Greetings and Happy New Year to you all!
Once again, I have been absent for the world of the blog for many weeks, however they were not fruitless weeks, oh no! They were weeks filled with crafting festive gifts for those I love, so I've got lots of lovely things to post about on here in the coming weeks. Hurrah!
In a change from my gifts last year, this year's lot were crocheted. I only learned how to crochet very recently. It was something I'd always wanted to do, but could just never get my head around how it worked. One of the reasons for this - I think - is because of the way I knit; I'm a thrower. "A what?", I hear you ask, I'm a thrower. That means that when I knit I hold my yarn in my right hand and it's my right hand that loops or 'throws' the yarn around the needle. This is also known as 'right hand knitting' or 'English knitting'.
In crochet you hold your yarn with your left hand, and your hand movements are more similar to 'left hand' or 'Continental' knitting, so for those that use the continental knitting method it's not such a huge jump to crochet, because you're already used to holding your yarn and controlling your tension with your left hand.
I'd tried to learn how to knit continental style before and it was a complete disaster, much the same way my previous attempts to crochet went, however one of the main reasons I wanted to learn crochet was that you can make any size project you want; you're not limited to the length of your needles the way you are in knitting.
Just after my son was born I made a massive blanket for him, it's 150cm x 150cm, and the trouble I had trying to get a circular needle to accommodate a project that size was unbelievable. The longest one I've been able to find is 180cm long and 4.5mm thick. Once you start getting into bigger thicknesses it's impossible to find a cable that long, also if you've got a piece of work that has 500 odd stitches in a row and you suddenly find you've made a mistake and have to rip it out, you'll pretty much lose the will to live because on projects that size a single row can take up to 40 mins to knit.
So with that in mind, I went and bought a set of 5 chunky crochet hooks and a book on how to crochet. First and foremost I'm going to say that, aside from containing some lovely patterns to get me inspired to learn, the book was largely useless as far as teaching goes, so I did what I always do in times of craft related confusion - I checked YouTube!
Now there are millions of videos on how to crochet on YouTube, in fact there are also videos on how to perform colonic irrigation on your self (don't ask) but after looking through a few of them I found a great one from Staci on VeryPink.com which was part of a series she did called 'Crochet for Knitters'. After watching a couple of her videos it was like a light went on in my brain and suddenly I could crochet along, too!! Huzzah!!
That was back at the end of September and since then I've made lots of crocheted projects, and at the risk of making an utterly, utterly dreadful pun, when it comes to crochet you could say I'm 'hooked' (cue laugh reel). I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.
There are a few things I really like about crochet in comparison to knitting, the main thing being that you work takes shape so much faster, I could finish a crochet hat in about one hour whereas it might take me a whole afternoon or more to knit the same thing. Also, if you set your work down and it starts to unravel, it's not catastrophic the same way it would be with a knitted piece, since each crochet stitch is 'closed' before you move on to the next.
That being said, I've found that some projects just don't work as well in crochet as they do in knitting - for example I recently crocheted a sock which turned out grand, only it's not really something you'd realistically wear - it's insanely thick, and the nature of crochet stitches mean it's not quite as smooth as a knitted sock would be.
All in all, I love crochet and I'm so glad I finally got the hang of it, but I'll never give up the knitting - I'll just have a wider range of projects to choose from in the future. So for any of my fellow knitters out there who are considering learning a new skill, I'd definitely say go for it, you won't regret it! And if anyone's interested, I'll list my favourite YouTube crochet channels below.
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