A little while ago (I think it was October or November), a lovely new shawl pattern was introduced. Maaike, the creative brain behind Crejjtion, released her Apple Pick Shawl. A triangular-shaped shawl with a simple border. The shawl is very wearable because its shape is rather flat. And it’s warm, but not too warm. Great on a grey and wet day like today is.
Talking about the weather (Dutch people talk about it a lot!)… Today is supposed to be the first day of Spring… Right! It’s grey, wet and dark. But let’s keep our heads up, the forecast for the rest of the week looks promising! Hopefully, my cold will get better then too. I am writing this blog post with a large cup of tea and a box of tissues next to me.
Back to the shawl!
For my version of the Apple Pick Shawl, I have used yarn that I bought when on holiday in England last Autumn. In London, I visited Loop and bought the yarn here. The brand is called The Uncommon Thread. I picked the BFL Light DK which is a 100% Bluefaced Leicester wool.
The grey one is called Nimbostratus (picture dark grey stormy clouds coming your way). The red one is called Lust (nothing to add here haha). What I really like is that both yarns are not really solid in their colour. They have kind of a stonewashed effect, especially the grey one. It’s so beautiful!
I started making the shawl with a 4,0 mm crochet hook, but I started over switching to a 4,5 mm hook later on. Much better! The whole piece was a bit dense with the smaller hook. Maybe I could have even used a 5,0 mm hook… Anyway, I’m very pleased with the result.
The texture of the pattern in combination with my yarn is so beautiful!
As you can see, I have added a third colour for the little border. Just the grey and red didn’t really work. The bright yarn adds something fresh! The white yarn is Humbug on DK by Kate Selene. I’ve bought that one together with two other ones for a knitted shawl (that I finally started, will share soon!).
One more texture shot… You’ll see that this shawl definitely needs a round of blocking.
And that’s where the drama started. I guess I did everything wrong that you can actually do wrong when blocking a piece… I used Eucalan (which was the only good thing) in hand-warm water (that was the mistake) and I left it in there for too long. Can you guess what happened?
An unwanted piece of magic happened: the white yarn turned into a very pale pink! There was some serious colour bleeding happening from the red yarn beautifully soaked up by the white yarn.
I unravelled the border rows and made it again using new, fresh, white yarn. The next round of blocking went better!
Are you ready for a ta-dah? Here it is!
I really like this shawl! Thank you, Maaike for the lovely pattern. I’m wearing it a lot!
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