Deviant

First things first: I finished the gift knit, a shawl for Checkers' bridal shower.




I am enormously proud of this thing. I designed it all by me onesies. The yarn is Rowan Cashcotton (YUM!), and you see the cast off? That's a long chain crochet cast off. That's right, the c-word. I was a little nervous about this initially, but once I got going it was sort of addicting.

So I moved on to my first real crochet. (gasp! shock! horror!)

I started an afghan in single crochet, after which I realized that this was not all that much faster than knitting, and after all, the prime advantage of crochet was supposed to be speed. I frogged that, and then I remembered the first book my aunt had given me when attempting to trick me into crocheting: granny square afghans.



Feel the granny square love. I've started assembling them now, because the idea of sewing a hundred thousand granny squares together at once makes me woozy. There's no real pattern; I'm just putting them together in big blocks, and I'll organize them later.

Meanwhile, earthchick passed on some really fat baby yarn that had gotten passed on to her. I knew immediately what this had to be, so I pulled out my N-hook, and roughly 5 hours later:



It's Beth's star-shaped baby afghan, and my first crochet FO. Am I proud? Enormously.

I never thought I would learn to crochet. It's been six years since I first started trying to crochet, off and on, and I was sure I would never get beyond rectangles. Now I'm churning out crochet things like I've heard they're discontinuing Red Heart Super Saver (and why are all the crochet patterns I have written for that sad excuse for yarn?). It's addicting. It's crack for knitters.

There's just one major crochet drawback: When I went back to knitting, I started wrapping the yarn backward.