NatCroMo 2016, March 12: Akua Lezli Hope

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The Crochet Express National Crochet Month Blog Tour

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Welcome to Crochetville’s fourth annual National Crochet Month (NatCroMo) blog tour, taking place each day of March 2016. Join us as we take a virtual tour on our passenger steam train, The Crochet Express, visiting crochet designers, crochet-friendly local yarn stores, and yarn companies, and offer some fun giveaways.

Today’s Posts: Akua Lezli Hope | Viktoria Gogolak | Yarn and Y’all | A to Z Alpacas | Daily Giveaway

Want to Chat about the Tour?

Part of the fun of taking a passenger steam train trip is talking with your fellow passengers. This year, we’re providing two locations where our passengers can get to know each other. We’d 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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Akua Lezli Hope

Crochetville is very proud to have designer Akua Lezlie Hope with us today, March 12 as one of the featured designers on our 2016 Designer Blog Tour in honor of National Crochet Month (NatCroMo). If you’d like to know more about Akua, please read our post about her from last year’s blog tour.

About Akua:

Akua Lezli Hope is a creator who uses sound, words, fiber, glass, metal, and wire to create poems, patterns, stories, music, ornaments, wearables, jewelry, adornments, and peace whenever possible. An award-winning poet, she has created a collection of poems on crochet for which she has also made crochet pages. An avid freeformer, her current interest is in using figural motifs in crochet fabric and small loom weaving. She has produced over 100 independently published patterns and is also included in StitchSeekers’ Futurenauts versus Retrobots, the Crochet 2010 and 2011 Calendars, Interweave Crochet, Knit Picks IDP, KnitPicks free pattern collection, Sanguine Gryphon, Tangled magazine, Crochet! Magazine Presents, Fall 2013: Crochet For A Quiet Evening, Crochet One-Skein Wonders: 101 Projects from Crocheters around the World, and Crochet! Magazine Presents Great Yarns Great Styles, April 2016.

1. Tell us about your favorite travel destination:

Paris is my favorite travel destination, a city of light and wonder. As a native New Yorker, I thrill to all the familiar and glorious differences. It has subways, buses, and cabs; sections and boroughs; galleries and street life. Yet it is ancient, sculpted, beautiful, and, somehow, both more serious and more effervescent than my home town. One need do nothing except rise and stroll to be entertained and enlightened. The long summer days there were never long enough. The food was delicious, soulful, from street to café to restaurant. And a river runs through it. As I was born on an island—Manhattan—of people from other islands, I have a deep affection for cities with water in or around them.

2. Tell us about a “dream” travel location that you’d like to visit one day.

It’s hard to pick one dream — the islands between and off Africa and Europe: Comoros, Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar, Cape Verde, the Azores, Zanzibar; Aeroscobing in Denmark. I would like to visit New Zealand, as my fiber love extends to paper and a great papermaker, inventor lives there.

3. Do you visit yarn stores when traveling? If so, tell us about one of your favorite finds.

I was delighted to run across a yarn store within a store in Paris. Years before it became popular in the U.S., I got some delicious metallic, multi-color yarn. I made a hat with some of it on the plane ride home.

4. Packing: Tell us about any crochet clothing or accessories you pack when traveling. Do you have any really cool packing tips to share?

Before the new TSA requirements, I happily packed work in progress, but as my hooks are precious to me and my favorites include metal, I no longer pack crochet projects. I always wear something I’ve created — so depending on time of year, that could be a hat, scarf, bracelet, pin, sweater, or vest.

Visit Akua’s Site: NatCroMo Specials

Akua Lezli Hope | NatCroMo Sneak Peek

I will be releasing a new pattern and offering it FOR FREE for one week. Click here to get the details.

Akua’s Designs:

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

Intertwinement | Akua Lezli Hope

1. Intertwinement, $3.75

An embrace of cables incise and texture this figured, unisex headband, which might also serve as neckwarmer/cowl. The stitch composition delivers a stretchy fabric that may fit head and neck sizes from children to adults.

Efflorescence | Akua Lezli Hope

2. Efflorescence, $4.50

Four different floral motifs unite to create this unique toque which may be insouciant and playful or quiet and demure. A large graphic flower is centered in the crown. The sides feature three different floral squares. You chose which motif to repeat – once for child size or twice for the adult size. There are many possibilities for using colors. The hats shown use three, but if you decide on one, the dimensional flowers and will still bring depth and texture to the hat. Autumnal colors would make this great for fall.

Guinan | Akua Lezli Hope

3. Guinan, $5.00

The Guinan hat is inspired by the architectural and futuristic head gear worn by the character Guinan on an iconic science fiction television show.

I read, write and watch sci-fi, and have done so since I was in elementary school. I try to merge my interests and create in ways that unite them. This hat is one of a series of science fiction-inspired headgear. The double spiral crown invokes earth wisdom and galactic wonder. The sides are wings that give the hat structure its lift. The season-spanning design is amenable to personalization, growing more dramatic in larger sizes. Create it in two colors as shown, or in a spiral of four — or more!