hey everyone welcome to ask me monday a weekly live feed and demo where i show you how to do something crafty and answer your questions and we just hang out my name is vicki howell so i apologize i'm a wee bit late today so you can you tell how like it's like right behind me um my studio is completely like a shambles right now i got floors redone and while i was gone my sweet husband painted my office and i just got back from the pinners conference yesterday and so there hasn't been time to test lighting with white background and also put anything back where it needs to be so i apologize i'm not normally late like this but we're here now and i'm really excited because i have fun stuff to talk to you about today so first off pinners conference um that was definitely you know experience that was new for me i tend to do more conferences that are really specific to knitting or crochet or crafting um and this is was just kind of a general like lifestyle kind of thing and it was cool you know i don't think the style was necessarily mine my classes were really fun and i just i really liked my students there was just some some really there were some really good peeps in there and so that was a really good experience but of course i hit the ground running driving back from dallas and dealing with studiopalooza and now coming here so i'm really happy though to be here um for a couple of reasons this the second one is i will show you in one one bit uh the first one is to answer your questions so i'm going to take a couple from the boards today and then um as always i will ask you at the end if there's anybody that has any questions live that i can answer thank you to those of you i can already see from richmond virginia traverse city michigan pensacola florida you know how i love to know where in the world you're watching from once again this is a regular series so you can watch this every week live like this or you can go back to my facebook page anytime it's convenient for you click on the videos tab and you'll see an ask me monday playlist all right the first question i took from instagram it's from jenny lynn and she wanted to know where she could find patterns for yarns that have long color changes so instead of not necessarily the yarns that are designed to be self striping or that have shorter almost like like patchy short lengths but the longer longer links and what i suggest doing is looking for any when you're googling or looking on ravelry or whatever look for the term pooling p-o-o-l pooling color because those are really great patterns for long yarns they're made to play with the long colors of yarns to either make something artistic or i mean it's all artistic but either for some kind of creative like sway or lava-like pattern or if you go to someone like laura bryant she's an absolute artist when it comes to calculating she does what she calls the magic number to figure out how those long strands of color are going to play so look up laura bryant for sure and uh i'll try and remember to put that in the show notes as well all right um the second question is from facebook it's from maxine and it's more of kind of a life a life question she wants to know because she knows that i work for my home studio she wants to know how i get people to leave me alone and i think this is a problem that a lot of us stay at home working people have when we're at home how do you get people to leave you alone to respect that this is your work time to not think that just because you're at home that doesn't mean that you don't actually have a job and that's tough it's extra tough if you have kids and it's summertime summer's rough i'm not going to kid you it is but in general if you have people coming in and out what i have found is that if you're in a main like a common area it's it's really it's really tough and and also you know difficult to make people be quiet in their own home if if you're out there so my my number one tip is try to find a place that has a door if you can have an office or a studio rock on if not lock yourself in the bathroom if you have to but if you need some quiet time take that time close the door and i found that it works best if you if you can give people in the household a finite time i think that if you just say i'm working all day that's a little abstract but like for me if i'm coming in to record i'll say i'll go to everybody in the household that's home i'm recording for the next hour or the 30 minutes or whatever i need you to not knock on that door sometimes so if you can say i need the next two hours to write or whatever doing that and then putting a note on the door to remind people really is the easiest way and then the rest of it takes self-control i know for me it's really hard to not you know pick up that phone and answer the non-work related text and not get sidetracked by things coming at me from the house from you know people knocking on the door or whatever so it's really part self-discipline in part just you know setting the standards that you expect your work time to be respected and you'll do your best to give guidelines about that so i hope that that helps you a little bit maxine um but it's time it's tough you know we're kind of in a new generation of this of where a huge amount of people now work from home you know we telecommute because of the interwebs we there's this whole new sort of like army of workers and we're having to to sort of navigate this path together so talk about it and and share your on these boards share your tips if you've got more tips we're a community here so feel free to use these boards under this video as part of that community so hello to shelly alexis chris good to see you again chris just did some production stitching for me i got your package it looks great i'll get back to you soon hi wilma okay what we're going to do today is pretty exciting well for me because i get to announce for the very first time my new partnership with inner weave some of you are from most of you are probably familiar if you are knitters or crochets with either crochets crocheters with either interweave knits or interweave crochet magazine or knit scene or a crochet scene they do a bunch of other magazines as well and then fun fact they were also the company behind knitting daily tv that i hosted for three seasons so i'm really happy to be partnering up with them for a series of kits that will be releasing slowly throughout the fall starting today with the first one called yarn craft by vicki howell it is my passion to get people to be creative in any means that they can for me obviously yarn is my chosen medium and so if i can get you to craft with it in any way that'll make my whole heart happy so i put together a series of you know my style kits which means fairly quick to finish but with enough interest that they won't be boring for more intermediate and advanced stitchers i really want you to be able to finish something for it to be accessible for you to be busy and still be able to have that creative time for you so the very first all of the kits are named after places in california which is where i grew up um and the first one is called the torrance triangle shawl so i grew up in torrance so i'm going to show you in a world when the facebook mentions app um becomes more tech i will now edit in real time a picture of it but now we're going lo-fi and i'm holding up my ipad to show you this is it oh you can only there you go it's a really beautiful kind of triangle shawl that you can either wear traditionally let me show another picture or you can um wear it i like to wear them bandit style and you can see it's open weave and i'll post pictures of this so you don't have to put your nose up to the screen it's really open weave and lightweight so it will work as a shawl in the you know in the spring or summer like if you're going to a wedding but i also love it as a layering piece for the fall i tend to not maybe wear a lot of shawls but i do love them wrapped as like bigger scarves or i kind of wear them gently askew on my shoulder or whatever so starting today the first kit release releases as i said and this is the torch triangle shawl and it'll come in a little package that looks like this look at that adorable little logo they put up for me not so cute um so this is the this is the first yarn craft kit and this particular kit is made out of mrs crosby yarn so i don't know if you know mrs crosby yarn beautiful stuff each kit comes in a little bag i'm just going to open it up for you to save and there all the kits this particular kit comes in two color ways one of them is this purple color and it is called wild huckleberry and this yarn is satchel it's a 100 superwash merino wool it is a lightweight but this shawl is crocheted so i'm actually using a bigger hook a size g hook because crochet stitches tend to be really dense and i wanted there to be a nice flowy drape for this so even though oh you're working with lace yarn i thought you said these are going to be relatively quick it's all lace and it's crochet so it's going to be nice and open weave so no this isn't going to be a finishing evening project but you can absolutely finish it in a handful of weekends for sure so it'll come with all the hangs of yarn that you need when you choose the color and then it'll also come with the printed out pattern so that you have that includes all the abbreviations and you know any any other information that you want so what i'm going to do today is i'm going to talk a little bit about the construction of this shawl but this if you watch this even if you don't end up getting this particular kit or making this shawl this is going to be a great explanation for you for just in general how to work a shawl from the top center out so what i think i'm going to do is i'm going to go ahead and flip the camera around from the beginning because i want to show you what i mean when i say top center out so this is that part where i i do you talk amongst yourself and i'm gonna try and flip this without you noticing okay and this is where you get really close to me all right that wasn't so bad okay so a lot of triangle shawls are are worked from i'm going to show you this little this is another colorway and this is just this is the other colorway that's available and this is just a little swatch that we did but a lot of shawls are worked from the tip all the way out this way let me show you a little drawing i have so often when you're working a triangle shawl it starts here and then it gets bigger and you increase out out out well for this particular project and for any top center out shawls you're going to start at the center neck and it's going to open out this way so that this is your your actual edging this will be the last row that you crochet not the first you're going to start here and it's going to slowly because you're going to be increasing up the center and at the sides you're actually going to be creating two triangles within it now i don't know about you but the first time i ever heard that it kind of blew my mind and made very little sense so i'm gonna go i'm gonna just say trust me it's gonna make sense after this and i'm gonna walk you through the first the entire setup for this particular shawl okay so what we're going to do is we're going to start i'm going to work with the pattern and i'm going to work the first several rows so sit back because we're going to be here for a few minutes so that you know how to do everything that you need to know to get started and work the entire body of this shawl okay again i don't know if i said this but this shawl is now available on the interweave store so interweave store.com and you can look up yarncraft or my name i will also be of course posting the link in the show notes melanie says it's so beautiful thank you rose says i'm getting good at my camera flips thank you it's only taken what are we at 43 44 show 44. um okay so the first thing that we're gonna do i'm gonna get my pattern ready is we are going to chain four so one two three four now what the pattern says is that you need to half double crochet and chain one three times in the fourth chain from the hook so this doesn't count the one that's on the hook so that means one two three four so another way that you could say this is you're gonna you're gonna work everything in that very first chain okay so we're gonna do half double crochet chain one we're going to do that three times total and then we have our beginning little nubbin which is using fourth chain making sure i did everything all right so that first chain four or the first chains counted this is going to be kind of hard to see here it'll get easier as we go along that counted as your your first half double crochet or htc and chain one and so what you want is a total of five htc's and then four chain one spaces so i've got one two three four five one two three four five yep did that okay this believe it or not right here is that top center area this is this okay stay with me stay with me it it makes more sense as it opens up so now we're going to turn row two we're going to chain four again that's going to count as your first half double crochet i'm sorry this is going to count as your first double crochet i'm going to get you some more light over here there we go is that a bit better and it's also going to count as that chain that first chain one now then you're going to i think i told you before that we're going to be increasing on both outsides and in the center so we're going to make another double crochet in that same stitch the same stitch that you already started in and we're going to make another chain one just an overall note for this particular pattern you're never going to be working into the chains so that's just something that you can keep in mind you're always going to skip them so then we're going to so like i said we're skipping the chain and then we're going to one two three go to the next one and that next one one two three four five one two just needs one double crochet and a chain one and then we're going to be at that center stitch now if you want you could put a marker there it might help it's up to you my aforementioned studio being a shambles meant i couldn't find my markers so here what we want to do is we want to double crochet chain one three times in the center this is what's going to make those increases i was telling you about that will open up the two triangles and make that flat edge at the top so i'm doing a double crochet chain one yes this is a this is available i see this the questions scrolling this is this kit is available on the interweave website and i'll post a link at the end in the show notes all right so this is our center now you can see here that it's a clear it's clear where the center is once you get going because it's going to be the only time that there's three stitches then you skip the next chain and then you're going to do another double crochet in the next one chain one and then when you get to the last half double crochet from the row below you're going to do a double crochet chain one double crochet and you can see already see this little this little nubbin this was where you started and can you see how it's already starting to form that triangle is that making sense so far okay so now that was round two round three this particular pattern i use for the first portion of it just to get you it to the stitch count number that i need for the next stitch pattern we're just going to alternate rows of half double crochet and chains and double crochet in chains so for this row which would be row three we're gonna we're going to chain three that first chain again will count as the half double crochet plus a chain one we're going to half double crochet in the exact same stitch as the first one and then we're gonna half double crochet in all of the double crochets so that means skipping all the chains until we get to that center one okay so here's the next one let's see susan wants to know where i'm putting my hook i'm putting it under both loops so you can see this is the stitch you see that see there's the top of the stitch i'm going underneath just like you would always when you're crocheting unless the pattern called for different okay now i've got to that center i've gotten to that center stitch so that means that i need to work three again so that means double crochet chain one three times okay so now we're rounding out and we keep going to the end we chained one double crochet chain one double crochet you're gonna see those two on the end and now we're at we're at the first one which would actually be chains and you want to do two double crochet oh wait these were half double crochets weren't they i just i just ripped in the center of it let's go back let's go back in time okay so these should actually be half double crochets all right so i've ripped those out and you can see how easy like you know when you make a mistake how easy it is to pull back this yarn this mrs crosby's yarn does not at all um make it difficult for you to need to do that okay so i'm working three half double crochets in the center and then i'm working one in each of the double crochets from the row below before i get to my last stitch i want to go into the into the top of that turning chain and work two half double crochets with a chain one in between now i wasn't going to show anymore but because i just did that snafu i don't want you to be confused now this row double crochet half double crochet now it me now we need to go to the back to the double crochet i wish i had better i'll make sure you guys can see so that means we chain four that counts as our first double crochet plus the chain one we're going to make another double crochet so i accidentally got into the space so you go under back through the loop and again we're not working into any of the chain spaces we skip the chains and only work on the top of the either half double crochets or double crochets depending on what the the row is what i love about this is you can you know you can see the your shelf forming before your eyes and it's kind of magical to be honest with you for me it wasn't a construction that i could visualize without seeing it formed in front of my eyes so once i did this and i actually learned how to do this for knitting before crochet it just kind of blew my mind it was so exciting because it was a completely different way to construct something than than i thought but anyways you get the idea we're going all the way around there's the triple in the center and you would continue doing that for here's a piece that i've already finished or not finished but you want to keep doing that until you get to row nine so you're essentially you're just going to keep continuing you alternate half double crochet and double crochet rows from here we're going to move and we're going to be doing these little cross triple or treble crochet stitches so we're going to start let me just re attach my hook to this new piece yes karen it does take shape quickly i know that's what that's what's fun too is you get to work with these smaller yarns like these lighter weight yarns but you can it's still accessible if you're super busy because we're working with a larger hook and crochet is a bit faster okay so now this on your pattern will be row nine we're going to one two three four we are going to chain four at the beginning of this row and that counts as your first treble crochet or triple crochet depending on what term you prefer they're interchangeable so from here we're going to triple crochet in that same stitch so that means we wrap around twice come through the first two loops and the second and then the third see that's where you get the that's why it's a triple crochet and then we're going to chain one and start the whole okay and this is where we start the fun chris crossy crisscross will make you jump jump stitch okay so man i'm getting old all right so to do that we're going to skip this first stitch this first double crochet and again we're always skipping the chain so i'm just kind of glossing over that we're going to triple crochet in the stitch below around the bar or the post of the stitch below uh teresa wants to know what happened to my class on craftsy way it's not there anymore they retired it unfortunately but i do have crochet classes on creative live now okay once you've created that you're going to go back and work the other stitch the the triple crochet in the stitch that you or around the stitch that you skipped before and what that does is that does a little crossy action and really it's going to be subtle but it'll give it a little texture then you're going to chain one and you're going to move to the next one so you skip the next stitch from the row below and that means that you're going to be working with this one so triple crochet go back get that other one now i'm going to show you another option just in just because we're all here together and why not if you don't like that on the back working through the front post is going to give you a ridge another way that you can do it is not work around the post and you can just work in the stitch so you can again skip that first one and you could just make your triple crochet through the stitch as usual and then come back and work in the stitch that you already skipped it really just depends on the look that you like so you can kind of experiment with that so i'm going to show you again so you're going to skip this stitch go to the next one come back work in that last one and you're going to do that all the way until you get to the center and i'm just going to work really quickly to get over there because i just want you to see what you do in the center it's really the same thing you've been doing from the beginning but just with triple crochet but i want to make sure that you guys are squared up with how we make this triangle shawl okay we're getting closer oops i didn't mean to do that chain one pull out and this hook that i'm using are the same hooks that i always use or the the clover amore hooks i really like them they're super comfy of course any hook will work just sometimes people like to know what i'm working with so okay i am done with my last little crossy cross action so now we're at our center one we're not going to be crossing yes rose it is kind of like a cable absolutely we're not going to be crossing in the center in the center what we're going to do is we're going to be just doing trouble crochets so it would chain so i'm going to go ahead and triple crochet in the center chain one and i'm going to repeat that two more times so three times total so nothing new application wise just a different stitch so that you see you've got just a solid three there so you can see how that looks different and i have this other piece kind of already done it's a different it's the in the other color way but that means whoops we're not even there yet that will that will mean that you have this stitch pattern everywhere but then you you get this really nice point it's harder to see because this yarn is variegated that will be in the center and then later once you you're just gonna do all those rows that i told you that's all you do for the entire body of the shawl until you get to the edging that's the only time that you change things up a bit so i think that's everything for this it's really it's really sort of simple you'll get in your groove easily you know like i said the first few rows where you're trying to figure out like what shape is this going to be i'm going to turn this around again so here we go what shape um is a little crazy but after that it comes together really really easily so thank you so much for hanging out and letting me show you that and again you can find those kits on the interweave store i will place a link you can always search for yarn craft and throughout the next three months i think i'm going to be doing more of these because there's six kits total they're all accessories except for i have one really cute baby couch and style sweater elaine wanted to know where you get the pattern again that's interweave store it comes in a kit with the mrs crosby's yarn and the pattern okay let me just do a quick scroll through and see if there's any questions that i didn't see it looks like it looks like you guys were getting it yes rose you caught me rose caught me on a half double crochet row i pulled that out um okay it looks like we're good all right well awesome considering we had to throw that together and i'm in half of an office i think we i think we got it out i think we did it so i'm going to be posting a trailer that kind of a little like intro that tells more about the kits as always i will be here to answer your questions i hope you'll go over and you'll you'll treat yourself to one of these kits to either make for someone as a holiday gift or just to give yourself i think we need to all give each other or give ourselves a little handmade treat every once in a while and i always say like whenever you get nervous about investing in really nice yarn and a pattern that's that you know is going to be beautifully photographed and was tech edited and and the designer was actually paid a livable wage and all of that stuff remember you're not just paying for the shawl you're paying for the entertainment the hours of entertainment it gives you the feeling that you get after making something beautiful and put it out to the world so i don't know i'm kind of into kids kind of dig them well thank you so much for being here tune in next monday as usual the same time i promise i'll be on time next week and i'm not sure what we're going to do next week i'll have to look on i'll have to look on the old schedule also make sure that you tune in this thursday crafters the podcast on itunes we'll be back this week i am interviewing natalie shannon she is from the company alabama shannon so make sure you check that out i'm looking forward to that and in the meantime if you want to watch any more of these videos like i said go to facebook or youtube i have a playlist on youtube facebook just click on the videos tab and there's a playlist and you can listen you can watch i think there's 40 something of them and you can also hear craftish on stitcher soundcloud through my website vickyhell.com or pretty much you know any place you find podcasts as always have a great creative week i'll talk to you soon bye