Crafted By Colette

Whilst I was searching on Pinterest for ideas for this 13 Days of Halloween blog series, I found this image.

A handy dandy reverse image search let me to the original source, Divine Debris, and I decided that I could definitely make these.

Amber from Divine Debris used size 10 crochet thread, but when I saw the image the first thought that came to mind was embroidery floss.  I’ve done knitting and crochet with embroidery floss before.  It’s very delicate and tricky.  It’s very… splitty.  Which I guess isn’t surprising because it’s designed to be split into seperate threads.  And I haven’t done anything other than embroidery with it in a few years – I haven’t even done too much embroidery to be honest, but that’s another blog post.

When crocheting with embroidery floss and making very small intricate things, you need to use a very small crochet hook.  And I have very fat fingers.

Whenever I crochet, whether I’m working with proper sized hooks or not, I have a tendency to mess things up.  And usually that’s fine, because I usually make things big enough that I can fudge it.  It’s harder to fudge things when you only have two or three rounds.  This is why the arms and legs and tails on the amigurumis that I make are always very squiffy.

For my first attempt, it started to look too round to be a pumpkin.  So I ripped it back and started again.

My second attempt is very cute.  Unfortunately, I forgot that the pattern is technically for an apple and that at a certain point you cut yarn and change colour.  For the pumpkin you don’t do that.  Except that I did.

At this point I stopped to think though.  It was already about as large as I like earrings to be, and if there were a few more rounds it was going to get even bigger.  Plus, I wasn’t sure if I even had enough thread left.  So I measured it, then ripped it back and tried with a smaller hook.

I’d been using a 2mm, but I couldn’t find a 1.5mm so I went down to a 1.25mm.  Hopefully that would decrease the size a little.  Unfortunately it made things even more tiny and delicate.  Attempt three was a fail.

Attempt four was a (blurry) fail.

But I managed to get attempt five to the same point I’d measured attempt two at.

It was essentially the same size.  Oh well.  I could make just the one and make a necklace pendant instead of earrings.  I most definitely wasn’t going to have enough thread for two anyway.  Right, time to carry on…

And that’s where I ran out of thread.  Damn.

Okay, I thought, so I’ll order some more thread.  I’m warmed up now so it should be a little easier when I try again.

They sent the wrong thread.

Pumpkins are not red.  After a little bit more wait, the right colour thread finally arrived.  And it was a lot easier to make the little pumpkin, having practiced before.

Attempt five went perfectly.  No problems at all.

Having decided that I was now making a pendant, I thought this was going to be a little flimsy.  So I made a second one.

…and slip stitched them together.

Stitching the stem was nice and simple.  Add a jump ring and voila!