Quick St. Patrick’s Day Candles

Happy St. Patrick’s Day my fellow candle crazy readers! I hope you’re having a good one so far.

If you’re getting ready to party, it may be too late to buy candles for your St. Patrick’s Day party décor. Here are some quick candle hack ideas to transform your blasé candles into Irish party centerpieces!

1. Paint plain pillar candles with shamrocks, words or Celtic knots. If you can’t draw it by hand, use the transfer method with tissue or trace the pattern from paper. To simply add a bit of green, try green stripes or polka dots.

2. Sprinkle green confetti around your candles. Festive St. Patrick Day shapes would be even better.

3. Wrap ribbons around your candles and secure them with straight pins. Look for leprechauns, green hearts, shamrocks, or just grab some pretty green ribbon.

4. Another easy transfer method involves temporary tattoos. See a beautiful example from Richella at Imparting Grace.

5. Don’t forget to use a festive table cloth! It truly makes a difference and adds a fun backdrop to your candle display.

For more see: St. Patrick Day Candle Ideas

Generally I like knitting patterns where I feel like you can use whatever yarn you have (because my stash is big enough and I want to use it, thanks) and make a successful project. This is one of those times when a special yarn makes the process that much easier.

The Floral Bouquet Shawl from Xandy Peters uses a specific extended color pooling yarn from Feisty Fibers, which allows you to place the bobble flowers with increasing frequency as you knit the project.

It starts with a solid color yarn, then the two color yarn is added in, and you make a bobble whenever you encounter the color pops. This would be hard to replicate with other yarn that doesn’t have the extended color pooling built in.

The background of the shawl is ribbed, making the project reversible.

The shawl uses fingering/sock yarn and comes out to be an asymmetrical triangle that’s 54 inches/137 cm long and 36 inches/ 90 cm deep and 60 inches/150 cm across the top edge.

Xandy says the pattern is for intermediate to advanced knitters. Knowing how to work traditional bobbles would probably help, but there’s a great video tutorial for how to work the floral bobbles so you can practice on other yarn or even incorporate the bobbles into other projects.

The bobbles are five-petaled flowers but they also kind of look like starfish to me, which could be fun on a child’s cardigan or other pattern. They’d also be fun on the leg of a sock or around the brim of a hat for extra whimsy.

The pattern includes photo and video tutorials, and written and charted instructions. It also includes tips on what to look for if you choose to use different yarn for the project, and instructions on how to dye your own yarn to use in the project.

If you want to give it a try, you can find the pattern on Ravelry.

[Photo: Xandy Peters]

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