Mystical Lanterns Pelmet

​Jane designed Mystical Lanterns back in 2016 and the blanket, scarf and shawl continue feature within the list of our most popular designs here at Janie Crow. We want to showcase another iteration of the much-loved motif, this time in the form of this gorgeous pelmet.
 
Jane first saw an example of this in the wonderful Folklore Yarns in Belfast, while visiting during a Stitchtopia workshop trip en-route to Iceland a couple of years ago. It looked amazing among the yarny treasures there.

During a subsequent workshop in France in October last year, our lovely friend Rosemary made the version that you see below. She used Stylecraft Organic Cotton DK in multiple colours (we think there are eight in the design) and adorned it with some gorgeous bells and elephant charms that she bought on Knit For Peace trip to India, as well as the little mirrors in the centre for added twinkle!

Here's Rosemary, busy making the pelmet

Since sharing images of Rosemary's pelmet we get asked about this lovely piece often, and so we decided it was time to give you a little more information to help you make your own if you’d like to. It would certainly make a lovely addition to your Christmas decorations, but really could be used year-round!
 
If you’d like to make your own version, here’s all the information you’ll need:

​The pattern: The pelmet uses the full and half-motifs that feature in either the Mystical Lanterns blanket or shawl pattern. Please note that the scarf pattern does not include the pattern for the half-motif, so we’ve not linked to that one.
 
The pelmet uses the edging described in either of those patterns, but Rosemary also added a final flourish with a row of 3ch picot in every other stitch on the top edge.

Yarn: This is another fab stash-buster project and the amount of yarn you need will of course depend on how big you make it.  Rosemary's version includes ten full size motifs and eleven half-motifs and is edged using the same edging shown in the blanket pattern. It weighs 150g (including adornments) and she used eight different yarn shades, so only very small amounts of each yarn were used. As we have said already, Rosemary used Stylecraft Organic Cotton, but any DK yarn weight will work.
 
​Adornments: You can add bells or other adornments to your pelmet. As a guide, the size of the bells on Rosemary's are 2cm (1 in). We found these pretty bells (shown below) on Amazon which we think would look lovely. You could choose to add tassels or tiny baubles or anything (or nothing) you fancy!

Rosemary also added beautiful Shisha mirrors to her full motifs and they measure around 2cms (1in) – click here for an example of what to look for if you’d like to add them to your project and we’ve made a little video to show you how to do that, which you can find here.

The motifs are joined using a simple double crochet (US sc) through the back loops: the only tricky part is making your head realise what fits where, as when you hold the motifs right sides together you need to make sure you’re holding the curves in the right places! This is explained in the pattern, so don’t worry too much and some judicious placing of stitch markers really helps here.

So there we are – we’d LOVE to see some more versions of this beautiful decoration out “in the wild”.
Have you made one? 
Would you?

​Let us know in the comments and of course, if you do post photos on social media, make sure you tag your photos with #janiecrow so that we can easily find them.

Don't you think it looks gorgeous in my - already-decorated-so really-it would-be-rude-to ask-me-to-return-it-now - room?