Continuing the Halloween posting marathon, next up is the Spiderella's Poncho kit by Herrschners!
I purchased this kit at the same time as a few others directly from Herrschners, but I first saw it on eBay while browsing crochet kits. Herrschners sells their kits both directly from their website and eBay for the same price, so it doesn't really matter which way you buy them, unless you plan on purchasing more than one as you can combine shipping from the website. I paid $22.99 for this kit and about $7 in shipping and taxes, for a total of approximately $30.
I originally bought this kit for the pattern (...I really wanted to make Lydia's poncho from the Beetlejuice cartoon and thought this was a good starting point) and figured I could make it using the included yarn as practice.
One complaint I have about Herrschners kits is, while the plastic zippers bags they come in are really helpful for storage and traveling, they don't provide much protection during shipping and the patterns arrive crinkled and sometimes damaged. It doesn't stop them from being useful/readable, but it feels kind of cheap. I've also noticed that some kits come with these nice tags you can sew on to your finished projects, and this one even includes a metal yarn needle.
The Spiderella's Poncho kit includes three skeins of Herrschners Worsted 8 yarn in special Halloween Shimmer colors (Ghost and Batty). There are additional colors of this Halloween Shimmer yarn (orange, green, purple, yellow, a black and orange blend, and a multicolor blend), but it's not the best quality and I think is best used as a craft yarn (it's not scratchy, but it's stiff and not the most comfortable to wear).
I'm sorry for the low-quality of this photo; it was a little difficult to get a photo of the full shawl as it didn't fit in my lightbox. I did make some modifications to the pattern (I used a J-hook instead of the recommended I-hook and I used single crochets instead of slip stitches since I can't seem to make slip stitches look good/work for me) but overall, this pattern ended up being much easier than I expected, especially the surface crochet work!
Here's a photo in my lightbox to give a better idea of the texture and shimmer of the yarn. The pattern was pretty much the same stitches repeated for each row, with increases every other row. What was really nice, and something I didn't realize before I made this shawl, is that the chevron pattern created by creating chain-2 spaces and skipping stitches is what you follow when you surface crochet the web, so you don't have to make the changes in direction yourself. You're basically just surface crocheting in a straight line and the pattern does all the work for you!
The pattern says to use slip stitches for the webbing, but I really didn't like how thin and flat it looked, so I used single crochets instead. I really like how this change turned out, as the webbing feels more textural and 3D.
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