Learning to crochet

So it’s been a hot minute since the last newsletter. That’s on me. Life kind of exploded and I have been holding on by my nails the past couple of months. Sorry for leaving you in a lurch, but I’m going to assume you have a life and know how it goes.

This month I’m going to do something a little different. It wasn’t me that was jumping in feet first, it was my daughter. She’s 12 and recently started crocheting. Towards the end of her latest project I gave her some advice that I realize applies to much more than just crocheting, so I’m sharing her journey and that advice with y’all…

A first attempt.

Her first attempt was a stuffed rabbit. She started it early September because she was working on it when I left for Litmus Live. Here’s where it is today:

It never made it farther than a tail and some legs. The head didn’t ever work quite right. After about the 4th time of hearing her give a frustrated groan and watching her pull it out I asked what was wrong. Turns out she couldn’t get the ball to be big enough, it got to a certain size that would have worked well for a tail, but she already had one of those.

I asked her what the pattern said to do and her response was “what pattern?” She had gotten a tail and four legs by just making it up as she went along. Which I was so proud of her for, but also, like, woman, why are you re-inventing the wheel?

I get the joy from figuring something out from scratch. That proud feeling when it all goes right. That’s a great high. But it’s OK to read some directions or see how someone else did it first. That’s how learning works.

Needless to say, she gave up on the rabbit.

A second attempt.

This time she tried a bear. It went much better and is adorable in the ugly doll kind of way.

Full throttle

So when we started talking about possible Halloween costumes based on Gravity Falls her first thought was “I CAN MAKE A MABEL SWEATER!” My first thought was more along the lines of buying one or having someone else make said sweater (see her attempt at a bear for my reasons why). But she was having none of it. She found a pattern on Etsy and after several hours of searching on multiple crafting websites and not finding any inexpensive pink yarn available for shipping as we live in a fricking big-box craft store dead zone. She decided to use the *muffled number* pounds of blue yarn sitting in our basement.

The pattern she found had her creating the front and back panels and the arms and then sewing them all together.

Of course she didn’t read the directions all the way through, as she is the type of individual that usually fails the reading the directions test. She started crocheting the front thinking that it was the whole body piece, decided it was not big enough to wrap all the way around her and added some extra rows to the ribbing before continuing on. About halfway up the front she realized that it was actually just the front panel and had an existential crisis because she didn’t want to start over. My advice? Mabel wears sweaters two sizes to big, just keep going, it’ll be fine.

I thought for sure she was going to run into issues with the pattern on the front of the sweater, but apparently not. She ran through that like a champ and finished up the front.

When faced with what to do next she took the difficult route and with one of the sleeves instead of the back panel. A sleeve that she started, got halfway through and realized that she was doing it wrong. She took the whole thing out, watched a video several times and consulted the pattern (yay for learning!) started again.

About a quarter of the way in she realized it wasn’t right again and got really frustrated because she didn’t want to start again. So she kept going for another 10 rows and then realized it just wasn’t going to work (it looked more like a hat and less like a sleeve, turns out she kind of followed the pattern, but made it bigger because she thought she should). Back to the videos and the pattern before she tried again. This time she didn’t even get far into the ribbing before she was like “What the hell? How do I do a double half crochet?! Have I been doing the whole sweater wrong this whole time!? I don’t want to take it all out again!!!!!”

I sat down beside her and said “What’s here [pointing to the stitching she was working on] is not important. What’s here [pointing to her head] is what’s important. If you have to take it all out it’s OK because you learned something and that will stay with you and help you do it better next time.”

Full disclosure: I shocked myself with that advice. Apparently sometimes I actually sound like a smart and wizened adult that my children should listen to.

She took it out and started again. She realized a couple of moments in that she had what we call “an idiot moment” (because no one is an idiot, but we all have idiot moments). She had been trying to follow the ribbing pattern as the sleeve. Crisis averted, she made it all the way through.

That second sleeve? That was done in one day instead of the three the first sleeve took. Of course when I pointed out that fact and how it related to my awesome advice she gave me a dirty look. I wouldn’t be succeeding at being a mom if she hadn’t.

The back panel she finished over a Saturday and then Sunday she sewed it all together and added the collar as she watched Dimension 20: A Crown of Candy. #GeekParentWin

Fly or Flop?

Well you tell me, here she is in her full Mabel costume:

I am so ridiculously proud of her. She stuck with it through it all and is super excited to do another one (the scouts honor sweater this time, which I’m not 100% sure I want her to have.)

Til next month; take chances, make mistakes, get messy!
Carin

One of the things I love and hate about watching my kids grow is seeing them get so excited about doing something new that think they can do it as good as a professional. I have to sit back and watch them fail spectacularly and be there with them through the failure.

But sometimes they surprise me and make something amazing, and that’s pretty awesome to watch. So take a page out of my kids book and try to do something like a pro would and see if you can surprise yourself.

September was kind of a dead month for me for reading. I did finally finish Mistborn. Possibly no surprise to anyone: I had read it before. Here’s a graph of how confidant I was that I had read the book as I was reading the book:

I also dove back into Kaoru Takamura's Lady Joker, Volume 1, but it hasn’t caught my fancy yet. I’ve only been able to get to chapter 2. I’m going put out there into the universe that I will finish it this month. We’ll see how it goes.

Follow along as I devour books this year.

Like the newsletter? Have ideas? Wanna share a story about something you dove into recently or something you're reading? Reply and let me know! I'm always up for new things to try or new books to read.

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