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Don’t tell my needles, but crocheting is my favorite fiber art.

It’s not that I don’t like knitting, I do. I prefer knitting in the round and I love color work, as you can see by my mittens. However, crocheting has my heart. You see, I can be bored to death by a crochet project because I’m repeating the same very easy stitch over and over. Yet people will constantly come up to me and tell me how beautiful what I’m working on it. How intricate it looks. Knitting will still cause people to strike up conversations, because fiber is a sadly dying art, but with knitting the project is as hard as it looks. I love that crochet can produce such a beautiful, intricate looking pattern without much effort. Take, for example, this close up of my wedding shawl:

Endless compliments while I was working on this. Mostly from curious classmates, but even from a random Indian woman on a plane. Not trying to brag, just saying how it was. In fact, every time someone would compliment me, I would look at my shawl and think, “Really? I think it’s kinda ugly right now.” But that is the beauty of crochet. A simple stitch can produce the above pattern. Plus there is only one yarn loop to keep track of!

Wedding Shawl

My project for the month of January was to make a shawl for me to wear at my wedding. I literally thought about what this piece would be for over a year. I knew I wanted to make my wedding shawl, but I had to pick a pattern and a color. I knew I wanted to crochet it and spend minimal money on the pattern. Then I bought my wedding dress and had to consider what would look good over it. Eventually, I stumbled upon a beautiful pattern in a book that I could get at the library, and we decided on green for the wedding party, making my shawl pink. The pattern is called Dragonfly Shawl.

Now, I know I keep saying that this was easy, and it was eventually. I can be awful at getting things started, though, and it did take me a bit to figure out the nuances of the pattern and figure out what exactly I was suppose to be doing and how I wanted to execute certain stitches. Once I got there, though, it is a large shawl, made in two parts, of repeats and is quite easy once you get the hang of it.

The hardest part of this shawl for me was the joining of the two halves, actually. Maybe it will look better once I block it, but those are the ugliest dragonflies I have ever seen. A guy on my trip told me (on his own) that the butterflies I was making were very pretty. Even if they were butterflies, I still think they are ugly.

All in all, though, I think this wedding shawl turned out very well and I’m excited about it. I still need to block it and weave in the ends, but since I haven’t done that yet, that will be a different post. I enjoyed this pattern once I got used to the pattern style, and the accompanying chart was very helpful to clear up any confusion.

For the specifics, I used two balls of Aunt Lydia’s Crochet Thread (Size 10) in orchid pink. Note that the pattern does call for 3 balls, however, so depending on how small or big you tend to crochet, you will want to keep that in mind. I didn’t work on the first half much at the beginning of my trip, but we had a lot of travel days in the second half, plus the transatlantic plane ride home. The whole wedding shawl took me a month and 10 days, but the second half and the joining only took me 13 days.

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