I haven't progressed as much as I anticipated on this project in the last week. Mostly because I just haven't put in the time.
First, I dropped tea on my project. Half a cup of hot, steaming tea. After drenching the affected area with cold water, I hung it for a day to air dry. I'm happy I chose a colored yarn (Lucci Hemp in Brick). Although my background has a little discoloration - that's just a temporary backing. I'm not sure a white crochet thread would have fared so well.
As the years go by, I find that the quality of light in my knit and crochet working area is crucial. Not being able to see my work well is just unfun. One challenge with a move is that it can take a while to fine tune a new living space and although I've got a great, comfy area to knit and crochet, I just haven't found the right lighting yet. I'm working with a head lamp. It's not terrible, I can do it, and if it were a more autopilot type of project it wouldn't bother me as much. But lack of good light cramps my style just enough to dampen my enthusiasm for the project and sitting down to work. It's just resulted in less time knitting and crocheting than I spent in my old house. Tools really do contribute to your joy of the craft.
In this blog post I'll talk about how I started joining the motifs and some of the design decisions I've made. (Read my first blog post in this series for info on creating motifs, laying them out, working the clones knot and free resources for Irish Crochet online). I'll be discussing the joining stitches that I did to get me to the point in the project pictured above.
Are my design decisions the best ones or the only ones that would have made sense? Not at all. The personal nature of this kind of crochet is what makes it unique and what makes everyone's work different. My hope is that by seeing my process, and the way that I tackled the joining, you will gain insight into this craft and be inspired to explore it in your own way.
I started at the arrow (can you see my starting tail?) and worked to edge the main motif using the following pattern as a guideline:
sc to the motifch 3 (or more depending, up to 6)
work a clones knot
ch 3 (or more depending, up to 6)
When joining to the motif, I kept my join stitches to the underside of the motif with the idea of helping to preserve the hard motif edge definition.
I eyeballed things, and erred on working the netting a little too tightly than too loose. Since this is going to be a cushion cover, I've had experience in the past that crochet cushion covers stretch over time, so I'm crocheting this one a little tight to compensate.
You can see above in some of the acute turns (circled), that I chose to just work a chain 3 to join nearby adjacent sides without working an intermediate clones knot. I just made these decisions as I went based on what I felt looked good as I worked.
You can see a couple of points along the hightlighted path above where I chose to join to the opposite border as I edged around, and at the very end of this path, I joined the main flower motif to the main branch motif before finally hitting a point where I had to rotate the work and change direction.
I continued to edge by rotating the work at the #2 arrow pictured above. My stitch pattern along the upper branch limb at the beginning was a little different than what I had done up until this point since I was joining to the motif AND existing clones knots at the same time instead of just edging. My basic pattern was:
sc to the motifch 3 (or more depending, up to 6)
join with sl st to the existing clones knot
ch 3 (or more depending, up to 6)
I then continued around the tip of the first branch and edged the interior of the next branch limb opening in a similar way to the first. I then joined to the tip of a 4th branch limb to continue to work into the initial edging around the main motif. My basic pattern changed to the following:
sl st around existing clones knotch 3 (or more depending, up to 6)
join with sl st to the existing clones knot
ch 3 (or more depending, up to 6)
An interesting modification to this basic pattern happens at the sharper turns around the motif, such as pictured above in the larger circled area. Take a look at the detail shot below.
Working around an acute turn like this is similar to working a circle from the outside in: you need to decrease. The challenge is that you need to preserve the trellis stitch pattern but connect to more than 1 clones knot at the previously-worked level of the grounding trellis. This is done with long crochet stitches.
Take a look at the stitch diagram overlay in the next image for detail.
The stitch sequence starts out with a ch 3 (I worked this from right to left), a clones knot (stitch symbol not shown) and then a cluster of 3 tr stitches, each worked through the bottom back of the clones knots previously worked in the trellis. Then I worked the ch 3 to continue along with my established edging pattern.
In all honesty, as I have been working this piece, I've been varying up the length of my long stitches to do these turns. Some are dc, some are dtr, it really depends on what looks best in the particular case. But tr is the average length of the stitch.
I essentially went forward until I couldn't (end of the green), and then I rotated to fill in the hole that remailed. My stitches for this portion start at the #3 arrow, I worked first from left to right, slip stitching around the clones knots previously made to build up the grounding, then turned to close the space by joining to the border. The dot represents my very last stitch. Do you see my ending tail?
I'll talk more about my approach attaching to the border in my next post, but will leave you with the detail shot of the stitches above. Can you see how I continued on with my basic grounding pattern to connect to the border scallops?