In honor of I Love Yarn Day I decided to try a yarn craft I’d never done before. So I chose macrame, which is not actually a yarn craft; it is more commonly done with cord or something else that doesn’t stretch. After looking around I found a pattern for a macrame owl by a crafter named Alice.
The pattern was wonderful and I highly recommend it. It uses only lark’s head knots, half hitches, and square knots, and the diagrams are clear enough I didn’t need any supplemental material, even though this was my first macrame project (odd, since my mother did a fair bit of macrame when I was young). I did use a different macrame resource to confirm I was interpreting the diagrams correctly, but I was.
The pattern calls for crochet thread, and I used sport weight yarn. I wasn’t sure what the length conversion would be, so I cut pieces at least two yards long. I didn’t need to; I had well over half the original length left over. However, it was convenient to have the extra weight – with the end of the yarn wound on bobbins to keep the strands from tangling together.
I used bamboo skewers for the top and bottom rods, and beads from my stash for the eyes. Instead of putting glue on the ends of the yarn to turn them into needles, I folded a length of thin wire in half to use as a threader. I stuck it through the bead, put the yarn through the folded end of the wire, and pulled it through.
Here’s a picture of when it first started looking like something. I added pins to keep the fold in step 6 in place until it was knotted up.
I found the pattern via the Macrame Lovers blog. It updates sporadically (and hasn’t for over a year) but has a decent number of patterns both locally and linked around the web.
[I accidentally categorized this as crochet and then linked to it from elsewhere, so it will stay in crochet to keep those links valid.]