Cascade Yarns Blog

This week the Cascade Critter came to be. He came together quickly and is already getting into all sorts of trouble. You can follow his adventures on Instagram as well as on the Cascade Yarns social media feed. To make your own Critter you need 1 skein of Pacific Chunky, US 9 DPNs, stuffing and safety eyes.
Materials:
- 1 skein Pacific Chunky Color Wave (60% Acrylic/40% Superwash Merino Wool) - 120 yds/100 g - shown in color 415 (Puget Sound)

- US 9 DPNs

- Stuffing/fiberfill

- Safety Eyes

- Yarn Needle
Abbreviations:
- K - Knit

- Kfb - Knit into the front and back of 1 stitch (increase 1)

 - K2tog - Knit 2 together (Decrease 1)
- 3 Needle Bind off - move stitches to 2 needles with half of work on each needle. With 2 needles parallel, insert a 3rd needle knitwise into the first stitch of each needle. Wrap the yarn around the needle as if to knit. Knit these 2 stitches together and slip them off the needle. Knit the next 2 stitches together (same manner). Slip the first stitch on the 3rd needle ov…

For the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to design crochet patterns for Cascade Yarns, and today I am writing to share how I created one of the most recently released patterns – the Bloomfield shawl.
Most of the time, my inspiration starts from the yarn. Heritage Wave is a super fine weight yarn, and the lightness of the yarn just begged to be made into a shawl. After deciding what I would be creating with the yarn, the next step was the shape, and I knew I wanted to challenge myself to try a new shape. A close friend of mine, who is also a knit and crochet designer, had recently designed a half circle crochet shawl for another yarn company. After asking for some tips on how to create that shape in crochet, I knew that sometime soon I wanted to try designing a half circle shawl in crochet myself. A couple of months later, I received a skein of Heritage Wave yarn to swatch with for design proposals, and I knew this would be a good yarn to use to try designing a new shawl in a new…