Combining knitting and crochet to make a shawlette

On a recent trip to New Zealand I was tempted by some beautiful yarn. Both the colours (blue, green and brown) and the texture attracted me. Woven from merino, silk and possum, it is soft, light and incredibly warm. You did read correctly, in New Zealand the possum was introduced from Australia and is considered a pest, so it is quite common to find possum pelts for sale, as well as possum fur woven into yarn. This is a win for everyone, it controls a pest animal while making lovely yarn!

Having bought this yarn I really wanted to make something special with it. I bought it as a hank, so I first had to wind it into balls. Having done that I realised that I didn't have much yarn to work with, so I decided to make a shawl. I consulted all my knitting books for shawl ideas (deciding against getting lost in the interwebs, I did want to get the project started this winter!).

I picked up the brilliant book Custom Knits Accessories: Unleash Your Inner Designer with Improvisational Techniques for Hats, Scarves, Gloves, Socks and More (Affiliate link) at a discount store last year, and its my kind of pattern book. It does have patterns that you can follow, but it also explains techniques and makes suggestions for modifying the patterns. As I tend to use patterns and recipes as guides only, this works perfectly.

This time I used the "Mambu Shawlette" pattern as guide this time. It uses bamboo stitch, which is basically just a wrap around increase, two stitches then pass the increased stitch over, purl on the other side. This gives a nice texture without having to follow a complicated lacy pattern.

At first I wasn't going to the centre eyelets/increases, but then I felt that it wasn't getting wide enough quickly enough for me, so I added them in after a few rows. I started with normal needles and switched to a circular needle when it got too big. I was really finding the knitting awkward after I've been doing so much crochet, so I did a deal with myself that I would finish one ball of wall knitting and use the second to do a crochet ruffle.

This is where I really started to deviate from the pattern! All I did was crochet doubles around the edge (and due to increases on the edge there were nice eyelets to hook into), then I went around and put an extra double in every third crochet. Then I just did doubles back and forth until I ran out of yarn.

Its not really cold enough to wear it much yet (photo above I'm still in a singlet!). It has made a small pretty shawlette that I can twist around my neck or over my shoulders and I'm sure I will wear it a lot when winter finally starts here.

What's on your needles (or hook) at the moment? Do you combine crochet with knitting? Do you have a preference?

Cooking and eating beans

When I was growing up, my family never ate many dried beans, they just weren't something that was used much in NZ cuisine. If I did eat beans, it was always from a can (and most likely baked beans). And until recently I was still using beans from a can, but it can be difficult to get organic beans, and to find cans not lined with BPA. Then I had an opportunity to buy some organic dry goods in bulk, so I bought 5kg of kidney beans, 5kg of adzuki beans and 5kg of chickpea (garbanzo beans). I know, that is a lot of beans. And then I didn't really know what to do with them! Not just what dishes to put them in, but how to prepare them, I just didn't know what method to use. So I decided it was time to learn how to use all these beans that I bought, here's what I found out. I started with an excellent ebook called The Everything Beans Book , from Katie at Kitchen Stewardship, which has lots of bean recipes, but more importantly, an explanation of h...

Guest post: Is there a place for power tools in the garden?

One of my regular readers and commenters offered to write a guest post about a horticulture course, its quite a funny read, with some serious insights into our technology obsession. If you'd like to submit a guest post, email me at eight.acres.liz {at} gmail.com. While I am always happy to share links back to your blog or website, this contributor preferred to remain anonymous. I hope you enjoy their story.... -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- -**- Just a few days ago our daily horticulture classes were interrupted by an invitation to review some new gardening gadgets. The idea was to open half a dozen of electric hand trimmers , test them and fill in some review about their goods and bads. As nothing is more dear to a student – even a “hort “ one - to escape routine and mess around till lunchtime, we opened the boxes and got down to business. What did we...

Farm update - August 2017

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