You’re just going around the room, carrying a cup of hot tea, admiring the nice wooden finish on all the furniture, wondering ‘Where in the name of tea should I put this cup down? It’s burning my fingers!’ and then the idea hits.
You could make some nice coasters, so that next time you want to enjoy a cup of hot (or cold, doesn’t really matter) nourishing liquid you don’t accidentally ruin something by leaving big round circles all around it.
I’ve been meaning to make some coasters since I got to Germany and until yesterday I didn’t have any proper yarn for this purpose. I wasn’t going to ruin my woolen yarn on a set of coasters, especially since most of it is sock or lace-weight anyway and it wouldn’t hold a flat shape for the life of it.
Passing by the yarn shop in town yesterday, on my way to the post office, I couldn’t control my urge and got inside. It’s so warm and cozy and filled with yarns of all colors and textures, so I had to fall in love with it instantly, even though the prices in the window scared me when I first lay my eyes on them.
I had entered the shop previously, just to look around, take in the elegance of the soft, fluffy yarns scattered about, locate the points of interest and find a couple of stitch markers.
I couldn’t find any stitch markers, but that’s not a problem, I can make some with a bit of wire (from the crafts store close to my new home, of course), but I did map out the whole shop in my head, just in case. It’s not really an effort, more of a memory exercise, so the next time I visited the shop,
I knew exactly where to go, to the special shelf in the back of the shop, full of cotton yarns. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, exactly, just something that wasn’t extremely expensive and thick enough to isolate a cup of tea from its surroundings.
My gaze fell upon a funky, multicolored yarn, thick but quite soft to the touch. It’s a multi-strand cotton that reminds me of the dark green cotton that I used on a shawl a few months ago. From the same maker, I found different intense colors, perfect for a fall ‘collection’. I got three colors, a burgundy, brownish orange and vivid yellow. The price was quite decent, even for Germany.
So I left as a happy customer, imagining all those pretty designs that I had seen online, transformed using the vivid colors I had just picked,
When I got home, it was obviously the time to pick a pattern. I wanted to make one from scratch, but the circle kept turning into a tiny hat, so I had to start from somewhere else. My first search was on Ravelry, in the free pattern section.
After collecting so many free patterns with gorgeous designs for shawls and sweaters and whatnot, I was a bit disappointed at the selection that I found. After all, coasters are just a kind of colorful doily, so there should be millions of designs available, right? Wrong!
Apparently, the decent-looking ones were all for sale. I could decipher their designs in less than 5 minutes, but nothing seemed to go with my three colors, so I followed the next avenue of online ‘research’, Pinterest.
This time, I was amazed at the quality of the images that I found, but that just goes to say how different these two platforms are in terms of content management (nearly none, versus crowdsourcing).
A very pretty (yet simple) design caught my eye, It was only a colorful bunch of leaves, but I knew it would be perfect for my tiny project.
So on I went, crocheting like mad, combining the colors (not a great idea in the end), changing the design just a bit around the edges, with every iteration. That’s how I am, if I feel that something is not entirely right and needs a bit of fixing, I just change it. No problem if it doesn’t turn out exactly as I had imagined it, that’s the magic of creating new things.
I decided that the pattern, simple and pretty as it is, is not exactly what I wanted. So I started to design my own crochet fall leaves. I’ll update this post once I finish a piece and stop frogging it every few minutes because this version was not entirely what I envisioned a real leaf to look like. No really.
I’ll let you know through the email subscription when the design is finished (I hope that will be before the snows come, because who needs fall leaf decorations when they can make snowflakes?).
I’ll see you soon.
Andrea