You show me yours and I'll show you mine

Um, I'm talking about craft skills here, people. For Thanksgiving, I drove up to Providence to visit my dear friends. (Yes, alone. Taz's consulate appointment did not go well, and he'll have to make another one for late this week or early the week after. By then there will be less than a week left until I go to India myself, so it looks like that's when I'll be seeing him. Sigh.) The three of us attended two separate Thanksgiving feasts, and I sincerely believe that I ate several times my body weight in pie alone. Needless to say, Friday was not a day for jumping out of bed at the crack of dawn to drive back to New Haven. Instead, Jessie did homework, while Mishmish and I decided to trade craft lessons.

If you've checked out her blog, you know that Mish is an amazing and creative crocheter, but she also wants to learn to knit. So we started with a knitting lesson, in which I taught her the long tail cast-on, as well as how to knit and purl in both the British and Continental styles (hey, just because I'm a thrower doesn't mean I don't know how to pick), and did a quick demonstration of binding off. She caught on very fast, and was soon a few rows into her first...whateveritsgoingtobe. Then she took a break to teach me some crochet basics. I already knew how to chain stitch, and I thought I knew how to double and treble, but, um, yeah. I was wrong. Who knows what I was really doing--somewhere between a double and a treble is what I thought was a treble--but she soon put me back on track. It was a wonderful way to spend the early afternoon. Yarn-happy and still overstuffed, I finally drove back to New Haven arriving just in time to swing by Sami's place for some spicy canapes and a chance to experience the Law & Order Marathon Time Warp.

On Saturday, between having already used up my fresh skein of the alpaca for x-mas surprise #5 and being so inspired by my newly learned skills, I decided to use up some stash yarn and get in some crochet practice at the same time:


Shell stitch using Microspun (which splits like hell, by the way).

It's about 12 inches so far. The foundation row is waaay too tight, but I decided to forge onward, mostly because I couldn't figure out how to get it looser, even after ripping out and starting over 481 billion times. If I'm really feeling inspired, maybe I'll crochet a matching hat. If I have enough yarn. Knowing me, that's a big if.