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Fun times with yarn!
Jan. 5th, 2012 01:21 pmOne of my birthday presents this last year was a set of long crochet hooks. (Designed for Tunisian crochet, but I am using them for regular crochet; I need long ones for the same reason I need long knitting needles.) For various reasons (*cough*DOG*cough*) I didn't get around to doing anything with them until a few days ago.
The first stage of the plan was to do practice stuffs: chain for a while, until I got comfortable with it; then single crochet for a while; then at some point move on to other stitches.
So I get some scrap yarn (which had the down side of being really splitty) and a needle and set to work...
...and discovered that I hadn't taken into account the necessary zeroth stage of the plan, namely how the fuck to hold everything.
I had my right hand towards the base of the hook to manipulate the hook and stuff, and the left hand had ALL THE YARN. Which as it turns out requires holding the project as well as the working yarn, because -- unlike knitting -- there is no second needle to stabilize stuff. And that also meant that I couldn't hold the yarn the same way I do for continental knitting, because I needed my index finger (and thumb) for keeping the stuff from squirming about, so couldn't also use my index finger for yarn tensioning.
(At the moment, I am "tensioning" my yarn by pincering it between the middle two fingers, so that index+thumb are free to work. It's awkward as all hell but at least somewhat functional.)
I joke about how learning to knit in the round with DPNs is like juggling a porcupine. ("and how do you juggle a porcupine?" "carefully.") But at this point, I'm relatively used to DPNs. Crochet, for all that there's only one hook involved, is rather like juggling a ... well, not porcupine. Recalcitrant jellyfish, maybe.
But at any rate, I now am able to do a) chain, b) single crochet, b) half double crochet, and c) slip stitch; and I am working on making these. (Where "working on" means "made a chain, went aughwtf about joining in the round, tried it, decided it looked horrible, pulled it out, decided that the chain looked wonky, pulled it all out, chained again, very carefully joined it with a slip stitch, triple-checked it to see if it looked right, got as far as chaining two and doing a hdc, realized I was working with the tail, said some rather undignified things and started laughing, worked back, made a horrid mess of things, pulled it all out, chained again, joined with slip stitch, eyed it warily, triple-checked that I then had the working yarn, chained two and did two hdcs and put it down because I needed a break."
(All of that being split over a couple of days.)
The first stage of the plan was to do practice stuffs: chain for a while, until I got comfortable with it; then single crochet for a while; then at some point move on to other stitches.
So I get some scrap yarn (which had the down side of being really splitty) and a needle and set to work...
...and discovered that I hadn't taken into account the necessary zeroth stage of the plan, namely how the fuck to hold everything.
I had my right hand towards the base of the hook to manipulate the hook and stuff, and the left hand had ALL THE YARN. Which as it turns out requires holding the project as well as the working yarn, because -- unlike knitting -- there is no second needle to stabilize stuff. And that also meant that I couldn't hold the yarn the same way I do for continental knitting, because I needed my index finger (and thumb) for keeping the stuff from squirming about, so couldn't also use my index finger for yarn tensioning.
(At the moment, I am "tensioning" my yarn by pincering it between the middle two fingers, so that index+thumb are free to work. It's awkward as all hell but at least somewhat functional.)
I joke about how learning to knit in the round with DPNs is like juggling a porcupine. ("and how do you juggle a porcupine?" "carefully.") But at this point, I'm relatively used to DPNs. Crochet, for all that there's only one hook involved, is rather like juggling a ... well, not porcupine. Recalcitrant jellyfish, maybe.
But at any rate, I now am able to do a) chain, b) single crochet, b) half double crochet, and c) slip stitch; and I am working on making these. (Where "working on" means "made a chain, went aughwtf about joining in the round, tried it, decided it looked horrible, pulled it out, decided that the chain looked wonky, pulled it all out, chained again, very carefully joined it with a slip stitch, triple-checked it to see if it looked right, got as far as chaining two and doing a hdc, realized I was working with the tail, said some rather undignified things and started laughing, worked back, made a horrid mess of things, pulled it all out, chained again, joined with slip stitch, eyed it warily, triple-checked that I then had the working yarn, chained two and did two hdcs and put it down because I needed a break."
(All of that being split over a couple of days.)