It's the time of year when everything has moved indoors and the windows are staying firmly shut against those grey skies. The more time I spend puttering around the house, the more I want everything to smell lovely to help combat those winter blues. I've been making my own chai mix on the stovetop and that tends to do the trick downstairs, but upstairs it's a no-man's land of bunnies and ever damp towels. SO, I decided to make some lavender and cedar sachets to tuck into drawers and hang on doorknobs and hangers in my closet.

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Ever since Kim and Jenny K taught me to crochet a few weeks ago, I've been on a roll! I've hardly put the hook down. I grabbed some scraps of Brava Bulky in Black, White and Dove Heather and made a few Granny Squares to make a pillow! The squares are all done and ready to be attached - I'll just have to pester Kim again next week to show me how to put them all together. I'll sew a pillow base with some of the beautiful fabric from Connecting Threads...

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I've been steadily honing my crochet skills over the past few weeks. I started with some plain, square dishcloths in single crochet, then amped things up when I started and finished a Granny Stripe blanket in two weekends and finally I've tackled my first project "in the round"! I was inspired to pick up one of my smaller hooks when I spotted Yvestown's free crochet Flower Coaster Pattern on Pinterest yesterday.

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Last weekend was a long weekend for us - I had all these plans to finish up some works in progress, especially my Graham Scarf, so I can start on some bigger projects. Instead, I ran out of the Stroll Tonal I was using on Friday afternoon (completely my fault, nothing to do with Erica's wonderful pattern.)  Luckily, Jenny is also working on a project in Goldrush & had some leftovers!  But this meant that I wouldn't be able to work on it all weekend.  And none of my other projects just seemed to appeal to me and I just fell into a blah mood. So I decided I needed cute quick projects to make me smile. I got out the brightest Swish colors in my stash and my E hook & had some fun!

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“Demoralizing” is not a word I use lightly; it lives in a secure lockbox and only gets to come out for special occasions. To use in a sentence: Carefully trying to recreate the Gibson Girl hairstyle is demoralizing. Or alternately: Learning to knit, as I’m now openly doing while surrounded by abnormal prodigies in this office, is demoralizing. But pish-posh, I say. You guys have approximately 250% more confidence in my knitting future than I do, which is the OPPOSITE of demoralizing. Now I’m just afraid I’ll let you down! Regardless, I poured over all of your thoughtful comments on my last post and a few major themes emerged: 1.) The internet and its largess of educational wealth is the best thing since sliced bread. 2.) “Girl, it’s just YARN. Use some pretty stuff. Have fun with it! You’ll be fine!” 3.) Practice, practice, practice. 4.) Crocheting creates a different mindset; it’ll take time to rewire your mind for knitting. And there you have it. My biggest mistake thus far is an essential misunderstanding of #4. In setbacks, I’ve been acting as though I’ve failed at “crocheting-with-needles”, as opposed to “knitting”. Yes, all forms of fiber crafting share some similarities and a mutually supportive community, but assuming that a crocheting background would give me an intermediate entrance into knitting is like saying, “I’m fairly adept at volleyball, so I must be decent at water polo”. There’s no gorgeous guarantee that you’ll be able to translate those skills to a different medium, and there’s certainly no way to do so without oceans of practice. In the midst of a challenge, I really like to break momentarily and rest on my laurels. As I knit my first garbled swatch, I repetitively thought: “You can still crochet, you’re okay at crochet, you’re alright at that, you can definitely make nice crocheted scarves, you can make pretty crocheted collars”.

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