One versus two....

20 years ago, my maternal grandmother (Grandma) taught me to crochet.  I quickly hooked my way through dozens of wash clothes.  Some had shell stitches, some were plain.  Slip stitch, chains, singles, half, and doubles.  One had the front-post/back-post double crochet stitches -it's still one of my favorite patterns.  A few of them were given as gifts; the rest resided in my mother's kitchen cabinet.  The following summer, my paternal grandmother (Gammy) recognized my interest in all-things-stringy and thought that knitting would be the perfect next step.

So Gammy sat me down with some green cotton yarn and a pair of steel, baby blue needles. She diligently showed me how to wrap the yarn and hold the needles.  She told me which way the yarn had to be carried for the knit and purl stitches, and explained how the yarn-overs towards the edges would leave a little space next to the border stitches.  She tried (and I do mean tried) to teach me to knit.  I sat there for four hours trying to force the yarn into the nubby, stretchy, stitched piece that my grandmother expected.  Each stitch (to me, at least) was a horrendous exercise in finger Olympics and tendon strength tests.  My hands hurt so bad that my fingers cramped that night!  Needless to say, the knitting lesson did not go well.  It would be fifteen years before I even thought to pick up knitting needles again.

The second time around, I taught myself.  I am still frustratingly slow at knitting.  Actually, it's more like aggravatingly slow - tortoise-type speed through a molasses pit in February.  But I have managed to cast on correctly two different projects, maintain proper spacing and gauge, and even completed one project!  The other has been on the needles for 4+ years.

I liked the knitted look of pieces for the lacy look some stitches left and the greater stretch inherent in knitted works, as opposed to crochet.  So imagine my surprise when I came across Tunisian crochet recently.  It looked soft and stretchy!  As I have been wanting to expand my crochet efforts, I researched the different stitches, hooks, patterns, etc...  Looked for different projects from beginner to more advanced, then headed off to the shop for some yarn and the extended hooks.

My first attempt at TC (besides little swatches) is a shawl.  I found this delightfully colored shawl pattern based on Doris Chan's All Shawl in Tunisian Crochet pattern.  Here's the link to the pattern I'm following: http://thelaughingwillow.blogspot.com/2011/07/funny-thing-happened.html

Things are going..... slowly.  First, the hook is LONG.  I keep bumping it into the arm of my chair, no matter how many times I shift to the left.  Second, I'm just slower at this; probably because it's new to me and probably because I tend to be interrupted more often now (cat, dog, family members).  So it progresses more slowly.  I also changed the pattern after I got about 12 rows in.  At 25 rows in, the shawl has turned into nearly a full-circle shawl instead of a half-circle. Each row takes about an hour at this point and I fear that I'm only half way done!  Eeks!

I'll post pictures soon, just been really busy lately!