Liula Ta-dah!

Well, hello! How are you? It has been a while (almost a whole month…). I am back from my holiday, my battery is recharged. And I finished my Liula scarf! Hurray! So that is what I want to share with you here.

In my last post, which you can find here, I shared my holiday preparations with you. The yarny part of those preparations that is. There weren’t many other preparations going on (besides some laundry) because I had a really nasty cold. I’m good now! My plan was to take three projects with me and I did. And I had one major goal: finish my Liula scarf before going home. Let me take you back to the beginning of that!

In one of her podcasts, Emma (of Potter & Bloom) introduced her latest pattern, the Liula scarf or stole. She used one single yarn cake to make it. I immediately liked the pattern and it was (finally!) the perfect excuse to get my hands on a Scheepjes Whirl yarn cake. I had been admiring them for a while but didn’t want to buy one before knowing what to use it for (how incredible sensible does that sound?).

I adapted the original pattern slightly to make the most of my yarn cake. You can read about my modification at the end of this post!

Yarn choices

The number of available Whirl colours keeps growing and growing, making it even harder to choose one. On the other hand, I am not a person to wear a lot of bright colours, so that makes the choice a lot easier. I decided to order one with the lovely name Mid Morning Mocha’roo (no. 766). Let’s have a look at it in detail, shall we?

I really like the combination of the brown, blue and grey tones. It makes a finished object out of this one very wearable for me.

So there I was, all set to start!

To be completely prepared (and while I was waiting for my Whirl to arrive), I did a little test run on the pattern using Scheepjes Stonewashed. And I have to say that it looks pretty great as well! Who knows, maybe for a second Liula? I’ve showed you here already!

There we go

My plan was to take this one with me in my hand luggage and therefore I started the scarf at home already. Starting something with a foundation of chain stitches is always a bit fiddly and I didn’t want to do that on the plane. I decided to do at least one pattern repeat so that I could just refer to the other rows instead of a piece of paper.

And here’s the first colour change happening already! Actually, this photo shows how beautiful and subtle the colour changes of the Whirl are. The twist of the yarn makes that it doesn’t split and it is really great to work with.

Now, to be honest… the rows that I worked while on the plane had to be frogged. I had made a mistake. At the beginning (the first third part or so) a lot of frogging happened. It took me a while to really get a feeling for the rhythm of the pattern. It was a bit like taking three steps forward and going back one step.

However, as soon as I got the rhythm the colour changes seemed to appear faster and faster. The fact that we had a whole day of greyish, rainy weather helped here as well.

Luckily I could work a lot of rows in the Provençal sunshine, near the pool. My Liula was growing and so was the hole in the middle!

Then you reach the point that the last colour starts to blend in and the cake collapses! And you’re almost there…

Time to weave in the (only!) two ends!

Ta-dah!

Okay, here is the big reveal! By looking at the photos you can probably guess why I wanted to finish this one in France right? I wanted to photograph my finished Liula using the colours and surroundings of our little holiday home. Here it is:

The math

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I made a little adaptation to the pattern. Instead of working three pattern repeats (in the width) I did four. The reason is that Emma mentioned that she had been using about 80% of her cake and her stole had become very long. Personally, I don’t like to wear very long scarfs and at the same time, I wanted to make maximum use of all the colours in my Whirl.

It worked out great! My finished Liula is about 35 cm wide and 180 cm long. I have about 5 gr of yarn left. That was not enough to do another pattern repeat. A Whirl yarn cake contains 215- 225 gr (1000 m) of yarn which means that I have used almost 98% of my yarn cake.

You can find full details on this project on Ravelry as well!

I hear you thinking: “What about the other two yarny things that you took along with you?” I did start the Birds of a Feather shawl. Twice actually, more about that later. And the socks… ah, the socks… didn’t take them out of their project bag. 🙂 I guess that’s the thing with holiday projects: you’re always afraid that you don’t take enough with you and in the end, it turns out that you brought too much. What’s your experience on that? Let me know, I’d love to hear!

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