Lover's Knot Shawl

Remember the Virus Shawl? When I was looking at the pattern on Woolpedia's site, I came across another crochet shawl pattern that looked interesting. There's actually quite a few interesting patterns, but one in particular: the Lover's Knot caught my eye. The pattern looked fast enough to be near instant gratification.

It's a shawl, like the Virus, with the squares on the diagonal. It's light and airy and scrunches up quite nicely to wear as a scarf. I worked on this one concurrently with the Virus shawl. It took one ball of the yarn used to make a triangular shawl about four feet along the base of the triangle.

Virus Shawl

In March, my LYS Nature's Yarns (http://www.naturesyarnsinc.com and http://www.ravelry.com/groups/natures-yarns) newsletter advertised an upcoming class to create a "Virus Shawl".

The pattern seemed simple enough. I had this gradated blue color-way cotton originally used for a partially-completed knit mini-poncho. Unfortunately, the poncho had a major error that was best dealt with by ripping the stitches back to zero. A new project suitable for the yarn made that ripping a bit less painful.

I couldn't find much information about the pattern beyond what's listed on Ravelry and the originating site: http://woolpedia.de/english/crochet-tutorials/shawl/ (scroll down to find the Virus pattern). Woolpedia's authors claim the design has been floating around the internet for years and no one seems to know why the pattern is named "Virus". Some speculate it's because of the pattern's recent surge in popularity. To me, the pattern motif looks reminiscent of bedspread and doily patterns from the last century. Maybe somewhere around the middle. Might be worth a little digging to find out.

The whole thing took about two months, working on it off and on. The pattern is fairly easy and mindless enough to do while sitting through other activities. The Woolpedia site has links to YouTube videos explaining how to work the pattern. You basically repeat the pattern until you reach the size you want or you run out of yarn. I ran out of yarn. The shawl isn't quite as long as I would like, but it's long enough to wear as a warm-weather scarf. Overall, I'm pretty happy with the finished shawl.

05-06-2016 Update: I found the label to the fiber used. The fiber is 100% cotton, 480 yds (438 m) and 100 g. It's made by Wolle's Yarn Creations and the colorway is titled "Unique Blue". I bought it from a vendor at the Shenandoah Fiber Festival a couple of years ago.

Mehndi-inspired t-shirt

One of my ongoing projects is perfecting a flattering, well-fitting t-shirt pattern. It takes a few iterations and I think I’m close.


My latest iteration is a white t-shirt. I’m dressing it up with Mehndi-inspired




The doodles are drawn using a black Stained by Sharpie fabric marker with a brush tip. This marker gave me the best line quality overall. Line quality was clearest when I held the marker vertically–there was less drag against the knit fabric.





I used contact shelf paper to stabilize the fabric and keep it from stretching and moving around while doodling. I tried embroidery stabilizer first. Then I discovered the contact paper works just as well. Which is good because I had a lot of it and not much of the stabilizer. The contact paper also proved effective at preventing bleed-through by the marker. Win!





The doodling part is about done. Next up is coloring. Who needs a coloring book when you have a t-shirt?

And... We're back

Littleberry Makes is back after a too-long hiatus. The past year or so has seen a lot of making but very little posting.

In the intervening time, I gave some serious thought to how (or if) I wanted to move this blog forward. One of the stumbling blocks was writing up something after finishing up a project. That turned into a bigger task than I could keep up with. And, when it came down to a choice of writing versus making? Making almost always won.

For now, I’m going to focus on publishing photos of works in progress with an eye towards my making methods. You’ll probably see some of this on Twitter and Instagram (@littleberry for both), too.

Ready for more making?