I love colors. And color combos, seing the colors respond to each other. I love those blogs where you see the talented ladies crochet all the colors of the rainbow together. Yet when I look back on the crochet garments I make, it doesn’t reflect that at all. I’ve been wondering why ? Yes I try to make every crochet project “worthwhile”, ie a project that wil easily translate into a pattern, AND which I know for sure I’ll wear.

Also: I DID try to “freestyle” several cardigans using tons of colors more or less the way I used to make hats or scarves. But they never made it to the final stages: sometimes they ended up being too large for me, or the motifs and increases weren’t sitting flat and I got tired of ripping and restarting for the millionth time. Or it just wasn’t working out and I started using the yarn for another project…
Good lesson also to see it’s not so easy as it looks sometimes. ;-) Let’s say I was building up skills !

I have thus decided to take more me-time, and freestyle some garments for myself, with no pattern-planning in mind. Just for the fun of it. I’m currently in love with that cardigan made by VMSomakoppa. And decided that grey fuzzy/lofty yarn would be perfect for it. A couple months ago, when sorting all my yarns I had put it together in a bag with various pink and grey/black yarns that would work together well.

Yesterday I started swatching. Started with a 6 mm hook. Too tight, with the halo of the yarn you could hardly see the motif. Up to 6.5 mm. Still to small.
I resolved to the last resort: my huge 8 mm (L) susan Bates hook (my absolute favorite brand of hooks, but that’s another story).

This time it was perfect ! In a couple hours I had 3 squares. Went for a little walk outside with the girls. While they were playing in the hut, I made 2 more. That made 5. And of course, I crocheted again at night: 7 squares are now sitting on my table as I type. That’s at least half of what I need, depending on whether I decide on full overlapping front panels as her version, or shorter ones.

Now let’s see if I can make this one work out as planned and have a cozy cardigan for the fall (it will soon get cold here in the Vercors mountains..)