Yarns

[jacey]

It must be all the talk of crochet, wool, yarn and spinning from heleninwales and another couple of friends... that and my mum who has just started kntting again after about twenty years...

So last week I popped into the wool shop in Denby Dale to pick up something for Mum and spotted some big balls of chunky acrylic yarn in deep purples and dark, inky blues. I haven't crocheted for forty years, but it was just like riding a bike, my fingers found the stitches automatically. So in one night I crocheted a shawl with a large star set into a roundel. I didn't have a pattern but made it up as i went along. With the bit in my teeth I went and got some more yarn (same colour) and in three nights crocheted myself a long waistcoat. Again no pattern but I took the measurements from a waistcoat I bought about fifteen years ago in Calgary.

The added bonus was that I also got to listen to the audiobook of Curse of Chalion while I was doing it.

I have Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrrell on audiobook, so now all I need is another crochet project and I might actually get round to listening to it.

Comments

[teriegarrison.livejournal.com]

Someone told me that when her gran taught her to crochet, the first thing she (the gran) did was teach her to chain and make her chain and entire skein, yank it out, and chain it again. I think that's a great way to get someone used to the idea that yanking it out is just part of crochet. Sometimes you can futz it (and I'm quite happy to do so whenever possible), but often you can't. I wish I'd had that part taught to me early on. I'm teaching some girls to crochet, and I often stress, just yank it out and re-do it.

Today, I had to yank out 4 rows of something I'm making. It's a moderately complex stitch pattern with 4 rows of different stitches, and the error didn't show up until I got to that spot on the next pattern repeat. Grrrr.

But yeah, older and less impatient. :-)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

If my gran had tried to teach me that way, I'd never have gone back for another lesson. I would have seen it as a pointless waste of time and given up.

I'm not actually any less impatient than I used to be, but working with computers for years has taught me that the best way to get things done with the minimum of fuss is to pay great attention to what you're doing, to be aware of things going wrong so you can correct them as soon as possible and that re-doing things is always quicker than doing them for the first time. One of the reasons I used to pretend mistakes didn't exist was because I usually didn't notice until I'd gone a considerable way past and then undoing so much was too disheartening for a slow knitter to cope with.