Although I was on vacation in San Diego, CA, last week, I had to work on some type of craft, or I would have gone mad. I did some embroidery (will show it soon) but made a run to the yarn shop after I received the book “Celtic Cable Crochet” by Bonnie Barker for review.
Oh… the patterns are sooooooooo beautiful! I am in love with the cardigans, shawls, cowls… All instructions are very straight forward and easy to follow. The last chapter has step-by-step photographs of the foundation stitches used throughout the book, which helped me a lot.
I wanted to finish a project from the book before I flew back home, so I chose the Dublin Duo (all photographs published by permission of Interweave and F+W Media Inc.):
This pattern was really fun, with arrows and reverse arrows. After a little while I did not have to look at the instructions so I was breezing through them. I did make one mistake on the scarf, which you will see below (Ryan, my 15-year-old son and model wasn’t available for this photo shoot!).
The scarf was my first project. I had trouble working with hook size J, for some reason. The scarf is worked the long way and when I realized my edge did not look like the book I was too far into the project to frog it, so I repeated the mistake at the end and called it a day.
The cables look really nice, though, which is due to Bonnie’s redesign of this traditional stitch. I also enjoyed working with a lighter yarn.
This is how my hat turned out. I think it is the first time I crochet (instead of knit) a hat. The construction was clever and fast. I used Heartland yarn by Lion Brand Yarns Size 4 (Medium weight) in color 113 Redwood, and crochet hook size J 10 (6 mm). The projects are soft thanks to the yarn and, possibly, to my stitches which aren’t so tight.
