June 6, 2014
Dear Everyone:
It’s an addiction. I admit
it.
Knitting,
crochet,
macramé,
needlepoint,
quilting;
basket-weaving,
cake
decorating, embroidery,
flower arrangements,
scrapbooking (when did
“scrapbook” become a verb?); building
model cars,
trains,
planes,
interstellar spacecraft, tiny
sailing ships in bottles, and so on…
It all involves doing something with your hands.
For some reason, it’s soothing to the nerves.
It’s even a cliché that mental health professionals will advise
patients to take up some kind of hands-on hobby.
And it’s more productive than playing
Solitaire.
At the end you usually have something to show for your efforts.
I happen to lean towards crochet myself.
I’ve done many others, but I always seem to go back to a simple
hook and a ball of yarn. A
twist here, a loop there and, before you know it, you have a pair of
baby booties.
This is good because, as we all know, nothing in the Universe can make
booties disappear faster than a baby.
Put the booties on, blink and presto!
They’re gone. Not to
worry. A 3.5-ounce skein of
lightweight yarn, and a size-F hook, yields about 9 pairs of booties
(size 0-3 months). Or from
the baby’s point of view, 18 possible new hiding places.
But let’s face it, booties can get boring.
Done one, done ‘em all, right?
After a while, you want something else to do.
Which is where the patterns come in.
Billions and billions of patterns.
Whole bookshelves full of potential projects.
These days you don’t even have to buy the books, the patterns are
available for free on the
Internet.
Why? Because the yarn
manufacturers put them out there.
Why? Because they’re
really in the business of selling yarn, and hooks, and needles, and
stitch markers, and
row counters, and a multitude of other helpful items
you never knew you couldn’t live without.
The patterns are just a way of getting you to buy everything
else.
So you pick out a free pattern and print it out and then the fun begins.
Ever try to read a crochet (or knitting) pattern?
Example: Ch 1. Sc2tog
over first 2 sts. 1 sc in each sc to last 2 sc. Sc2tog over last 2 sts.
Turn.
Got that? Of course, every
discipline has its own terminology.
But, seriously!
Now, back in the days when there were real grannies making “Granny
Squares”, all that abbreviating made sense.
It took a lot of time to write out, in longhand, “Chain 1.
Single-crochet two together over the first two stitches.
One single-crochet in each single-crochet (of the previous row)
until you reach the last two single-crochets.
Single-crochet two together over the last two stitches.”
And when the manufacturers were publishing actual books, instead of
pdfs, they wanted to fit as much on a page as possible.
But now, with the miracle of computers, where you can
copy-and-paste the same instructions as many times as necessary, all
that abbreviating and “rep last 4 rows 2(3,4,5)” (translation:
“Repeat the last four rows two times for the smallest size (3
times for the next larger size, 4 times for the next larger size, and so
on”) is just an example of somebody being lazy.
One of the first things I do with a pattern is start a
Word document on
the computer and translate all of that gobbledy-gook into English.
I also focus on just the size I want, eliminating all the extras.
Sometimes that’s when you discover something got left out, or
left in. One pattern
advised, “repeat 4 (or 17) times.”
Huh?
Sometimes you just have to follow the directions to figure out where
you’re supposed to be going.
That’s one reason for holding on to all the leftover yarn from previous
projects. You pull out some
old yarn of the same weight and try to figure out what you’re making,
sort of like Paint-By-Numbers.
You don’t really know what it looks like until you have it in
front of you. That’s when
you realize that 17 was a typo.
It should have been 7.
“Jeannie” told me about a knitting project (this problem is not
exclusive to any hobby) that she took to an expert who glanced at it and
said, “Oh, yes. I’ve seen
this before. That row was
supposed to be deleted, only it wasn’t, and that throws everything off.”
As for experts, these days there are dozens of Open Forums on the
Internet, filled with helpful individuals who will cheerfully guide you
through the thicket of instructions.
Or not. Sometimes you
just throw the whole thing into a corner and go back to booties.
Or slippers, which are really just grownup-size booties.
I even took some yarn to
Denver with me on our trip last month.
Over two evenings in the hotel room, I spent several calming
hours whipping up a pair of slippers for a friend of ours who’s going
through radiation therapy.
And now I have a half-skein of yarn left over to use the next time I
want to try out another pattern.
Which will satisfy my crochet-craving for a while.
Love, as always,
Pete
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