My mom asked me to make a shawl for her, but when I got some thick, grey yarn and started one, she didn’t like the color and it was too dark. So she looked through her yarn stash and found the yarn she wanted to use – Plum Wine from Caron Simply Soft, along with some unknown white yarn as an accent. We settled on those two and I was excited to get started. I decided to crochet since it would go faster and found a great pattern that I thought she would like.
The pattern looked great and with a similar yarn weight, it looked like it needed only a few repeats of the first type of pattern and a bit more of the second. It worked up beautifully and quickly (except for that row that stood out, which was the slowest part, but it looked really cool).
However, I started doubting that the pattern would provide the needed size. After adding more rows than called for, it still looked short. I used up the white yarn for the second pattern type and the contrast looked great.
It was clearly too small though, so I couldn’t leave it like that. I gave it to my mom to try and she agreed, so I had to put it on hold until I got more plum yarn to finish it.
After procuring the yarn, I finished up the second band. I kept going in the second pattern type because I thought it would look weird switching back to the first in the middle of it. It looked really nice at this point but still failed the size test, even though I was way past what the pattern said and was just winging it at this point.
So I kept going. I ended up buying another skein of the plum yarn, as well as another white one because the plum stripe was getting too big. I left a bit of both colors because my mom wanted to put a fringe on the ends, but this was the finished product on my side. In hindsight, I would have kept going with the first pattern type for longer so that they would be more balanced, but with the amount of time I put into this, I was just glad to be done with it.
It still looks nice, doesn’t it? And it covers up a lot, which is what my mom wanted – a large shawl to curl up under to watch TV or read. It ended up being pretty heavy too, so it’s just an extra dose of comfort.
This was probably the fastest I have ever crocheted something though. Despite the rows getting longer with each one (especially at the end), they just flew by. It took 2 and a half weeks from start to finish, and that included a break before I could buy the yarn I needed (twice). I am pretty happy with how it turned out!
You can also find this project on Ravelry.
