I spent some time working on my crochet problem this evening, after having a mild epiphany about double crochets, in which I figured out that I'm not just supposed to be pulling loops through each other: the point is to yarn over and pull that through. Well, the diagrams I have are highly suspect, let's just say that.
Anyway, this is where I started, with a very tight circle I made, apparently entirely with slip stitches. Beats the heck out of me how I did it, but at any rate it's very tight and tends to cup.
Then I tried my hand at a simple yo-yo, which got kind of messed up because the yarn I'm using has a tendency to come untwisted in very uncool ways. On the other hand, it was cheap and it doesn't feel totally unpleasant for a synthetic yarn, so I've kept it instead of just throwing the whole ball away.
I've been thinking about making a yo-yo afghan for Casa Decrepit, to keep us warm on cold winter evenings, so I'm going to have to have another go at that one.
Then I decided to try out double crochet, and that's when I had my minor epiphany, although of course James Joyce would just about piss himself if he heard me use the word that way. Anyway, I figured out the double crochet, but the pattern I worked with it still came out looking like something was wrong with it. So I went back over it and found out that she neglected to mention a chain 4 somewhere in there, and had me do an extra double crochet, which makes the whole thing look kind of buck-toothed.
For my next trick, I worked a circle with single crochets, and I had some trouble following the instructions (reading patterns SUCKS but I suppose there's no other way to learn how to read them than by reading them), but it still seemed to come out OK, so I went on to the next row of double crochets alternated with single chain stitches. Very fancy.
I was going to continue on to the next row of the pattern but I couldn't figure out what she meant by "Sl st into next ch 3 sp" because doing what it seemed to be telling me caused the whole thing to curl up into a tight leetle ball rather unattractively. (I have since figured it out, but I'm done fiddling with my hands for the evening.)
On the other hand, it looks quite nice as-is, an worked in a less finicky yarn would be quite easy.
