Unfinished Bazness

A few months back, I decided to make a hat for my Dad (who, by way of explanation, is known to the family as 'Baz'). After perusing the Lincraft shelves for some time, I selected a nice soft wool-alpaca blend in a shade of blue I thought he'd like.


On inspection, I found that the yarn was actually 12-ply, something I'd overlooked when getting sidetracked by colour selection. It was a thicker than I wanted for this neat little pattern, but I wasn't too worried.


"Oh, gauge won't much matter for a hat," I thought. "I'll just use a bigger hook". This piece of erroneous logic resulted in a beanie suitable only for an individual with a head the size of a bucket. It was useless; I pulled it undone and chucked the yarn back into the stash.


A few weeks ago, on hearing that my parents were planning a day-trip to Christchurch, I remembered I never made that hat, and decided to have another go at it. I dug through the stash and pulled the yarn out again. I couldn't find another pattern I liked better than the first one, so I figured I'd just go down a hook size. Two, in fact, since the first hat was so oversized.


Using a thicker yarn with a smaller hook made the working fairly dense. The pattern itself can be a bit tricky if you're not paying attention - it's a design of v-stitches, but you have to be fairly careful to stitch only inside the v-stitches, and not in the gaps between. Even then, the shaping of the crown comes together in an an unusual five-pointed shape, and takes a while to form a recognisable hat shape.


A small amount of a lighter blue sourced from the Nana stash provided a contrasting stripe, and the beanie was complete. It was actually a bit small, this time. Ironically, if I hadn't got concerned about the weight of the yarn and just followed the pattern, it would probably have come out fine. Oh, well, crochet tends to stretch a bit anyway.


As it turned out, the beanie didn't really suit Baz at all. It sat oddly and tended to ride up and sit above his ears. Mum says he has a funny-shaped head and his hats always do this, but I think it would be less inclined to do so if it were a better  well - I tried!

Doily decor

I like to have a chair in a bedroom. Somehow, a room seems more properly furnished with a chair in the corner. And of course, it's useful for throwing things on.


For this reason, I had been on the lookout for a suitable chair for my spare room. It's not a large room, so a normal occasional chair wouldn't fit. I needed something smaller.


Yes, I am going somewhere yarn-related with this. Be patient.


In the end I spent $10 on a second-hand dining chair at the Eco Shop. Stained, battered and dated, (in my brother's words: "looks like it's been stolen from a motel") it was in need of a bit of attention. I originally intended to recover the seat with new fabric, but couldn't find any to fit the colour scheme of the room.


Which is where the yarn stash comes in. Amongst the Nana-stash were a couple of balls of 3-ply in a shade of purple that would work well enough. The idea I had was to create a doily-style cover for the chair seat, backed with a plain colour fabric.




After a bit of browsing, I selected one of these three patterns. In fact, I inadvertently chose the smallest of the three, (the yellow one) which was a bit contrary to my plans. All of the patterns were for doilies smaller than my chair-seat, but by using thicker yarn and a bigger hook, I hoped to get a larger result.


By the time I was working the final rounds of the doily, I knew it wouldn't be big enough. Some improvisation was needed. I left off the final round of decorative picots, and made a couple more rounds based on the previous pattern, joining the 'petals' of the doily to make a continuous round.


That was enough to extend the doily to the edges of the chair cushion. I used a netting-style stitch to stretch around and over the edges of the cushion, and that was that.


While the doily was drying out from blocking, pinned into shape over the (plastic bag-covered) chair cushion, I sanded down the chair and spray painted it grey. A piece of teal fabric and a staple gun covered the original hideous pattern on the chair seat, and a length of elastic, threaded through the edges of the doily, provided the means of holding it in place.


I'm quite pleased with my upcycled chair. It's actually the first thing I see when I walk in my front door, and I smile every time. It didn't use much of that yarn, though - there's still plenty left for the next project!

The yarn stash

It's a familiar phenomenon to any knitter or crocheter: that astonishing collection of leftovers, impulse buys and relics of projects either abandoned or yet to be started.


My own yarn stash, rapidly acquired in the year or so since I took up crochet, has taken ownership of a corner of my lounge, setting my natural hoarding impulse at war with a preference for uncluttered spaces. Even sorted tidily into bins, (which, in any case, tend to get scattered around the room when I'm looking for something) the collected yarn takes up a prominent position in the room.


You see, I've recently been handed my Nana's yarn as well - the accumulations of a lifetime's knitting and spinning, along with a huge array of knitting needles and sundry associated items. My comparatively modest collection was dwarfed by this influx of yarn, which includes many old-fashioned items I wouldn't have chosen myself, but hope now to find a use for.


The thing is, looking through your yarn stash with a project in mind is like contemplating your wardrobe when you've got a wedding to go to. Sure, there's plenty of stuff in there, but nothing that really suits the purpose. So what do you end up doing? You go out and buy something suitable (and add the leftovers to your stash when the project is finished).


I propose to do the opposite, i.e. come up with projects based on the yarn that I already have, instead of finding a pattern I like, then checking to see if I have any yarn that will work. It's the only way to shift the clutter in the corner.


Am I going to stop buying yarn? Don't be silly. There will still be things I want to make that necessitate further purchases, and if necessary I'm fine with adding new-bought yarn to a stash project, if it helps me use something up. This does of course mean that I'll still occasionally be adding to the stash, so I'll have to be careful to use up yarn faster than I'm adding it.

Inevitably, some of it will end up in granny squares. I had in fact begun a stash-busting granny square operation, prior to the arrival of the Nana stash. After all, it's the traditional use for odds and ends of yarn. However, I hope to come up with a few things that are a bit more inventive. After all, there's plenty of scope for creativity in crochet.


Actually, I don't intend to stick exclusively to crochet either. It's certainly my comfort zone, but I may just take this opportunity to expand my horizons a little. Perhaps it's time I took up knitting, or macramé - whatever uses the yarn!


Because after all, yarn is not for hoarding. It's for using.