Harlequin Poncho

After Christmas I went to the Meijer store to scour the clearance items and came across some Red Heart Celebration yarn skeins in bright jewel tone colors with sparkly silver or gold thread wound within the yarn. Here's a link on that.  redheart celebration
So I bought one skein each of seven colors they had left, (almost all the rest they had but I think I left a few pinks and yellows).

If you checked out that Red Heart link and scrolled down a bit, you can see that the colors are so bright and they reminded me of Mardi Gras and jesters. So, I decided to make a poncho in tunisian crochet.

It's made the same as the puzzle piece poncho by making two rectangular pieces and joining those together end-to-side on the front and end-to-side on the back as well.

You can see the seams running across diagonally on both the front and back from the joining.

Then I added two more rows of squares on the top to fill in the poncho up to my neck.

(Don't ask me about the hat! It's my next post! Shhh!)

The poncho flares out a little at the top and stands up nicely thanks to a fleece lining I added so it would be warm and so the yarn, (which is really scratchy because of the metallic thread,) doesn't hurt my neck.

I decided to add a cute pom pom trim around the neck area. It's some unwritten law that a crocheted poncho requires fringe or pom poms, isn't it?! LOL! Anyway, it make this a fun piece. I was going to add pink jingle bells but my son talked me out of that. Something about not wanting to annoy anyone whilst wearing it. LOL!

Here it is laid out in the back. Yes, that one green square at the top could have been purple. 

I used a dark purple fleece blanket material for the lining.

I sewed this in by hand and, well, I'm not very good at that.

It's so soft and very warm and toasty now. (But still not warm enough for this ridiculously cold weather we are having here in Indiana right now! Ugh!)

Anyway, I'm ready for Mardi Gras.  Let's see. Tuesday, March 4. It'll still be cold so this poncho won't be too warm by then.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!