Falling Out With Olive

I took 4 balls of KingCole Riot DK with me on holidays, and, having searched for a simple pattern before we left, I'd decided to start an Olive Twist Shawl, inspired by the lovely lovely Meredith of mereknits.

I looked up the Olive Twist pattern on ravelry, saved it on my phone, packed up my yarn, hooks and an empty dental floss box, and boarded the plane. What? Don't you always pack an empty dental floss box when you fly ? You mean it's not on your essentials-in-hand-luggage list ? Nop, me neither, until my local crochet group pointed out that whilst crochet hooks are allowed on planes, scissors aren't. Their suggested solution - should you need to cut your yarn at 30,000 feet (is that how high a plane is ? No idea, but it sounds good :) - use the little metal thingy on the dental floss box. Genius!

And so I joined the mile-high-crochet-club! Rock and roll baby! Yeahhhh!

I wish I could say that whilst on holiday I spent many a happy hour hooking by the pool. I did spend quite a bit of time doing just that, but it wasn't happy. Let's just say Olive and I did not get along. Determined though, I had lengthy email conversations with Meredith (who by a bizarre twist of fate actually only lives about 20 miles from where we were staying) and still the pattern somehow evaded me. Stubborn as a mule, I persevered.

After over 2 weeks of crocheting, frogging, crocheting, frogging, frogging more , shrieking, frogging more, crocheting, swearing, frogging again, crying ( ok so I didn't actually cry) and then finally realizing that I had actually invented my own pattern - which I didn't even like - I gave in. Yes, I admitted defeat.

I couldn't bare to rip the whole thing back though, (in fact what I wanted to do was burn the wretched thing) but I was very sensible and calm (unusual) and finished off the row I was on, and then gave it to Little Miss for her new doll.

I wasn't very much in love with King Cole Riot at this point either, but had three and a half balls to use up, so I had a flick through one of my new books, One Skein Wonders.

The eagle-eyed among you will remember I blogged about it before here. I really really love this book. My crochet book collection is quite extensive, I am a bit addicted to buying crochet books (nearly as much as buying yarn), but this one ranks up there with my favourites. I had a flick through and found a great pattern for some doll clothes. 

I made the jacket of the Rainbow Doll ensemble, but left the sleeves off to make it a sleeveless cardigan. It was a bit big for dolly - she was being cuddled in bed by Little Miss at the time and so wasn't available for a fitting.

So I made into a sort of double-breasted-wrap-sleeveless cardy, complete with button and loop fastening.

Little Miss finger-crocheted some bobbles for Dolly's hair, and a bracelet. We like the finished outfit, what do you think ?

One other twist of fate - I bought a magazine whilst away, which turned out to have the Olive Twist pattern in it! Total accident!

I still haven't made up with Olive, however now I was back on speaking terms with the King Cole Riot, but I needed a project for the flight home. It had to be really simple, an overnight flight with 3 children and the hope of maybe watching a movie doesn't leave much brain capacity for complicated crocheting .

Being unable to find anything that seemed simple enough I decided to do a sort of granny stripe-come-simple-filet-crochet scarf-cowl thingy (catchy, huh), of my own design. For now I will leave you with a sneak peek, and I'll post more pictures, and the pattern, another time :)