Adventures in Crocheting

After two crocheting classes I had managed to learn just about everything there was to know about crocheting, or so I thought. Being the only student in the class meant we raced through the single, double, and treble-crochet stitches and had plenty of time left over for half-double, slip stitches and even crocheting in the round and granny squares. We covered yarns, patterns and even some fancy stitches as well. Feeling very accomplished indeed, I decided I was ready to make something on my own. A and C both had made requests, so I got to work putting my new skills to the test. 

A wanted a blanket, which I decided to do in a very simple pattern of alternating rows of single and double-crochet stitches. It is easy to do, but very time consuming. I still haven't finished it, and now I can see why people do granny squares because it's so much faster than making row after tiny row. I'm sure I'll finish it someday, and it is actually quite pretty.

C wanted me to make her a snake. A simple request, so it seemed. After thinking a bit about the pattern of her snake and how complicated it is, I figured that the easiest thing to do would be to make a series of rows in one color, with a few rows of a lighter color for the belly, and then to use a needle to hand-sew the patterns in with black.

So, we headed to the craft store to pick out some yarn. Although I felt that we should use olive green or some type of greenish brown, C insisted that her snake had to be totally brown with no green (like she says Ginger is), and in fact picked a really dark brown for the body color. There was no talking her out of it, and this project was for her anyway, so we left the craft store with three balls of yarn in ivory, black and dark brown. It was a ridiculously soft, bulky yarn with tufts all over. Now I wasn't really looking forward to this project quite as much. This yarn was going to be difficult to work with.

Eventually I began to make the rows that would make the snake. It actually started to look much better than I thought it would and my confidence grew that I'd be able to pull this off, making a completely free-form snake. I even tapered the ends and everything.

One evening while she was in bed, I realized I had made way too many rows, but I came up with a great solution. Instead of connecting the two edges and stuffing the snake, I simply rolled it up and sewed the edges together that way. So proud of my work, I set it down and suddenly realized in horror that I had just crocheted my daughter a soft and fuzzy piece of poo. Yes, you read that right. Don't believe me? See for yourself....

Now, granted I did not pick the color of yarn here, but Mike and I still giggled every time we looked at the thing. The above picture was taken after I sewed black eyes on one end, and you can see a little bit of the white underbelly on the right side. But it doesn't help. It really doesn't.

Determined to do better, I began to search for patterns online. I was elated to find a pretty realistic pattern for a carpet python, especially since most of the other snake patterns were meant to be silly or cutesy and definitely weren't very realistic-looking.

Carpet Python crochet pattern!

I read the pattern over and over and felt really good about it. We headed to the craft store again for more yarn, this time choosing an olive green for the body and a patterned black and white yarn for the diamond print, so it wouldn't look like such perfect diamonds when finished.

I made the first row easily, but then when I got to the second row, something was wrong. The required number of stitches wasn't possible based on the first row, and I was (pretty) sure I was reading it right. After meeting with one of my friends who has been crocheting for years (thanks, Libby!), I found out two things:

1. 5-ply yarn is not the same as size 5 yarn, which would explain my confusion about how I was supposed to crochet this super-thick yarn with that super-tiny hook. I had bought the size 5 Bulky yarn, instead of the 5-ply very thin yarn. This meant my snake would not only be ginormous, but the holes in between the stitches would be much bigger, and the yarn would prove to be harder to work with later since I had gone with a smaller hook than the yarn really needed (trying to split the difference between the hook the pattern called for and the hook the yarn called for).

And 2. The pattern was completely wrong. Sigh. My friend assured me this would be 'no problem'. I could figure it out, which meant that I'm pretty much back to where I started, using the wrong yarn with the wrong hook, making a pattern that is wrong (i.e. making it up as I go). Grr...

I barely followed the pattern adjusting just about every instruction, and once I managed to finally finish it, I decided I'm done with snakes, at least for now. I'm a little scared to start a new project now, even though there are a few I really want to try. My bad luck with crocheting can't keep up forever, can it?

This snake turned out pretty cool, actually, even though it's really big. It's probably pretty close to life-size when Ginger is an adult (it's probably about 4ft long). But at least it looks like a snake and not something that you don't want to touch!