Or? — An Elegant Sufficiency

If you had caught sight of the waste bin at my feet this morning, you'd have guessed what was going on.

If you'd seen the website I'd been discussing with friends, you might even have guessed what I was making.

Well, I had all the ingredients on hand and though I wasn't looking for a distraction, the ironing would wait, wouldn't it?

I dived straight in, using the same sized pompom gadget as recommended and following the directions to the letter. The outcome was, well, large! I thought part of the charm of the allsorts in the article was that they were life-sized; a lot smaller than this.

I had used the pompom size 35 to make this one.

I had two smaller gadgets in my bag though.

The purple one is 25

and the pink one 20.

I decided to use the purple one for now and scaled down the number of wraps by a third, which seemed to work, though these small gadgets soon fill with yarn and are then tricky to close.

As soon as the loops are cut, it's easy to see how it's going to work. I was making the square "sandwich shape" in pink, black and white.

When it's cut loose, it doesn't look so good, but after a close trim with sharp scissors it shapes up.

But there's something wrong with the instructions for these square shapes. I can't quite work out what - perhaps the directions for the "pretty" one are swapped with those for the other square one? It doesn't really matter, because once you've made a couple it's easy to work out how to arrange the colours and so on, but for a while I was confused!

I went back and made another round one, thinking that I'd like the real liquorice allsorts to have that same balance of liquorice and coconut sweet. Actually, at that moment I was really wishing I had a packet of real ones in the house. They wouldn't have lasted long!