Tangles & Twists: Lucky Clover Scarf

One pattern a week seems to be the best I'm able to do at the moment. That's a bit slower than 'normal' but it does help keep the quality up. I hate using filler patterns even if they do have some good ideas. I keep getting distracted by books and food so my crafting has slowed down a bit. The purple blanket is still going, but it's my 'I'm lazy and don't want to do housework' project so it's been going in fits and starts. Plus I've been on a food kick. That tends to happen after I've been sick, I start eating everything I can get my hands on to the exclusion of all else. It would be less of an issue if I hadn't started learning to make new food at the same time. All of my comfort foods are some form of Asian, which is probably odd for a little white girl of Polish/German descent but that's how it is, and I've been learning how to make some really awesome Korean food. So far I've tried making pa jun and dukbokki (scallion pancakes and spicy rice cake 'stew'). The next on the list is bibimbap (a rice dish where you cook all the bits separately then mush them together in your bowl) and I may try bulgogi (marinated beef) again. My beef dishes tend to suck; the meat is always too watery and the texture goes from pan fried to boiled in a heartbeat. What's worse is that it doesn't seem to matter if I dry the meat off first. I think I need to get my meat from a better store than Walmart. Maybe I can find a butcher, I bet it would help. Once I get those recipes down the crafting will probably kick up again, that's what normally happens.

On top of those distractions, I have planning in full swing for a certain October party. Nothing keeps me going quite like Halloween plans. Sometime in the next week or so I'll start posting little bits about the various plans that I have and then the related crafting projects that go along with it. What should be interesting is that a lot of my ideas aren't necessarily Halloween specific. There's a fair number of ideas that I'm working on which could be used really easily for kid's birthday parties or other randomly themed parties, if you're into that kind of thing. Nor are all my ideas going down the blood and guts path that many of them did last year, not that that helps you if you've got a kid who wants a zombie party.

Right, getting on with things, I have a fun little pattern going today. It took me a while to figure out exactly what I wanted to do; I got to do a lot of ripping. Then, once I had my motif, I had to figure out what to do with it. Naturally I went with the loathed piecework. I swear, for something I hate so very much, it's too damn useful. It's been pretty warm in my corner of the world and that has me thinking spring. Green and spring. Happily, there's a holiday that goes nicely with that. I have no specific feelings about St. Patrick's day, which is unusual for me since I tend to be really opinionated. For instance, I despise Valentine's day with every fiber of my being. I have an intense dislike of cutesy stuff being shoved down my throat 24/7 and the implication that it's ok to be a jerk 90% of the time so long as you buy something fancy to show your love on one day a year pisses me off. I don't need a specific day to show people I care, I try to do that all the time. Granted, I don't always succeed, but I do try.

Once I started thinking St. Patty's day, I had a second brain wave. I was getting bored with blocky things, so why not go lacy on this one? What's more, there is a method called Irish crochet that looks awesome and is light and delicate. Now, Irish crochet it typically done with teensy little steel hooks and crochet thread and I'm not a terribly patient person. My solution was to make an Irish crochet inspired pattern. That way I could still use normal yarns and hooks and it wouldn't take a million years to make a scarf. Coming up with the pattern took a bit of doing; I had to try several iterations before I got something that looked nice. Then I had to figure out how to connect the motifs. Join as you go wasn't an option. There's something about that joining process which bollocksed up the shaping. Consequently, I got to sit on the couch staring at my cute little clover for quite some time. Then it hit me. 4 leaf clovers are supposed to be lucky and St. Patrick's day has always had the whole 'pot of gold' association with it. Coins were the answer! Hence the devil piecework. Sewing the thing together takes more time than making all its bits.

Lucky Clover Scarf

Materials:
Red Heart SuperSaver (I used some leftover DuPont Sayelle for the yellow, but Red Heart should work just fine for the coins)
J hook
I hook

Clover Pattern make 11
Using green and the J hook ch2,
Round 1: 8 sc in the first ch. Join. Do not turn.
Round 2: (ch6, sk 1sc, sc) four times. Join and turn.
Round 3: (7sc in ch6 space, ch1) in each ch6 space. Join but don't turn
Round 4: (ch2, sk 2, dc, ch2, dc, c2, dc, c2, dc, ch2, sk1, slst) in each of the four loops of sc.

Coin Pattern make 40 leave tails for sewing. Half of them need to be extra long for the way they're joined later.
With yellow and the I hook, ch 2.
Round 1: 6 sc in the first chain.
Round 2: 2 sc in each st, join with sl st. (12 sc)

Long tail vs Short tail

Prepare the coins for sewing as shown

Starting point

Pull through

Step 1

Pull through

Step 2

Assembly
Note: For best results read over the whole process before you give it a go. The way some of the coin joins are done is not typical. I've designed this so that you get the most secure join possible but you're going to want to make sure you end weave as securely as possible or your scarf may fall apart in the wash.

Weave in ends of all the clover motifs. Pick a side to be 'front' on the coins. For shorter tail coins: Using the tail on the coin, sew the coin to the 2 sts over a second dc on the clover as shown. Weave the end in using the most secure method you know.
For longer tail coins, sew the coin to a clover as for the short tail coin. Then, instead of end weaving, use the needle to move the yarn tail to the other side of the coin as shown. Then sew the coin to a short tail coin on a different clover. Weave in ends.