My favourite crochet yarns

Bergere de France Ideal

I first came across this lovely soft yarn at my local farmers market one cold autumn day in 2012. I crochet all year round, but come the autumn I love a big project for the dark and cold winter nights. A throw to cover my dining room basket chairs would be good! A basket full of colours on the stall was irresistible to me. I took home 6 balls each a different colour to experiment with.

Using a 3.25 size hook I tried out a few circular motifs from memory including a traditional granny square, which with clever use of colours could have looked really good. But I wanted something to challenge me, so out came the books , cuttings and patterns from my craft cupboard.

Jan Eatons book, 200 crochet blocks gave me the inspiration I needed. I like to do projects that include challenging patterns with repetitive bits I can do when I'm tired. I tried out several motifs but the combination of 'popcorn flower', 'alternate bobbles', 'sunshine and flowers', 'and 'lacy cross' were the ones I loved the best. I also created my own version of bobbles and a raised flower square for the corners.

For such a big project the colours had to be right. I love autumn colours so brown, rust, copper came to my mind. Taking the dogs into the garden one day in October a bright sun lit the trees with golden yellows, deep browns and sludgy green browns. Amazingly the little stream that runs through the village and passes by our cottage sparkled a lovely bright blue in the sparkling sun. These are the colours I chose, brown, golden yellow, sludgy brown and bright blue.

Beregere de France provided the golden yellow(girolle), brown (elephant) and blue (myosotis). I love combining more than one yarn to throws and cushions it adds interest and is more fun to crochet. A bit of research online and I found a double knitting sock yarn online that had a mixed yarn that included sludgy brown and blue.

Making the throw I loved using soft Bergere de France. It comes in loads of lovely bright colours, but you can see how I used more subtle colours to create my favourite patchwork cushion.

To begin with I made one motif in each colour and decided to use the sock yarn only for this motif. Then out with the graph paper and I came up with my design. This is an oblong and features a diagonal of the same motifs which I think looks really good and you can see in the image.

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Winter suddenly turned cold and icy following a relatively mild December.

Looking in the cupboard under the stairs where I keep my walking gear and the dog leads I discovered my woolly hat had a big hole in the back!

Out came the wool baskets and on to Pinterest for inspiration! I used three balls of King Cole double knit wool to create this woollen beret. Berets are not normally my style but as I crochet the rounds of stripes it seemed to naturally form a beret shape so I decided to go with it.

I love textured crochet stitches and adding them into the outer edge of my beret pulled the band in so it would stay on my head!

When it was finished the beret seemed to lack something so I added a small tassel that includes all the coloured wools. Here's the result.....

What is your favourite colour?

The variety of yarns and the choice of colours available now seems limitless making it difficult to make a choice for crochet projects! From mass produced to hand spun and hand dyed yarns are wonderful today.

Rather than decide that I want to make a specific item I look for patterns and stitches I like first with a bit of inspiration from home magazines, Pinterest and sometimes my garden. Then I look for a yarn. You can see some of my favourite yarns here!

Bergere De France Ideal

This cushion I made this winter. I was looking for something to make and and I saw a baby blanket made using popcorn stitches. It gave me an idea for a cushion with a popcorn stitch bow central motif, with double crochet motifs surrounding it.

I always order too much wool so I had some Bergere de France Ideal in my large wool basket, including some red and turquoise blue. The cushion is made using squares 3 x 3 and the stripey squares are made with double crochet. It's a double sided cushion and was lovely to make.

Everything I make has memories associated with it. This cushion I made on dark winter nights, hence the bright colours! It makes me thing of my new dog who sat at my feet in front of the wood burner while I crocheted and listened to the radio.