Extra, extra!

Oh, dear…what an embarassing expose… 😳 Click to read.

To make your own newspaper snippet, go here. Discovered by following a link from the CrochetMe Blog to Mason-Dixon Knitting. Too cool.

In other news, at the request of attentive reader AnnMarie, I will reveal to you my huge crocheting blunders. Read ’em and weep. Or giggle. Whatever.

1) I was crocheting every stitch through the back loop only, coming from the back. So it made little ridges, but not the big poofy yummy ridges you get from doing BLO correctly. It looked funny, not at all like what I saw other people were doing, and the discovery that I was supposed to crochet through both loops unless directed otherwise was quite a breakthrough. (My mother claims she tried to correct me at age ten, but I was too pigheaded. Moi?)

2) Um. Apparently, you’re supposed to hold your yarn *behind* your work. Oh. Really? Now, I realize that it is much more difficult to hold it in front of your work (seriously) but it was easy to attribute this sort of problem to inexperience, and I actually got quite deft at it. Once I had the hang of it, I would have been able to chalk any differences between my technique and someone else’s to the natural ‘mirror effect’ of looking at a righty’s work when I am left-handed. (Of course, my mom was not a hard-core crocheter at all, only breaking out the hook about once a year…or once every couple of years, whatever. Plus I took a crocheting break from about age 12 to age 18 or 19. It was easy not to notice.) Correcting this also made pulling loops through MUCH easier, and also reduced the amount that loops just fell off my hook.

And then, of course,

3) Once you are holding your yarn behind your work instead of in front of it, it becomes pretty obvious that you ought to poke your hook from front to back instead of back to front.

All of these corrections have resulted in faster, prettier, less-stressful crocheting for me. Yay!