I have forsaken knitting

No that is not true. Let us just say that I have begun using one stick instead of two. Get it now? Crochet! And it's a hook not a needle, I keep saying that. It's just that I have begun to notice these wonderful granny square afghans. Especially Alicia's. I just think that they are delightfully tacky. I wanted one.

Okay so I must admit that I have always thought of crocheting as being below knitting. I know that is terrible of me, but it is true. I think that I am just a snob, in music, books, in everything. Maybe not yarn though, at least yet, because I am also very frugal. I think that this snobbishness is also why I thoroughly enjoyed Main Street by Sinclair Lewis, which was the most recent book that I had to read for lit class. Carol comes into this small town with all these ideas about reform and changing and improving all these small town people. Most people hate her as a character because she is pushy, but from the beginning I loved her because she went to library school in Chicago and worked at a library and saw all these people come in, not for literature, but for tractor magazines. And I can totally relate because today, everyone comes in the library for the dvds and John Grisham and Nicholas Sparks, not for anything decent. And it's frustrating because there is a lot of good literature out there, but people just don't have the time or so they say. Or they want something light and uplifting, because God forbid that they actually do any thinking.

See this is why the new title of my blog is "Knitting in College", because the two things interact.

Anyway, I still think knitting produces more aesthetically pleasing things, but crocheting isn't all bad. So don't be offended. And so I've started making some granny squares. These are my first two:

The one on the left is my first one, done in the traditional granny square pattern. The one on the right is my second one, and it's being blocked. On the floor. In the semi-middle of my dorm room. I am pretty sure my roommate thinks that I am crazy.



I think part of the reason I looked down on crocheting is that I could never get it right. Knitting came much easier. But crocheting is not easy! Or perhaps I am just not familiar with terms and what things look like. But it took me a while to get the hang of it. I didn't realize that "into the ring" actually meant into the ring.

So project specs. I am planning to crochet my granny square afghan in Caron Simply Soft, because it is cheap and I already have a lot of it. I am going to use the blue you see above and a darker navy that I also have. These colors (and hopefully another shade of blue) all match my comforter that I use at school. It is a china plate type design, blue floral on white, and I completely adore it because it is very colonial. I will have to crochet 56 8-in squares to get my desired squares. I am not going to do multi-colored squares, at least so far. I checked 200 Crochet Blocks from the library and I'm crocheting patterns out of that.

So far it is all going well. I like it. Although my hand is not used to crocheting and it definitely cramps up a lot sooner than it would with knitting. But I am excited.