When I queued up the tutorial video for the crochet cardigan, I found myself watching a young and perky gal so excited about this pattern and promising that "it will fly off your hook!" Well, I'm not finding that to be true (although there's a lot of slipping off the hook - more about that later). Here's my progress this week, which has been slow. There's a lot of counting, which limits the kind of tv show I can have on while I work. I've already had to do a fix at the end of a row so I didn't have to undo two rows of crocheting, and undo a different row where I'd put a stitch in the wrong place near the beginning which threw off where the final stitches would land. I'm not flying (although one thing about crochet - those stitches really do fly when you're undoing them), and I'm not exactly enjoying the journey.
Add to that the difficulty of working with the slick yarn whose twisted threads don't really stick to each other making it way too easy to snag one as the hook is pulled through or even find the hook splitting the strand altogether. Slow going but I persist. There are many 4 row repeats left to go on this back section. I've only managed 3 so far.
Not having a great deal more success with the quilting on Venetian Tiles. I finished the 1/2" echoing inside the half blocks around the outside, all done with a walking foot. Moving on to the small "cornerstone" squares, I was reticent to give up my walking foot and slowly worked my way around 4 of the 9 squares' fabric motifs. No, you cannot see the stitching very well, as I wanted, but because I used Thermore batting, I'm not getting much texture either. I'm wishing I'd used something with more loft. The more I studied the different squares that were left, the more I realized I'd need to get rid of my "training wheels" and switch to free motion quilting. Not my finest hour as I quilted a fifth square, but again, it doesn't really show.. I'm planning on switching thread color on the final four so before doing that, I moved to one of the big octagon blocks, again studying the motifs to determine the best routes round for minimum starting and stopping. Not exactly flying on this one either but slow and steady wins the race I guess. And of course, the more I do, the more relaxed and better I'll get.
Continuing spring reporting, my side of the street is lined with chokecherry trees that burst into bloom last week.
They have a sweet smell that hit me as soon as I opened the front door. I just love them. Apologies for the blurry pic - it was quite breezy when I tried to get this close-up shot. I also noticed a lilac bush in bloom, another sweet smelling flower that strikes me as coming out a bit early this year. I'm sure the Lilac Festival organizers and participants are a bit worried as the parade isn't until next weekend.
