FO: Merhaba Shawl

Don’t you just love it when a project just flies of your needle? The Merhaba Shawl is one of those projects.

The pattern is by Happy In Red (go on, click, I’ll wait :)), and it’s really awesome! The pattern calls for Scheepjes Softfun, Softfun Denim and Softfun Aquarel and it’s made on a 4,5mm(size 7) crochet hook.

I obviously wouldn’t be me if I’d read the pattern correctly. See, if I had read it correctly I wouldn’t have had to restart for the third time. She even asks you to read the whole pattern before beginning, but when have I ever been wise…? So I misread a part (which was clearly written I should note, so it’s all on me) and I didn’t end up with the right amount of repeats.. oops

I only found out once I’d reached the middle section (twice). So just do yourselves a favor and read the instructions with more care than I did haha 🙂 If you’re one of those people who are not too impatient to read you’re going to be just fine 🙂

So a little bit about blocking: yarn is a string and when you knit or crochet with it, you force it in a different shape. You’ve probably noticed when working on a project and the pattern shows a beautiful image and you’re ending up with a sad heap of yarnblob. It’s because the yarn very much liked it’s status as ‘string’ and loves to revert back to this relaxed state.

Blocking it means washing (or spraying water on it, but I prefer washing), and pinning it while stretching the fabric. This allows the fiber/ yarn to dry in the new position, accepting its new shape.

If there’s any wool involved I’ll handwash and block (rather violently), if there’s cotton involved it ends up in the washer. Because, well, cotton 🙂

In the end it took me longer to weave in the ends than it took me to crochet the whole project. For some reason I didn’t weave the ends in while working, which is what I normally do because I seriously don’t like weaving in ends at the end of the project. Perhaps it’s because I restarted so many times and I really wanted to see it done 🙂 Now that it’s done it really doesn’t matter! It’s one of my favorites <3

A few notes:

Scheepjes Softfun is a super nice and soft yarn! I frogged it to bits (and I had finished the first section twice and you wouldn’t know looking at the yarn. It’s still super soft and there’s no damage to the yarn whatsoever. I chose the same colors as the pattern states, except for the Softfun Aquarel. I used a shade darker because I didn’t have the lighter version and I just had to start 😛 So yeah 🙂

happy crocheting <3