Celtic tiles coat - the one that went wrong

I needed just one more square in silver grey and was two thirds through when I realised that I wouldn't have enough yarn!

Never mind, I thought, I will do a half red, half silver one. And it was looking good, though I wasn't sure if the red would last out either. 

When I ran out of red I went back to using the last few grammes of silver grey with my fingers crossed it would last till the final row. Phew! 

For the edge I opted to use emerald green, as I will be doing a round of green on each square before also joining them all into a coat with the green also. 

And the end result was surprising to me. I had in mind the Japanese Wabi-sabi way of finding beauty in flaws as a way of accepting this square as a unique one amongst the rest. And it may well end up being my favourite square. 

This is the square being blocked before all the ends are sewn in. 

Review: Sirdar Jewelspun Yarn

I have used this yarn in place of Moda Bouvardia to craft a hooded jacket.

The yarn is described as trying to represent a hand spun effect. As someone who has spun their own yarn in the past, I can confirm that this yarn does have this effect. However, it may not suit everyone's requirements as a consequence.

As you can see in the image above, some sections are over spun, while others are under spun. This is easy enough to remedy by making an invisible join, but becomes irritating when there are many sections like this. Also it is not a consistent (persistent) fault. 

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Another annoyance is the appearance of knots, sometimes only a short way into a new ball, and again seemingly random in regularity and frequency. Again resolved by an invisible join, but I don't feel that I should have to keep doing this, particularly when it does create a slightly thicker area in the item being crocheted. 

 

I would point out that there are a lot of images of Sirdar Jewelspun online and based on these I would never have used the yarn. I was lucky enough to be able to see some in real life (although the store did not have enough for my project) and went on to order some online as a consequence. It is definitely a more attractive yarn when you can see it for yourself. 

This is the exact yarn that I bought :- 

 

I have been wearing my completed coat for some time now and it is so lovely to wrap around myself. I really like it and am glad that I picked Jewelspun to make it with. 

Winding a yarn ball

This is me winding a whole ball of yarn on my winder...

LAMXD yarn ball winder

I bought this yarn winder because I have a job lot of cheap yarn which continually knots up into yarn squids which makes crocheting (and more importantly, keeping an even tension) really difficult.

So far, I have wound a yarn-end with success, and subsequently a full ball too. Both (problematic yarn balls) required me to sort out the yarn squids as I was winding, but it had minimal impact on the yarn cake that the winder produced.

Having crocheted with the small yarn-end cake, I have found that it makes working the yarn much smoother and a great deal easier.