Hooked up with one of those frightening looking single ended 30cm Pony Tunisian Crochet hooks (the cable ones look a bit TOO scary and unwieldy for a beginner) I sat down on a quiet rainy saturday afternoon and began to work my way through some online tutorials.
Thanks to lovely folk on Mastodon (in particular the awesome AmyShark and AnnieBeeKnits my terrible stitch-dropping mess to the left was unpicked and whipped back into shape.
First off though, a stark revelation occurred. Now, I'm not one for watching tutorial videos. I can't really explain why but if someone produces a tutorial onYouTube I'm likely to pass it up for a photo / description type tutorial instead.
But sometimes you've just gotta dig into those videos - and when I looked at one on Tunisian crochet (this one - in fact - which is utterly brilliant and highly recommended: Tunisian Crochet: Simple Stitch (aka Afghan Stitch) - YouTube) I realised something.
I HAVE BEEN YARNING OVER THE WRONG WAY ALL THIS TIME!
Since I started out in Crochet in fact. I don't know how I've made all the things I have without realising this but I have been bringing the yarn over from the front of the needle, backwards rather than the other way round (it's funny because in knitting I did exactly the same thing, wrapping the yarn around the needle clockwise instead of anti-clockwise). So call it a quirk of my brain or something but as soon as I corrected that, it was like re-learning crochet all over again - and definitely helped me get Tunisian crochet licked.
So I started again, foundation chain...
Yeah yeah, scrappy and nothing special to look at. Then using the PROPER yarn over technique I started to work the return row and subsequent rows.
(Tension is clearly something I struggle with, as you can see!)
It began to look like Tunisian crochet all right...So I carried on for a few more rows...
No more dropped stitches (I was counting my original 20 stitches all the way along and even though it looks like it's tapering, the row count is the same, I just need to get my tension sussed).
Et voila! A new technique learned.
One other thing I've been doing is trying to learn a few more fancy crochet stitches as I nearly always crochet everything with the same old single crochet, half double crochet, double crochet or triple crochet stitches. So I got to work on a sampler...
In there you've got Moss Stitch, Sedge Stitch, Shell Stitch, Box Stitch, Spike Stitch (my new favourite stitch), Cribbage Stitch and a very bad attempt at grid stitch. These were done before the revelation about yarning over wrong, so they're not exactly neat but Shell stitch is lovely, I could see me using that for something more decorative.
Crochet is still my first love in terms of yarn craft, and though I do love a good knit, I will always love Crochet more as it's what I started with. Finding a brilliant community on Mastodon is really helping me so the old obsession is starting up again and my head is totally filled with ideas for new bits and bobs.
That yarning over thing though, sheesh...that just made me LOL.
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