A Poncho For All Seasons?

Thank you so much for all your kind comments on my roll-neck winter poncho.

This post is really a PS to my last one with some pics of the second poncho that I made for a friend and finished in time to give her this week.

It's in a rather different palette of colours but still a palette that carries a certain seasonality.

This version is warmer in tone and has some more autumn echoes with its reds, burgundies, russets and golds as well as the dark evergreen, vivid New Year's green, winter white and winter blues so perhaps this one should be an autumn poncho. As I said in my last post, I made it for a recently bereaved friend and the colours were chosen in part seasonally and in part because they have personal significance for her. This one I made using a 5mm hook rather than a 4mm one, using the same weight of yarn - mostly Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran, but there's some Rooster Aran in there too. I think that, with the bigger hook size, possibly the drape is slightly better than in my first but it's marginal.

It has the same border as the first one and the same style of roll-neck. All that is different is the addition of the ruffled rose which I made to pin on the roll-neck collar. Just because. This is a lovely pattern, courtesy again of Sue Pinner's Granny Square Pattern Club. (Details on Sue's sidebar here) I tweaked it, just a little, with an extra round in the outermost petal layer to make it a little more showy and ruffly. The leaves I made up myself. I like it pinned onto the neck of the poncho like this but it's stitched onto a brooch pin so it's removable or re-positionable depending on the wearer's whim.

When someone loses the love of their life, there is so little one can say. Words, in fact, are often not much good on such occasions. But being there; offering an empathetic hug both literally in person and metaphorically through a piece of soft and warm, handmade hooky that can be worn in the lonely moments of the night, the wakeful small hours of seemingly endless days, or other corners of time when sadness presses in, unbidden, seems to me to have some mileage. I hope so anyway.

Of course a piece of soft and warm, handmade hooky is also welcome at other seasons of life - celebratory as well as sad ones. It occurs to me a hooky poncho would make a fantastic going-to-uni-present or leaving-home-gift, for a girl anyway. Not sure H would thank me for one! But lovely for a new mother or for a friend moving abroad too, perhaps. Hmm, food for thought!

Anyway, for the first time in weeks, I have no poncho on my hook so there is a little space to dip it into some small projects. Snowflakes, doilies, hearts, a few more hyperbolic flowers, that sort of thing! Space, that is, before I get the urge to start a Spring / Summer poncho in lighter yarn and Spring / Summer colours. Before I know it, I will have made a poncho for all seasons - of the year, if not of the heart.

Happy Weekend everyone!

E x