Spring Has Sprung!

There is no doubt about it--spring has arrived in southeast Arizona. And it has brought me another surprise. I didn't realize that bulbs planted in the fall would actually bloom here. Well, as you can see from these photos, they do indeed:

Daffodils are "my" flower, since I was a March baby, and my favorite color is yellow. I couldn't be happier or more energized.

And what have I been doing with all that energy and happiness? Taking my yarn for a walk by making scrumbles, of course! What's a scrumble, you ask? As defined by Sylvia Cosh and James Walters here: "'Basic' scrumbling means making freeform random patchwork pieces to be joined into a continuous, textured fabric."

On a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico this past autumn, I wandered into a boutique downtown and was completely blown away by the coats, vests, and scarves they had displayed. I didn't know how they were made, but I loved them. Since that time and after a lot of research I've found out that they were constructed using scrumbles from freeform knitting and crochet. Check out the International Free Form Crochet Guild site for freeform examples and links.

I'm currently involved in making scrumbles to donate to two groups on Ravelry that will use them to make items for fundraising to support breast cancer research. I'm a real beginner and at first was very anxious about my scrumbles. Were they good enough to donate? What would others think of them? I checked out the work of others on their project pages to see how mine compared and then decided the whole idea was to do "my" thing. Last night I even got brave and made one without following the guidelines I had been using contained in Jenny Dowde's wonderful book, " FreeForm Knitting and Crochet." I'm happy with what I've done so far, but you can judge for yourself. . .

When I'm working on scrumbles I feel like my whole body is humming with energy. It is very liberating to work without a pattern.