Swatching a New Project ::

Things have been crazy since I came back from maternity leave, it's only been 5 weeks, but it feels like a whole lot longer. Almost as soon as I started back a load of work landed in my lap. It's such a nice feeling to have people search you out and ask you to do work for them.
Of course most of what I've been working on is massively top secret, but needless to say there's been a whole lot crochet going on.

One project I can tell you a little about (though not a lot!) is my upcoming entry in Design Wars. If you don't know about Design Wars, it's a weekly challenge pitting 2 (sometimes more) designers against each other. Usually the designers use the same yarn, sometimes they follow a theme, both produce a pattern and the public votes for their favourite. The last time I took part was back in 2013 before the challenge went weekly, you can see my entry over here.

My yarn arrived last week and I finally got a chance to doing some swatching with it last night. It's Scheepjeswol's gorgeous Sunkissed. It's a cotton yarn that's beautifully matte and soft and has a look of a hand dyed yarn. I'm really impressed with it, despite it being 100% cotton I haven't had any problems with splitting so far and it has a much nicer drape than you'd expect from a cotton.

Did you see my ingenious use of knitting needles as blocking wires! This is what happens when you decide to block at 5am and your usual wires are upstairs where everyone else (except the baby who is the reason you are awake at this ungodly hour) are sleeping. I'm pretty impressed though, I think I will always use dpn's for swatch blocking from now on.

My only problem now is choosing a stitch to use! I love all of these swatches so much.