You'll be Swell, You'll be Great!

Growing up, I remember my Grannie having a small pewter hanging in her kitchen that read “take time to smell the roses”.  I seem to recall asking her about this one day as it made little sense to my pre-adolescent self.  I believe she told me that it was a retirement gift (I’m sure she’ll correct me if I’m wrong once she’s read this – Hi Grannie J)  Looking back, I believe that at age 10, the thought of needing to take time to smell roses seems like a silly thing to make time for.  To me, this probably seemed like nothing more a nonsensical way of getting closer to a bee than was truly needed.

I’ve known the words to “Everything Coming up Roses” for as long as I can remember.  It’s actually been stuck in my head all day today.  The lyrics and melody lift my spirits as they conjure up memories of my childhood, and make me stop and think about what will, hopefully, be a bright future (at a time where my life is filled with the kind of upcoming changes that lately, seem to fill me with anxiety.)

Does anyone else find roses to be as romantic as I do?  They’ve always been my favorite – whether as flowers given to me after a show in my childhood; or adolescent, romantic daydreams of “Prince Charming” bringing home flowers. 

I even carried roses on my Wedding Day.

“Where’s the crafty tie-in!” you ask?

Well, my Sunday started with me finishing up a new cowl.  I saw pictures of this great cowl at MaybeMatilda back in the fall, and was convinced that I could figure out the pattern on my own…..THINK  AGAIN,  HOLLY.  I tried variations of what I thought Rachel may have done for a couple of Christmas gifts; but it was a complete struggle of trial and error, cursing, and frogging.  The two Christmas gifts were completely different when finished and I didn’t 100% love either version as a long term pattern for my use.  My penny-pinching self held out though (sorry Rachel!), and I believe that I have finally figured out the correct combination of base chain, “infinity crocheting”, hook, and number of rounds to create something very similar to what I first fell in love with last fall.

 If my counting is accurate, I do believe mine is 5-8 rows wider than Rachel’s, but I.LOVE.IT.  Now that I have my own chicken scratch notes to go off of, I look forward to make one again in the near future – I mean who wants to try and make something again if you can’t consistently make it the same each time?

“What's the big deal with the roses you yammered on about 2 pages ago!” you ask?

Well they started out here on my new cowl (that’s right, I’m keeping this baby for myself!).  I used a different rose pattern on the cowls I made at Christmas.  These roses turned out pretty, but were 3x more time consuming to make and weighed about 5x more than the one does!

Once I found THIS pattern, and I played around a bit with different hooks and one vs. two strands of yarn; they became (just as Lucy warned….)

VERY addicting!

For anyone who is curious, I’ve settled on 2 strands of worsted weight yarn and my trusty Susan Bates “L” hook.  The one on my cowl was made with my favorite “K”hook and measures about ~3” across while the ones I now prefer with the larger hook are ~3.75” across.  Now you know!

There’s 15 of them sitting there.  I made all of them last night. Someone I still need to go through and sew them, etc. [which I’ll likely hate every second of], but I just LOVE them!

ALL THE ROSES = ALL THE FUN!

Can’t wait to see what I decide to do with them all ;-)