My crochet experience has been ongoing, but not extensive, so I thought I’d share my progress here to inspire me to get off my butt and learn more. So far I have only made blankets (and one scarf for Dad) for two reasons. The first reason is that blankets are simple and give you plenty of time to learn the basics. The second reason for sticking to afghans is that I really, really like blankets. I collect them and can’t think of a thing I would like to make more with a crochet hook.

So the only way to get better at crochet if I am only going to make blankets is to make more interesting blankets. I have recently started 4 new blankets (I need to have a few to work on at a time in case I get bored, and I get bored easily) with fancy new stitches learned from Donna Kooler’s book of Afghan patterns (although she didn’t make any of the afghan pattens in the book, so I am not sure why it’s HER afghan book). The pattens include ripple shown above (pretty easy and I actually already knew this one), basket-weave, front-post raised row, and drop-hook (where you skip down and crochet through two rows). I’m going to make that beautiful blanket on the cover, eventually. I’ll keep you posted as I go….