Tuesday, November 16, 2010

More stars, the third time

I'm very happy with how this square for Spreading Love for Marie is turning out so far.  Only about 1.5" left to go before binding off and crocheting the edges.  I switched to size 5 needles, down from size 6 on the second stars block and size 7 on the first one.  They seem to be working out well and the width is about 11.25 - 11.5", which leaves about the right amount of room to single crochet all the way around and finish off nicely with all edges matching.

For this square I started with stitch # 30 from the right edge.  I drew lines on my printed chart to try and prevent me from starting in the wrong place or just reverting to stitch #1 at the beginning of a row.  I did try to do that second thing a few times anyway ;o).  I placed markers where the pattern indicates and also one after the far left edge of the chart to know everything afterward is the stitches that were skipped at the beginning of the row (stitches 1-29 in order from right to left).  The goal was to put the large star on the right side of the small star.  I guess so there'd be something different about the second and third version, besides the colors.  In the second one the two ombre colorways were fabulous together.  With the third, I didn't realize that I was choosing skeins that both faded to nearly white. It seems that would be ok for either the star portion or the background, but not both.  (I think it would be even better if the fade to white was only in the stars color and not in the background.)  The white from each strand would often line up too closely together.  So I added in a plain yellow and a different yellow ombre yarn, too.  Actually, one was the yellow and peach used in the version two.  I briefly used some of the seafoam -oops! that's seaspray- yarn that was used in the first star square and also in the diamond brocade block.  When the original background yarn got to the bluish color I added the seafoam strand at the opposite side and worked a few of the background rows in that before switching back.  I'll have a lot more ends to weave in at the end, but I think using the extra yarns was the right choice here.


At the right the square is shown upside down, with the large star on the left just like version 2.  It looks very different because turning it around doesn't change the way the stars are slanting.  I suppose I've changed it since the first version because I can, I thought to do so, and I like to think I'm improving on something each time.  I didn't want to settle for as many partial stars as I got in the first square when I could change the starting point to shift it all and have more stars and less star pieces.  I'm sure it's just me though ;o).  I hadn't thought about flipping the chart upside down and working it that way.  That doesn't seem like a meaningful change would result, though.

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