Crocheters, I have a new pattern for you today! I’ve been teasing this design on Instagram over the last few weeks and I’m pretty stoked about releasing it. Please welcome Pyrifolia!
Spring is usually a bit touch and go where I live—we’ll hit summer weather in February and then freeze hard in April. This year was nail-biter with all our flowering & fruiting trees, but I think we squeaked through all right! Pyrifolia is named for one of my favorite trees, the Asian pear (Latin name Pyrus pyrifolia). I’ve loved the fruit my entire life; my grandfather was an avid gardener and grew enormous ones in his tiny backyard (that yard was so green it would make your eyes hurt). The fruit isn’t ready to pick until late summer or early fall, and it’s always a long wait…but Asian pears really are 3-season trees. Early spring, when they bloom and set their fruit, is the most spectacular:
Once the fruit sets, there’s a wait of several months for them to ripen (these are still several weeks out):
And then we can usually expect a botanical fireworks show in the fall:
I wish I could show you a picture of the way the fruit tastes, but there are some practical obstacles to that.
Anyway, I whipped up this shawlette as a quick gift about six weeks ago and jotted down some notes, intending to propose the design and get yarn support for another sample at a later date. But the Asian pears started blooming, and I just couldn’t pass up the chance to do sample photography then and there. A spot of whirlwind pattern writing, a trip to the tech editor, and some furious crocheting from my testers, and here we are!
I started with one skein of Fyberspates Scrumptious 4ply in the colorway Water, which I’ve had in stash since my only LYS held its closing sale a couple of years ago. (I’m still cranky about that shop closing, by the way…) I wanted to maximize the yardage as much as possible, so I created the design to be easily adjustable—once you’ve done the setup, just repeat 12 rows over and over until you’re almost out of yarn. There are a few more rows and a delicate picot edging to finish it out, and then you’re done!
Most of the techniques are super simple; while it’s always hard to give a skill level for any given pattern, I’d personally describe this as an adventurous beginner piece. The shawlette is mostly double crochet with a band of v-stitches and bobbles every few rows. The trickiest bit is to keep track of your increases (the shawlette increases every row along the top edge), but other than that it’s an easy and soothing project. And because of how adaptable it is, really you could make it in any weight of yarn you like.
The pattern is available via Ravelry and LoveCrafts, as usual; and it’s 25% off on Ravelry until 7:00 PM EST on May 1. One of the things that gets my goat with LoveCrafts is the lack of any kind of promotion/sale infrastructure, so I’m only able to run the sale on Ravelry; maybe one of these days…
In any case, I hope y’all will enjoy this design! Crocheting and photographing it was an absolute blast; now that Asian pear blossom season is over, I just have to find some other flowering thing to take pictures next to—rose-bushes, perhaps?
