Category Archives: Crochet

Catching Up

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Welcome to the end of July 2021! So much has happened, and most of it has passed without a blog entry. Life is a box of chocolates and sometimes you run into a really thick caramel and have to slow down.

COVID-19

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Photo by Chokniti Khongchum on Pexels.com

In the time I’ve been away, I discovered that on Saint Patrick’s Day 2021, March 17th, that I had contracted COVID-19 when I could no longer smell or taste anything. My test came back positive, but I didn’t have a strong illness associated with it. Then my mind cast back to January 2020, and when I thought that I had Norovirus, but upon reflection I think it might have been COVID-19 as well, except in January of 2020, COVID kicked my ass. So perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t, I didn’t get tested at the time. Then we all got the happy news that we were invited to have our first vaccination series with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. Mine was on 3/30, and then subsequently again on 4/20. Now I have at least one true COVID-19 infection, and the mRNA, so that puts me in a pretty strong resistant category.

Working From Home & Working In The Office

During the entire pandemic, the state of Michigan opened and closed. We played the flirt game with spikes and surges and it was very ugly for quite a while. Restaurants closed up left and right, the only real dining game in town was those joints that decided to adopt a strong take-out offering. I bounced from Home to the Office, and in one of those bounces, I contracted COVID-19 from my workplace. Since then, I have had weight issues which naturally led to hypertensive issues as well. Since April I think, I’ve been back in the office, and back in the swing of things. I still quarantine myself, I still mask, and I still have lots of hand sanitizer. COVID-19 has changed how I behave, it created a host of new habits and since they can only help me, I have kept them going. I don’t know if I will ever let go of them.

Noom

On April 16th, 2021 I started the Noom program. I started at 331.4 pounds, and now I’m down to 291.4 pounds, on the program, with a lifetime goal of 220 pounds. The program is very good, the educational components are really quite valuable and I’m almost done with the education parts. I don’t think that I’m ready to “be free of the program” as I think what I need most is the discipline that the app offers me, the rigorous control over my food intake, and being careful so as to not over-indulge and gain back the weight I have lost so far. I definitely think that Noom is a diet that everyone could really benefit from, I don’t feel deprived or starving, and I still am losing weight.

Crochet

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Photo by Castorly Stock on Pexels.com

Over pandemic, I picked up a new hobby. Crochet, which is a style of working with yarn to make various fabrics and items. So far I’ve made many blankets, hats, gloves, and “Cat Pads” for donation to Kalamazoo Animal Rescue. I have discovered that Bernat Blanket, which is a 100% Polyester yarn works amazingly well for animal applications. The yarn is very strong, it can stand up to sanitization methods, and it doesn’t suffer when cats dig in with their claws. I started a WordPress.com blog Bluedepth’s Crochet and there I cover all the neat things that I’m exploring with the yarn arts.

One of the obvious and unfortunate things about yarn arts, and Crochet and Knitting is the gender issues that surround them. Both are seen as “women’s work” and so, much of the education and pattern supply is led by and for women. Obviously, there are some things that are unisex, and I do wish quite often that more people would try something like crochet or knitting, they may find something they truly love and celebrate as I do when I make something beautiful and it is instantly useful.

Crochet Yarn Estimating

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I have been thinking about starting a new crochet project and it struck me that there were no measurements or calculators online that could give you an estimate of the amount of yarn you would need based on the measurements of the projects result, with fixed terms such as the weight of the yarn, the hook used, and which fundamental stitch was used to create the final result. The goal is to answer this question,

“If I wish to make a square of fabric that is 34 inches by 34 inches, made of half-double crochet using a 5mm hook and worsted weight yarn, how much yarn would I need to complete the project?”

So I decided to find out the answer manually. I worked several styles, including:

  • Foundation Chain
  • FSC
  • FHDC
  • FDC
  • SC
  • HDC
  • DC
  • SC Strip
  • HDC Strip
  • DC Strip

Where the strips were just a single row of that kind of stitch, and the non-strip measures were measuring the yarn after creating a complete work in the square based on the index, which for all of this was five inches. So, a SC Strip is 5 inches long, one row of SC, and SC is 5 inches wide by 5 inches high.

Here are the numbers that I measured, these are inches of yarn consumed for each category (YCR – Yarn Consumption Rate):

Stitch Five Inches LengthAverage YCR per Inch
Foundation Chain 25.54.8
FSC8016
FHDC8717.22
FDC8215.5
SC 785.531.42 (per sq inch)
HDC 80232.08 (per sq inch)
DC 79031.6 (per sq inch)
SC Strip5310.6
HDC Strip78.515.7
DC Strip10220.4

What surprised me was that Double Crochet uses less yarn, a little bit, than Half-Double Crochet does, and then just how close the three fundamental stitches are to each other when you hold width and height at a fixed value.

So my answer is, for a 34” by 34” square of fabric, Half Double Crochet with a Foundation Half Double Crochet will require:

FHDC = 34” x 17.22 = 585.48 inches of yarn

HDC = 34” x 34” = 1156 square inches x 32.08 = 37,084.48 inches of yarn

Full Project = 585.48 + 37,084.48 = 37,669.96 inches of yarn, with 36 inches per yard results in 1,046.38 yards of yarn.

So with this information, I know what my project would potentially cost me, outside of the project time itself, so if I select a superwash merino yarn, for example on yarn.com, their Valley Yarns Valley Superwash is $6.49 a ball, and a ball has 97 yards of yarn in it. That requires 10.78 balls, well, really 11 balls. That’s $71.39, with their 20% off deal, their out the door is $64.10.

The really nice part of knowing the rough yarn consumption rate for these stitches is that you don’t have to overbuy your yarn and then end up with extra of anything. There will almost always be partials but there is a big difference between having a third of a ball left versus having 3 1/3 balls left.

If you find these values to be useful, I would only ask that you leave a comment here letting me know that they helped.

Hidden Killer

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While working on Scott’s Thermal Cap, the brim, the band around the head, involved 32 discrete stitches per row. The pattern I was using demurred on chaining up the side and instead relied on the natural height of the SCTS to provide the height required as rows were added. Because the chain was omitted, every stitch requires attention, because usually when a chain appears on the side, it “uses up” whatever stitch was next in line, and so you customarily have to skip “where you should go” for the “next spot”. Without the chain on the side, progress is slower, the weave is thicker, and counting becomes rather picky. You want to make sure you have 32 in each row, lest you have decreases where there shouldn’t be any, and your hat comes out looking obviously wrong.

There are a lot of tools for maintaining counts in Crochet. Little plastic barrel counters, clickers, and a few apps for the iPhone. There was one of these apps, that among all the other features also had a verbal input mechanism. The app was updated and the verbal input mechanism was deprecated for Voice Control in iOS.

I have another app, called MultiTimer, in it are counters with audio feedback when you tap them. I had been using this app to count stitches in my work, but its a little annoying to have my hands on the work and then reach over to tap the phone. So I did a little poking around:

  1. Settings
  2. Accessibility
  3. Voice Control (turn it on, it downloads extra iOS components)
  4. ON: Show Confirmation, Show Hints, Overlay: Item Numbers. OFF the rest.
  5. Back to Settings, then to Control Center
  6. Customize Controls
  7. Add Accessibility Shortcuts
  8. Out to Home Screen

So, when I am working on a project, I plug the phone in (since Voice Control is a battery pig), start MultiTimer, switch to my Crochet panel where I have set up all my counters. Then I swipe up from the bottom, tap Accessibility Shortcuts icon, tap on Voice Control, then swipe down to hide the Control Center panel. Overlaid on top of all the screen items are little shaded numbers, so I focus in on the counter that I care about, “Stitch Count” and then I can say “Single Tap” to advance the counter, or “Tap 6” to clear the counter, or “Tap 4” to decrease the counter. That enables me to keep my hands on my work, and my eyes, and just say clearly what I want and the phone makes a little click sound when it does what I want. That way I can concentrate on the work, and then look at the display for the count. When my work session is done, I swipe up from the bottom, tap the Accessibility Shortcut icon, turn off Voice Control, and exit the MultiTimer app. Done and done. This way I can keep my mind focused on the work, I don’t lose count due to interruptions or cats, and it makes my phone do one singular task really well. After I started using this feature, I took back a little bit of the gripes I had previously issued against iOS, just a few. 🙂

Crochet Day 2

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Yesterday I tried and made a lot of mistakes. First was trying to accomplish a slip knot, which by the book was impossible. I found another way and it works much better, the X method on my hands. Then struggling to make a chain stitch, but I got better slowly. Then I tried several lines of single crochet and it came out floppy and anemic. Turns out I was doing it completely wrong. So I ripped up everything and this morning tried it again. I finally figured out what was wrong, I was only picking up half of the loops that I needed so there was no depth to the work.

In a few hours I ended up here. Looks like it’s going to be a scarf for Scott. There’s some missed stitches at the base, but overall it’s not bad for a day 2 attempt.