Yarn Over, Double Chain, Yarn Over…Start Over

I'm blogging over at Everybody Needs A Little Romance today,so I've put some of it here. But to read the entire post and see the pictures, click the link above and check it out.

My best friend and critique partner crocheted me a scarf for Christmas. It’s a beautiful red yarn with tiny gold thread running through it and I absolutely love it. She used a loom and after I saw the others she’d done decided I wanted to do some myself.

With coupons in hand, I went to Michaels, found the loom (and a couple of others in different sizes), picked out the yarn, and the crochet hook I’d need to finish the ends when I was done.

I may have forgotten to mention that I did not know how to crochet, which was why the loom sounded like a perfect solution for me. I mean really, how hard could it be to just finish the thing with some single stitches at the end.

I’d completed about 10 rows when I realized I wasn’t putting the yarn on the loom correctly and had to pull it off and start over.

Maybe reading the directions a little better would have been a good idea, but I wanted to start making the scarf, not spend time making sure I knew what I was doing. Hmmm…I think I’ve been down this road before.

It took about a week of working on it in the evenings to finish it. Uh yes, I should have been writing, but right now, I have this story idea germinating. And I did have a pad and pen with me while I was working on this project. Sometimes doing something else my ideas and plotting really start to flow.

Here’s a picture of that one. The ends are…okay, not so much matching a hundred percent, but unless you look hard, you wouldn’t really notice.

What’s a girl to do? Yep, go to Michaels and buy some more yarn. Only this time I decided I wanted to truly crochet a scarf. No loom, just the hook and me. With several hooks in different sizes and several different skeins of yarn in different colors and sizes I was went home ready to begin.

The problem? I have (or had), no idea how to do that. So I did what anyone who needs to do some research does. I went to the internet. YouTube to be exact. There I found many videos on crocheting. Learned how to do the single crochet stitch and then…stop! These women’s fingers flew across the screen and they used language that I did not understand. Chain three, single, skip two, chain 5 and so on. I soon realized I was way over my head and needed to start at the beginning with something much simpler than a shell stitch.

The girl who works across from me in my day job crochets and knits (with 4 needles, dear Lord), she’s made several baby hats with the most adorable flowers on the sides. I told her my plan, err plight, and she said bring the yarn, bring the hooks (all of them) and she’d show me what to do.

You’d think I would have learned from the above-mentioned taking the yarn off the loom and starting over several times before I had that down. But nope, not me. I brought in this beautiful gunmetal gray yarn that all soft and furry and going to be the most beautiful scarf in the world yarn. Yeah, the girl looked at me with you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me eyes. She took the time to show me what to do, but strongly suggested I used a ‘normal’ yarn for my first time.

I was determined to do this. I worked at it for several nights and realized that I had no idea what she’d really taught me and my very pretty yarn was knotting up something horrible.

Back to the proverbial drawing board. New yarn, the ‘normal’ kind and this time I told her to tell me what to do and let me do it instead of watching her. She gave me the directions, which sounded like this:


So, if you went to the over blog, what did you think about the scarfs? Do you jump in with both feet and to wade back to the beginning of the pool and start over again, or do make sure you've got it down before starting a new project?

Hugs,
Vicki