I remember perusing through my Netflix a long time ago and seeing a recommendation that looked somewhat interesting. It was called “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries”. I enjoy British style murder mysteries and so I added it to my queue- and it sat there for months. I do that a lot. I’ll add something to my queue so that I can find it again if I want to, but many of those “adds” waste away until I do a queue purge.

Happily that did not happen here. One day I just randomly decided to go ahead and give it a shot. What a grand decision that was! “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” is one my favorite shows of all time now. It’s funny, witty, romantic, and sassy …. and oh my heavens the clothes!!

I’ve always loved the fashion of the 1920’s and joining that with an unflappable (pun intended) Australian lady detective was just divine.  I waited anxiously for each new season to come to Netflix. And recently when the Miss Fisher Team created a crowdfunding site to help fund the upcoming movie and give it all the pizzazz it deserves, well I thought that was just the cat’s pajamas and jumped on board! I even have the signature tote to prove it 🙂

My pattern designing tends to focus on fandoms that I love and so of course Miss Fisher came in very high on the list. I originally conceived this design as a “Great Gatsby”-movie-like motif of a dark background and gold angular lines, with a framed section featuring Phyrne’s silhouette. Eventually, though, I dropped the silhouette to go for a more sleek, purely art deco, design.  I chose a rich teal as my background and a truly shining gold as the contrast. I had been eyeing this amazing silk yarn from the Etsy seller “DyeforYarn”for a long time and this was the perfect project for it. Their silk yarns are so lustrous I could swoon!

I thought that the shine would be perfect for an art deco design and the fact that silk would be more drape-y would work just fine with a design that was more abstract than pictorial. And while the look is gorgeous, I have to admit that I don’t plan to double knit with 100% silk yarn again ANYTIME soon :-/ With 15 individual plys I had to go soooo slowly because of the constant splitting. The silk strands were lightly twisted together but being silk they don’t grab onto each other and it was incredibly easy to misjudge and stick your needle right through the middle of the strands, or miss just one when making your stitch, which made an unsightly loop and needed to be fixed. And heaven help you if you had rough spot on your hand that could snag the yarn because that’s all it took to pull one of the single strands out away from the rest, causing you to go back and try to even it out again with your needles… I think I will stick with wool/ silk blends for the foreseeable future! 😉

But the finished product, named the “Fox Spirit Cowl” in honor of an episode of Miss Fisher, did turn out quite lovely and I once again dragged my husband out in the sweltering heat of summer to take photos wearing a winter weather accessory 🙂

And as a last minute hurrah, I even decided to copy Phyrne’s fantastic mugshot scene for just a little bit of added fun, even with my 32 week large belly in the frame  😉