Hooked for Life (5 page)

F
elting (or more properly in many instances, fulling) is the process by which heat, soap, water, and agitation turn loosey-goosey crochet (provided it is made with a minimum of 70 percent animal fiber) into dense wooly goodness. Unless, of course, felting is the horrible thing that happens to you (and more likely the non-fiber-literate person in your household who also does the laundry) when the washing instructions are ignored or your favorite 100 percent wool item is accidentally thrown into the washing machine with the jeans or towels.

If you have never tried a felted project before, I highly recommend it. It’s a lot of fun to cruise along crocheting at the speed of light (big hook, big stitches), weave in the ends in the most sloppy way possible (because, after all, they will felt in anyway), and not worry too much about gauge or shape (because any minor fudges will all come out in the wash, as they say). You wind up with a flimsy sort of oddly shaped something if you are
making a purse or bag, or a garment that would fit you and three of your closest friends. Then you throw it in the washing machine, do your thing, and it comes out looking exactly like you wanted it to.

Well, more or less. Felting is more of an art than a science—your results may vary. My results vary, too. Every time I felt something, I have all these grandiose ideas that measuring and swatching and testing ahead of time will tell me exactly what I am going to pull out of the washing machine, and yet I am always surprised (sometimes pleasantly, sometimes not) by the results.

The great news about felted fabric is that whatever you end up with will be acceptable in one form or another. As long as you are a flexible type of person, that is. I designed a felted purse pattern recently that had absolutely no relationship whatsoever after it came out of the washing machine to the sketch I had made. No resemblance whatsoever. It was funny and scary at the same time how wrongly I’d guessed about how the piece would change shape while it was felting. That said, I changed the title, did a little fiddling with the way the closures were set, put the original sketch through the paper shredder so no one would know how very wrong I was, and sold the design anyway. It may not have been what I expected, but it was still a pretty cool purse.

If your felted piece comes out from the wash and you simply can’t stand it, the very good news is that you can cut it up with a pair of sharp scissors and make it into something else. Unlike woven fabric it won’t fray, so cut away. Stitch the pieces into something else, throw a blanket stitch edging on, and crochet around it. If all else fails, cut it into 4-inch squares and call them coasters and act as if that’s what you meant to do all along. No one will ever know!

I started on the slippery path to felting addiction with knitted pieces. They worked out fine, and one Christmas everyone in my family (who
would appreciate them) got felted slippers. But then I started thinking about felting in crochet. Crochet has a structural quality to begin with so you can easily make all kinds of shapes. Crochet goes really really really fast so you can get to the fun part, the actual felting, quickly. Crochet is a pretty dense fabric from the get-go, so you can get an extremely thick and cushy end result, or crochet with a finer gauge wool and get soft and flexible felted goodness. In other words, crocheted felting ROCKS.

S
crumble
is a word that I thought was a typo when I first ran into it. In fact, as I am writing this, the computer
still
thinks it’s a typo. It’s the word for a building block of free-form crochet—you make a bunch of scrumbles containing any stitch or fiber you choose, made in whatever manner suits you, and then you join them together into something larger.

Start with a hook and some yarn and just work in whatever direction they take you—scrumbling is sort of like doodling, only with yarn instead of with pencil and paper. The glory of free-form crochet is that it can be anything you want it to be, even if you don’t know what you want it to be when you begin. You can combine any sort of stitch and yarn and texture and go to town until you get bored with it, then instantly move onto something else. You’ll know when it’s finished; it will tell you. Then you make another and another, and eventually, out of the pile of
disparate bits and bobs rises a finished piece. It could be anything from a wall hanging to a garment, and it will be completely unique—a piece of crochet art that no one in the world besides you could have made.

Crocheters talk a lot about whether they are process driven (“Just give me a hook and some yarn so I can crochet and I don’t much care what comes out the other side”) or result driven (they have a strong idea what they are going to make in what size with what yarn and they are going to make exactly what they envision). Free-form crochet is for people who really enjoy the process of crochet. Not that you can’t get fantastic results—you really can make some striking pieces that are a delight to wear or display. But relaxing a bit on the planning side of crochet is likely to bring you the most creative results, if that makes any sense. If you let yourself be driven by the yarn and the hook and what they are telling you, you can do a little planning later on when you have a clearer idea of where you are headed. The process crocheter doesn’t mind taking a few detours along the way since it’s the journey that matters, and may even change the destination entirely if there is a pretty pathway leading her away from her original goal.

Of course, if you are shaking your head and looking askance at the idea of yarn and hooks speaking to you, perhaps free form is not your game. Some crocheters need the reassurance of a pattern—a road map, if you will, to get them where they are going.

Which isn’t to say there is no planning in free form. If you want to wind up with something wearable in approximately your size, you need to do the math about how you want each garment piece to be shaped and measured, as compared to how large and what shape the pieces coming off of your hook actually are. Some free-formers work with paper or fabric templates—they mark out the shape of the pattern piece they need and arrange and rearrange the scrumbles until they have a layout
that is both pleasing to the eye and the correct shape. Some “build” their pieces on a mannequin to get the flow and drape just right. The fantastic news about free form is—it is never ever wrong. It is only what you want, when you want it, if you wind up with a little section that needs to be filled in, all you need to do is whip out your hook and yarn and crochet a piece that fits.

Free form is like making a jigsaw puzzle at the same time that you are putting it together. At least you don’t need to force any pieces to fit in! And it’s an excellent excuse not just to build up stash (“Hey, I’ll use that skein in something somewhere because it looks so nice next to some of my other skeins”) but to use it up. Because one of the things a yarn can tell you is when it is gone—no pesky leftovers to put back in the box, just set yourself a challenge to use up this sparkly bit until there is no more.

It also doesn’t matter what type of gauge you like to work in; you can turn your favorite techniques into free form. I have seen some gorgeous free-form garments in thread that look like their cousins in Irish crochet, and some wild and wooly outerwear that will stop traffic (in a good way!), and just about everything in between.

If you can take the plunge, free form can be the ultimate crochet adventure. And you never have to leave your chair.

A
migurumi
means “Beanie Baby” in Japanese. Okay, in fact it doesn’t, although it is a Japanese word. It refers to small stuffed knitted or crocheted (but mostly crocheted, yay!) animals, or anthropomorphized inanimate objects.

Some cool, trendy crocheter who is way younger than me introduced me to the concept. I thought they were pretty cute, but what would you actually do with one, or a bunch? My daughter already has a population of stuffed animals rivaling that of a small city, does she really need more? How many of these little guys would I really want to make, anyway? And how many designs do there need to be?

The answers to these questions are apparently collect them, yes, none, and millions—because the ami craze has caught on all over. People collect amis they have made as well as amis others have made. Crocheters
buy patterns and materials for them by the ton, and even buy the amis of certain fiber artists to add to their collection.

Me? I don’t get it. I didn’t get the whole Beanie Baby thing, either. Apparently I am not wired to fall in love with animals that don’t come over and wag their tails when I call them. And since they aren’t fiber bearing, either, I really don’t have a lot of use for them.

What I do like about
amigurumi
is that they have turned a lot of people who are not otherwise crochet lovers, into crochet lovers. Some fiber council somewhere decided that statistically, a lot of people turn to crocheting when they or someone they know is expecting a child, because crocheted baby things are so lovely. I think a lot of people who are becoming caught up in the ami craze will learn to crochet just so they can add to their collections.

Once they have been assimilated, we will turn them into all-around crochet lovers. The
amigurumi craze
will pass someday—does anyone remember that Beanie Baby prices ran to the thousands of dollars, and now they are in the discount bin at the grocery store? And at least the
amigurumi
will always be cool because they were not mass-produced—each has a bit of individual character.

In the meantime, someone hand me a hook and some yarn, please. I see a little lion that I might not be able to resist.

T
here is an area in my living room where I like to sit and crochet, or knit, or spin, or sketch. My daughter calls this area Mount Yarn. If I am looking for something and stomping around the house with my searching face on, she will often call out, “Hey, have you looked in Mount Yarn?” She thinks she is funny … although sometimes she is right.