Choker in the Making

For the past year I've had a few skeins of (what I now believe to be extinct) Plymouth Royal Bamboo yarn in a deep crimson and silver. They sat there. I occasionally squished them, loving that bamboo silky feel. But nothing really came of it.

I knew I wanted to do something cable-y with them, but knew that cables alone wouldn't be enough. I wanted to pair the colours together somehow.

I then began thinking up a choker. It was to have a single rope-like cable in the center, in silver, bordered by the crimson. Which then lead me to how I was to achieve this effect. First I thought intarsia. But how would I do the crimson border? I then figured simple garter stitch, but knew that the natural drapeyness of bamboo would easily make it wonky, and the end result could look very sloppy.

Despite just learning how to crochet, I then settled upon crocheting a border. A single row of treble crochet would give a lovely trellis-like appearance for my cable-vine.

So I set to work. Simply doing a treble crochet right into the main piece would make little spikey parts where I would crochet a stitch, so I did a row of slip-stitched around the edges....and liked it. Alot.

Once again, I scrapped an old idea just to replace it with a new one, and here's my work in progress:



I know this sounds a bit dorky, but the silver yarn kind of reminds me of mithril. For those of you not familiar with J. R. R. Tolkien's work, it's the silvery metal highly esteemed by elves in the LOTR trilogy.

I plan on buttoning the piece together with a knit flower in the silver yarn, but I'm still trying to figure out how to make that work.

Off to tinker around some more...

-The Bloated Ewe