2017 NatCroMo Blog Tour, March 5: Tanja Osswald

A-Glamping We Will Go: 5th Annual National Crochet Month Blog Tour

Welcome to Crochetville’s fifth annual National Crochet Month (NatCroMo) blog tour, taking place each day of March 2017. Join us for a month of virtual glamping (aka glamorous camping), as we visit crochet designers, crochet-friendly local yarn stores, and yarn companies, as well as offer some fun giveaways.

Today’s Posts: Tanja Osswald | Akua Lezli Hope | Daily Giveaway

Want to Chat about the Tour?

Part of the fun of glamping is the daily round-up around the campfire, chatting and stitching with friends. We hope you’ll join us in our NatCroMo Facebook group, where we’ll be sharing daily camping recipes, campfire songs about crochet, and so much more! We’d also love to hear about your favorite things you’ve discovered on the tour and see photos of your current crochet projects. You’re invited to join us daily for virtual cocktails/appetizers and dinner. (We’ll be sharing links to some fabulous recipes!)

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Tanja Osswald, Osswald Design

Crochetville is very proud to have designer Tanja Osswald of Osswald Design with us today, March 5, as one of the featured designers on our 2017 Designer Blog Tour in honor of National Crochet Month (NatCroMo). If you’d like to know even more about Tanja, check out our post from last year’s blog tour.

About Tanja:

When I was six years old, I learned to crochet and I cannot remember a time when I was not happy about that. I like to make things that have a use (including the use of prettifying my life) and I like to push the borders of the established. For example, I invented horizontal cables.
My favorite projects are fingerless gloves, so this year, I started a subscription: My Year of Mitts 2017.

Do you crochet in public? If so, when and where?

Whenever I’m traveling, I have a project (or two) along, so I crochet a lot on trains. That way, traveling time does not feel like dead time to me but like a little holiday that I can use for my favorite hobby.

Share the story of your favorite thing you’ve ever crocheted or designed.

Tanja Osswald | Osswald Design | Hohenhof Shawl

It is hard to pick a favorite, but one of my favorite projects is my Hohenhof shawl. It combines two elements that I love: mathematics and beauty. The inspiration for this shawl was a silver bowl I saw at the Hohenhof museum. It was made out of two intertwining spirals. I had already been making ammonites incorporating Fibonacci numbers and the bowl gave me the idea to work a double spiral. The ensuing shawl was fun to crochet and I love wearing it.

How do you decide what to name your patterns?

There’s no strict naming routine I follow. The name of a colorway can inspire me, a certain feature of the pattern, or something that happened during designing. For my series of slip stitch crochet softies, I had a list of German first names and browsed through that until I found a name that sounded right. Sometimes, friends come up with name suggestions, as for Twister or Blind Peacock in the Jungle.

Tell us about your most popular pattern.

Tanja Osswald | Osswald Design | Comet Gloves
My most popular pattern is for a pair of fingerless gloves. They are worked in slip stitch crochet which gives a wonderful stretchy fabric. The pattern features the horizontal cable technique that I invented. For this pattern, I let the cables get smaller towards the arm, which reminds me of the tail of a comet. The pattern won the Crochet Award 2015 for Best Fingerless Mitts Design.

Visit Tanja’s Site: NatCroMo Specials

Tanja Osswald | Osswald Design | NatCroMo Special

National Crochet Month is raffle month! Tell me (on my blog) about your favorite pattern of mine and what you like about it and win it!

Or: Show me a project you made from one of my patterns (link to your Ravelry project page, including a photo) and win a pattern of your choice!

During March, I will draw weekly winners from everyone participating.

Tanja’s Designs:

If you’re not familiar with my work already, I’d like to share three of my designs with you.

Tanja Osswald | Osswald Design | Guido

1. Guido, $4.25

Guido the Zen frog is very relaxed. He likes to sit in the sun all day long, just looking at the clouds. If an insect happens to fly past him, he catches it with his tongue so quickly that it’s hard to be sure that he even moved. And if there are no insects about, why move at all?

Guido is crocheted in slip stitches.

Tanja Osswald | Osswald Design | Pastos

2. Pastos, $4.25

Last summer I began a painting course. My teacher stressed the necessity of layering in painting: the layers underneath can shine through the layers on top or be revealed through gaps in thicker paint (‘pastos’ in German). These fingerless mitts are inspired by the latter kind of layering of color, the orange is hidden yet revealed by the holes in the gray, and also just a glimpse at the edge, as though the gray color has not been brushed quite as far…

A special feature is how the mitt can be reversed: depending on the placement of the fold, the proportion of orange to gray shifts. For the mathematicians: you are crocheting
a torus.

The mitts are made using slip stitches which helps them fit snugly to the hand, the double layer makes them extra warm.

Tanja Osswald | Osswald Design | Surfing the Clouds

3. Surfing the Clouds, $7.95

I created this shawl because I had to make a shawl from 100 g of silk for a swap and I like working shawls in a semi-circle. Since I did not know how many rows I would get, I used many short pattern repeats in an increasing number of repetitions per row.

The lace section is both fully written out and charted. There are two charts: A short one giving you each row separately and a longer one showing where each stitch goes into in the row before. The shawl is worked in slip stitch crochet, so be aware that they are not your usual crochet charts. As there are no crochet symbols for slip stitch lace, I invented them.