Design Wars Challenge with Scheepjeswol ::

I'm so excited to reveal my newest design for the Design Wars Challenge. 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. You may remember me posting about starting my design process back in May over here. 

The theme for this weeks design challenge was the gorgeous Sunkissed yarn from Scheepjeswol. This cotton yarn has a hand dyed effect, which produces lovely subtle colour changes, it's also really nice to work with, no splitting, which is pretty rare in my experiences with cotton yarn.

Obviously babies and baby garments are heavily on my mind recently, so I was very eager to turn this yarn in to something especially for my little Effie. Inspired by the many envelope neckline vests she has in her wardrobe, I made this envelope style t-shirt. I absolutely adore this Oceanside colourway and paired it with Scheepjeswol's Cotton 8 in Canary to add a pop of colour to the edgings.

I liked it so much I sized it up for Milo too. I moved the little pocket up to his chest to make it a little more boyish and made his in Rockpool, with a red trim.

My competitor for this weeks challenge is the wonderfully talented Ana of Accessorise, with this gorgeous crochet shawl.

You can cast your vote for your favourite of the designs over here.

The pattern will be available to purchase on ravelry from Thursday and if you use coupon code DWSALE you can get 50% off until Saturday too! 

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.