My latest hobby – crochet!

My grandmother is extremely talented – she can knit, sew, crochet, embroider, cross-stitch and create very beautiful and useful things. My mother also can do most of that too. But these sorts of skills don’t seem to be as common in my generation. I can knit a little, but nothing fancy, just a scarf or something equally simple. I used to sew a little back in high school, but again, just simple things like book bags and a pair of shorts. I can cross stitch, but frankly, that’s probably about the easiest craft to master – the stitches are simple and all you need is the patience and focus to follow the pattern correctly, neatly and consistently. I recently decided it was time to add a new skill to my repertoire – crochet!

I was back in New Zealand for a few weeks and while checking the news on the NZ Herald website, one of the ‘you may be interested in’ links at the bottom of the page caught my eye. It had nothing whatsoever to do with what I had been reading, but was a link to a beautiful bright orange crochet bag. I followed the link and looked at the pattern and found it was written in another language:

1ch, 1dc in each tr to end, sl st in first dc ... 64dc.
1ch, 1dc in each of next 11tr, 13ch, miss 10tr, 1dc in each of next 22tr, 13ch, miss 10tr, 1dc in each tr to end, sl st to first dc at beg

I decided to learn what this all meant and how to do it. Fortunately, I happened to be at my grandmother’s house at the time. I was hoping she might be able to teach me, but there were two obstacles to that: one is that she’s not well, and two is that she’s left handed and it’s difficult for a lefty to teach a righty and vice versa. However, she did help me out with a lovely full set of crochet hooks, a ‘First steps in Crochet’ book (with 54c price sticker still attached!) and some practice wool.

It is a bit hard learning something like this from pictures in a book though, so I supplemented with a YouTube video (only one because I was on a very slow 2G connection). This was my first effort:

This looks pretty atrocious, but it helped me get the hang of creating the stitches. After I thought I had a few basic stitches mastered well enough, I moved on to make a granny square:

There are a couple of mistakes in it, but overall it came out looking more or less correct. However, the wool I was using was not that great, so I headed off to spotlight for some cheap practice wool. I next tried to make something round. It was supposed to be round and flat, but I didn’t increase the stitches properly so I got something rather hat-shaped.

I also tried to make something scarf shaped, but I kept accidentally decreasing stitches and ended up with a triangle. I started over with the help of a couple of new YouTube videos, and this time had better luck. The beginning had a few hiccups:

But by the end I was a bit better:

I practiced three different stitches as well as colour changes:

After that, I went back to the granny square and made a better job of it in two colours:

After that, I started practicing for the first thing I really wanted to make: coasters! I was delighted that the first one I tried turned out flat, although I wasn’t very good at joining the rounds:

The actual stitches looked good though:

I had a few more tries. The first two (top row) are made using double crochet. The ones on the bottom are half double and single crochet respectively. I got a bit better at making the seam neater.

I didn’t like the chain borders though, so my next attempt was to use a different kind of yarn (cotton instead of wool) and try a different edging:

Closer, although I’m not so sure about the fire engine red :)

I decided to switch to something else for a while, and made a dishcloth from my red and white bamboo cotton yarn. I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. This was my first try at actually following a written pattern. I modified it to be square rather than rectangular:

The bamboo cotton is lovely and soft and spongy although it is a pain to work with as it splits really easily. It isn’t perfect, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out:

I’m going back to coasters for a while now, but I currently assembling a list of things I’d like to make. First step though is to find a source of yarn here in Hyderabad!