My husband surprised me with several skeins of red metallic yarn. He said that he thought I might want to make something pretty for Christmas out of it.
It took me a couple days to decide on a vest… then I searched for a few more days for different patterns and downloaded several of them and printed them off. I tried them and was not happy with any of them. Then it occurred to me that I can free-hand a vest using an ‘open shell stitch’. Tah – dah and that is what I did.
This vest looks better offline than in the photos.
This vest is a fairly good example of shades of colors. It was made from yarn bought off the same shelf… however, there is a difference that I cannot see, but cameras pick them up.
I’m thankful that, to my eyes, in real life, the vest looks like it’s all the same shade.
Here’s a photo of the skeins I have left. Without the photo, I can’t See the shade differences of the skeins.
Next time before I start a project, I’ll take a photo and see which skeins are shaded. (If I can remember.)
This is hilarious (to me, but I’m old and sometimes easily amused)…
I wanted to get a fairly good photo of the ‘open shells’ to show the stitch is prettier than the photos of the vest show.
So, I laid the vest into the scanner and scanned it. To my surprise, it scanned the upper part to be gold and the lower part to be red. ~hearty chuckle~
Well maybe with all these bad photos, you can get the gist of the colors and the stitch pattern. 😉
Here’s wishing you successful holiday crafting!
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I like the way these colors look together. My husband thinks the blanket is really pretty.
I call this blanket ‘Autumn Beauty‘
So, on I searched and then I landed upon a wonderful pattern called “sunburst granny square”. I immediately liked the look of the square. It took me a week or so to work with the pattern and work out my colors. I’ve worked out color themes for several different squares for throws and blankets. I’m planning to make one or two more. I wonder how that will go. 😉

Last Spring, I bought some Bernat Baby Sport yarn. I’ve not done anything with baby yarn and decided to give it a go. Well, I tried the yarn with plain & basket weave knitting, plain & basket weave loom knitting and then tried it with block & shells & simple crochet to no avail.
The c2c worked okay, but I wasn’t satisfied with it until after I adjusted it to make the brick a bit tighter. Then, I had to think of something to make and decided to buy some tiny tulips Bernat Baby Sport yarn and make it kind of like a patch work blanket.
3 – 8.5 oz skeins Bernat Baby Sport yarn – Funny Prints