This year for my birthday Mike surprised me with a mini trip to Solvang, a cute city filled with Danish-style architecture. ♡ We mostly spent the time wandering around and eating snacks haha. At one point we passed a shop called Rasmussen’s that had a sign saying there were linens and yarns inside, so of course I wanted to check it out haha.
The downstairs was made up of a gift shop and a children’s toy shop, and tucked in the corner of the toy shop was a set of stairs that led to a small fabric and notions store. I forgot to take a photo of it, and somehow there doesn’t seem to be any photos of it at all online! The store had a small selection of quilting cottons, notions and yarn, as well as table runners and tea towels (I was sad that this is what they meant by “linens” – I at first thought they might sell yardages of linen fabrics to sew with 😅).
When we were about to leave the shop, I saw a small basket with some hand-dyed yarns. I’ve never purchased any before, although I did get dangerously close to starting a sock-knitting hobby a couple of years ago just so I could start collecting pretty yarn haha. I fell in love with the colors of this particular yarn because they reminded me of roses and the Madonna Inn (I love a good vintage color scheme that includes some touches of neon ♡). An interesting note – Dream in Color Yarn doesn’t seem to sell the Riley variety like this one anymore, and I wasn’t able to find specific mentions of it online either. I wonder how long this shop has carried these skeins?..
I wanted to make something simple with this yarn that would really showcase the colors, and also something that I could put out on display and enjoy seeing all the time. I settled on a doily, and found this one by Leigh Ann Atwell on Ravelry.
This was my first time crocheting something completely from a written pattern! And.. I did mess up on the first doily without realizing it until later haha. In one of the earlier rows, I ended up crocheting the repeat in every other chain instead of every other single crochet “space”. 😂 This made the overall doily slightly large, and also took away the flower shape in the center – I kind of like it though, and will probably repeat this on purpose in the future!
The yarn kept coming off my hand-rolled ball twisted up, so I came up with the solution of un-spinning the twists using my pottery banding wheel – it worked really well!
Below is the first doily right after I finished crocheting it. I was a bit concerned that it had so much extra volume that looked like it might prevent it from laying flat (a result of my following the directions incorrectly), but after I wet-blocked it it looked fine. 🙂
I looked up how to wet-block superwash merino and mostly followed these instructions by Very Pink (although I just used warm water without any wool wash or soap). The doily ended up laying nice and flat! ♡
Since I had so much yarn left over, I decided to make another doily to possibly gift someone in the future. And after completely this one and wondering why it was much smaller than the first doily, I realized where I’d made the mistake previously haha. This one had a much more defined flower shape before wet-blocking.
I love how soft they look with my vintage computers! 💕
