posted by Lily on crochet

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It began so well – so simple, pleasing colours, lots of promise, the Mon Tricot book by my side.  In between paragraphs, it grew and grew.

Then I added the zigzag row.  Hmmm … colours weren’t a great success – not enough contrast.  And I think there were a few extra stitches added – all a bit confusing really. Nevertheless, the real problem arrived with the next six rows – of which there are no photos – a combination of dodgy crocheting and a style of stitches that gather themselves up without any extra help on my behalf.  Did I stop and pull them out?  I did not.  I added more and more rows, each time I turned, yanking those tight, rebellious rows, believing that one day they would smooth out and the wrap/blanket/thingy would no longer look like it possessed a 1950s cinched waist.

Finally, I began dreaming about those rows.  They were never going to stretch out.  They were never going to look right.  I was going to end up with wrap/blanket/thingy that had a flounce! And now I had twice as much again crochet between the last live stitch and the disaster rows.  Clever stuff, that.  And yet, in these same dreams, I just undid the knots at the end of the appropriate rows, ripped out those shrinking stitches and joined the two remaining happy pieces back together.  It worked in my dreams so I decided to apply this solution to real life crochet – and so uncrocheting was born.

I uncrocheted the offenders – very quick and easy.  And one of the two pieces left had a nice neat row just waiting for me to start again.  But the other was kind of live.  My mum just couldn’t fathom how this could be so given it is crochet but it was definitely kind of live.  Probably because it wasn’t an edge but loops that had once been through an edge. These blue loops proved very tricky to pick up – I had to ditch them – it was only two rows of a reasonably plain stitch.  At first I patiently pulled them out, twist by twist, hoping to preserve and reuse the yarn.  After 2 hours I had only progressed a quarter of a row.  I gave up on the pulling out and attacked with the embroidery scissors.  They were oh so much more effective :-)

As I snipped the blue stitches out, I picked up the purple stitches and added a white row of double crochet to stabilise them.  Yep – worked like a dream :-)

Then, I simply used double crochet to bind the two edges together.  And it worked too!  Phew!  It does make a slightly raised seam on one side  - we’ll call that the back – but it sits beautifully smoothly and you would never know that there was once 6 rows of dreadful where now there is simple white.

Done!  Now I can pick up this sweet, soft, getting-heavy crochet without twitching.  Now I WANT to pick up this crochet and get back to those lovely pink and white rows of fish scales. Thank goodness for the courage of dreams.