My Bigmama's Pineapple

As I have mentioned before, I love vintage crochet. My great-grandmother (whom I lovingly called Bigmama) had a lot of crochet items that her mother made and left her. One of my favorites was a table cloth that had an intricate pineapple in the center of it. I have finally figured out how to make this particularly intricate pineapple after years of: try this...rip...try this....rip....looks like this....rip...over and over and over again. And before you say it, yes I have searched for it in pattern books (hence the overindulgent purchases to Abebooks and Thriftbooks), to no avail, and in a twisted way, really enjoyed the trial and error aspect overall. Never mind the many unpleasant words I used and created every time I had to rip it apart, but nonetheless, perseverance has finally paid off.

I made the one pictured above using Aunt Lydia's Crochet Thread #3 in silver, but my plan is of course to make them using my own Badan ARTisan hand dyed yarns in various weights, and to also play with variations on how to connect them together in various designs. Any suggestions?

DYE DYE DYE!!!!!

DYE DYE DYE!!!!!

I have been doing a lot of dyeing to build up inventory for my March show and the remaining February shows here in Southern California. Here's one of the new colors and fibers, Black Cherrie. I love this color and the fiber. It is a combination of 70% superwash merino wool and 30% SeaCell. I have put a couple of skeins in my Etsy shop. Getting this rich and intense of a color took a little extra work and time. I used 3 different colors to make this color, and 3 different dippings.

I can't wait to knit or crochet something up with this. Right now, I am working on a new crochet fedora hat pattern. I will be hopefully rolling out a nice colleciton of hats for spring. I really want to do some larger pieces, I have designed a caftan for lounging around in the house, but I don't know how long that will take to do. Here are a couple of other items from the dyeing session this week.