CROCHET PATTERNS 11th April 2021
As usual, the spoken bit's HERE
This time last year, at the beginning of the first lockdown, I made a list of all the things I wanted to achieve. Amongst a wide variety of stuff was learning to crochet. Now there are many thousands of good people out there in You Tube Land showing off their crochet skills, some of them are even quite good teachers. I was fairly ruthless in my elimination - some folk have annoying mannerisms of speech, some I simply could not understand properly (there are some American accents I find almost impenetrable I'm afraid - I am British, after all!). But in the end I had a nice selection of channels who gave out good information and explained things to my satisfaction. Among several, there were Bonny Bay, Hooked by Robin, Olga Poltrova, Fiber Spider and Mikey from The Crochet Crowd.
In the process of all this learning, I found myself downloading patterns where I could and learning to read them (thank you Mikey in particular). Where there was no pattern, I got fed up with having to keep pressing the 'Back' button and decided to try and work out the patterns for myself. Oft-times, trying to work on a pattern would make me realise my crochet skills weren't up to it yet. The good news is that where I put something by a while back, I find I can now follow said pattern...
A short step from there to trying to work up some patterns of my own devising. This involves a huge amount of trial and error, of crotchetting and a huge amount of un-crotchetting - known as frogging (think "rippit rippit") - to get the balance right. So, this post is about how I made my latest pattern, which at the moment has the rather clumpy name of Treble Crochet Clusters Shawl... I need to come up with something better I think! It came out of a previous pattern which I called the Pillars of Wisdom:
From there I wanted to make a triangular shawl; figuring out one's stitch increases is not always easy and there were several false starts:
The new pattern sort of combines three stitches into one: first of all half of a treble stitch, followed by half of a double and then all the loops on the hook gathered off the hook in pairs by a third stitch:
As you can see from the photo below, it's not just the actual crocheting, it's trying to keep proper notes as you go along and tweaking the written pattern as you go...
Anyway, I'm pleased with the results although I still keep tweaking it of course! The shawl in the photo is, as yet, unfinished but is made from hand-spun, hand-dyed Wensleydale wool (has a wonderful long, silky staple).
Finally, I like to set my crochet pattern up as an A4 set of instructions - and I wish I could attach the pdf here, but I can't seem to see how to, so a photo will have to do.
If you would like a copy, just email me at thecraftbench@gmail.com If you are interested you can also ask for the Pillars of Wisdom pattern. Happy crotchetting! 👍
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