May 2019

It has been an exciting few months for our founder. Hiding behind events and teaching sewing skills to local home school families, Faye has been working on her first Top Secret project pattern.

“My top secret journey began back in January when I initiated an email conversation with Simply Crochet magazine. (My Granny and I have been fans of the magazine since 2013. We would take it in turns to buy it and share with each other.) Unfortunately the patterns that I had been submitting at that time didn’t fit with what the magazine was looking for. Then Sara, editor for Simply Crochet, asked if I would be interested in the Hook to Hook design challenge. There is no way I was passing that up and immediately said yes.

With the brief, craft room accessory, and yarn (caron x pantone) in hand I set to work creating drawings, writing notes and pondering how far one skein could go.

It took a couple of weeks of emails pinging back and forth before a design concept was agreed upon. Then I set to work developing the craft room pockets.

Normally when creating a new design I have control over how much yarn I want to use. But the challenge here was to only work with the one skein. As you can see from the above image, one 100g skein is in fact five mini skeins. In this case, five different shades within the plaited hank. I love the concept of this yarn, to have a beautiful ombre of shades, but with each small hank weighing in at 20g and just 24 metres in length, I soon realised why Simply Crochet call this a design challenge. 😀

I wanted to create a pattern that the maker could really have some fun with the colours and stitch combinations. Believe it or not, all three pockets were made using just double crochet. I incorporated spiked double crochet stitches to add contrast and texture.

The next challenge was to make sure I would have enough yarn to give the pockets a tight structured background. To ensure that the yarn would go the distance, I chose to drop my hook size down.

The yarn itself suggests using a 6mm hook as it is described as worsted weight. Having played around with a different colourway of the same yarn and a 6mm hook, I already knew that it wouldn’t have been strong enough for the purpose I had in mind.

So using a 4mm hook for the decorative pocket fronts, and a 3.5mm hook for the background, I was able to create a stiff fabric that was up to the challenge of holding a variety of objects, including my mobile phone but I forgot to photograph it.

And the final challenge is now taking place on Simply Crochet’s Instagram Account. Their readership has been asked to vote for their favourite design. Is it mine, the craft room pockets, or Natahsa Butler’s jar cosies?

Simply Crochet, Issue 84, is currently available to buy (May 2019) in stores, or as digital editions directly from Simply Crochet Mag