Saturday 24 September 2011

Hooked!

Hello, my name is Bria, and I'm a crochetaholic.  I love it!  I stare at crochet blogs and get lost looking at pictures on Ravelry...all I want to do is make beautiful, fun, funky things with some yarn and a hook.  Unfortunately, I'm just a beginner without much of a stash of gorgeous wool (or cotton, or acrylic) to make stuff from so I'm stuck with small projects at the moment.  So, how did staring at photos of yarn take over my life?  I'll tell you!  Lucky you.

In early July, I came across this tutorial on how to make a knotted headband.  It looked so easy,  doable even.  I had tried (and failed at) crochet before so I knew I could (at the very least) make a long chain and use a hot glue gun.  We live nowhere near a craft store and we don't drive so actually getting the materials was going to be tricky but when we went on vacation to Lerwick, Shetland, I knew I'd be able to get some good yarn there.  Of course, that's just what I did.  I bought some lovely black wool with silver sparkles and set to work making chains.  It felt so....crafty.  I was actually MAKING something for the first time since I'd moved to England (unless you count making a baby...yeah...probably doesn't count).  Here is the finished product:


Pretty cute, huh?  Well, I felt silly for being so proud of myself because all I had done was make a chain.  How hard is that?  So I looked up some basic crochet tutorials on YouTube and set to work learning how to really crochet.  These are some of my early creations:


All of this while I was still on vacation.  I'm pretty sure my mother-in-law (and husband, for that matter) thought I was a bit nuts for spending so much time crocheting, but the seed had been planted.  I couldn't stop.  Of course, making little flowers and granny squares can be very fun but I needed something more.  Something bigger.  So I found this hat tutorial on ThreadBanger.  Maybe it was too much too soon because this is the sad hat I made (while on a ferry in the North Sea):

 Mushroom?  UFO?  Who knows!

Poor sad hat.  I should really frog the whole thing and reuse the yarn...perhaps I could make another hat.  A hat that I would actually wear!

Since making the sad hat I've actually completed some things I like (more on those later).  The problem with finding a new hobby is that I want to do EVERYTHING...right NOW!!  It's hard to step back and thoughtfully choose one project to work on and finish before moving on to the next one.  I think I need to make a list...and I need a fairy yarnmother to shower with me gorgeous skeins of lovely yarn.

And that's it.  My very (VERY) short crochet history.

UPDATE:  I took photos of the sad hat while my son was napping but left it on the coffee table when I was finished.  Well...apparently the sad hat has a fan.  Once he got up, my two year old discovered the sad hat, shouted, "HAT!" and then ran around wearing it for quite awhile.  Maybe I won't frog it after all.

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