Well I still haven't made it back into the sewing room, It's school holidays now and the husband is home all day and my nephew is in town visiting:), it just seems rude to disappear into another room alone. But I am finding comfort in hanging out in the lounge room and engaging in the learning of new things!
With the Granny squares I made in the hospital, I made 2 little pram sized rugs for my twin nieces.
I stitched them up with white yarn using a weird concoction of twisted hand holding and backwards feeling crochet as per a wonderful tutorial i found on
this blog here. The colour combinations of the yarn she's used in her granny squares to demonstrate the technique, makes me feels happy and warm and I find my self going back to her page often, just to look at it again:)
The beginnings of my rows.
Looks a little like ZigZag!
I then edged it all the way around in the white and finished the edge with a pink petal style edge inspired from a crochet flower tutorial on another blog.
I really like them, I still have to weave in all the wool ends and beginnings, but otherwise I finished them :) and will post a proper pic once I finish weaving in the ends.
Now I am not content with just making squares anymore, *g* I have been learning how to do different stitches and using different sizes of hook.
Using a great pattern from the blog called
imagine, I made a bright green with pink trim beanie with a pink flower and a bright purple with white trim beanie with a white flower for my sisters tiny twins, and then I made some smaller baby pink beanies, with a smaller hook as their heads are still too small for the beanies I made first with the larger hook. And I used a shell edge to finish the edges, which I used a smaller hook for on the pink ones, because the larger hook on the bigger beanies, the shell edge came out loose.Then my 13 yr old nephew saw what I made and wanted a beanie in black of course is there any other colour for a teenager? apparently not ;)
A hook is a hook, is not a good hook?
Being new to this crochet caper, I sent husband to the shop to randomly chose a crochet hook for the Granny Squares. Not realising how many hook options there were, he accidentally chose an awesome hook first up, and bought the same brand/style/type in a smaller size for the small beanies.
For the nephews, blacker than black beanie, the pattern needed a bigger size 6.5 mm hook so I popped in to buy a new one.
I learned quickly that the cheaper, pretty coloured plastic crochet hooks are totally rubbish. I'm so disappointed! They were so pretty! They unfortunately have rough joins in the plastic that the yarn gets snagged on and my stitches ended up knotted and the yarn shaggy and fluffy. The stitches didn't glide on and off like my metal hooks, I felt like I was fighting to make every stitch and it showed in the wobbly uneven work. I unravelled it so many times in the end that the wool looked awful and knotty so I just cut it off and threw it out and started over.
So, dud crochet hooks made me so frustrated! It makes me wonder how many other beginners chose pretty coloured, cheap hooks and gave up crochet in frustration! Luckily I'd chosen a good hook first up, so I knew it wasn't feeling right or looking right with the cheaper hook.
I'm only just learning to read patterns...I definitely wasn't confident enough to make the baby beanie bigger on my own, so I went searching for a bigger pattern. The
Bernat Website has some free patterns on it, I started on
this pattern an hour ago...although it is very very similar to the others it's easy to follow and looks like it should. The nephew didn't want it to fold over on his forehead just end around his eyebrows so I had to shorten it by 15 cm or thereabouts.
So, here it is.
Also, my wonderful husband took the dodgy pretty coloured hooks back to the store first thing the next morning and they gave the money back immediately. Husband picked up a more expensive brand plastic one instead, it really was immediately better to crochet with even though it was also plastic. I still miss the smoothness of the metal hooks but at least each stitch is smooth and more even like it should be.
I know it's probably pedantic, but it bugs me that I now have 2 different looking types of crochet hooks. I like things to match! I'm weird like that. I want a matching set. :)
So, I went looking online today, and found some wonderful sets of different size crochet hooks that I want to buy, but I am finding that even in sets with metal hooks in the smaller sizes, the larger sizes in the same set are plastic..how weird. Is there a reason why larger sized hooks aren't metal ones?
If someone finds a metal set of crochet hooks in mid to bigger sizes, let me know... so it can be mine:)
Oh yes, it should be mine ;)
