My Love Knows No Bound

Can I just say that I fucking LOVE crochet?? Don't get me wrong, knitting is and always will be my main love in the world of crafts followed closely by sewing, but crochet is fucking amazing.

I just made a dog sweater in two days. Now, granted, I'm sure I could have knitted one in an equal amount of time, but with all the alterations I made on the fly while I created this sweater I would have had a lot of frogging to do had I knitted it. That's one of the things that I love about crochet over knitting. Like, with this dog sweater, I followed the pattern for the leg holes and they were just too huge for my FLB. With knitting, I probably could have knitted a couple of little swatches and sewn them in place. Or picked up stitches on one end of the leg hole and then sewn it down once it was all knitted up. But with crochet, I just chained some stitches and crocheted three rows of DC stitches, securing each row with a slip stitch and that was it. Done.

I also love that I have the ability to crochet pieces onto things. Using the dog sweater again as my example, the original pattern called for crocheting the leg bands and then sewing them on. Pfft. No way. I simply chained the required number of stitches and crocheted the leg bands on the sweater, slip stitching at the bottom of each row to attach it on. Ta-da. Again, with knitting that would have been merely a matter of picking up stitches with some DPNs and knitting the band. So that wasn't much simpler than my first love.

I am making some good progress on the jammer hat as well. I have about 14 more rows of the star pattern and then 14 more rows of solid black knitting before I start the decreases. Of course, I'll probably wind up having to start my decreases early since I didn't use a pattern at all for this hat aside from a general guideline for the decreasing and a chart for the star. But I'm soldiering my way on through and should hopefully have it finished by Monday night at the absolute latest.

I can't wait till I'm at the same level in crochet, where I can just take yarn and a hook and make something. I'm going to attempt that once I finish the jammer hat, I think, in fixing my mukluk sock slippers. I was going to knit them in the Holding Hands, Feeding Ducks stitch, but I may decide to do them in a star crochet stitch which, really, is the same stitch, just a different craft form. All I know is that I want to do a star stitch/HHFD stitch and alternate each 'star' black and the ice blue yarn. I think that would look so neat. Either that or I want to do some ridiculously easy fair isle pattern. One of my many knitting books has some in it that don't look terribly hard. It has solid striped rows and a couple rows broken up with different colored stitches. So we'll see.