This week, I started work on a butterfly shawl. I wanted to make another clothing item after making my mom’s dress, pictured below. It’s good to have a long term project while I work on my smaller things to sell but I ended up working mainly on the butterfly shawl at the time. The shawl was testing my patience. In the previous week, I was working on a micro-crochet project of a hummingbird clearwing moth. It’s a moth that imitates a hummingbird! It was a good challenge and I was very pleased with how he turned out. I’ll go into some detail on the differences I noticed between a project I am excited to work on and enjoy doing and one that I was dreading and thought was going poorly.

I’ll start with the positives about the micro-crochet clearwing project. I’m super happy with how he turned out, and I learned a lot of new techniques from making him. He was my first micro-crochet project and I’m just… enthralled that he didn’t look like crap. I completely “winged” the color change, since I wanted to try for a more realistic look. I used embroidery thread, since he was so small, and learned how to properly do so. I also had to make the wings and antennae sturdy enough to stand on their own, so I learned how to pin, block (soak in water), and coat pieces in PVA glue. I plan to use that method in the future for a hot air balloon project… we’ll see how that goes. The last and most applicable thing I learned is how to embroider a circular black eye. My embroidery skills aren’t great, so any progress in that direction is very good. The embroidery was a little rough around the edges but it turned out the way I wanted in the end.

The clearwing didn’t give me too many issues, overall. It was a lot of new experiences packed into a tiny project, so most of the difficulties were reworking things and forgetting to stuff him before I sealed him off. He took me some time but I was excited to work through all my difficulties. I discovered today that the real thing is about half the size of the one I made. I saw them buzzing around today at a garden store and it was INCREDIBLE. I can say I’d change the size of him but that would’ve been jarring for my first micro-crochet project.

As for the butterfly shawl, I received a lot of yarn from my aunt as a gift! It’s all incredible yarn and I chose a colorful, corded yarn because it seemed well-suited to the project. In retrospect, it was definitely not. It didn’t feel scratchy on the skein but when twisted and contorted, it was a bit scratchy. The color change on the yarn was also more abrupt than I would’ve liked, it has the color palette of a gummy worm. I still like it though all said and done but it was a more trying process than I would’ve liked.

The shawl did actually turn out okay in the end but since I was being a debbie downer about the color scheme and I wasn’t fully into it, it took me far more time than it should’ve had I been very excited and into it, like the micro-crochet clearwing. I’ve learned that being into a project is a very important factor when it comes to my speed and efficiency in finishing it. This is why most of the crochet items I make are things I like. I want to make things that are unique as well, so these factors all work together to allow me to create the things I want to do. More to come, of course.