Time to Crochet! Week 7

I’ll shut up about the crowns now, because I have finally finished one! (And by “finally,” I mean that I finished weaving in the ends about thirty seconds before typing this.)


It looks awesome! When we picked out the yarn, I couldn’t decide between the gold and the silver, and asked my two year old. She, of course, went for the shiny blue one. My mother was standing nearby and informed me that I couldn’t ask her which one she wanted and then not get it for her. So I ended up with a sparkly gold and sparkly blue. I’ve finished the blue one, and trimmed it with gold, and I’m just about to trim the gold one with blue.


I tried to get motivated to finish the ears for the tiger hat I stopped working on a month ago, but the ears that came with the pattern aren’t going to work, so I’ve been searching around for ears that will be cute.


But I got distracted.


I have a friend who knits and crochets and is generally a yarn geek just like me. Whenever I’m befuddled about a pattern, I go straight to her, and she de-fuddles it. Most often, her advice is something like “just follow the pattern and see what happens. If you don’t like it you can always figure out something different.” I could tell myself that, and I’m sure there’s an instant when I do, but that thought always gets disregarded when it comes from me, and when I hear it from her it’s gospel truth.


In addition to project advice, we chat about things we’re working on, giggle about yarn prices on amazon.com (a penny for a skein seems like a good price until you look at the cost of shipping), and share new things. One of the things she distracted me with this week was something called Tunisian crochet.


It’s a very interesting method of crocheting that works with all the stitches at once instead of one at a time. It looks a lot like knitting, since all of the stitches stay on the hook, and the preferred tool is a longer hook with a stopper on the end, to keep the stitches from escaping. I shared it with my mother, and we sat and oohed and aahed at how pretty the finished product was. We both had the same reaction: “You wouldn’t have to use one of those fancy long hooks, would you?”


You don’t. But I’d imagine it’s helpful. I made a little square of the basic Tunisian crochet stitch, and it looks awesome, but one problem I had while making it was my hook, which was not made for Tunisian crochet. Most crochet hooks are not uniformly cylindrical, and often have a little flat part near the middle, so that the makers would have a place to stamp what size the tool happens to be.




My problem was that as I scooted the stitches onto the hook, they crowded over that bumpy middle part, and were larger than I’d meant them to be. That wasn’t a huge problem for me, since I hadn’t meant for my stitches to be any particular size, but it would have caused some difficulties if I’d needed them to be precise.


But Tunisian crocheting is fun! I’m going to try a little project with them and explore the different styles.


Maybe someday my poor tiger hat will have ears...