Catherine's Crochet Corner

Phew, isn’t it hot? At least, it is in my corner of East Anglia! Hot, dry and with only the barest of breezes, today, to make things a little more bearable.

I do not do well in heat. I may have mentioned this before, like every single summer ever. Sigh.

However, I am still crocheting, despite the heat 😀 Wheatfields is small enough that it’s not too hot to sit and work on it, and apart from during the very hottest hours, I’m actually not finding it too difficult to work with the acrylic yarn. I have been interspersing it over the last few weeks with other, smaller projects (finishing off a baby blanket and using up the yarn ends to make some oddments, of which more in another post once I’ve got it all photographed) but I am making progress with Wheatfields, and I’m pretty damn pleased with it, too.

This picture I took about ten days ago, when I finished the bushes on the lefthand side. Electric light, sorry – the colours are a bit off 😀 but wow I was so pleased when I finished those bushes. They were…tricky. What I ended up doing was a lot of foundation single crochet and working into a short section of chain stitches to create that sense that the branches and leaves were growing out leftwards and upwards. Then I built up those little fronds with more green and interspersed it with the white sky behind.

Obviously at this point I had also begun the hills and sky, to support the bushes; I’m not yet wholly happy with the sky at the utmost left, but I’ll come back to it later. In that particular place, the blue and white is rather mixed up, not nice clear swirls as it is in most of the rest of the sky. I don’t think it needs much for me to be happy, but I definitely think I need to leave it until I have more sky built up there 😀

So, next I moved on to the cypress tree. I think I said before that I’d go for sky next, but if so, I changed my mind 😀 Again, what I’ve done here is not only used amigurumi-style circles to build up bulk, but also used foundation single crochet/working into a chain to create the impression of those bushy branches reaching out into the sky.

I’ve also built up more of the hills that are behind the bushes and trees, especially that little clump of bushes just to the left of the cypress tree (which was, I can tell you, very difficult to translate into crochet because ugh shapes and branches and blue and ugh so glad it’s done). That’s what I’m going to keep doing now – working on cypress tree and the hills behind it, before moving onto the sky.

I’m definitely putting a lot more detail into this than I did Starry Night (I say this every update, I’m aware). I think I’ve learned a lot since I did Starry Night, and it’s possible I’ve also been in a more nitpicky mood this time around – this whole year has been one big rollercoaster for a lot of people, and in times of stress, obviously, we seek greater control over the things we can control. Which for me is, apparently, this freeform crochet! Looking back at Starry Night, I think I would do it differently now, and I think Wheatfields will have hugely more texture and detail than Starry Night…but obviously I still love Starry Night and am still very proud of it 😀

So onwards and upwards – literally, as I go upwards towards the sky! It’s undeniably hard work at times, and I do keep having to have short breaks of a few days to work on something less taxing, but I’m enjoying it so much, I really am. When I get it right, it’s the best feeling in the world.