Freeform crochet scarf- WIP

What am I working on today?? I have just started a new work-in-progress, a autumn freeform crochet scarf that I will send to Karen S., who won the grand prize in my drawing earlier this month. I have a very unstructured way of doing my scarfs. Rather than make a variety of scrumbles (which are patchwork pieces of crochet), then put the scrumbles together- I just take my crochet hook for a crazy walk by sticking my brain in neutral and just going for it.

My method is indeed very freeform. I follow no rules, I don’t think about stitches. Instead, the most important thing for me is: Do I like it? It is textural enough? How does the yarn interact with the previous yarn used? Do I have enough variety of yarn color & texture for interest? Does it “feel” right to me?

Choosing Yarn- It helps to have several hundred yarn colors & types to pick from. I’ve been collecting yarn for many years, and I have lots of leftover yarn from previous freeform projects. If you love to recycle, another way to obtain interesting yarn is to pick up colorful knitted sweaters from your thrift store and pull the garment apart. Hint: Wash the garment first to get rid of odors and cooties.

Figure 1

Figure 1 illustrates the first yarn pile I threw together. It was lacking in many ways and was a bit boring for me. I wanted to warm it up a bit, so I went back to my yarn stash to expand the choices. karen said she likes Autumn colors, so I made sure to include orange hues:

Figure 2

As you can see I added in oranges and omitted brown and light turquoise and greens. It still does not work for me, by taking a photo I can easily see that it is rather flat and uninteresting.

Figure 3

An improvement, notice how the addition of the lighter shade of turquoise really brightens it up a bit? Thus said, I’m still not 100% finished or satisfied. I will sleep on it and have another go in the morning light.

Update: I went ahead and edited further this morning. Now I am making a sample freeform crochet of the color chosen to see if it “works” for me in the application/project I am making. Hmmm… If I am not completely satisfied, I start over until I am.

I decided to share my method of operation in my approach of this WIP. I will be sure to post picture as I best learn from those experiments which do not work- as well as from those experiment which are successful.

Regards, Carla