Prickly Pineapples

I have been trying to make myself a light shawl for summer evenings ever since last year. My ideal was to use pineapples (a special crochet stitch/pattern that looks like a pineapple or the “eye” on a peacock’s tail) to stretch along the length of a straight shawl, but could I find a pattern for pineapples in a straight line ? All the patterns I could find in books and on the net were all for pineapples in a circle. So I set about trying to draw out my own pattern and even to crochet small pieces to see if I could figure it out. I soon got bored. - so gone was the idea of my lovely shawl.

This spring we treated ourselves to a new sofa and I felt it looked rather plain so I decided to crochet a nice little antimacassar for the back and some arm covers, but what pattern

to use? I stumbled upon an archived version of a site called “Vintage Crochet” which had been taken down a few years ago and although the archive is not complete, many of the chair backs were still available and what did I find? A pattern for straight pineapples ! It looked so pretty as an antimacassar I decided to use that pattern and here are the results, now all I had to do was up the hook size and use wool instead of cotton thread and my long awaited shawl would materialise.

Well the pineapples are proving more tricky than I thought in wool, maybe it is because it is summer and I am not concentrating as much, but whatever it is, I seem to have to keep undoing and re-doing bits of this shawl and the other day I just put it away so that I could chill out for a bit. During my

cooling off period we had some Dutch guests in one of our gîtes and after chatting with them one day I discovered that she was very interested in patchwork, we chatted out this and that, about my crochet and she showed me pictures of her work (amazing I must say) and that was that. A couple of hours later, to my surprise she arrived at our table in the garden with a little pouch. She said she always brought something to keep her hands busy on holiday and this was for me ! It was exactly the right size for my crochet hooks, so I dashed upstairs, put my hooks in it and started back on my shawl. Do you know what? I haven’t made a mistake on this shawl since – thanks Gon for getting me going again !