to its normal chaotic state, rather than warp speed chaos which is what we were going through this time last week.

We had an amazing Woolfest, our best ever, which is fantastic.
NDS has 2 homes, 1 business premises, 3 human mouths and 3 animal mouths to support and  feed, life isn't always easy so having such a brilliant show really helps.
In fact its helped so much we are thinking about having a few days off at the end of the month, so we can eat ice cream and be tourists in our own home.

And the Woolfest liked us as much as we liked it, we won first prize for the best double stand :-)

We were so busy that I didn't have time to take many photo's, but I did take these early Saturday morning before the lovely customers were allowed in.

The lovely Emily from John Arbon Textiles, buying back the wool she spun for us a few months ago.
Hopefully Phil gave her a big discount as she is almost family, she's Daisy's house mate and a lovely lovely person.
You might know her from her previous life, she was the dyer behind Viola Yarns

Daisy has written a much better blog post than me, but then she is a writer, so its to be expected.
She has far more photo's as she was allowed to sneak off and take them at the end of Saturday before breakdown.
She's also written about "Team NDS" and its journey to get where it is today.
Its well worth a read.
You can find her blog HERE

Backbone of a book (Waiting for the Woolfest)

We're off to the Woolfest tomorrow.
We've spent the last week dyeing Woolfest wool and now Phil is winding like mad trying to get it all ready in time.
Dais and I are labeling and wandering around trying to work out what we need.
The last few weeks have been very busy and chaotic.
I keep thinking that once we have finished dyeing for the show and wholesale and clubs things will get back to normal, but I'm beginning to realise that chaos is normal.
So having a few hours to dither is a luxury.

 While I've been dithering I've been photographing wips for the new book, I've been posting them on twitter and facebook.
And so thought I would do a blog post about the book and project wips.

The book will have 5 design sections with 2 projects in each section.
So here is the backbone of "Madder Triangles"

Semi Random - needs new name

Lecchi Blanket - Finished

Plankton Scarf  - WIP

Ripple 

Un-named blanket - WIP

Isabella Scarf - Finished

Star

Florence Blanket - Finished and given to baby Florence

Myrtle Blanket  - WIP which I am making as a Florence variation to exhibit on the stand at show's.

Star Scarf - not designed yet.

Spiral

Spyro Blanket - Finished

Spiral shawl - not designed yet

Wings

Icarus Shawl - Finished 

 Designed for my project club, the members haven't recieved the last pattern installment yet, so you only get a very tiny peak.

Serefina Shawl - Finished

 It's a lace variation of the first one and has lots more colours, as its very similar to the club shawl you can only see a tiny bit of this one too.

I can already feel the RSI creeping in....sigh.......