missy42's Southwest Seville (original) (raw)

June 2, 2010 Baker’s Dozen’s description:

In this swap you will be placed into groups of 13. Each group member will knit or crochet one 12 inch square per month to send to the member of the month. As the MEMBER OF THE MONTH (MOM), you can choose the weight (fingering, sport, worsted, bulky) and color scheme. Please do not ask for certain brands, or fibers unless allergic.

The Baker’s Dozen is my very first swap, and this is the second 12”x12” square being made for the Eddy Group I was assigned to. For June, 2010, the MoM is emayfieldz. In order to keep the square a surprize, I won’t be posting any further information until I confirm that emayfieldz has received it. Heck, it may not even be a crochet project!

July 13, 2010 I had an emergency on the send-out date that I had to take care of immediately. Since then, I’ve had a couple of unusually busy weeks. I was finally able to get this thing sent out today. Pictures and details to come when emayfieldz lets me know that she’s received it.

August 8, 2010 emayfieldz confirmed that she received this square, so now I can tell you all about it.

When I was first stalking researching the members of my swap group, I came across emayfieldz’s Prayers, Crafts and Life and, I knew I wanted to do some sort of a cross motif for her. I went flipping through one of my favourite crochet pattern books - 200 Crochet Blocks book by Jan Eaton - and the Seville square jumped out at me.

When posting her yarn preferences, emayfieldz revealed that she lives in the Southwest, so she wasn’t keen on getting any fibers that would be too warm. So naturally, I started thinking cotton. But I didn’t know what colours. Fortunately, shortly after posting her preferences, she finally revealed that she liked Southwest colour combos.

Personally, when I think Southwest, I think turquoise. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any, nor could I find any on one of my many yarn crawls.

So I checked out some images of Southwest design on-line. Fortunately, these did show quite a few colours that I did have - reds, yellows, browns, sage greens, sandy whites. I still wasn’t quite sure what the colour scheme would be, precisely, but I knew I would incorporate some if not all of those colours.

I went ahead and started the Seville square in Lily’s Ecru. Naturally, it didn’t make it out to the full 12”x12”, so I knew I’d have to make some sort of border. Here’s where I incorporated the second thing that comes to mind when I think Southwest: geometric shapes. I sketched out the diamond-and-arrow shapes I wanted to be on the border and worked several rounds of single crochet with spike stitches to form the shapes. Only to have the edges were buckling like mad.

So, I went down a hook size to the H (5.0 mm) and experimented with different colour schemes for the border. I finally decided to keep the colours as simple as possible, incorporating only the brown and red and leaving out the yellows and greens. Going down a hook size for the border also fixed the buckling problem and allowed it to lie flat.

And voila! There was emayfieldz’s finished square. photospice saw the finished square and informed me that it looked like something out of a home in Santa Fe. That made me very happy, because that’s kinda sorta exactly the look I was going for.

♥