Good Read!

If you enjoy reading crochet blogs, and since you're reading this I assume you do, you should check out Mary Beth Temple's book: Hooked for Life: Adventures of a Crochet Zealot.

It's a delightful read full of funny anecdotes and inside jokes for the crochet enthusiasts.  Over Christmas I read portions of it aloud to my family and even they, the uninitiated, found it funny.

Here's the info:
ISBN-10: 0740778129

Here we go again: Stitch One!

This first stitch I really like and will likely reuse.  It's consistent and a good mix of solid and lacy.  It's also fast: it grows at the speed of dc, and is essentially mindless.  The baby blanket I made from it is really nice, and it would be appropriate for scarves, afghans, shawls etc.  Additionally, basically any color striping pattern you'd want to try out would work with this stitch.  The pattern for this stitch is easy to read, and would be a good one to start on if you're not confident in your ability to decipher crochet-script.  This stitch gets my ringing endorsement for both novices and experts alike.

Here's the pattern:

Chain 93, then work the stitch until fabric is square.  Add the standard baby blanket border to finish.
Round 1: sc around, 3 sc in corner
Round 2: dc around, 5 dc in corner
Round 3: sc around, 3 sc in corner
Round 4: (sc, ch 3, sk 1) around, (sc, ch 3, sc in same stitch) at corner

I made this with Lion Brand Pound of Love yarn in Lavender with a J hook.

New Year, New Book!

Last year, I crocheted my way through Triple Play Pattern Stitches by making a baby blanket out of each of the thirty stitches.  That's thirty baby blankets in a little less than four months.  I was thoroughly sick of making them when I finished.  I think I'm finally over it, and I have another audacious plan. 

I went home for Christmas and went shopping with my mom and sister.  Part of that shopping was naturally for yarn.  While browsing through the patterns my mom found a book for me that I'm actually using.  When I first looked through it, I saw several stitches that looked exactly like some that are in Triple Play Pattern Stitches.  They were so similar, that I even commented to my mom that there would probably be a law suit about it for copyright infringement.  Weeks passed, I started using the book, and I finally noticed that it's by Darla Sims, the same person who wrote the Triple Play book.  Apparently I'm a fan of her work. 

So the audacious plan I mentioned earlier is that I'm going to do it again.  I'm going to work my way through the book, testing out all of the stitches by making a baby blanket.  But this time, it's not thirty stitches; it's fifty stitches!  The new book is 50 Stitches for Afghans, and I'm going to try them all. Unlike her previous book, these stitches only show one colorway instead of three.  That feature was what initially drew me to the Triple Play book, and I still really like it.  It helps in understanding the stitch and planning your color scheme.  So, I am going to make an effort to try the stitches with a colorway different than the one in the book, so that there will be two colorways for each stitch.  That won't be for all of them, but I'm going to try.

Here's the info: Published by Annie's Attic.  ISBN: 978-1-59635-302-2.  Author: Darla Sims

Blended Arrows Stitch

A while back, I was Christmas shopping and ran across a crochet book.  I flipped through it, and was generally unimpressed, but I did see one afghan pattern that was interesting.  I decided not to buy the book because out of dozens of patterns only one was something I'd want and it was over twenty dollars.  Earlier this week, I recalled the pattern and decided to try it out as I remembered it.  The first attempt was a disaster.  There was no way that I would make an entire blanket in the simplistic way the pattern called for, but I liked the overall look, so I got out some paper and figured out a way to make it work.  I have since tried to find the original pattern, but I don't remember enough about the source to find it.  I don't even know the name of the book or of the pattern.

In any case, the idea of long stitches to blend colors together has merit.  There are myriad ways to arrange them to make interesting patterns.  This particular one is more complicated than other options, but it's a starting spot.

Some modifications you could try are to skip rows 7-12, which would change the shape of the arrows (to something non-arrow-like) and have them all go in one direction, or to expand it to having lsc7, with an extra row of sc and ch 1 sp, which would make the arrows change direction on their own.

This stitch is one I would normally avoid: it's slower than sc, complicated, and uses up so much yarn.  I'm surprised that I like this stitch so much because it doesn't do anything that I normally like stitches to do, and I would not recommend this stitch pattern for beginners or for something you want to work up quickly and easily.  However, I'm loving how this is turning out.  The overall effect reminds me a little of how quilts feel because it's so solid and the complicated rows fold down the simple rows, making it thicker there, basically at a seam.  So far, I've spent about 20 hours, 4 skeins of I Love this Yarn, and have only gotten about 18" of fabric.  I guess I was just up for a challenge.

Color Pattern:
Use one color for first 5 rows, then change colors every 6 rows.  Change colors at row 6, 12, 18, etc

Stitch Definitions:
lsc2= long single crochet into ch 1 sp 2 rows below
lsc3= long single crochet into ch 1 sp 3 rows below
lsc4= long single crochet into ch 1 sp 4 rows below
lsc5= long single crochet into ch 1 sp 5 rows below
lsc6= long single crochet into ch 1 sp 6 rows below

Note: st = stitch, which can be sc, ch 1 sp, or one of the long sc

Chain a multiple of 6 + 3
Row 1: sc in 2nd ch from hook, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 ch] across, sc in last 6 ch
Row 2: ch 1, turn, sc in first 5 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 2 st
Row 3: ch 1, turn, sc in first 3 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 4 st
Row 4: ch 1, turn, sc in first 3 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 4 st
Row 5: ch 1, turn, sc in first 5 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 2 st

Row 6: ch 1, turn, sc in first sc, [sc, lsc2, lsc3, lsc4, lsc5, lsc6] across, sc in last st

Row 7:   ch 1, turn, sc in first 6 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 ch] across, sc in last 1 st
Row 8:   ch 1, turn, sc in first 2 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 5 st
Row 9:   ch 1, turn, sc in first 4 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 3 st
Row 10: ch 1, turn, sc in first 4 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 3 st
Row 11: ch 1, turn, sc in first 2 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 st] across, sc in last 5 st

Row 12: ch 1, turn, sc in first sc, [lsc6, lsc5, lsc4, lsc3, lsc2, sc] across, sc in last st

Row 13:  ch 1, turn, sc in first 1 st, [ch 1, sk 1, sc in next 5 ch] across, sc in last 6 st

Repeat Rows 2-13 for pattern, ending with either row 7 or 13

Modified Shell Stitch Summary

We've reached the end of the shell stitch series and I for one am glad.  Since most of these stitches are very similar, it wasn't all that interesting to do, and I'm guessing, not all that interesting to read.  However, I did find some great stitches through this process that I otherwise wouldn't have tried.  The best find in this series was 10001.  Basically, all of the palindromic stitches are worth looking at, and some of the others are neat too.  Here's how it all panned out:

00000 : open, lacy, stretchy
00001 & 10000 : grid of single/double thick squares, worth a look
00010 & 01000 : complex mesh, quintessential crochet
00011 & 11000 : neat: thick vertical columns separated by open triangles
00100 : grid of triangles you can diagram and fill in like fillet crochet
00101 & 10100 : vertical columns of triangles, filled and open, good for scarves
00110 & 01100 : thin vertical columns, simple and boring
00111 & 11100 : like Stitch 2 from Darla Sim's book
01001 & 10010 : lacy network, surprisingly pretty, good for scarves
01010 : light, simple, and easy, good for scarves and baby blankets
01011 & 11010 : small holes, not really interesting
01101 & 10110 : pretty, but nothing special
01110 : twin vertical columns, simple, lacy, and elegant
01111 & 11110 : solid and boring
10001 : awesome, grid of double thick squares, try it!
10011 & 11001 : interesting, diagonal line of holes through fabric
10101 : nice, you can actually see the stitches, will reuse
10111 & 11101 : solid and boring
11011 : solid, and easy, uses less yarn and is almost indistinguishable from the original
11111 : original shell stitch

An explanation of how to read these stitches is in the introduction to this series, here.

Shell Stitch 11011

We've finally made it!  This is the last stitch in the variations on shell stitches series: stitch 11011.  I think this stitch is even easier to do than the original simple shell stitch because it is so obvious where to put your single crochet.  When I first started making shell stitches, a couple of years ago, I had some trouble deciding which one was the middle dc, but this clears all of that up.  You simply sc in the only space available.  This stitch looks virtually identical to the original, but it does use less yarn, so if running out of yarn is potentially going to be an issue, consider using this stitch instead. 

Here's the stitch pattern:
Stitch 11011:
Chain a multiple of 6 + 5
Row 1: sc in 2nd ch from hook, (sk 2, [2 dc, ch 1, 2 dc] in next ch, sk 2, sc) across, 3 dc in last ch
Row 2: ch 1, turn, sc, ([2 dc, ch 1, 2 dc] in sc, sc in ch 1 sp) across, 3 dc in last sc

Repeat Row 2 for pattern


Here's the baby blanket pattern:
Chain  95, then work stitch 11011 until work is square.  Add this border and you're done:
Round 1: sc around, 3 sc in corner
Round 2: dc around, 5 dc in corner
Round 3: sc around, 3 sc in corner
Round 4: (sc, ch 3, sk 1) around, (sc, ch 3, sc in same stitch) at corner

I made this with Lion Brand Pound of Love in Honey Bee with a J hook.