The designing process

By Caitlin Bongers.

As the title says - I have been playing with some different techniques and forms. For quite a long time my mother and I have been struggling with the fact that we often just don't like the look of something that has been crochet. The forms are most of the time just not as elegant as knitting, weaving or other techniques. But we really do like to crochet!

I have been searching for more inspiration and one of the only crochet designers that I absolutely love is Sophie Digard. I am not ashamed to say that I took a lot of inspiration from her designs, and you really should check her out! Of course I didn't want to copy her work so I tried to give it my all and make something that could be really called "me". I am still in the designing and playing process but I'm actually starting to love it!

It is also a great way to use handspun (single ply) yarns. I have some new fleeces that I love to spin and use and now I actually have another goal for it. I can combine it easily with other yarns so I have to worry less about the material costs - which can really become high very fast with handspun.

The yarn

Next to my own handspun yarn I also used our yarn Yumi - which is a 50% silk 50% yak - and a new 100% royal baby alpaca yarn. This baby alpaca yarn is something new in our shop that deserves talking about. Not counting my handspun it's our first 100% local yarn. All batches yarn are limited since the mill doesn't mix fleeces together but spins them separately. This way every batch of yarn is the beautiful and unique fleece of one of the alpacas. Also the washing product that they use is eco friendly and doesn't have any dangerous chemicals in it.

We visited the mill recently and have seen their lovely machines (and alpacas obviously). They have an amazing de-hair machine which picks out the dirt and harsh hairs. This way they do have a lot of second-grade fibre loss which they use as pillow fillings and such, but their yarns stay top quality!

Our first 2 colors are in off-white and light-fawn and are now limitedly available in our webshop! Less than 10 skeins of both - the off-white is a delicate 18 micron and the light-fawn is even softer 15 micron!!!

You can find a selection of our yarns on our Etsyshop

You can find a video of Caitlin making this on our Patreon site. If you support us there you help us a lot to make more and better video's about our work and share our work all over the world.