To add a little sparkle!

I finished crocheting my lovely sparkly shawl a week or so ago, but it's taken me this long to manage to get it blocked and photographed - stretching it out with a bazillion pins long enough for it to dry is tricky with two wee ones in the house!

So here it is finished:

It needed blocking - which is washing, and then pinning out the item whilst wet in order to even out any tension in the fabric, and in this case to accentuate the points of each hexagon and to open out the lacyness of the pattern.  So I washed it with gentle shampoo, put a little conditioner in the rinsing water (fabric or hair, it doesn't matter!) and rolled it in a towel to get most of the moisture out - it only needs to be slightly damp.  Here it is pinned out to block, note the dodgy rearrangement of the foam jigsaw - I could really do with a larger one:

I lied, not a bazillion pins, but 124 I think.  It was every pin I had, plus a couple of sewing needles too.  Some day soon I'm going to try to get some blocking wires - I've heard that you can use "welding rods", but I've neither seen nor heard of these for sale . . . but then I've never asked either!  I intend to investigate!  It needed to sit there until it was dry.

And in action - traditional:

and bandito style:

 

I love the circular pattern formed by the holes around each motif - the blocking really improved that, and made the whole thing relax and drape so much better.  I LOVE blocking!  Well, to be fair I love the effects of blocking - actually finding the time and space to pin the whole thing out can be a bit of a bugger - but it's so worth it!

So to recap from my previous post - this is motif 38 from Beyond the Square Crochet Motifs by Edie Eckman, made from two balls of  rico creative reflection yarn in pastel using a 5mm crochet hook.  I started with the center, back of the neck hexagon (the dark purple one), then made the five in an arc around that one, then eleven in a larger arc around that, and then thirteen around the outside edge.  They were joined as I went, by slip-stitching into the corresponding chain spaces and picot stitches on the neighbouring hexagons.

I'm so pleased with my new shawl!  I don't often make something so frivolous for myself, but the colours and the sparkle are just the ticket to lift my mood through the last of the chilly weather.