I can crochet!!!!

I seem to have been AWOL again this week, I always seem to be busy but not necessarily in a crafty way!!! Tompom has dropped his daytime nap so that means daytime crafting has dropped to zilch although i have managed to do a small amount of crafting on my swaps in the evening. Bex and El over at Stuffed Nonsense are being ever so patient as I am terribly behind with my A Little Bit Greener swap. I'm also on the PTA committee at school and its coming up for the summer fayre so I've been busy selling advertising spaces for our flyers!
It hasn't been all work and no play though as on Wednesday though I had a fab day learning how to crochet. I attended a beginners crochet course at Franklins, met some lovely people and brushed up on my skills. I had only ever been able to do chain stitch as a child and lately have been coveting all your blogs on granny squares and flowers, so when I saw this one day course I thought I would grab the chance to learn some new stitches. The picture below is not what I made (I wish) but what we should be able to make once we have acquired our new skills.

Sandy our teacher for the day took us through the basics of holding the yarn correctly, and initially I couldn't decide whether to crochet left or right handed, but finally settled on holding the yarn with my leading left and the crochet hook with my right hand. We then practised our chain stitches before progressing onto double and treble chain stitch.

Above is one of the lovely ladies that I met on the course and hopefully we will all be back in July for the next course to learn more stitches and catch up on what we have been crocheting..

Here's just a couple of shots at my first attempts, I really used the day for practising my new skills and perfecting the tension in my stitches as I found that the first row was the most difficult to get right. I chose a lovely shade of green for my wool but can't decide whether to make a bag or a scarf, think I need a bit more practise first as I my work keeps decreasing at the end so I think I'm not crocheting the last stitch...

I did find a beautiful crochet book as some inspiration for the future and it's on my Christmas wish list, although I may just have to borrow it from the library first , just for research - obviously!!!!