By the end of the second class, I was feeling bold and decided to try a simple project of my own at home. I picked a simple narrow spiral scarf design that I found in a magazine, and managed to complete it in a couple of nights in front of the telly. Progress at last!
For our final class Jemima had encouraged us to bring in patterns that we were interested in doing, or questions we had about how to read patterns that we'd seen. I brought in my scarf and she showed me the proper way to finish up. I also brought a
granny square that I'd started at home to finish. We also learned how to work in a circle, talked a bit about tension, hook sizes, making swatches and how to read a crochet chart. Charts are awesome - one of the books I bought has them and they are genius for demystifying written pattern instructions. Apparently the use of charts for crochet is fairly new, and you need some heavy-duty software (like Illustrator) to create them. Hopefully some bright spark will devise a free/cheap app to create them soon, because I do find them dead useful.
All five of the other ladies in the class seemed to enjoy it as much as I did, and we encouraged Jemima to run an "Improver's Crochet" class where we could build our skills.
I have already started a simple project from a book by Erika Knight called Crochet Workshop, as well as working on more granny squares, and planning my next six projects.
I've also joined Ravelry, which is a great social networking site for knitters and crocheters - you can keep notebooks for your stash, patterns, projects etc, and check out lots of patterns (including loads of free ones), and see what other people are making.
I can see that buying wool could easily become as addictive as buying embroidery threads! And I'm really loving doing the crochet, so how I'm going to fit all my embroidery, crochet, sewing, cross-stitch, quilting etc into my precious spare time is going to be a bit of a problem........ ! Plus finding the time to write blog posts about it? I'm going to have to give up the day job, it's clear.