If crochet were faster than knitting

then this freaking afghan would be done.   I have always believed that crochet is faster than knitting.  Based on that assumption, when I woke up in late July and realized that I had forgotten that I had a going-away-to-college afghan to make, I went with crochet.  Double crochet, in fact, using worsted weight yarn.  I chose yarn in his favorite colors, black and red, plus a little grey to lighten it up.  Colors and yarn choice, Vintage worsted from Berrocco, designed to work with spilled beer and pizza.  I thought I’d at least be finished by Labor Day, in early September. Oh, how wrong I was.

August:

October  Still at least a foot left to go.

He is going to school in Michigan, where I’m sure it is already chilly.

I miscalculated rather seriously on this one.  Fallacious reasoning explained below.

•  A giant rectangle is not portable.  One thing that helps my knitting projects move along is that they are generally portable.  I can knit in meetings, hanging out with friends, or when I’m flying or traveling as a passenger. This huge, heavy, object was not portable in the least.  Did I mention it is heavy?  Much heavier than a blanket knitted with the same yarn would be, I think.  Look at the  nice blankets I made his sisters.
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• In the past, the “super fast” crocheting I did was small squares.  They seemed to fly by.  I really think it was that I could take them along.  I also worked them in finer yarn, so they were not as, um, heavy.
• In a long row-by-row project with dark colors, I knit much faster than I crochet, because I can do most of the knitting without looking all the time.  I have to see where my crochet hook goes every time.  This meant that I got about half as much done while watching the Olympics as I would have if I had been knitting.  I could not crochet and watch Usain Bolt.  I had to pause frequently.
• Crocheting this heavier weight yarn makes my right shoulder hurt in a weird spot.  If it’s true that repeating a full range of motion is less likely to give one problems with repetitive stress injuries, I just can’t figure out how to do full range of motion crochet.  Something would get hurt. Or broken.
• Project monogamy might have helped, but really, it was much too hard to be monogamous with a humongous heavy blanket during the sweltering summer, even while listening to Moby Dick, shipmates.
• It all boils down to poor planning.  Or bringing out a book when I should have been making a blanket.  I’ll do better with the next one, I have a few years yet.

So, those of you that knit and crochet, do you think crocheting is faster than knitting, or is it all about  the circumstances?

Sound the Retreat

I have only ever been on one knitting retreat, about 15 years ago. It was fun, but there were quite a few glitches and the beds were awful. For years the Yarnery folks have talked about hosting a retreat, and Sarah finally took the knitting bag by the handles and made it so. (She is a geek and will like that reference.)

We spent a wonderful weekend at Superior Shores on the, yes, shore of Lake Superior.

That’s a photo from their web site. For us, it was cold, raining and windy. (When we cracked the bedroom window it felt like a episode of Sgt. Preston.) All in all, a lovely May weekend to stay inside and knit. We started out Friday night with cocktails and snacks as a getting-to-know-you opportunity. Throw in the dice game for swapping yarn along with the cocktails and you could say the ice was broken. It turned out to be a really fun group of knitters. Experience ranged from a former yarn shop owner (with warped sense of humor) to a brave newbie who had just finished her first hat.

Theresa and I roomed together. The beds were comfy, but the twenty something couple next door felt obliged to have a drunken quarrel at 3 am. “But you’re my girlfriend, I love you!” Drink and dial cell phone activity. You get the picture.

Apparently they made up the next night, but mercifully I slept through that. Over the course of the weekend, we looked at every couple that came into the dining room and muttered   “Think that’s Jimmy?”

The morning class was color theory/colorwork with Peggy Lexau teaching. That was the class that used my ugly blanket as the bad example. Best take away there – tips on finding value when choosing colors, from the low tech red/green plastic viewer, to taking a photo with your camera and making it black and white, to my newly purchased value viewer app for the iphone/ipad.  Look at the yarn I bought at Yarn Harbor in Duluth when we stopped by for a book signing. (Lots of fun, great snacks and yarn!)

The colors, intended as a striped sweater for the lovely Miss Minerva’s (red- haired dark-eyed) First Birthday this fall:

With Value Viewer:

I think the combo will be fine for stripes, but the values are too close in two of those colors for any significant contrast in stranded colorwork.

In the afternoon class, Theresa taught crochet for knitters. It is fun to see how knitters respond when they see how quickly a border can get crocheted onto a knitted square. I was originally going to do a ‘short rows three ways class*’, but we decided that an extra teacher’s aide would be more useful. I think it was. With a group of 20, extra eyes and assistance came in handy.

The rest of the time was eating, drinking, hanging out and knitting. It was a treat to get to know so many new knitting buddies. Also, I hadn’t been north of Duluth for quite a while. Here’s my little photo essay on how you know you are ‘Up North’ as they say here in Minnesota:

They take their politics very seriously:

Lots of taxidermy –

Sarah was quite taken with the bear.

Things I wouldn’t eat on a bet:

Interesting community activities:

Candy store with a portrait of the knitting namesake:

And, on the way out of town, a car with Illinois plates where the driver honks AND flips the bird to a couple of middle-aged women crossing the street when he felt entitled to be turning right. (No photos of that episode.) Ahhhh, up North indeed.

I hope there will be more retreats.

*I will be teaching that at Fiber College of Maine in September.

Crochet Adventures

I am suddenly surrounded by friends and family having babies.  So much fun, and most of these babies need blankets.  I decided that this was a time to break out the stash and bust it good.  I’ve knitted a few (I’m on my fourth Wearwithall Baby Blanket) and decided that some of the smaller amounts of cottons might work best in a crocheted square of some sort.  It’s intended for an August baby girl (hey, like me!) so it could have some holes in it.

I started winging it, making a circle.  It got floppier and floppier, and began to resemble a ruffle.  Obviously my increase ratio was  more than a bit off.  I ripped some out, and tried again.  Much better.  And I have to say, although I do prefer knitting, this sort of trial and error in simple crochet is really quickly done.

Here’s the beginning of the blanket.  It’s a little girlier than I would normally make, but I think the bright blue saves it from being totally insipid.  I had all these bits of yarn in a plastic bin.  No labels at all.  As I was working with them, I realized the square was a bit like the rings of a tree, and I could date my stash acquisition.  Although some of these yarns are still being made, they are no longer at the Yarnery, and remind me of a time when they were.  Snatching the time to fool around with Skitch, which I recently downloaded, I annotated the photo.  I present to you the archeology of my crocheted baby blanket.

OK, it’s now a week after I started this post.  Strike out all the optimism  in the paragraph above. I ran out of the blue yarn, and then the white, and the blanket got uglier and uglier.  I figured I’d finish it and give it away.  Someone  might want it for putting down on the dirt under the baby’s good blanket.

I took it along to the Yarnery’s first ever knitting retreat.  (More on that later.)  During a color class, Theresa grabbed the blanket as a demonstration of what not to do with color.  This blanket should have had one of those Glamour magazine black spots pasted across it to protect its identity.  Someone suggested that pet shelters always want blankets, and this would be a good place for this one, as dogs are color blind.  (I was laughing, really.)  Finally, Theresa told me it was ok to stop making it and give the partly finished blanket and cotton stash to the “Iowa Church Ladies.”  Whew.  It went into the trunk of her car, and may I never see it again.

An interesting observation – did you know that a small tube of Bacitracin looks very much like a sample tube of Tom’s of Maine Toothpaste, especially when right next to each other in a medicine cabinet?  And that after you use the Bacitracin by mistake in the wee hours of the morning, then spit it out and follow it up with the Tom’s of Maine, that doesn’t really taste much better?  Thought you might like to know.

MLE