Heeeelp…….

Okay, so I began crocheting.  I thought it looked really easy and the end product looked so professional, so I bought my wool (100% cotton) and my crochet hook (of undefined size) and excitedly began.  Only I really did not understand the youtube videos.  So I bought a book.  It was for beginners, and apparently anybody could understand it.  So I bought it with great expectations.

Monday night I learnt to do the single crochet stitch.  I did enough that I could make a very small dish cloth.  I didn’t want to aim too high 🙂  I then learnt to end a line and begin a new one and then the double crochet stitch.  And merrily sat crocheting for about sixteen and a half hours, or at least that is what it seemed… Happily dreaming of all the perfect dish cloths I would make all my grateful friends and family, I was a little perturbed when at the end of the night all I had to show for my efforts was a trapezium shaped cloth, which was heading towards being triangular in nature:

crochet1

Oh, and it was a bit holey!  I showed Gary, and giggling he told me to keep practicing.  So the next night I began on my next cloth.  This time I followed the pattern in the book.  This was apparently the very easy pattern at the beginning of the book.  Anyone could do it.  Excellent, I thought, that must include me, right?  So excitedly I began once more.  One line of 35 single crochet stitches.  Done.  Then turn and double stitch for the foreseeable future.  Foreseeable future kept me busy for two whole nights.  It was looking promising to be honest.  Each line seemed to be as long as the one before, in fact, the lines looked like they might be getting longer.  Oh, goodie!  A nice big dish cloth!  I was on my way to dish cloth glory.  I determinedly carried on.  By the end of the second night I held my ‘large’ dish cloth up for inspection.  I could see straight through it.  Okay, I hadn’t fixed the hole problem then.  And the size discrepancy was becoming alarmingly obvious.  Also it looked like I had learnt many additional stitches in addition to the two the book had taught me…..

crochet 2

By this point, I was thinking maybe crocheting wasn’t for me, and I wasn’t for it.  Then I suddenly remembered that lots of my blogging friends crocheted.  So all you crocheting experts, could you take a look at my incredibly inferior piece of work and tell me where I have gone wrong?  I think how I end a row is not right, and I think I might have a tension issue, and of course there is the matter of my home-made stitches – are you able to tell what I am doing wrong?  And what on earth is causing the holes?!

I leave you with a few pictures up close:

crochet 3

crochet 4

Any advice would be welcome, and you never know your help may turn me into a crocheting cloth goddess…..