Cassie's Picks
This piece was a fun experiment that turned out much better than I imagined it would. It started when my 5 year old daughter, Cassie, wanted to keep one of the pieces I made for the 60-odd International Freeform Crochet Challenge. I am planning to mount that piece and didn't want to part with it, so I told her that I'd make something similar for her from yarns that she chose. I pulled out all of my bags of small yarn bundles. I have one or two gallon size ziploc bags per color and one bag of multi-colored bundles. I told Cassie she could pick 25 different yarns -- whatever she liked best. Well, she picked more than that to start with and I told her she had to put some back. I confess that I gave her a suggestion to put all the yarns together and take out any that didn't seem to look good with the others. I also confess that I gently encouraged her away from a few that I thought would look awful (VERY thick white and red yarns). But other than those few tweaks I stuck with her choices, and really enjoyed the challenge of making them work together.
This piece, like its predecessor, is done completely with single crochet rows in the back loop of the previous row. I really like working with this technique -- it produces interesting texture and it's a neat way to introduce colors that you might not use otherwise. Colors can be partially hidden by working them so that they are most prominent on the wrong side of the piece (they are actually worked from the right side). There were a few yarns in this piece that I always worked that way -- very "in your face" lime green and cherry red, for example. I found that it was best to end each segment with a wrong side row (more visible on the right side) because that allowed for an adjacent edge to be attached and hidden underneath it.
I will definitely be experimenting more with both techniques: short rows of sc in the back loops and yarn selections by Cassie. I think I like this piece even better than its predecessor, but what kind of mom would I be if I kept it for myself? Finished September, 2006.
This piece later became part of a gallery exhibit.
