making paper daisies: New Year and A Crochet Ta Dah!

Hello! And Happy New Year to you all; I hope your Christmases were brilliant and you found time amidst the madness to stop, breathe and reflect on what really matters in this season. It’s all over now and a fresh New year stretches ahead of us; I always love the anticipation that it brings. If you have followed my blog for a while you’ll know I love to make new year’s resolutions, loads of ‘em, but I’ll wait to share those with you another time. For now I want to share my (very over due) Ta DAh! Moment of a hooky project I started back in October when I fell head-over-heels in love with Autumn :)

Enjoy!...

Waaay back in October, as Autumn was beginning to make way for winter I was worrying inside my creative mind about letting go of all the colour and beauty that had blessed my soul so much that year; ONLY autumn has this magical appeal, the shift in colour paired with the emotional anticipation and preparation of settling down for winter. I am sure it is its brevity that makes it so special; the same reason flowers are such a wonderful gift. Anyway, I got an idea to make a crochet scarf in all of those beautiful hues that I could drape about myself and cheer my spirit on those cold, grey, slushy, muddy winter days (that actually have been very warm so far so not as much scarf-draping/swishing has happened than I would have liked).

Very unlike me, I just drove to the yarn store, and probably took less than half an hour to pick my yarn, colourway, pay and walk out with a bag of swag. Woah. No crazy planning, getting lost in the fascinating world of endless colour combination possibilities – just look, pick, look again…..and buy. It was a thrill just trusting my eye.

I had already found my pattern on Pinterest and used my long car journey that weekend to hook the first few rounds and get a feel for the piece. It was fun, but scary as I hadn’t made anything like this before and the flower motifs were much larger than I had imagined. The fact that I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not was annoying, but it went away the more I made.

I spent many happy moments hooking methodically through the pattern. First I made all the centers (why do I feel that isn’t spelt right?); I can’t tell you how pleasing it was to see the little piles of colours grow.

Then I moved onto the middle round; this felt like real progress and was a little addictive.

But then the hard work came; deciding where each colour would go, evenly spaced in the whole scarf scheme of things and adding in the final round of petals, joining as I went.

This was slow progress and I spent many evenings at the dining table laying out all the pieces in their correct order only to have time to crochet two or three completed flowers before packing it all up again before bed (sorry, dark evenings = poor photos).

The reason it took so long to complete was due to the mini-crisis I had in the middle of the final round where I decided that I might not like the pink. My good friends (and some strangers) on face book were really helpful and all encouraged me to keep it in; as did the few people I unexpectedly assaulted as I thrust my crochet under their nose and asked for their gut feeling on the colour- goodness, the people I know are really nice to love me!

Anyways, after that I finally got round to finishing it, and then it sat. And sat. The ends; I couldn’t face darning them in, ugh. But just before Christmas when my hubby had the kids I took myself off to have coffee with my scarf and darn in her scruffy ends.

I blocked it the next night; never have I blocked anything this big. Blocking always sounds like it is offensive to me, maybe that’s why I tend not to do it, but it really needed it to look finished this time.