Good guess Christina, but nope, my mystery project isn’t felted. This is the Crochet Half Moon Shawl from Lion Brand in Jiffy. The color is Pearl Grey*. I wanted to make it in a darker color but (surprise, surprise) JoAnn only had six color choices and only two in the amount I needed.
I saw this pattern first in the Spring/Summer Lion Brand catalogand put it on the back burners as a project I would like to complete. (I’m sure there’s a snazzy acronym for this but it’s lost on me.) Anyway, then I saw the Half Moon Shawl CAL on Crochetville a few weeks ago, and suddenly I had to try it out. It’s amazing the motivation you can acquire from a CAL by the way. So somehow I thought that it only required three balls and now I am stuck. I need to buy another ball of Jiffy or frog it. I’ll probably keep it and pick up another ball when I get off island again, whenever that is.
There are a million different versions of this shawl now. The one I really wanted to make used Lion Brand Romance. I liked the lime color in the picture and the mohair-ish look, but Jiffy was on sale and Romance wasn’t carried at that store.
Also there is a version that uses a new yarn called Cupcake. I’m partial to bright colors so I’m excited to lay eyes on the actual yarn. It looks like a slightly sturdier version of Bernat Baby Coordinates Sweet Stripes, the yarn I used for the Chromium Star Blanket. They are both four ply and, from what I can tell, have the same spinning technique. I had trouble with the Sweet Stripes yarn splitting, but to be fair this was probably exacerbated by the fact that I frogged the blanket lots before settling on the structure. Say what you want about RHSS, but you can frog that acrylic a million times and still look fine incorporated in a FO.
In all, I liked this project. It’s an easy project, but not sc-square boring. I hear there are some corrections to the pattern, but I wasn’t looking and didn’t see any. Plus, it’s warm, kinda soft and pretty. I can’t complain.
*Was anyone else ever taught that gray is the correct spelling for the color? I noticed that Lion Brand spells it with an “E”. I even looked it up on Merriam-Webster. Although they don’t make and distinctions definition wise, they list grey as a variant and the definition is under gray. This whole gray/grey topic reminds me that the television show Grey’s Anatomy changed the “A” to an “E” from the book Gray’s Anatomy. (I didn’t notice this by the way. A Grey’s Anatomy enthusiast pointed it out.) I guess that it’s sort of like through and thru: same meaning, different spelling. Is it wrong to prefer gray over grey? Hmm.
*That’s cool* a random fact
The Chinese see a “toad in the moon” as opposed to the “man in the moon”. When there is an eclipse, folklore says that the toad is trying to swallow the moon.
A Whole Load of Craft 