Mother's Day Secrets, shh!

A bowl before felting

For this year's Mother's Day presents I'm working on crocheted felted bowls for my mom and mother in law. The original pattern was in Felted Crochet by Jane Davis but I wanted it bigger so I increased the pattern repeats. After the 7th row I added (working in the pattern repeat) a row of 6 dc, a row of dc, and a row of 8 dc. Then I worked even for 4 rows instead of 3.

The yarn I'm using is Decadence (100% Superfine Alpaca) from Knit Picks, it is a little smaller guage than what the pattern calls for but worked fine. It is a bigger skein than the pattern calls for and would be enough for one bowl if you followed the pattern. With my increases one skein is just a smidge not enough. I solved this by doing the last "work even" row and the final row of sc in a contrasting color. I was hoping to get one of the larger bowls from a skein but it didn't work out.

note: I haven't felted the first bowl yet, so this is the other color I made, not a drastic change in color during felting. ;-)

After felting I couldn't come up with a bowl the right shape and size to dry it over* so I dried it on a kitchen towel with tightly wadded paper towel stuffed inside to the shape I wanted. That worked really well. The mother's day gift will be a bowl, on a cardboard cake round for stability, filled with goodies (blank book, lotion, candle, hand soap, cat shaped pencil sharpeners, etc.) and wrapped up in cellophane.

The other design plan is to make some all in one color and then embroider on them.

* You should have seen me trying all my bowls on my head when I made the first felted hat. ;-) One turned out to be quite perfect.